Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.

The Prettiest Boy in the World

A profile of Andrej Pejic, a model who walks the runway in both men and women’s clothing.

For even a moderately vain female, spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: If he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh—which, in his case, is flawless and poreless and has an English-rose luster.

Renegade Miami Football Booster Spells Out Illicit Benefits to Players

An 11-month investigation ends with a booster, now in prison for a Ponzi scheme, going public with details of how he spent millions on college athletes from 2002 to 2010.

[Shapiro] said his benefits to athletes included but were not limited to cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multimillion-dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, bounties for on-field play including bounties for injuring opposing players, travel and, on one occasion, an abortion.

High Explosive for Everyone

Madrid, 1937:

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.

U.S. Journal: Pinellas County, Florida Attractions

A visit to Walt Disney World.
The first thing I did at Walt Disney World was to take an oath not to make any smart-aleck remarks. A Disney public-relations man had told me that attitude was everything. So I placed my left hand on a seven-Adventure book of tickets to the Magic Kingdom and raised my right hand and promised that there would be no sarcasm on my lips or in my heart.

Peyton's Place

When your house is the set of One Tree Hill:

On one shoot, I remember, I'd been confused about where they needed to set up (confession: hungover), and as a result neglected to clean the bedroom. Later, a crew guy—the same one who'd told me about Blue Velvet—said, "I'm not used to picking up other people's underwear." I felt like saying, Then don't go into their bedrooms at nine o'clock in the morning! Except… he was paying to be in my bedroom.

Why Can’t Linda Carswell Get Her Husband’s Heart Back?

How a Texas woman pushed for autopsy reform.

Clinical autopsies, once commonplace in American hospitals, have become an increasing rarity and are conducted in just 5 percent of hospital deaths. Grief-stricken families like the Carswells desperately want the answers that an autopsy can provide. But they often do not know their rights in dealing with either coroners or medical examiners, who investigate unnatural deaths, or health-care providers, who delve into natural ones.

How Now, Mr Chow? The Sweet ’n Sour Saga Behind the City’s Epic Food Fight

Inside a restaurant lawsuit.

Michael Chow’s complaint, which sought $21 million in damages, alleged that the team behind Philippe, including chef Philippe Chau, restaurateur Stratis Morfogen (also behind the well-received Ciano) and several codefendants, appropriated the Satay recipe and 11 other Mr Chow standbys, the “modern” decor of Mr Chow’s restaurants and even the name Chow—thereby engaging in deceptive trade practices, swiping trade secrets and infringing on the Mr Chow trademark.

Kelly McEvers, a former war correspondent, hosts NPR's All Things Considered and the podcast Embedded.

“Listeners want you to be real, a real person. Somebody who stumbles and fails sometimes. I think the more human you are, the more people can then relate to you. The whole point is not so everybody likes me, but it’s so people will want to take my hand and come along. It's so they feel like they trust me enough to come down the road with me. To do that, I feel like you need to be honest and transparent about what that road’s like.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Audible, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

Tyrus Wong, ‘Bambi’ Artist Thwarted by Racial Bias, Dies at 106

He left China at 10 and would never see his mother again. He lived in extreme poverty once he arrived in America. He found his calling in art, became the creative force behind one of Disney’s iconic films, but didn’t get recognition for his brilliance until late in his life, when in addition to painting and illustrating he began to make fantastical kites.

Read more

Fox on the Longform Podcast

Exasperated Attendees Give Up On Gwyneth’s Goop Summit

Finally, the crowd broke for lunch, with those who paid $1,000 availing themselves of private workouts. The highest tier lunched with Paltrow and select panelists. The proles were relegated to wandering around the warehouse and converted parking lot for two hours, getting solicited by dream interpreters or standing in endless lines for free blowouts or manicures — services promptly halted once the panels resumed, no matter that some had spent well over an hour in line.

Michael Barbaro is the host of The Daily.

“I don’t think The Daily should ever be my therapy session. That’s not what it’s meant to be, but I’m a human being. I arrive at work on a random Tuesday, and I do an interview with a guy like that, and it just punched me right in the stomach.”

Thanks to MailChimp, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Blinkist for sponsoring this week's episode.

Decades after ’80s Art Stardom, Painter Mark Kostabi Is Still Hustling

Then there’s Mark Kostabi, the former New York gossip column fixture and self-professed “con artist” who everybody remembers but nobody talks about. Christie’s and Sotheby’s have no comment. Neither does the MoMA, the Guggenheim, or the Met, despite the curious fact that they all have Kostabis in their permanent collections. As for quotes from some highfalutin critics expounding on the semiotics of cone hats, cash registers, and the Sony Walkman in Kostabi’s work? Not a chance.

Columbine Survivors Talk About the Wounds That Won't Heal

After all these years, it’s still there, in the back of her mind, lurking. No matter how good things are going, it never quite goes away, this feeling that she should have died that day. And her brush with death is the first thing that strangers tend to notice about her, like a limp or a disfigurement. Once they find out where she went to high school, that’s all they want to talk about.

