Search Results for: new york review of books

When Richard Nixon Declared War on the Media

(Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

More than 40 years ago, Richard Nixon subtly changed the modern presidency. During past administrations, the American news media had always been referred to as “the press,” but Nixon, whose contentious relationship with the nation’s newsrooms was longstanding, tweaked that policy, and began labeling the press as “the media,” a term he felt sounded more ominous and less favorable. As Jon Marshall wrote in 2014 for The Atlantic, Nixon was the first president to exclusively use this term, and while subsequent presidents were similarly at odds with those whose job it is to hold the country’s chief executive in check, none were as vitriolic as Nixon.

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The Denial Diaries: On #MeToo Men With No Self-Awareness

Francesco Carta / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Dan Harmon had no plans to say anything about the way he had treated Megan Ganz. But then, in January, the writer who used to work for him on “Community” accused him of sexual harassment on Twitter. Though he was advised not to respond, the women he worked with told him that if he was serious about making amends, he needed to talk about where he went wrong. So a week after Ganz’s tweet, Harmon spent seven shaky, breathless minutes of his podcast, “Harmontown,” on a systematic breakdown of the self-deceptions — including calling himself a feminist and those who questioned him “sexist” — that enabled him to harass Ganz. “I did it by not thinking about it,” he told his listeners, “and I got away with it by not thinking about it.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

More Than Me “I am Abigail” campaign, 2012

This week, we’re sharing stories from Finlay Young, Katie Prout, Molly Crabapple, Sean Flynn, and Harley Rustad.

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Defeating the Celluloid Axis

Charles Chaplin Film Corporation / Bettmann / Getty

J.W. McCormack | Longreads | August 2018 | 9 minutes (2,429 words)

Here is what we know for sure: in mid-September of 1932, the actress Peg Entwistle, who had galvanized the young Bette Davis to pursue acting after Davis witnessed Entwistle in a Boston production of The Wild Duck, climbed the Hollywoodland sign (years before the sign would be bought by the Parks Department, the last syllable jettisoned) and jumped to her death from the top of the H. In Hollywood Babylon, arcane filmmaker-turner-tattletale Kenneth Anger gruesomely referred to the her as the “skydiver Peg Entwistle” opposite a photograph of an unknown, topless blonde woman.

It’s understandable. By the time Anger published his chatty, often spurious volume of gossip, few readers would have known the difference. Entwistle had appeared in only one film, RKO’s Thirteen Women, unreleased at the time of her death and in which her starring role as the rapacious and lesbian-coded Hazel Clay Cousins had been mercilessly reduced on-set to a mere cameo (still, it could have been worse; only 11 women survived the final cut). And yet, Peg Entwistle’s outrageously on-the-nose suicide would become a kind of synecdoche for L.A.’s glut of broken dreams, placing her firmly among the very first of the tragic blonde bombshells that Hollywood would chew and spit out over the course of subsequent decades, and confirmation for the tabloid-buying public that the movies were an amoral industry, ruinous to female purity, and fatal to those who chased success on its terms while being blinded by its lacquer, froth, and Satanic illusions.

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Defined by Want

In “The Food of My Youth” at The New York Review of Books, Melissa Chadburn describes a childhood in which getting enough to eat was a much bigger concern than it should ever be. Eventually, she was removed from her mother’s care and put into a group home. There were regular meals there, but three meals a day doesn’t erase the scars of a childhood defined by want.

It was lonely there, but at least I didn’t have to worry about going hungry. I didn’t like to eat food prepared by other people—I was afraid I would taste their emotions—so I learned to cook the food provided by the county. It was largely frozen, prepared in bulk. Salad was a sturdy iceberg with sliced carrot slaw; the ground beef came in a fat tube. The group home kitchen, with all its canned food, and dates on plastic containers, resembled a bunker in the Midwest, as if we were all preparing for the apocalypse.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home. But we found ourselves in limbo, guarding our hearts, biding our time before the Unknown, waiting to see where we would end up. In that place of permanent temporariness, food was the only thing we had some control over; the rest was all court dates and social workers and group therapy and anger management.

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Peterson’s Complaint

CSA Images

Laurie Penny | Longreads | July 2018 | 20 minutes (5,191 words)

“Incredible! One of the worst performances of my career, and they
never doubted it for a second!”
– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Now that’s a scientific fact. There’s no real evidence
for it, but it is scientific fact.”
Brass Eye, “Paedogeddon” episode

“The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen down castles
a rough time.”
Jordan Peterson, “Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority”

***

“We have this tree, and we have this strange serpent. That’s a dragon-like form, there—a sphinx-like form that’s associated with the tree… And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. The lesson the snake tells people is, you bloody better well wake up, or something you don’t like will get you. And who’s going to be most susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve.”

That’s Professor Jordan Peterson, offering the “realistic and demanding practical wisdom” endorsed by David Brooks in the New York Times.

“The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and his authority — people worshipped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast.”

That’s the Book of Revelation.

“I could not understand why there was a half-man half-chicken statue outside. I spent the next six hours screaming. Non-stop screaming as loud as I could. I’d become convinced I was a dead body lying in a forest. I was in the afterlife, and more than that, I was in hell.”

And that’s a man from Vancouver describing a mishap with magic mushrooms in Vice. Of the three excerpts, it’s the only one that can convincingly claim to be non-fiction.

The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon. 

If every generation gets the intellectuals it deserves, we’re in serious trouble.

