The Family Hour
An oral history of The Sopranos.
An oral history of The Sopranos.
Sam Kashner Vanity Fair Mar 2012 35min Permalink
An Iowa dad’s surprisingly short path from commentor to screenwriter.
Jason Fagone Wired Mar 2012 20min Permalink
Jimmy McNulty, Mike Daisey, and the problems with skirting the system to get to the greater truth.
Aaron Bady The New Inquiry Mar 2012 10min Permalink
Fact-checking David Sedaris.
Alex Heard The New Republic Mar 2007 15min Permalink
Searching for the reclusive band’s studio in Düsseldorf.
Alexis Petridis The Guardian Jul 2003 10min Permalink
Stylistically speaking, in terms of clothing, they arrived in shirts and pants and shoes (there’s really no other way to say it). They had haircuts, but it didn’t really look it. While other bands were mumbling or over-enunciating their dreary positions or penny-candy philosophies, Pavement kind of screamed for a generation. But they did it in a way that was so deeply American that it was almost Scandinavian.
Playwright Will Eno profiles the band and their cult as they grow up and prepare for a reunion.
On Jonny Greenwood:
Greenwood is an anomaly: a musician who made his name with a rock band and who is now embraced by the modern-music establishment as an actual, serious composer. The night before the Alvernia session, he was onstage in an aircraft-hangar-size room at a steel plant in Krakow, performing the minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” for an audience that included Reich himself, as part of a weeklong new-music festival, Sacrum Profanum. (Reich is a fan; he praises Greenwood’s decision to have the string section play with guitar picks on “Popcorn Superhet” as “the first new approach to pizzicato since Bartok.”) He wasn’t the only performer at Sacrum Profanum with pop-music credentials — the bill also included the techno provocateur Aphex Twin and Adrian Utley, from the trip-hop band Portishead. But he was the only guy from a superfamous rock band whose singer has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Alex Pappademas New York Times Magazine Mar 2012 15min Permalink
An essay on working at Sotheby’s.
Art pricing is not absolute magic; there are certain rules, which to an outsider can sound parodic. Paintings with red in them usually sell for more than paintings without red in them. Warhol’s women are worth more, on average, than Warhol’s men. The reason for this is a rhetorical question, asked in a smooth continental accent: “Who would want the face of some man on their wall?”
Alice Gregory n+1 Mar 2012 20min Permalink
A profile of thriller writer Harlan Coben and what it takes to succeed as a novelist even when the literary establishment doesn’t acknowledge your existence.
Eric Koningsberg The Atlantic Jul 2007 30min Permalink
Jane Jacobs has a somewhat ambiguous legacy—or at least one that's contested by different factions in the present-day debate over cities and urbanism—but to me her most important idea is encapsulated in the title and spirit of this piece. It's old and, I think, utterly prescient about what successive waves of planning fads miss. The purpose of urban space is for people to use it. A great place is a place where people want to be.
Jane Jacobs Fortune Apr 1958 25min Permalink
A profile of Suge Knight, 29 and the C.E.O. of Death Row Records, before the deaths of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G.
Lynn Hirschberg New York Times Magazine Jan 1996 35min Permalink
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.
Aaron Gell The New York Observer Feb 2012 15min Permalink
The artist discusses her latest record, Biophilia, science and music education.
Up until she developed a vocal-cord nodule a few years ago, Björk made a point of not investigating how that instrument worked. “With arrangements and lyrics,” she says, squinting over her coffee, “I work more with the left side of my brain. But my voice has always been very right brain. I didn’t try to analyze it at all. I didn’t even know until I started all this voice work, two years ago, what my range was. I didn’t want to let the academic side into that—I worried the mystery would go.”
Nitsuh Abebe New York Feb 2012 10min Permalink
An analysis of Dr. Seuss’ literature.
Louis Menand New Yorker Dec 2002 15min Permalink
The strange saga of a 2009 Gary Oldman profile that his manager, Douglas Urbanski, aggressively sought to kill.
"Mr. Heath's motives are dishonest in the least...supposed 'journalism' at its very lowest...while Mr. Heath may find his sloppy reporting cute, in fact it is destructive, and he knows it...his out of context and uninformed pot shots...out of context swipes at me...stretching the most basic rules of journalism...in certain ways has aspects of a thinly disguised hit piece... a hole filled swiss cheese of wrong facts, misleading insinuations, and in general lazy, substandard, agendized non-reporting...again and again Mr. Heath attempts to turn the piece into a political piece...GQ has allowed Heath to go for the cheap shot..."
Chris Heath GQ Feb 2012 1h5min Permalink
A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home:
The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself.
Ron Rosenbaum Esquire Jun 1997 35min Permalink
On the difficult challenges faced by an auteur in Nigeria’s burgeoning Nollywood film economy.
Andrew Rice New York Times Magazine Feb 2012 20min Permalink
Best Article Arts Science Movies & TV
An investigation into the myth of actress Frances Farmer’s lobotomy.
Matt Evans The Morning News Feb 2012 30min Permalink
On New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow’s descent into madness.
Ariel Levy New York Mar 2007 25min Permalink
Can Netflix bounce back?
William D. Cohan Vanity Fair Feb 2012 15min Permalink
How Yvette Vickers, a B-movie starlet who had appeared in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, ended up mummified in her Los Angeles home last year.
Steven Mikulan Los Angeles Feb 2012 20min Permalink
A history of erasure as literature.
Exploring the relationship between authors and their parents.
It mattered to her that she could have, or might have, been a writer, and perhaps it mattered to me more than I fully understood. She watched my books appear with considerable interest, and wrote me an oddly formal letter about the style of each one, but she was, I knew, also uneasy about my novels. She found them too slow and sad and oddly personal. She was careful not to say too much about this, except once when she felt that I had described her and things which had happened to her too obviously and too openly. That time she said that she might indeed soon write her own book. She made a book sound like a weapon.
Colm Tóibín The Guardian Feb 2012 15min Permalink
A profile of New York chef and fisherman David Pasternack.
Mark Singer New Yorker Sep 2005 30min Permalink
Contemplating Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia church, as the controversial finishing work is completed.
Stephen Crittenden The Global Mail Feb 2012 10min Permalink