Hillary Frank is the creator of The Longest Shortest Time podcast and the author of Weird Parenting Wins.

“I think motherhood is not valued in our culture. We don’t value the work of mothers both at home and then at work. Mothers are the most discriminated against people at work. They’re discriminated more against than fathers or people without children. Mothers are promoted less, hired less, and paid less. People are forced out of their jobs after they announce that they’re pregnant, they’re passed over for promotions, and they get horrible, discriminatory comments like, ‘Oh, don’t you really think you want to be at home? Do you really want to come back?‘ And American work culture is not set up for people to be parents and mothers.”

Thanks to MailChimp, The Great Courses Plus, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, and the novel The Gin Closet. Her new essay collection is Make It Scream, Make It Burn.

“My writing is always basically asking: what does it feel like to be alive, and how do we ever try to understand what it feels like for anybody else to be alive? In that sense, on the intellectual level, I’m always going to keep chasing the same unanswerable things.”

Thanks to Mailchimp, Pitt Writers, Mythology for sponsoring this week's episode.

Eli Sanders is an associate editor at The Stranger and the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

"There was one particular moment in the trial, which I described, where ... there was just not any human ability to be detached from what was happening in front of you, what was being shared. It was so painful, you could not help but cry, and there was no reason to deny that that moment had happened."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

Sponsor: Aeon Magazine

Our sponsor again this week is Aeon, a great new digital magazine covering ideas and culture. Aeon publishes an original essay every weekday, several of which have been picked for Longform. Here are three recent favorites:

No Drama, King Obama, by Edward L. Fox
In Javanese culture, a ruler must stand chivalrously above strife: cool, intelligent and self-contained. Sound familiar?

Mortal Remains, by Thomas Lynch
The dead are no longer welcome at their own funerals. So how can the living send them on their way?

Animal Spirits, by Stephen T. Asma
The more we learn about the emotions shared by all mammals, the more we must rethink our own human intelligence.

Read those stories and more at aeonmagazine.com.

Emily Nussbaum is a television critic at The New Yorker.

"I actually feel this kind of crazy cause ... because TV is condescended to, has been put down and treated like it's junk, and TV deserves to have the kind of criticism that expects it to be great. To me it's a really engaging and satisfying cause, no matter whether I'm praising or criticizing something."</i>

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

</blockquote>

The Longform Guide to Memory

This guide is sponsored by Dear Thief, the new novel from Samantha Harvey. A letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story, Dear Thief is about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes. And it is about how we remember, or fail to remember, our stories.

The Sunday Telegraph called Dear Thief "an incandescent vision of hope and acceptance." The Guardian said it's "a heady, elegiac combination of eroticism and loss, loathing and rapture."

Buy your copy today.

See the collection

Buy Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey today.

Grant Wahl is senior writer at Sports Illustrated and the author of The Beckham Experiment.

“I said to Balotelli, ‘I know you’re into President Obama. There’s a decent chance that he might read this story.’ He kind of perked up. I don’t think I was deliberately misleading him. There was a chance!”

Thanks to MailChimp, Audible, </em>Feverborn</a>, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.</p>

Liliana Segura writes for The Intercept.

"My form of advocacy against the death penalty, frankly, has always been to tell those stories that other people aren’t seeing. And to humanize the people—not just the people facing execution, but everyone around them."

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

Nicholson Baker is the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications. His latest book is Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.

"In the end, I don’t care how famous you get, how widely read you are during your lifetime. You’re going to be forgotten. And you’re going to have five or six fans in the end. It’s going to be your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren are going to say, Oh, yeah, he was big. … So I think the key is, write what you actually care about. Because in the end, you’re only doing this for yourself. … So maybe do your best stuff for yourself and for the three, four, five people who know in the coming century that you ever existed. That’s all you need to do."

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

Ben Smith is the media columnist for The New York Times. He was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.

“I do think there's some kind of personality flaw deep in there of wanting to like, you know, find stuff out and tell people.... I'm not sure that's a totally sane or healthy personality trait, but it is definitely, for me, a personality trait…. I think that in political reporting, certainly, there's a kind of reporter who thinks that their job is basically to pull the masks off of these monsters. And I generally tend to think all these people—with some exceptions—are weird and complicated and often doing really awful things. But they aren't necessarily irredeemable or impossible to understand. They're interesting.”

Amanda Hess, a staff writer at Slate, has also written for Pacific Standard, GOOD, and ESPN the Magazine.

"I ended up not loving the fact that I was getting a bunch of calls from MSNBC and CNN, who mostly wanted to talk about people threatening to rape and kill me and only a tiny bit about the story I'd written. ... It was tiring, and it seemed dismissive of me as a person. It's a strange thing to become somebody else's story, especially when the story is: You're a victim of an insane online harasser. That's who you are."

Thanks to this week's sponsors, TinyLetter and Oyster Books.