The Longform Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Capote, Talese, Orwell, Boo—masters of the craft, in their own words. New at Slate.
Search
Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
Can Sylvia Earle Save the Oceans?
“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”
AOL Hell
The surreal existence of an AOL content writer:
I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie.
Hemingway Reports Spain
THEY SAY YOU never hear the one that hits you. That's true of bullets, because, if you hear them, they are already past. But your correspondent heard the last shell that hit this hotel. He heard it start from the battery, then come with a whistling incommg roar like a subway train to crash against the cornice and shower the room with broken glass and plaster. And while the glass still tinkled down and you listened for the next one to start, you realized that now finally you were back in Madrid.
This Week's Most Popular Articles in the Longform App
A husband who spent millions failing to kill his wife, the nightmare of working for RadioShack and how an East German quantum chemist became the world’s most powerful woman — the most read articles this week in the Longform App, available free for iPhone and iPad.
This Week's Most Popular Articles in the Longform App
A surgeon opens up about medical mistakes, Chris Rock discusses Ferguson and Cosby, and the story of a woman who survived her husband's repeated attempts to have her killed — the most read articles this week in the Longform App, available free for iPhone and iPad.
My First Time, Twice
"I realized, as I was going through puberty (early), the necessity of shifting my focus from doing things that would impress my parents and teachers to engaging in behavior that would strike my peers as cool. I started saying 'like' constantly. I smoked pot when I was twelve. I dropped acid when I was thirteen. Losing my virginity was the next logical step."
Playboy Goes West
As Playboy magazine moves to Los Angeles, the writer considers its place in the Midwest.
No other general interest magazine tried to reach readers in the wide swathe of land between New York and California. “It was a Midwestern magazine, designed for people there. If you wanted it to be hip, edgy, go toe-to-toe with GQ, you were making a mistake,” said Chris Napolitano, a former executive editor who began at Playboy in 1988.
Welcome to Refugee High
“If Sullivan High School had a motto, it would be ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Its immigrant population now numbers close to 300—45 percent of the school’s 641 students—and many are refugees new to this country. This academic year alone, the Rogers Park school has welcomed a staggering 89 refugees—nearly three times as many as last year and far more than at any other high school in the city.”
A Heist on Time and a Half: Inside the Most Corrupt Squad in the Nation
“If you could put your own crew together and rob the biggest drug dealer you know, who would that drug dealer be?”
Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner at Defector.com. She hosts the podcast Normal Gossip and is the author of the upcoming book You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.
“I was always very interested in how you strategize a creative career. And I think that that is an unsexy thing to talk about, right? It's much sexier to be like, Oh, I love working on my sentence-level craft, which is not true for me. But I think that a lot of a creative career is understanding it is still a job, and then understanding how you make sure that within the container of the job you can do the work that you want to do. That is a really difficult balance to make. So if you can understand how people who have done it before you, you can copy them.”
Connie Walker is an investigative reporter and podcast host. Her new show is Stolen: The Search for Jermain.
“For so long, there has been this kind of history of journalists coming in and taking stories from Indigenous communities. And that kind of extractive, transactional kind of journalism really causes a lot of harm. And so much of our work is trying to undo and address that. There is a way to be a storyteller and help amplify and give people agency in their stories.”
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
Brittany Luse is the host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute.
“One of the things I love about this job is everything is practice. I love it. It's like if a show is great and everyone loves it, you gotta put on another one. You just gotta do it again. And if the show didn't quite do what you'd hoped or set out to do in your mind and in your heart, you gotta do another one. I just love it. You can never feel too good and you can never feel too bad.”
Michelle Dean is a journalist and critic. Her new book is Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion.
“There isn’t one answer. I wish there was one answer. The answer is: You just have to wing it. And I’m learning that — I’m learning to be okay with the winging it. ... I guess the lesson to me of what went on with a lot of women in the book is: You have to be comfortable with the fact that some days are going to be good, and some days are going to not be good.”
Thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
James Verini is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. His new book is They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate.
“War is mostly down time. War is mostly waiting around for something to happen.”
