Gay Talese’s classic 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra with annotations from the author:
“The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers. Do you have a photographic memory?-eg I go over stuff so much, and go over it again and again and again, that I can remember it forever, almost.-gt A couple of years ago, you told Chris Jones, ‘I don’t take notes in front of people.’-eg Right.-gt So what techniques to do you use to remember such a complicated scene or extended dialogue? You’re describing — in great detail — movement, wardrobe and the location of the various parties. This strikes me as something that would be difficult to capture even in real time.-eg Every night, if I don’t sneak notes in during the day going to the bathroom or something — which I do — I go home and before I go to sleep I write down notes from the whole day, what’s in my mind.-gt”
A profile of former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who spent time in prison for corruption and fraud charges. Abramoff is back in the public eye and wants to help with government reform, but it’s unclear if his intentions are completely sincere:
“Many who knew Abramoff in his past life view his reform efforts with skepticism. I could almost hear some of them rolling their eyes on the other end of the line when I called. A couple of them sighed loudly when I explained what I was working on. One suspected I was just a pawn in Abramoff’s comeback strategy, asking if he was ‘pushing’ me to do the story. (For the record, I approached Abramoff for this article, not the other way around.)
“‘Time will tell whether Jack’s doing this to get a seat at the big-boy table again in Washington,’ says Neil Volz, who worked with him at Greenberg Traurig. ‘He likes to win. He wants to engage in politics in probably the only issue that he currently can—and win.'”
A profile of actor Daniel Radcliffe, who, despite becoming wildly famous at a young age after he starred in the Harry Potter films, has managed to stay earnest, self-aware, and out of the tabloids:
“Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley, Harry Potter’s best friend, recently described the long, drawn-out experience of appearing in the films as ‘quite suffocating.’
“Radcliffe, however, rarely betrayed any strain. ‘If he was feeling good, bad, indifferent or terrible,’ says David Yates, who directed the last four Potter films over six and a half years, ‘he carried the perception that everything was lovely and great, even though the pressures were really intense.’
“As Radcliffe explained it: ‘The second you seem down, everyone’s very concerned. It affects the set.’ Temporarily suppressing a mood was easier than bringing a crew of hundreds of people to a halt — it was just another skill he learned on the job, part of keeping the vast machinery around him moving smoothly. ‘If I ever was feeling ill,’ he said, ‘it was: “Get a doctor on set!” “No, I’m fine.” … That feeling makes me not want to worry people.'”
Dan P. Lee profiles director Alfonso Cuarón and the difficult journey making his new film Gravity:
“When Cuarón first dreamed up Gravity, he thought that he’d essentially hacked the Hollywood system: Here was a potentially audience-friendly adventure movie, and as long as they landed an A-list actor, production would fall into place. He and Jonas wrote the screenplay at lightning speed. They attracted immediate interest from studios, and, crucially, Angelina Jolie. They began preparing for a shoot. ‘And then very soon we find out that the film was not going to be achievable with the existing technology,’ Cuarón said.
“So, I wondered, what did he do next?
“He laughed, smiled broadly. ‘Waste four years of my life.'”
In 2011, Longreads highlighted an essay called “Weekend at Kermie’s,” by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, published by The Awl. Stevens is now back with a new Muppet-inspired Kindle Serial called “Make Art Make Money,” part how-to, part Jim Henson history. Below is the opening chapter. Our thanks to Stevens and Amazon Publishing for sharing this with the Longreads community.Read more…
Fifteen-year-old Audrie Pott took her own life after nude photos of her were circulated around school by high school classmates. Three boys were later arrested and charged. It’s “a shocking tale of sexual assault in the Digital Age” that’s becoming less uncommon as a number of high-profile cases similar to Pott’s makes headlines while many others go unreported:
“‘It’s a perfect storm of technology and hormones,’ says lawyer Lori Andrews, director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology in Chicago. ‘Teen sexting is all a way of magnifying girls’ fantasies of being a star of their own movies, and boys locked in a room bragging about sexual conquest.’
‘But as of yet the law provides little protection to the rights of those violated. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act effectively means that no Internet provider can be forced to take down content for invading a person’s privacy or even defaming them. ‘I could sue The New York Times for invading my privacy or Rolling Stone for defaming me,’ Andrews says. ‘But I couldn’t sue and get my picture off a website called sluttyseventhgraders.com.’
“The flip side of this ugly trend is that when gang-rape participants and bystanders record and disseminate pictures of an assault, public outrage is inflamed and cops and prosecutors have evidence they can take to court. This can mean rape victims get more justice than in years past. Arguably, the Steubenville rape would never have been prosecuted without the video. However, since so many of the incidents involve juveniles, punishment is neither swift nor certain.”
