Search Results for: oral history

Twenty years later, how Michael, Magic and the NBA’s best players sought to regain U.S. dominance in Olympic basketball:

Nathaniel Butler (official NBA photographer): We were sitting on the baseline. Magic is backing a guy down, and the guy on defense is yelling at his bench, “Now! Now!” And on the bench, one guy’s pulling a camera out of his sock and taking a photo of his teammate.

Hubbard: One time they were playing against Venezuela, and the guy who was guarding Magic kept on saying, “I need your shoes! I need your shoes!”During the game. And Magic goes, “Look, I need my shoes!”

“The Dream Will Never Die: An Oral History of the Dream Team.” — Lang Whitaker, GQ

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An oral history of The Wire, ten years after the show’s debut:

Michael B. Jordan (Wallace, Barksdale gang dealer): This is some real shit. It was real to the point where crackheads would come up and try to cop. I had fake money, and they would come over, and an exchange would go down. I would think they were part of the crew, and I’d make the exchange. Then security would come around and be like, ‘No! No! No!’ and break it up. I was like, ‘Oh, shit! That’s really a crack-head! I’m sorry! I’m not really a drug dealer!’

“Maxim Interrogates the Makers and Stars of The Wire.” — Marc Spitz, Maxim

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Maxim Interrogates the Makers and Stars of ‘The Wire’

Longreads Pick

An oral history of The Wire, 10 years after the show’s debut:

Michael B. Jordan (Wallace, Barksdale gang dealer): This is some real shit. It was real to the point where crackheads would come up and try to cop. I had fake money, and they would come over, and an exchange would go down. I would think they were part of the crew, and I’d make the exchange. Then security would come around and be like, ‘No! No! No!’ and break it up. I was like, ‘Oh, shit! That’s really a crack-head! I’m sorry! I’m not really a drug dealer!'”

Author: Marc Spitz
Source: Maxim
Published: Jun 1, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,920 words)

On the 25th anniversary of “Licensed to Ill,” an oral history of the birth of the Beastie Boys.

Then we were like, ‘Oh, shit, we should get a D.J.! Like rap groups. They have a D.J.!’ Nick Cooper knew about this guy Rick Rubin who went to NYU and would throw parties and had turntables. And a bubble machine. We were like, ‘If we had a fucking D.J. and a fucking bubble machine, we’d be fucking killing it.’

“Rude Boys.” — Amos Barshad, New York magazine, April 24, 2011

An oral history of Friends:

JIM BURROWS (director): Based on the [live] audience for the Friends pilot, I knew how popular that show would be. The kids were all pretty and funny, so beautiful. I said to Les Moonves, who was head of Warner Bros., ‘Give me the plane. I’ll pay for dinner.’ I took the cast to Vegas.

MATT LeBLANC: Who goes to Vegas on a private jet? And Jimmy gave me 500 bucks to gamble.

LISA KUDROW: On the plane he showed us the first episode of Friends. None of it had aired yet.

Jimmy took us to dinner, and he gave us each a little money to gamble with. He said, “I want you to be aware that this is the last time that you all can be out and not be swarmed, because that’s what’s going to happen.” And everyone was like, ‘Really?’

“With Friends Like These.” — Warren Littlefield, Vanity Fair

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With Friends Like These

Longreads Pick

An oral history of Friends:

JIM BURROWS (director): Based on the [live] audience for the Friends pilot, I knew how popular that show would be. The kids were all pretty and funny, so beautiful. I said to Les Moonves, who was head of Warner Bros., “Give me the plane. I’ll pay for dinner.” I took the cast to Vegas.

MATT LeBLANC: Who goes to Vegas on a private jet? And Jimmy gave me 500 bucks to gamble.

LISA KUDROW: On the plane he showed us the first episode of Friends. None of it had aired yet.

“Jimmy took us to dinner, and he gave us each a little money to gamble with. He said, “I want you to be aware that this is the last time that you all can be out and not be swarmed, because that’s what’s going to happen.” And everyone was like, ‘Really?‘”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: May 2, 2012
Length: 35 minutes (8,773 words)

Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics:

Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him and Mrs. Krabappel to engage in Bull Durham-inspired extramarital shenanigans. Canseco’s wife rejected the scene, and the staff had to do a last-minute Saturday afternoon rewrite when Oakland came south on a mid-August road trip.

