Search Results for: profile

How Oil Money From Texas Fuels Hollywood

“The story begins in the 1930s, with Glenn McCarthy striking oil in Beaumont. McCarthy—who was the inspiration for the Jett Rink character in Edna Ferber’s Giant—used his millions to bankroll the 1949 drama ‘The Green Promise’, starring Natalie Wood and Walter Brennan. The movie was almost immediately forgotten, but McCarthy established a much-repeated role: the Texas oilionaire eager to rub shoulders with the stars.

“Fast-forward to the early 2000s, when Tim Headington, the CEO of Dallas-based Headington Oil, hooked up with Graham King, a British-born producer whose first credit was on the Dallas-shot film ‘Dr. T. and the Women’. The duo has since produced ‘Hugo’, ‘The Tourist’, and last year’s Best Picture winner, ‘Argo’. (The famously press-shy Headington has said little of his attraction to Hollywood, other than to tell Forbes, in 2012: ‘[M]ovies have intrigued me for many years, both as a fan and as a possible participant in the process.’

“Fort Worth-based John Goff, chairman and CEO of Crescent Real Estate Holdings, invested a reported $2 million in the 2012 Glenn Close drama ‘Albert Nobbs’. Businessman Bob Kaminski led a group of approximately a dozen area investors to put up a third of the $12 million budget for the Navy SEAL thriller ‘Act of Valor’. According to Variety, at least one high-profile Hollywood producer, Brian Oliver (‘The Ides of March’, Ron Howard’s ‘Rush’), has been putting together financing packages ‘with coin coming mostly from oil and real estate investments in Texas.'”

— In D Magazine, Christopher Kelly examines the rise of Christian entertainment in North Texas, which is being funded in part with oil money. See more stories about movies.

***

Photo: A Scene from the film Hugo

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Sentence I Read This Year

Catherine Cloutier is an online producer at The Boston Globe’s Boston.com.

“Life, Feinberg says, guarantees misfortune. The wolf is always at the door.”

James Oliphant’s profile of Ken Feinberg in the National Journal transformed the way I view our nation’s response to tragedy. The monetary value of a life lost to violence is rarely equal. In highly publicized events, such as the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., or the Boston Marathon bombings, private donations flood victims and their families, while victims of inner-city gang violence often do not receive enough compensation to pay for a funeral. Feinberg tries not to ponder this inequity when distributing victim compensation. He looks at the numbers, determines a method of distribution, and gets the checks out quickly. He has a job to do. It’s math, not emotion. For one week and much of the many that followed, my life and job revolved around the coverage of one of these tragedies. Reading this article, particularly lines like the one I featured, gave me perspective on that event in light of other tragedies in our country. Violence and death are constants; what’s not constant is the attention given to them.

How Much Is a Life Worth?)

James Oliphant | National Journal | August 2013 | 18 minutes (4,405 words)

Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

***

Photo: aigle_dore, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite Stories About Taxes (and Twist-Ties)

Photo: 59937401@N07, Flickr

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a writer and an editor.

Taxes aren’t boring—they’re just supremely difficult to write about in a compelling way. These three stories stand out because they illustrate the far-reaching consequences of different countries’ tax policies through a few very influential people:

1. “Marty Sullivan figured out how the world’s biggest companies avoided billions in taxes. Here’s how he wants to stop them” (Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 2013)

In his affectionate profile of tax expert Marty Sullivan, Steven Pearlstein breaks down everything that’s wrong about the US tax code in Sullivan’s nonpartisan, almost technocratic view—and goes on to explain why politics make it so hard to alter, let alone fix, the system. Not exactly action-movie material, but it’s handled so deftly that I couldn’t put it down.

2. “A Tale of Two Londons” (Nicholas Shaxson, Vanity Fair, 2013)

In Vanity Fair, longtime tax writer Nicholas Shaxson shows how the City of London became a hub for tax-free global capital through the story of One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential building, its fabulously wealthy and faceless owners, and the offshore accounts they used to buy and register the properties anonymously.