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The Urban Crisis of Affluence

Skyscrapers
Photo by Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images

After three decades living in and around New York City, I, too, am leaving to make way for the only people the city is still welcoming: billionaires who don’t live here.

In Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker writes at length in “The Death of a Once Great City” about how the few who can afford to build and buy in New York don’t want to live here, either. In one affluent twenty-block corridor, “almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year.” A couple of neighborhoods south, developers at an eighty-three-unit luxury condo were recently offering “to throw in two studio apartments and two parking spots for any buyer willing to shell out $48 million for the building’s 7,000-square foot penthouse.” That’s five empty things for the price of one empty thing, in case you’d like to park dozens of millions of dollars in an investment property that’s big enough to fit dozens of homeless families.

Drawing from Michael Greenberg’s incisive piece on the city’s housing emergency last summer in The New York Review of Books, Baker connects the dots between empty penthouses and empty storefronts, decrying how “all that our urban leaders, in New York and elsewhere, Democratic as well as Republican, have been able to come up with is one scheme after another to invite the rich in.”

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there.

The new rich infesting the city are barely here. They keep a low profile, often for good reason, and rarely stick around. They manufacture nothing and run nothing, for the most part, but live off fortunes either made by or purloined from other people—sometimes from entire nations. The New Yorker noted in 2016 that there is now a huge swath of Midtown Manhattan, from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue, from 49th Street to 70th Street, where almost one apartment in three sits empty for at least ten months a year. New York today is not at home. Instead, it has joined London and Hong Kong as one of the most desirable cities in the world for “land banking,” where wealthy individuals from all over the planet scoop up prime real estate to hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, a bolt-hole, a strongbox.

A triplex at the forthcoming 220 Central Park South will reportedly be sold for $200 million, and a four-story apartment at the same address is priced to move at $250 million. These would be the largest home sales ever recorded anywhere in the United States.

Who spends this sort of money for an apartment? The buyers are listed as hedge fund managers, foreign and domestic; Russian oligarchs; Chinese apparel and airline magnates. And increasingly, to use a repeated Times term, a “mystery buyer,” often shielded by a limited liability company.

This is not the benevolent “gentrification” that Michael Bloomberg seemed to have had in mind but something more in the tradition of the king’s hunting preserves, from which local peasants were banned even if they were starving and the king was far away.

There are now so many of the supertalls gathered so closely together that they threaten to leave the lower sections of Central Park, the only true architectural marvel to be seen here, in shadow for much of the year. One simulation found that the shadows of the highest towers may knife a mile into the park on the winter solstice.

When the journalist Warren St. John protested against these towers that block the sun and literally leave children shivering in the park, he pointed out that the highest supertall apartments—when they are occupied at all—house maybe a few hundred people, as opposed to the 40 million individuals who use Central Park every year. But this seems to be the calculation on which New York now operates.

Even for those who can afford the new New York, it is unclear how much they actually like it or maintain any ability to shape it to their tastes. What is the point, after all, of paying a fortune to live in a city that is more and more like everywhere else?

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

The Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas
The Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas where prisoners from death row are executed. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Pamela Colloff, Amanda Fortini, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Ira Glass, and Linda Holmes.

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You Are What Your Fingerprint Says You Are

A U.S. soldier uses a handheld tool to scan the retinas of military-aged males in Paktika Province, Afghanistan.
A U.S. soldier uses the Biometric Automated Toolset-Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (BAT-HIIDE) System to scan the retinas of military-aged males in Paktika Province, Afghanistan. Photo by The U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s essay at The New York Review of Books asks us to reconsider the passport: while the West uses “passport” as shorthand for “opportunity and exploration,” the reality is very different, and passports are more frequently tools of control than liberation. And what happens as they’re increasingly digitized, and we move from passports to fingerprints and retinal scans for identification? Our movement is constrained by our very bodies.

Passports, in other words, were invented not to let us roam freely, but to keep us in place—and in check. They represent the borders and boundaries countries draw around themselves, and the lines they draw around people, too. This is the case in wartime and in peace. While most countries no longer ask for Casablanca’s famous exit visas, all their elimination has done is remove a cudgel from the bureaucratic gauntlet. As barriers on people’s leaving fall away, blocks on their entering shoot up. And what is the use in leaving if you have nowhere to go?

If the passport served as a symbol of belonging to a sovereign nation, and, for the more fortunate, a way to travel outside it, not long from now the lines will be drawn around our bodies, rather than our countries. As printed papers and analogue technologies are giving way to intricate scans that can identify us by the patterns on our irises, the shape of our faces, and even maps of our veins and arteries, we no longer are our papers; rather, our papers become us.

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Sharp Women Writers: An Interview With Michelle Dean

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Natalie Daher | Longreads | April 2018 | 15 minutes (4,014 words)

The subjects of cultural critic Michelle Dean’s new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion — including Dorothy Parker, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion and Nora Ephron — have appeared in Dean’s writing and interviews again and again over the years. It’s not difficult to see how Dean would develop a fascination with opinionated women — she is one herself. Lawyer-turned-crime reporter, literary critic, and Gawker alumnus, Michelle Dean’s has had her own “sharp” opinions on topics ranging from fashion to politics, from #MeToo to the Amityville Horror.

The book is more than just a series of biographical sketches. Dean is fascinated by the connections between these literary women — their real-life relationships, their debates, and the ways they were pitted against each other in a male-dominated field.

We spoke by phone between New York and Los Angeles and discussed writing about famous writers, the media, editors, and feminism.
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