Thanks to Mailchimp, Pitt Writers, and "Couples Therapy" for sponsoring this week's episode.
Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosopher and journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, The Verge, The Believer and many other publications. Her new book is Easy Beauty.
”I literally didn't talk to anyone in my life about disability until I was, like, 30. Ever. Not my husband, not my friends, as little as possible to my own mother. I had this very bad idea that what I needed to do in every single social situation was wait until people could unsee my body…. And it was all in service of trying to be truly recognized or truly seen. And, of course, what was happening is I was involved in a complete act of self erasure because my body and my real self are related…. There is no real me without my physical self…. I did not think I was going to ever write about this, but once I started, it felt like I met myself for the first time.”
Leslie Jamison has written for The Believer, Harper's and The New York Times. Her latest book is The Empathy Exams.
"I sort of love imagining a small army of 22-year-old men who are just like, 'Fuck that book, I wish it was never published.'"
Thanks to TinyLetter and Harry's for sponsoring this week's episode.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper has written for GQ, Spin and BuzzFeed.
"Writing is the worst part of this gig for me. I hate sitting down and writing; it's being with my worst self. … But then, when it's over, it's the best. I have no greater joy than reading what I've published—with the exception of some editors who have fucked up my shit."</i>
Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!
</blockquote>
The Longform Guide to Sight
A blind man who taught himself to see, a killer obsessed with eyes, and how different animals perceive the world — a collection of our favorite articles about sight.
Maciej Ceglowski is the founder of Pinboard. He writes at Idle Words.
“My natural contrarianism makes me want to see if I can do something long-term in an industry where everything either changes until it's unrecognizable or gets sold or collapses. I like the idea of things on the web being persistent. And more basically, I reject this idea that everything has to be on a really short time scale just because it involves technology. We’ve had these computers around for a while now. It’s time we start treating them like everything else in our lives, where it kind of lives on the same time scale that we do and doesn’t completely fall off the end of the world every three or four years.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Audible, and Casper, and MIT Press for sponsoring this week's episode.
Ben Taub is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
“I don’t think it’s my place to be cynical because I’ve observed some of the horrors of the Syrian War through these various materials, but it’s Syrians that are living them. It’s Syrians that are being largely ignored by the international community and by a lot of political attention on ISIS. And I think that it wouldn’t be my place to be cynical when some of them still aren’t.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Audible, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.
Playboy Interview: Fidel Castro
“Let me state, in all frankness, that I have never harbored personal doubts or a lack of confidence. That may be good or it may be bad. But if you see your actions as objectively correct, then not having doubts is good. I must admit that pride may have influenced my attitudes from time to time. But once I came to a conclusion as to what was right, I had great personal confidence in those ideas.”
Cord Jefferson is the West Coast editor at Gawker.
"I consider myself to be a sincere human being. And I think that the way the internet carries itself, the way the internet has dialogues, is often insincere. That concerns me. I don't ever want to lose my sincerity. I don't ever want to lose my ability to feel emotional about things that I write about. I don't ever want to have a distance from everything that I write. I think that can be a danger of writing too much for the internet, that you develop this elitist distance from everything. That nothing really matters, you know?"
Thanks to TinyLetter and Hulu Plus for sponsoring this week's episode.
A Schizophrenic, a Slain Worker, Troubling Questions
A schizophrenic man kills his counselor at a group home in Massachusetts:
Many people wondered aloud whether the system had failed both the suspect and the victim. How had Ms. Moulton ended up alone in a home with a psychotic man who had a history of violence and was off his medication? How had Mr. Chappell been allowed to deteriorate without setting off alarms?
Report on Texas Tower Shooting
The noon chimes in the bell-clock tower rising above him to the building's 307-foot pinnacle sounded: pom-pom-pom-pom . . . 16 notes, high and sweet. Some say the chimes say a poem: "Lord, through this hour "Be Thou my guide, "For in Thy power "I do confide." After the chimes, there is a long pause -- 23 seconds if you hold a wristwatch on it -- time enough for a practiced man to reload three rifles and a shotgun.
“Doc” Quigg’s wire report on the 1966 Texas Tower shooting on the campus of UT-Austin.
