Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story,” by Ned Stuckey-French, originally published in 1999 in culturefront, the former magazine for the New York Council for the Humanities. It’s a story that takes a closer look at the dynamics of a friendship, and the roles we play in each other’s lives.
Alexander Woollcott fell in love with Harpo Marx the first time he saw him. It was the evening of May 19, 1924, and the Marx Brothers were making their Broadway debut in the slyly titled musical comedy I’ll Say She Is. Woollcott was there, reluctantly, to review it for the Sun. Another show, a much-hyped drama featuring a French music-hall star, had been scheduled to open the same night, but when it was postponed at the last minute, the firstline critics decided to take the night off. Except for Woollcott. His career was in the doldrums, and hoping against hope for a scoop, he dragged himself over to see what he assumed were “some damned acrobats.” Read more…
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most recent history, The Bully Pulpit, chronicles the intertwined lives of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, often in excruciating detail, from Roosevelt’s struggles with the bosses of his Republican party to the fungal infections that plagued Taft’s groin. But the most illuminating aspect of Pulpit is the spotlight it shines on the muckraking journalism of the early 20th century, particularly as practiced by a monthly magazine called McClure’s. There, writers such as Ida Tarbell, Ray Baker, and Lincoln Steffens held the feet of the powerful to the fire. In one landmark issue, January 1903, articles by all three were featured, including the third installment of Tarbell’s 12-part exposé of Standard Oil and Baker’s counter-intuitive, sympathetic portrait of coal miners, whose dire circumstances had forced them to cross picket lines. Read more…
Our latest first chapter comes from Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, who has chosen Janet Fitch’s 1999 novel White Oleander. If you want to recommend a First Chapter, let us know and we’ll feature you and your pick: hello@longreads.com.Read more…
Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. Read more…
An excerpt from Radley Balko’s new book Rise of the Warrior Cop, on the militarization of U.S. police forces and the reasons SWAT teams have been able to conduct raids for seemingly minor alleged crimes:
“In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost for hosting charity poker games. Players said the tactics were terrifying. One woman urinated on herself. When police raided a San Mateo, California, poker game in 2008, card players described cops storming the place ‘in full riot gear’ and ‘with guns drawn.’ The games had buy-ins ranging from $25 to $55. Under California law, the games were legal so long as no one took a ‘rake,’ or a cut of the stakes. No one had, but police claimed the $5 the hosts charged players to buy refreshments qualified as a rake. In March 2007, a small army of local cops, ATF agents, National Guard troops, and a helicopter raided a poker game in Cary, North Carolina. They issued forty-one citations, all of them misdemeanors. A columnist at the Fayetteville Observer remarked, ‘They were there to play cards, not to foment rebellion. . . . [I] wonder . . . what other minutiae, personal vices and petty crimes are occupying [the National Guard’s] time, and where they’re occupying it. . . . Until we get this sorted out, better not jaywalk. There could be a military helicopter overhead.'”
Rethinking the legacy of one of the most ridiculed hair bands of our time:
“I have no insight into the goings-on of Jon Bon Jovi’s headspace, but I like to imagine him having a ‘Once in a Lifetime’ moment during the Springsteen duet: ‘This is not my classic-rock staple, this is not my classic-rock backing band. Well, how did I get here?’ Maybe I’m projecting: In many people’s minds (certainly many critics’ minds), perceptions of Bon Jovi will forever be fixed in the late ’80s, the band’s most commercially successful period, when Slippery When Wet and 1988’s New Jersey spun off seven top-10 singles — an unprecedented run for what’s ostensibly a hard-rock band — including four no. 1’s. ‘Blaze of Glory,’ the breakout song from Jon Bon Jovi’s ‘solo’ soundtrack for Young Guns II, also hit the top of the charts during this period.