Instead of Lothario, Canseco got to play hero, rushing into a woman’s burning house to rescue her baby, then cat, followed by a player piano, washer, dryer, couch and recliner combo, high chair, TV, rug, kitchen table and chairs, lamp, and grandfather clock. Requesting the new sequence turned out to be the wiser move. Canseco and his wife had nearly divorced earlier that year before reconciling, and a week before “Homer at the Bat” aired, Canseco was arrested by Miami police for chasing down and ramming his wife’s BMW twice with his red Porsche at 4:30 a.m. After the chase ended, he allegedly got out of his car, came over to his wife’s driver-side window, and spit on it.

“The Making of ‘Homer at the Bat’.” — Erik Malinowski, Deadspin

See also: See also: The Making of ‘Nevermind’ (Excerpt from ‘Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge’) — Mark Yarm, MTV Hive, Sept. 19, 2011

Ten years after the arrival of the first detainees, officials, lawyers, prisoners and soldiers speak out on how it all started—and how difficult it has been to close it:

When I first got down to Guantánamo, I, along pretty much with everybody else in my group, thought that we were going to be dealing with the worst of the worst. That’s what we had been told.

When I started to get a broader view, I realized that a large majority of the population just had no business being at Guantánamo. Maybe they had been picked up on the battlefield, and maybe they were involved in low-level insurgency. That would’ve been the worst of it with a large portion of these characters. The majority of the ones that I saw—really, we just didn’t have anything on them. So it was kind of a shock to the system on the level of the detainees.

“Guantánamo: An Oral History.” — Staff, Vanity Fair

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Matt Pearce: My Top 5 Longreads

Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch. He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square.

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1. Paul Ford – “The Epiphanator” – New York magazine

I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a critical mass people have finally accepted the deep role social media plays in the way we live our lives, a progress I’ve measured largely through 1. former New York Times head honcho Bill Keller’s decreasingly humiliating comments about Twitter and 2. this brilliantly droll smoker by Paul Ford, who writes about social media’s arrival the way some people write about coming to terms with their mortality. I don’t think the tone in Ford’s essay would have been possible even last year, which is what makes it so definitive of the moment, and it has that David Foster Wallace quality of articulating deep feelings about a phenomenon I didn’t quite realize I’d felt and certainly never could have expressed so wonderfully.

2. Édouard Levé – “When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue” – The Paris Review

Levé was a photographer, but right before he committed suicide in 2007, he wrote a book called, um, “Suicide.” His prose here, distracted and fissiparous, reads like a kind of literary pointillism: Each individual fleck doesn’t make much sense on its own, but by the end the mass agglomerates into something dark and quite beautiful. It’s like tossing through a box of unsorted and unmarked photographs to deduce the life of the man who shot them — and damn, what a life it must’ve been.

3. Alex French and Howie Kahn – “The Greatest Paper That Ever Died” – Grantland

I’m still not sure what to make of Grantland, but I liked it a lot more after I read this oral history of The National, which was an national sports daily with huge ambitions whose collapse read like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novella set in contemporary New York. In a lot of ways, The National is Grantland’s forebear, and so if Grantland doesn’t work out, the least we could hope for would be an autopsy as funny as this one.

4. Jon Lee Anderson – “King of Kings” – New Yorker

Over the summer, I reported on a Libyan-American trapped in Libya during the civil war. He’d grown up there, and after he escaped, we became friends. On the day Qaddafi died, I texted him to see if he’d heard — he lived in a van because he didn’t have any money, and nor did he have a TV — and I didn’t hear back. While walking through a park later, he told me that when he got my text about Qaddafi, he sat down and didn’t move for several hours. It’s tough to explain how deeply Qaddafi had engrained himself into Libyan psyches, creating a distortion field where it was impossible to imagine existence without him. While walking, I told him about the New Yorker and how it writes these comprehensive takes on a subject that often become the final word, and I told him we could expect something from the New Yorker on Qaddafi. And shortly later, there it came: A brilliant postmortem by Jon Lee Anderson to explain the man-cum-phenomenon. My friend had trouble finishing it because it hit so close to home, and that’s what great journalism should do.

