The Cosmology of Serialized Television
What makes a great show?
What makes a great show?
David Auerbach The American Reader Jun 2013 20min Permalink
What the writer’s newly revealed letters mean for her long-debated legacy.
Hermione Lee New York Review of Books Jun 2013 15min Permalink
Seven years after being fired from The Replacements, their founding guitarist is an thirty-three-year-old unemployed line cook living amongst memories in Minneapolis. He would be dead within two years.
Charles Aaron Spin Jun 1993 15min Permalink
“In the past, when he has spoken, he has sometimes replied to questions by protesting that he is boring. Maybe he believes that this is the case, or just believes there is no point in allowing himself to seem interesting in the way interviewers usually want people to be. Still, he has told himself that tonight he will be truthful. He’s feeling calmer these days. He has not had one of these conversations for a while, and he intends it to be a long time before he has another.”
Chris Heath GQ Dec 2004 15min Permalink
An interview with the artchitects responsible for Stuttgart’s train station, Hamburg’s concert house and Berlin’s airport, three projects “currently competing to be seen as the country’s most disastrous.”
Der Spiegel Jun 2013 Permalink
On Japanese writer Gengoroh Tagame, who creates gay manga work “in the artistic tradition of Pasolini, de Sade, Yukio Mishima and Lolita.”
Chris Randle Hazlitt Jun 2013 10min Permalink
The thin, resentful line between comic and audience.
Patton Oswalt pattonoswalt.com Jun 2013 Permalink
On an artist who’s spent nearly 50 years bending the rules of space and light, and his life’s work, an extinct volcano in Arizona where he has been developing a network of tunnels and underground rooms since 1974.
Wil S. Hylton New York Times Magazine Jun 2013 25min Permalink
"I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z."
Jon Caramanica New York Times Jun 2013 20min Permalink
A profile of Stevie Nicks.
On cushy jobs in web development, deeply un-cushy opportunities in writing, and our assumptions about the value of labor.
James Somers Aeon Jun 2013 15min Permalink
On film comedy’s silent beginnings.
James Agee LIFE Sep 1949 30min Permalink
On writer James Agee.
David Denby New Yorker Jan 2006 20min Permalink
The odyssey of Kim Jong-il’s personal chef.
Adam Johnson GQ Jul 2013 35min Permalink
On artists using their bodies to blur the line between human and machine.
Sally Davies Nautilus Apr 2013 15min Permalink
An interview with T.J. Jackson Lears, historian of the “charlatans and hucksters of the Gilded Age, the cagey, conniving street peddlers of what we’d rather think was a premodern world.”
B. R. Cohen Public Books May 2013 15min Permalink
A trip to a pepper-eating contest in remote India.
Mary Roach Smithsonian Jun 2013 30min Permalink
A profile of the writer.
Plus: An excerpt from McCann's new novel, TransAtlantic. (via Longform Fiction)
Joel Lovell New York Times Magazine May 2013 10min Permalink
“Some companies are beginning to allow women to take their management-training courses. A woman sitting in on an executive conference is less of a shock to the male than she was only a few years ago. A few big companies–R.C.A., the Home Life Insurance Co., and the New York Central, for example–have even ushered women into the board room.”
Katharine Hamill Fortune Jan 1956 20min Permalink
“The supernatural stuff doesn’t get to me anymore. But here’s the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years: The movie opens with a woman in late middle-age, sitting at a table and writing a story. And the story goes something like, then the branches creaked in the - and she stops, and she says to her husband: What are those things? I can’t think of them. They’re in the backyard, and they’re very tall, and birds land on the branches. And he says, why, Iris, those are trees. And she says, yes, how silly of me. And she writes the word, and the movie starts. That’s Iris Murdoch, and she’s suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Terry Gross NPR May 2013 30min Permalink
How Jeffrey Katzenberg became the Democrats’ kingmaker.
Andy Kroll Mother Jones May 2013 Permalink
“I haven’t put out an album in 20 years. Let’s face it. I am an oldies act. I just don’t want it to be like when you watch Channel 13 and there’s the Delltones or some English band from the ’60s, and they’re real crotchety and they look terrible, and I go, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to be on that show.’”
Andrew Goldman, Billy Joel New York Times Magazine May 2013 20min Permalink
Inside Brigham Young University’s successful animation program.
Jon Mooallem New York Times Magazine May 2013 20min Permalink
Patsy Cline’s hometown and the debate over her legacy.
John Lingan The Morning News May 2013 30min Permalink
The trade in fake olive oil.
Tom Mueller New Yorker Aug 2007 20min Permalink