“Susan Orlean’s1 1987 profile of Bon Jovi for Rolling Stone was typical of how the press treated the band at the time. The piece begins with an extended, oddly reverential treatise on Jon Bon’s ‘fourteen inches’ of hair: ‘Its color is somewhere between chestnut and auburn, and the frosty streaks in it give it a sizzling golden sheen,’ Orlean writes. ‘Truth is, it would be safe to say that Jon Bon Jovi has the most wonderful hair in rock & roll today.’ Orlean describes Jon Bon’s locks as an oedipal metaphor for rebellion against his dad, a hairdresser, though her poker face doesn’t quite hold. She doesn’t really take this guy seriously, and the implication is that we shouldn’t either.”
[Fiction] Excerpt from Woke Up Lonely: Boredom, loneliness and a loss of innocence at a remote listening station in the middle of nowhere:
We got to the cave, the door was unlocked, and inside were a few cryptanalysts I’d seen around, but never talked to. They were gathered at a work station-turned-bar, and playing cards. The three were ecstatic to see us. Hey, Teddy, and, you, what’s your name again? I said I had some reviewing to do and not to mind me at all. Suit yourself, they said. Teddy was dealt in and I retreated to a corner. I sat with my back to the room, put on my headphones, and cued up. Okay, now pay attention. I listened once just to get back into the zone, twice to access my guy’s headspace, and a third to parse content from emotion. By the sixth, I had completely tuned out his whimpers and clamor of self-disgust, but I still could not make sense of the rest. I pressed my headphones into my ears and went: Listen.
Meantime, the others were kissing. I’ll just get right to it, they were kissing. Not that the card game had escalated into strip poker, not that there’d been any pretense to make these amorous gestures compulsory—as per spin the bottle—just that the four had tired of one pursuit and moved on to another.
[Fiction] Excerpt from Woke Up Lonely: Boredom, loneliness and a loss of innocence at a remote listening station in the middle of nowhere:
“We got to the cave, the door was unlocked, and inside were a few cryptanalysts I’d seen around, but never talked to. They were gathered at a work station-turned-bar, and playing cards. The three were ecstatic to see us. Hey, Teddy, and, you, what’s your name again? I said I had some reviewing to do and not to mind me at all. Suit yourself, they said. Teddy was dealt in and I retreated to a corner. I sat with my back to the room, put on my headphones, and cued up. Okay, now pay attention. I listened once just to get back into the zone, twice to access my guy’s headspace, and a third to parse content from emotion. By the sixth, I had completely tuned out his whimpers and clamor of self-disgust, but I still could not make sense of the rest. I pressed my headphones into my ears and went: Listen.
“Meantime, the others were kissing. I’ll just get right to it, they were kissing. Not that the card game had escalated into strip poker, not that there’d been any pretense to make these amorous gestures compulsory—as per spin the bottle—just that the four had tired of one pursuit and moved on to another.”
Avi Rubin, a 44-year-old computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, is obsessed with the math behind Texas Hold ‘em:
When he began studying poker, Rubin frequently thought in terms of how a computer might model the game. Several disciplines were applicable—game theory, expert systems, machine learning, combinatorics. The latter is a branch of mathematics concerned with finite countable structures. The various combinations of cards in a poker hand are finite countable structures. As he trained himself to be a better player, Rubin would make up combinatorics poker problems, then solve them on a computer. He has considered studying the game by creating decision trees, branching diagrams that plot a chain of if-then options and are routine for a computer scientist. For example, he could start with a single hand, then chart all the variables—his position in a round of betting, the texture of the flop (that is, does it have potential to create strong hands like straights or flushes), whether he is playing against three others or heads-up against a single remaining opponent—to see what might happen. ‘For any given spot in the decision tree,’ he says, ‘I could come up with a probability distribution of different plays. Then I could write a learning program that I could use as a simulator on the computer and play a thousand times with particular settings, then tweak the settings and run it again to see if I do better, and work backward from it to infer why that was a better play in that situation. The thing is, there are so many variables and so many factors you rarely find yourself in a precise situation that you’ve studied. What you have to do is abstract out the reasoning used to get to that decision, then apply that logic and process to whatever situation you’re in.’
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