5. Tim Rogers – “Who Killed Videogames? (A Ghost Story)” – Insert Credit

This monster on the deep unhappiness behind the contemporary gaming experience came at me from out of nowhere a few months ago, and it hasn’t left me since. I still have questions about it, actually: How much is real? How much is fiction? In the end, the particulars didn’t matter so much as the dark way Rogers captures the Pavlovian sickness behind games created by companies like Zynga, whose games thrive by creating an itch in users rather than aiming for real joy.

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Honorable mention: 

Kim Zetter – “How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History” – Wired

One of these days, after The Big One hits, we’re going to wish we’d stuck more narrative writers on the tech beat to explain the malevolent 1s and 0s secretly undermining our lives online and, increasingly, our relationship with the world at large. There will always be the Nicholas Schmidles to write the Osama bin Laden takedown (which might’ve been on this list if not for transparency qualms), but the day is soon coming where our most important national security enforcers write code instead of rappelling out of helicopters — if they aren’t already. Zetter’s piece is a brilliant argument that that day has already come. (Bonus points for Wired’s visual presentation of the story.)

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Mental Floss Editors: Our Top Longreads of 2011

The editors of mental_floss magazine: Mangesh Hattikudur, Ethan Trex, Stephanie Meyers, and Jessanne Collins. They’re also on Twitter and Tumblr.

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“Deep Intellect,” Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine)

Is it weird to say we enjoyed this trek “inside the mind of an octopus” because it was so sensual? Who knew the octopus can taste with all of its skin, run amok out of water like a spooked cat, and solve puzzles? Montgomery’s exploration into the psyche of the spooky-smart mollusk and the researchers who study them is surprisingly … touching.

“Doubling in the Middle,” Gregory Kornbluh (The Believer)

The reversible prose talents of “master palindromist” Barry Duncan are something of a very, very local legend in Cambridge, Mass. This long overdue profile introduces his technique to the rest of us, on the occasion of the completion of an epic 400-word palindrome earlier this year.

“How to Mend a Broken Heart,” Shannon Service (Brink Magazine)

A broken heart can literally kill you (the diagnosis is “myocardial stunning due to exaggerated sympathetic stimulation”), and heartbreak can be harder to get over than a heroin habit. This candid essay weaves together a look at the latest in the science of lost love with a trip inside the Croatia’s brand-new Museum of Broken Hearts.

“Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code,” Jonah Lehrer (Wired)

We’ve been downright willy-nilly in our scratch-off lottery ticket technique all these years, which is the only possible explanation for why we’re still not millionaires. Jonah Lehrer introduces us to the Canadian geological statistician who unearthed the mathematical algorithm buried under that gummy silver stuff.

“Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone,” Amanda Ripley (Time)

Private after-hours tutoring is so rampant in South Korea the government has had to enact a curfew to curtail it. It’s like an action movie where police are trying to break up kids’ late night study groups! 

“Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma,” Peter Savodnik (Wired)

Since sometime in the early ’80s, a mysterious shortwave radio station, UVB-76, based north of Moscow, transmitted beeps and buzzes around the clock. In 2010, it began to act strangely—first stopping entirely, then broadcasting random series of numbers and other, stranger noises…

“Broken Kingdom,” Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Phantom Tollbooth, Adam Gopnik talks to the two creators about synesthesia, the GI Bill, radio, and why everyone thought the book would end up on the remainder table. 

“The Greatest Paper that Ever Died,” Alex French and Howie Kahn (Grantland)

French and Kahn’s riveting oral history of short-lived sports daily The National’s epic collapse has a little bit of everything for sports-media junkies, including quotes from greats like Frank Deford and Charles P. Pierce and, of course, a $52,000 brass eagle. 

“The Joy Lock Club,” Pagan Kennedy (Boston Magazine)

Getting to know Schuyler Towne, renowned recreational lock-picker (recreational lock-picking is a thing!) and publisher of the magazine NDE (Non-Destructive Entry) aka “the Us Weekly of hardware security.”

“Death in the Pot,” Deborah Blum (Lapham’s Quarterly)

Any article tagged “cooking, food, government, medicine, poison, war” is auto-must-read in our book. An overview of food adulteration through history, from the Greek army’s “mad-honey poisoning” of 401 BC to today.

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