Laurie Winer

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12 Great 2011 Nonfiction Pieces Online For Free

December 14, 2011 in Misc. | Permalink

A bunch of great articles from this year that made me rethink assertions, informed me or entertained me. All available for free.

  • “Getting Bin Laden” (Nicholas Schmidle, New Yorker): The best long-form journalism of the new century. Perfect writing and editing. Will be read with equal fascination 50 years from now.
  • “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” (Michael Idov, GQ): Intrepid reporter with a deadpan sensibility ventures onto the most insane movie set ever.
  • “Better, Faster. Stronger“ (Rebecca Mead, New Yorker): Wicked portrait of a Silicon Valley self-help guru. Reading this piece is a good way to learn how to write profiles.
  • ‘”The Elusive Big Idea” (Neal Gabler, New York Times): I don’t agree with most of the assertions of this essay, but it’s deeply intelligent and provocative.
  • “Douglas Rushkoff” (Peggy Nelson, HiLowbrow.com): Deep and probing interview with the media ecologist.
  • “Who Invented The Seven-Game Series?“ (Michael Weinreb, Grantland): Reporter asks simple question others gloss over, finds interesting historical and analytical info.
  • “Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead” (Laurie Winer, L.A. Review of Books): Great writing about Sam Zell and the painful decline of the Los Angeles Times.
  • “Show the Monster” (Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker): Brilliant Guillermo del Toro portrait for fans of film or great writing.
  • “The Man Who Inspired Jobs” (Christopher Bonanos, The New York Times): Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land was oddly omitted from Steve Jobs’ obits, but this lucid, insightful essay remedied that oversight. Better yet: Bonanos is apparently working on a book about Polaroid.
  • “All the Angry People“ (George Packer, The New Yorker): The most revealing reporting yet about the genesis and meaning of Occupy Wall Street.

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“Kael Knew How To Read The New Graphic Nihilism”

November 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Laurie Winer writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Brian Kellow’s new Pauline Kael bio:

“Kael assumed national prominence in 1967, exactly when movies were taking quantum leaps in depictions of sex and violence, causing, as such leaps always do, anguish among cultural gatekeepers. Her review of Bonnie and Clyde marked Kael’s real debut in the New Yorker — she had previously published one article there about movies on TV. With his review of the same film, Bosley Crowther saw his 27-year reign as movie critic at the New York Times come to an end; Kael knew how to read the new graphic nihilism, and Crowther, her avowed nemesis, was left in the dark. Crowther had long been a powerful critic, and he had had his day, opposing Eugene McCarthy and censorship, and helping Americans to accept foreign films such as Open City and The Bicycle Thief. Now he was exposed as perilously out of touch. He was such an advocate of film as a force for betterment that he could hardly tell one violent movie from another. He called Bonnie and Clyde ‘a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredation of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-up in Thoroughly Modern Millie.’ The resistance to this position was so strong that he wrote a second screed, precipitating his forced retirement as a film critic at the end of 1967.

Kael’s response to Arthur Penn’s film was so visceral because she sensed it marked a change in her own life as well as a change in movies. She was 48 years old, the single mother of a daughter, a person who had come from a West Coast farming family and who had struggled long and hard and with precious little recognition. With Bonnie and Clyde she finally came into her own as a critic of stature, someone who could influence the course of events, and she was eager to insert herself into the cultural moment: ‘The audience is alive to it,’ she wrote of the film, as if anyone with sense felt her excitement:

Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours — not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.”

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PK + WA, 1975:

See also:

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“He Was Sam Zell, An Iconoclast, As They Call Rich Older Men Who Ride Motorcycles And Wear Leather Jackets, Whether They Look Good In Them Or Not”

November 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

At the L.A. Review of Books, Laurie Winer, a former Los Angeles Times writer, provides a wonderfully caustic inside look at the demise of that once-great newspaper, which cratered due to seismic shifts in technology and the stunning dickishness of belligerent billionaire Sam Zell. The opening:

“Since it seemed it couldn’t get much worse, Los Angeles Times editor-in-chief James O’Shea decided to look on the bright side. It was 2007, and the newspaper had a new owner. He was Sam Zell, an iconoclast, as they call rich older men who ride motorcycles and wear leather jackets, whether they look good in them or not. Maybe Zell would be iconoclastic in the right way, you know, odd but decent and smart, useful, so O’Shea phoned the Chicago businessman about giving the Times an in-person interview. Zell agreed. O’Shea then offered to pick up his new boss at the airport. Zell declined, informing O’Shea that his personal jet could easily deposit him near his beach house in Malibu.

When Zell called back an hour later, the polite part of their relationship was already done. Zell informed O’Shea that he would, in fact, fly into LAX and make himself available to reporters at an office there. ‘I was going to invite all of you to come to my house in Malibu,’ said Zell — for the second time indicating his address — ‘until you sent a fucking reporter up there and scared the shit out of my housekeeper.’ Zell wanted it conveyed that he traveled in an entirely different social sphere than O’Shea. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he continued in his distinctive rasp. ‘You want to talk to me, call me and I’ll talk. But you don’t fuck with my employees. Got that?’ O’Shea immediately apologized, even though he wasn’t sure what for.

And so began the improbable last chapter in the fall of a major newspaper, as chronicled by O’Shea in The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. Among other things, the book is a reminder that whenever you think things can’t get worse, they can. They can get much, much worse.”

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“Hopefully, we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq…fuck you”:

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