Search Results for: profile

Philip Seymour Hoffman: 1967-2014

“In my mid–20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman, to Lynn Hirschberg, in a 2008 New York Times Magazine profile. Hoffman was found dead Feb. 2 in Manhattan.

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Photo: justinhoch, Flickr

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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The Botmaker Who Sees Through the Internet

Longreads Pick

A profile of Darius Kazemi, who is turning Twitter bots into an art form: He’s created dozens of automated programs whose purposes can run the gamut from cultural commentary to complete nonsense:

Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jan 28, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,258 words)

How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

Longreads Pick

A mathematician uses data mining and algorithms to find the perfect match on a dating site:

When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of women matched at 99 percent. He scrolled down … and down … and down. Ten thousand women scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s.

He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid members are notified when some­one views their pages, so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-old women on Monday, another thousand 40-year-old women on Tuesday, looping back through when he reached 27-year-olds two weeks later. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some 400 a day. And messages began to roll in.

Source: Wired
Published: Jan 21, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,931 words)

Famous Cases of Journalistic Fraud: A Reading List

Washington Post Investigation of Janet Cooke’s Fabrications

Bill Green | Washington Post Ombudsman | April 19, 1981

In 1980, Janet Cooke made up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, won the Pulitzer Prize for it, then, two days later, gave it back. Here’s the internal investigation of how the Post leaned on her to get her to admit she faked it.

[Cooke’s] new resume claimed that she spoke or read French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Her original resume claimed only French and Spanish. The new form claimed she had won six awards from the Ohio Newspaper Women’s Association and another from the Ohio AP. […]

Janet was crying harder, and Bradlee began to check off her language proficiency. “Say two words to me in Portuguese,” he said. She said she couldn’t.

“Do you have any Italian?” Bradlee asked.

Cooke said no.

Bradlee, fluent in French, asked her questions in the language. Her answers were stumbling.

(The formatting is not that great, but if you save it in Instapaper and read it there, it’s easier to follow. Here’s a non-single-page link).

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9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List

Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. Read more…

Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Study of Hidden Animals

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

I spent this morning exploring The Museum of Unnatural History in Washington D.C. Fueled by the likes of Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman and Paul Simon, the museum is the storefront for 826DC, which holds workshops and tutors local kids in creative writing and reading. A venue combining my fascination with cryptozoology, contemporary literature, and teaching kids to write? Sounds positively mythical.

But I’ve been fascinated by cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, since middle school; I devoured Paul Zindel’s Loch and Reef of Death. In college, I read that essayist and poet Wendell Berry’s daughter, Mary, said, “I hope there is an animal somewhere that nobody has ever seen.  And I hope nobody ever sees it.” A week ago, Dan Harmon, creator of “Community” proposed to his fiancé at Loch Ness. And today I admired stencils of chupacabras and jars of unicorn burps. Cryptozoology reveals all the best and worst parts of human nature, and it makes for great storytelling.

1. “The Private Lives of the Cryptozoologists.” (Martin Connelly, The Morning News, March 2013)

Step into the cabinet of curiosities: The International Cryptozoology Museum is in Portland, Maine. It’s stuffed with artifacts ranging from a taxidermy Bigfoot to children’s drawings to blurry photos. It’s staffed by sweater vest-clad Loren Coleman, a foremost authority on cryptozoology and a wonderful tour guide.

2. “Bigfoot.” (Robert Sullivan, Open Spaces Magazine, 2012)

Sullivan interviews several of the men most invested in finding Sasquatch; these profiles read like entries from a delightful almanac. Though their methods range from field work to anthropological study, these men share a rivalry with each other and anger toward the scientific community’s contempt for them.

3. “Dr. Orbell’s Unlikely Quest.” (Eric Karlan, All About Birds, Winter 2004)

Cryptozoology isn’t only Bigfoot and Nessie. These scientists are also interested in animals thought to be extinct. Here, Eric Karlan delves into Dr. Geoffrey Orbell’s triumphant search for the Takahe—a bright, flightless, stocky bird native to New Zealand, supposedly gone forever–which took over 40 years of scrupulous research in the face of naysayers.

4. “Loch Ness Memoir.” (Tom Bissell, Virginia Quarterly Review, August 2006)

With weird, wonderful humor, skeptic Tom Bissell explores Loch Ness with two writer friends and his childhood love of Nessiteras rhombopteryx.

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Photo: JD Hancock

Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About

For four years now, the Longreads community has celebrated the best storytelling on the web. Thanks for all of your contributions, and special thanks to Longreads Members for supporting this service. We couldn’t keep going without your funding, so join us today.

Earlier this week we posted every No. 1 story from our weekly email this year, in addition to all of the outstanding picks from our Best of 2013 series. Here are 10 stories that we couldn’t stop thinking about.

See you in 2014. Read more…

The Wage Warrior

Longreads Pick

A profile of Maria Elena Durazo, Los Angeles’s most powerful labor leader:

Just how much influence does Durazo have in Los Angeles? Anyone who wants to build anything big—a hotel, a skyscraper, a sports stadium, a rail line—must first go through her and the County Fed, providing assurance that the project will create “good union jobs.” In the exceedingly rare instance that a nonunion project does get approved by the labor-friendly city council, it can face protests and even litigation. Developers are said to be frustrated that a single interest group has so much clout, but nobody is willing to speak openly. “I don’t know any developer who would go on record saying anything that would antagonize María,” a consultant told me.

“She’s one of the foremost power brokers in the city—there’s no question about that,” says Jaime Regalado, the former head of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs. “Call it a fear factor, call it a respect factor. Those who make decisions in the public sector have to listen to her.”

Published: Dec 23, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,682 words)

Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: New Questions About a Legendary Tennis Match

The Match Maker

Don Van Natta Jr. | ESPN | August 2013 | 34 minutes (8,461 words)

 

Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

My story, The Match Maker, was online at ESPN.com only a few hours on Aug. 25 when I heard from a California man who shrugged at the possibility that tennis champ and American hustler Bobby Riggs had thrown the famous September 1973 Battle of the Sexes match. The man’s name is Russell Boyd, and he claimed Bobby Riggs had talked openly and repeatedly with him, back in June 1973, about his intention to lose his upcoming match against Billie Jean King at the Houston Astrodome. “I didn’t realize at the time that it was such a serious matter of him playing Billie Jean King,” Boyd, 56, told me, “and that he was actually expected to make an effort to win.” Read more…