Search Results for: profile

The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin

Longreads Pick

A profile of the American writer and author, whose fiction helped transform the mainstream.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 13, 2016
Length: 26 minutes (6,658 words)

America’s HGTV Obsession: A Reading List

Let’s get this out of the way: I can binge-watch House Hunters for hours. In the past, I’ve devoured episodes of House Hunters International and Tiny House Hunters as well, but the original House Hunters gives me the most satisfying fix: its predictable formula has never felt stale, even after many seasons.

America’s most popular home renovation and real estate network, HGTV—the home of House Hunters, its spinoffs, and a growing network of lifestyle porn—succeeds because of its consistent programming in useful escapism. In a single episode, I might learn how to refresh the color palette of my bathroom or see how much space $800K will buy me in the vacation rental market in Maui. In a half-hour dose, I can experience that strangely pleasurable thing called House Hunters rage: I’m inspired, enlightened, and incensed in equal measure, my voyeuristic side piqued by the entitled and pointless arguments over whether the kitchen countertop is the right shade of granite or whether an older house has enough “character.”

Regardless of what you think of its shows, HGTV knows the formula for successful programming. Here are six reads that touch on why this network can dish out exactly what its audience wants, hour after hour. Read more…

A Nation Struggles to Find Common Ground

I can do nothing more than share this with you and pray that saner minds will prevail. This is beyond right and wrong; it’s about the principles we hold dear in this democracy. Recently a “friend” — whose face I’ve obscured to protect his privacy and right to free speech, however vile — posted this on Facebook: Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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Ali Wong’s Radical Raunch

Longreads Pick

A profile of comedian and writer Ali Wong, whose work takes on the last taboos of female sexuality: pregnancy and motherhood.

Author: Ariel Levy
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 26, 2016
Length: 16 minutes (4,209 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Illustration by Miguel Porlan For The New Yorker

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

The Month That Killed the Sixties

Clara Bingham Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul | Random House | May 2016 | 30 minutes (8,161 words)

 
Below is an excerpt from Witness to the Revolution, an oral history of the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and early ’70s. In this excerpt, witnesses recall the month when everything seemed to fall apart. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

 

You can jail the revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution.

—FRED HAMPTON, SPEECH, 1969

*

December 1969 was plagued by violence and despair. As bloodshed in Vietnam escalated, so did violence at home. The ranks of Americans who considered themselves “revolutionaries” swelled to as many as a million, and militant resistance threatened nearly all government institutions related to the war effort. Nonviolent civil disobedience of just months earlier, with the October and November Moratoriums, had evolved into violent clashes with police, rioting, arson, and bombings. In the fifteen-month period between January 1969 and April 1970, an average of fifty politically motivated bombings occurred each day.

At the vanguard of this domestic rebellion was the Black Panther Party, which, in reaction to police brutality and FBI harassment, publicly declared war against the police. Two dozen Black Panther chapters had opened across the country, and in 1969 the police killed 27 Panthers and arrested or jailed 749. J. Edgar Hoover announced that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to [the] internal security of the country,” and he assigned two thousand full-time FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” the Panthers and other New Left organizations. In a 1969 speech to Congress, Hoover declared that the New Left was a “firmly established subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of our traditional democratic values and the principles of free government.”

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged on. From 1961 until 1971, the U.S. military dropped more than 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals— defoliants or herbicides, including Agent Orange—on 4.8 million Vietnamese. In 1969, 11,780 American troops were killed, bringing the death toll to 48,736. It was not a festive Christmas for those in the peace movement. John Lennon and Yoko Ono displayed huge billboards in Los Angeles, London, and other cities that read: “War is over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” On New York City’s Fifth Avenue during the holiday shopping rush, a woman blocked the street with a sign that read, “How Many Shopping Days Until Peace?” Read more…

Are You Ready to Meet Your Fixer Uppers?

Longreads Pick

Home renovation shows package the American dream from anxiety-riddled nightmare to easily-digestible entertainment. In this profile of Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner goes long on how the couple works together and how they’ve managed to rebrand Waco, Texas as a place not of tragedy, but of shiplap and dreams.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Sep 21, 2016
Length: 36 minutes (9,143 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photograph By John Francis Peters For The New Yorker

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Patagonia’s Philosopher-King

Longreads Pick

Nick Paumgarten’s profile of Yvon Chouinard, the eco-conscious and anti-corporate co-founder of Patagonia. Chouinard was a close friend of, and co-adventurer with, Doug Tompkins, the late founder of the North Face.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 12, 2016
Length: 34 minutes (8,672 words)