An intimate look at the life of Caitlyn Pinto, a ten-year-old girl living in Canada who loves Justin Bieber and has thoughtful ideas about racism and bullying:
“Caitlyn has an iPod touch, which allows her to surf the Internet, though she uses it mostly for iMessage, and FaceTime, a kind of one-on-one video chat. She and her friends message several times a day, about dumb stuff: school, music, what are you eating, whatever. On Fridays, they group-message, with everyone texting online at once. The family rule is that Facebook is not allowed until grade seven, and Caitlyn is fine with that. After much discussion at school about cyberstalking and cyberbullying, the prospect of sharing too much in cyberspace makes her nervous. Friends talk about the suicide of Amanda Todd, the BC teen bullied so callously across the Internet and at school. Caitlyn has heard stories about grade seven girls being teased online, and this is scary: an electronic footprint fixes a young girl’s identity when she is most in flux, and it can’t be erased. ‘I like texting more than Facebook, because you know where it’s going. It’ll just go to one friend, and you can’t forward things.'”
A profile of Chris Bolyard, chef de cuisine at Sidney Street Cafe in St. Louis, who works under celebrity chef Kevin Nashan:
“Living outside the spotlight is nothing new for Bolyard. As the chef de cuisine of St. Louis’ Sidney Street Cafe in Benton Park, he has long worked alongside its celebrated owner and executive chef, Kevin Nashan. While the story itself has been told many times – talented chef laboring quietly behind the scenes – Bolyard’s tale is different because of its length. He’s worked for Nashan for nearly a decade, playing right-hand man to a boss who collects James Beard nominations like Pokémon cards.
“When it comes to food, chefs, by their nature, are a narcissistic bunch, and many in Bolyard’s position would’ve left to spread their own culinary gospel. An executive chef position here. A small bistro there. But Bolyard has stayed rooted, happy in a situation that is not far from ideal.”
A profile of psychiatrist David Burns, who wrote Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, “one of the most successful psychotherapy books ever written” that has helped transform the field of psychiatry:
“Equally surprising: Burns tells the therapists he wants them to fail. Time and again. They can afford to do this because—unlike when he was a psychiatric resident in the 1970s and not one of his patients improved appreciably over an entire year—he now has 50 techniques they can try to cause ‘dramatic change’ in patients. ‘Right away. Not in five or six years.’ Burns wants them to fail at technique after technique until they find the ones that work for each patient.
“To some of the therapists, it sounds too good to be true. Burns reassures them that the techniques he’s about to teach, once dismissed by the mainstream, are becoming the mainstream.
“I know what he says is true. I’ve read his books and used his methods and have experienced the relief of having my own acute depression evaporate in an instant.”
Julia Wick is a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC.
With Chelsea Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison and Edward Snowden’s future still uncertain, it seems a pertinent time to look at what becomes of our whistleblowers after the initial flurry of publicity fades. On the public stage and popular culture, whistleblowers are both celebrated and reviled, categorized as snitches and traitors, and heroes and martyrs. They are almost always seen as symbols, but they are also often people whose lives are shattered. The U.S. has had some version of whistleblower protection laws on the books since 1778, but whistleblowers themselves have still often faced reprisal, have been left jobless and hounded, personally attacked and professionally discredited. Here are the stories of six famous whistleblowers, and their lives long after the press has picked up and left town.
Jesselyn Radack is a “Lifetime TV writer’s dream”—the mother of two young children and pregnant with her third who had privately struggled with MS since college. She was a government lawyer with the Justice Department’s ethics unit when a colleague asked her to look over the FBI’s interrogation of the John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. She spoke up about the impropriety of Lindh’s being questioned without a lawyer present, and quickly became emblematic of the Ashcroft-era treatment of whistleblowers, her life turned upside-down. And then she did the most unlikely thing of all—became an activist for whistleblowers across the nation. She is currently the National Security & Human Rights Director of the Government Accountability Project.
The cinematic version of Frank Serpico’s life—Serpico, starring Al Pacino in the title role—begins with Serpico being shot in the face during an attempted drug bust and ends with closing credits saying he is “now living somewhere in Switzerland.” Kilgannon’s profile of the honest cop who exposed NYPD corruption picks up four decades later, long after Serpico’s lost years in Europe. Bearded, bitter, and in his early seventies, this Serpico lives a monastic life along the Hudson, just a few hours north of his former city. Perhaps the most poignant scene involves a rewatching of the famous film, which Serpico has never seen in its entirety, on the reporter’s laptop in a small town public library, where “the real Mr. Serpico stared out the window, unable to watch—too painful, he said.”
Pamela Colloff’s character-driven profile of Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins is a reminder of why fans of longform journalism love Texas Monthly. This is a deftly drawn and richly layered narrative of what life is like for a whistleblower who, despite being nationally-lauded, still finds herself rejected by the high-rolling Houston society set to which she once belonged.
No collection of whistleblower stories would be complete without a mention of Mark Felt, née Deep Throat, the source who leaked the details of Watergate to the Washington Post. Felt, who was ultimately responsible for the downfall of an American president, could easily be considered the ur-whistleblower of the last century. Written nearly three decades after the fact, O’Connor’s story finally exposed Felt’s identity.
Long before Snowden made headlines, Thomas Drake had grave doubts about the NSA’s use of domestic surveillance. Drake, then a senior executive at the NSA, to The Baltimore Sun and was ultimately indicted under the Espionage Act. Mayer uses Drake’s story as a lens to explore the larger issues of warrantless surveillance in post–9/11 America, and though the piece itself is more than two years old and dealing with a case that has now been dropped, it is still relevant, perhaps unsettlingly so.
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