Search Results for: profile

Honoring Your Forebears: Our College Pick

Longreads Pick

R.J. Vogt’s profile of an aging Medal of Honor winner draws the best of Esquire‘s voice, ruminating on age and death and masculinity and heroism.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 12, 2014

Honoring Your Forebears: Our College Pick

Regular readers of a particular magazine can usually pick up on that publication’s voice. Articles sound like Cosmo or the New Yorker or Saveur and we read them because we like articles that sound that way. We like the voice. Professional writers learn to tailor stories to a specific magazine and journalism students practice writing stories that sound like they could be published in the titles they love and admire. R.J. Vogt’s profile of an aging Medal of Honor winner draws the best of Esquire‘s voice, ruminating on age and death and masculinity and heroism. It is, like all good magazine articles, about something bigger than the initial storyline.

He Wears a Medal of Honor

R.J. Vogt | Medal of Honor Project | July 29, 2014 | 10 minutes (2,598 words)

François Truffaut on an Aging Joan Crawford

As she neared fifty, determined to keep going, she became almost grotesque, answering her own needs and the wiles of directors eager to exploit her. In Nicholas Ray’s odd, beautiful, impassioned Western “Johnny Guitar” (1954), she’s Vienna, a tough businesswoman who runs a saloon and constantly faces down groups of armed men. Vienna is both an icon of self-reliance and a woman who’s uncontrollably in love with a handsome young gunslinger (Sterling Hayden). The performance, lodged somewhere between the dignified and the absurd, is so peculiarly willed that it stunned the young François Truffaut. “She is beyond considerations of beauty,” he wrote. “She has become unreal, a fantasy of herself. Whiteness has invaded her eyes, muscles have taken over her face, a will of iron behind a face of steel. She is a phenomenon. She is becoming more manly as she grows older. Her clipped, tense acting, pushed almost to paroxysm by Ray, is in itself a strange and fascinating spectacle.”

—From “Escape Artist,” David Denby’s 2011 New Yorker profile of Joan Crawford.

 

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Escape Artist: The Case for Joan Crawford

Longreads Pick

David Denby explores the reasons why so many people dislike Joan Crawford as well as the complicated woman behind her public persona in this compelling profile from 2011.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 31, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,300 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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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Modern Farmer Plows Ahead

Longreads Pick

A profile of upstart magazine Modern Farmer, which its founder has described as “farming magazine for media professionals.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 10, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,937 words)

In a Bookstore in Paris

Longreads Pick

A profile of George Whitman, the eccentric deceased founder of cult bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and his daughter and successor, Sylvia.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Nov 1, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,841 words)

Reading List: Longreads and This Land Press at Housing Works

Coming this Wednesday, Oct. 29, in New York, Longreads and WordPress.com present a special night of storytelling at Housing Works with Oklahoma’s This Land Press. The event will be hosted by This Land editor Michael Mason, with Longreads founder Mark Armstrong. (You can also RSVP on Facebook.)

To get you ready for the big night, we’re thrilled to share a reading list of stories and books from the event’s featured storytellers.

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Rilla Askew

Askew is an Oklahoma-born writer and author of the novel Fire in Beulah, set against the backdrop of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

“Near McAlester” (This Land Press, August 2014)

On the complicated history of the place closest to her heart.

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When Oscar de la Renta Told Hillary Clinton Not to Wear Black

“What’s Senator Clinton wearing?” the designer wants to know. It’s Inauguration Day and De la Renta is in his studio, too busy tweaking his new collection to attend the festivities. He is squinting at Chrissy Haldis, a tall, willowy, and by all accounts mannequin-mute brunette who has served as his house model for the past two collections. She stands rotating in slow circles, sheathed in rare, velvety Uzbekistani fabric that, when hemmed and cut, will become a long coat retailing in the neighborhood of $10,000. In De la Renta’s adjoining office, the inauguration is being broadcast over the Internet—there is Laura Bush, pert and stately in a pearly De la Renta cashmere dress, though the designer is currently concerned about the clothes another client, Hillary Clinton, has chosen for the event.

“She’s wearing black,” someone points out.

De la Renta frowns. “What?”

“It’s a black jacket, and a—”

He cuts her off. “Oh, I always tell Senator Clinton . . .” He pauses delicately. “Well, I mean, I’m sure she looks beautiful. Hillary is a beautiful woman. But I always tell her not to wear black. She looks tough in black”—he tenses his fists and jaw to illustrate his point—“and she is more than just a tough lady. The problem is that everything else she has, every other piece of clothing that’s not black, is mine, and with Mrs. Bush also wearing something of mine today . . . ”

After a moment, De la Renta simply laughs. The designer, who grew up under a dictatorship, seems to find politics most compelling, not as an engine of policy and social change, but as a theater of bombastic personalities kept in line by social formality.

“I’m a nonpartisan voter,” he says with a smile. “I vote for the man, not the party. I voted for Clinton, but I voted for Bush. I also voted for Reagan.” He pauses. “Black! I cannot believe she’s wearing black!”

— From a 2005 profile of Oscar de la Renta in New York magazine. The iconic fashion designer died yesterday at the age of 82.

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Photo: YouTube / Oscar de la Renta Film, Bill Clinton Presidential Library

Thirty-Three Hit Wonder

Longreads Pick

A profile of Billy Joel, resident of Long Island who takes a helicopter ride to his monthly job at Madison Square Garden.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 20, 2014
Length: 41 minutes (10,384 words)