The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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D. Zucker: You know who came in to read for Ted Striker? Bruce Jenner came in to read.
J. Zucker: That’s right. That was funny. And David Letterman tested, too. Letterman was really funny, because… I’m not sure why he tested. I think maybe his agents pushed him to come in or something, because he really didn’t want to. It’s funny, because Letterman’s a satirist and a comic, and he doesn’t take himself seriously enough, in a way, to be an actor.
D. Zucker: Yeah, he didn’t want to be an actor, although—I don’t know if you remember, but he actually came in to read for Kentucky Fried Movie.
J. Zucker: Oh, did he really? I’d forgotten about that!
D. Zucker: Yeah. So we knew him from then, and every time he came in to read, he would have us cracked up for five or 10 minutes before he actually went through with the reading.
J. Zucker: I think acting, to David, there’s something phony about it. I don’t know if he thinks about it that way, but I just feel it’s not his thing. But he actually wasn’t bad. He’s just not an actor. He looked great, and his comic delivery for all those lines was good, but I’ll never forget when we were on the set and did a screen test with him. One of his managers was there, and I sort of came up to him with a big, optimistic smile and said, “Well, I think we’re making an actor out of him!” And his manager’s response was, “Fat chance.” [Laughs.] I must’ve drawn the short straw—and I say that because nobody wants to tell someone that they didn’t get the role—but I ended up being the one to call David and tell him. And he was just relieved. I’ve never seen an actor so happy to be told that he didn’t get the role. A few years later, though, we ended up going on Late Night With David Letterman, all three of us, and we showed the clip of his screen test for Airplane!.
— From The AV Club’s oral history of Airplane!, which looks back on how the hit 1980 comedy was made.

Mark Attanasio: The day started at 5, not 5:01. …You got in between 4:30 and 5 and got yourself situated. … Often clients would show up early to man up and show Mike, “Hey, I’m here, too.”
G. Chris Andersen: We financed Ted Turner. We financed John Malone.
Mark Attanasio: Within a year I was in front of guys like Ron Perelman and Steve Ross at Warner Brothers.
Lorraine Spurge: And then, at some point, we met a gentleman named Steve Wynn.
Ken Moelis: Steve came to me in 1986. And he says, “Look, I got this idea. We’re going to build this casino for $800 million, and it’s going to have a volcano that goes off every 15 minutes.”
—from “Renegades of Junk: The Rise and Fall of the Drexel Empire”, an oral history by Bloomberg News reporters Max Abelson, Jason Kelly, and David Carey. Interviews trace the trajectory of former investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, where Michael Milken helped popularize junk bonds before the firm filed for bankruptcy 25 years ago.

“Parks & Recreation” may have begun as a The Office spinoff, but it ended its seventh season on its own delightful, lauded terms. At Uproxx, Ashley Burns and Chloe Schildhause compiled a spoiler-free oral history of “Parks & Recreation,” the biggest little show that could. This one’s for you, Pawnee.
On positive comedy: A lot of comedy seems negative and built on conflict and that stuff can be really funny, but if you look at some shows, sometimes the characters are just mean to each other. So, one of the challenges of Parks and Rec, that I hope we met, was that the characters were friends who had conflicts that were based on personality types and not based on zingers.
On Amy Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope: After the first season we thought that Leslie was going to be more conniving and savvy about politics. But then we realized that just wasn’t a good color on Amy. It seemed better to have someone who was more into doing good with politics and wanting to be a good person in the government and that seemed more fun.
On writer’s room antics: TV writing is such a communal process, and I have much more experience being in a comedy room, and I know that comedy writing is such a communal experience that the writer of that episode definitely has a shape in that first draft, and first jokes and language of that script. But together the final version is a group effort. Always spearheaded by the showrunner, our showrunner being the amazing Mike Schur, who is the funniest, smartest, nicest man, or person, I’ve ever met in the industry. So he is the voice of Parks and Rec and together we all work with him to make that final voice.
On the last day of shooting: We arranged our schedule so that the last scenes were with the entire cast and they were on our set and not a location. We were able to all be together for the last moments of the show. It was very nice and felt very appropriate. The cast was very sad and the producers were very sad, everybody’s really sad. But sad in the best possible way. And we kept reminding ourselves that the fact that we got to be this sad means that we had a really great run. The worst thing in the world would be to shoot the final day of your show and then be like, “Get me the hell out of here.” That would have been a much sadder scenario. So it was all the good kind of sad. That’s an emotion you can deal with, when you realize that the reason you’re sad is because something great is ending.

As the Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi once wrote: everyone poops. But we don’t talk about this openly or often enough. In fact, talking and reading about poop might make you want to hold your nose — but it’ll also open your eyes. Here are nine pieces about shit, from a DIY mixture a woman used to treat her life-threatening infection, to prehistoric poo that brings us one step closer to understanding the origins of life after the dinosaur age.
Suffering from a recurring intestinal infection called C. diff, Catherine Duff decided to take matters into her own hands. Using healthy stool from her husband, they concocted an unconventional cocktail — using a plastic enema, blender, and a cheese cloth — which he then transferred into her. This procedure, known as fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), saved her life. Duff advocated for FMT as a viable treatment when the FDA considered regulating it as an “investigational new drug,” and founded the Fecal Transplant Foundation to educate the public and to connect patients, doctors, and stool donors. Read more…

Comedian and actor Robin Williams died today at the age of 63. Here are five in-depth interviews with him.
Terry Gross talks to Robin Williams, and, towards the end of the interview, asks him about depression: “Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah.”

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Paste Magazine has an oral history of The Wonder Years with some of the actors from the show. The Wonder Years is finally being released on DVD this fall, after years of delay due to music rights issues. (Cocker originally performed “With a Little Help From My Friends” at Woodstock in 1969, and that version ended up being used for the show.)

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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