3. “Man Making Ireland Tax Avoidance Hub Proves Local Hero” (Jesse Drucker, Bloomberg, 2013)

Finally, Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker profiles Feargal O’Rourke, the man who helped transform Ireland into a “hub for tax avoidance” for multinationals like Apple and Facebook. Drucker withholds judgment (this is Bloomberg, headline and all) but O’Rourke’s mercenary wiles shine through a few well-chosen anecdotes. Choice quote, on Breaking Bad: “I don’t know what it says that we can be rooting for a guy on the dark side of the law.”

Bonus Pick: Most Fascinating Thing I Learned from a Story This Year

Twist-Ties vs. Plastic Clips: Tiny Titans Battle for the Bakery Aisle” (Paul Lukas, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2013)

My favorite business stories are the ones that reveal how much time, energy and thought goes into seemingly mundane consumer goods. This Businessweek article about the ‘bakery bag closure and reclosure market’ is a great example of that. Did you know bag closures generate about $10 million in sales per year? That studies have failed to resolve whether consumers prefer clips or twist-ties? And that there are people whose job it is to sell commercial bakeries on the virtues of these objects? All of this makes perfect sense, of course (hi, capitalism!) but it takes a story like this one to get you thinking.

***

The Passion of Dan Choi

Longreads Pick

A profile of Dan Choi, a gay Iraq combat veteran who became a media star after his public push to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Since the victory, Choi has found it difficult to figure out what to do next:

In late August, I was on my way to interview Dan at his apartment when he messaged me that a big protest was shaping up at the White House. President Barack Obama had just announced that he would ask Congress for authorization to use force in Syria. I raced to meet him at the north entrance, but all I found were tourists snapping photos and Dan circling around on his bike. He hung out for a while, texting a friend to ask for an update. She didn’t respond. After 20 minutes of scouring his contacts for people who might have more information, he looked up from his phone and gave me a sideways grin. He was being a good sport, but he looked crestfallen. I sensed—or maybe I just imagined it—he was asking himself the same question I had been: Who is Dan Choi without “don’t ask, don’t tell”?

Published: Dec 2, 2013
Length: 28 minutes (7,175 words)

Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

Reading List: Religion Gone Extreme

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

Each of these stories this week is about a facet of religion gone extreme, and each is an example of why these pieces of longform journalism are important. There is detailed, professional storytelling, gripping subject matter, the opportunity to delve behind-the-scenes and try to get at the truth. It’s so easy to make assumptions about folks who don’t take their sons to the doctor, or the daughters of cult leaders, or the woman who studies the daughter of cult leaders, but good reporting forces us to reassess our assumptions.

1. “The Fall of the House of Moon.” (Mariah Blake, The New Republic, November 2013)

Though his espoused family values and extreme legalistic moralism attracted the Republican Party, Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church enforced harmful sex rivals and fostered an environment of bitter sibling rivalry, drug abuse, and adultery. I’m in awe of Blake’s thorough investigation. I read most of this article to a friend of mine as she gaped.

2. “Why Did the Schaibles Let Their Children Die?” (Robert Huber, Philadelphia Magazine, October 2013)

Herbie and Cathy Schaible lost two young sons to treatable illnesses because their independent Baptist denomination does not believe in man-made medicine. They believe unacknowledged sin, not lack of medical treatment, caused their sons’ deaths.

3. “Caught Up In the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher.” (Susan J. Palmer, University of Toronto Press, 2001)

Cult-lover or sympathetic scientist? In courts of law, Susan Palmer is summoned to explicate her studies of New Religious Movements (NRMS). In this (delightful!) bear of an essay, she discusses the ethical dilemmas of investigating NRMs.

4. “A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?” (Tom Bartlett, Religion Dispatch Magazine, May 2012)

When your leader’s prophecies don’t come true, what do you do? Bartlett interviewed followers of doomsday herald Harold Camping. It’s a solid companion to Palmer’s essay about NRMs.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

•••

Longreads has featured each story included my list this week, and is in the midst of its Member Drive. Our goal is 5,000 subscribers, who’ll receive weekly updates and exclusive access to some of the best journalism today. I’m a member, and I hope you will consider becoming one as well.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Sasha Belenky on Jeanne Marie Laskas's 'The People V. Football'

sasha
Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post.

Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most riveted, however, by her 2011 profile in GQ of Fred McNeill, former star linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings — which similarly begins in the car. It’s a heart-wrenching scene, with McNeill’s wife, Tia, fighting his dementia along with the Los Angeles traffic, and it’s a great example of Laskas’ gift for capturing language. As journalists continue to shed light on the concussion crisis in football, Laskas’ article stands out as one of the most personal, most devastating accounts of the long-term damage being done on the field.

•••

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Birth of the Modern American Suburb

“The land Levitt found was in the largely empty farmland of Hempstead, Long Island, and Levitt amassed thousands of acres. His timing could not have been more perfect. Sixteen million G.I.’s were returning from the war, many needing a place to live. There were abundant hard-luck stories of couples living with parents, sleeping in back rooms, or, worse, in tents, boxcars, or the fuselages of old Army bombers. What’s more, the federal government had passed the G.I. Bill, which, among other benefits, gave ex-soldiers access to cheap loans. Perhaps most important, the banks were rolling out a product that was just as world-changing as the smartphone: the 30-year fixed mortgage. It made buying a house, which, for most Americans, had been a carrot on a stick—always chased but hardly ever caught—suddenly seem like no big deal.

“Levitt broke ground in Hempstead in 1947. His method was the one he’d pioneered in Norfolk—the modern suburb, with its rows of cookie-cutter sameness, is, like so many modern institutions, a relic of the Second World War. He laid the building materials every hundred feet, the 27 teams with their 27 tasks moving across the waste. It took thirteen minutes to dig a foundation. Then came walls, the roof, a refrigerator. By 1948, the Levitts were finishing 30 houses a day. One day in 1949, Levitt wrote 1,400 contracts. He worked the desk himself, says Simone. ‘He was a humble man. As brilliant as he was, he would stand there, take the hundred dollars, thank the customers, and wish them good luck.’ Four years after breaking ground, the last house in the development sold—number 17,447. By then, the village had changed its name from Island Trees to Levittown.”

Rich Cohen (New York magazine) on Simone Levitt, the wife of Bill Levitt, father of the modern American suburb. Read more profiles from the Longreads Archive.

***

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Beating Rituals and Sex Ceremonies in Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church

“The central pillar of Moon’s theology held that Eve had a dalliance with Satan in the Garden of Eden and then slept with Adam, which is how human beings were burdened with original sin. Moon also believed that people, movements, and even entire countries embodied these biblical figures. He himself was the ‘perfect Adam,’ and his mission was to help humankind reclaim its original goodness by forging a new world order led by Korea, the ‘Adam nation.’ America, the ‘archangel’ nation, would play a key role in this mission by helping Korea to rout communism, after which it would bow down to the Korean-led regime, with Moon as its king and messiah.

“Moon told his followers that they could join his sin-free bloodline by marrying a spouse of his choosing and engaging in a series of rituals. First, the newlyweds would beat each other with a bat, and then they would perform a three-day sex ceremony involving prescribed positions in front of Moon’s portrait. After the final sexual interlude—in missionary position—the bride would bow down to the groom, a confirmation that they had restored the ‘lost ideal of goodness.’”

-From Mariah Blake’s latest story in The New Republic, on the rise and fall of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Read more from The New Republic.

***

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

A Former Basketball Star's New Life in Europe: Our College Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

College athletes who don’t go on to play professionally sometimes continue their career in Europe. And that’s usually the last we hear of them. But the University of Pittsburgh’s Jasper Wilson made good use of a trip to Strasbourg to profile former Pitt basketball star Ricardo Greer. Greer, now 36, does things like throw his kid a birthday party and dispute his salary with his boss. These are adult concerns, beyond dull to most college students. But Wilson saw these moments as part of his narrative, a “whatever happened to” story about a student-athlete who grew up to become a responsible adult who makes a living doing the thing college prepared him to do. Sports journalism is in desperate need of reporters who can identify fresh angles beyond the churn of conflicts manufactured by ESPN and talk radio. Wilson had to go all the way to France, but he found one.

Greer Made Career, Home Playing in France

Jasper Wilson | The Pitt News | November 6, 2013 | 12 minutes (2,928 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.