Rebecca Mead

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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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My 5 Favorite Non-Fiction Articles So Far In 2011

November 7, 2011 in Urban Studies | Permalink

Limited to pieces that are online for free:

  1. “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.
  2. “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” (Michael Idov, GQ): Intrepid reporter with a deadpan sensibility ventures onto the most insane movie set ever.
  3. “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.
  4. ‘”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.
  5. “Who Invented The Seven-Game Series?” (Michael Weinreb, Grantland): Reporter asks simple question others gloss over, finds interesting historical and analytical info.

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“I Am Willing To Forfeit The Sum Of $1000 To Anyone Who Can Prove It Is Possible To Obtain Air Inside The Torture Cell”

November 7, 2011 in Urban Studies | Permalink

Here is a cool artifact of Harry Houdini, courtesy of kottke.org. It’s audio from a 1914 wax cylinder that Edison made of the master of escape. In the clip, Houdini describes his Water Torture Cell trick.

Harry Houdini speaking, in 1914 (mp3)

If you’re unfamiliar with Jason Kottke and his site, he’s one of the original bloggers and has been serving up intelligent posts since before most people heard of the word “blog.” Everyone who came after and tried to do something smart in the format owes him a debt. To learn more about his early days as a blogger, have a look at this 2000 New Yorker piece by Rebecca Mead (subscription required).

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More Harry Houdini posts:

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“He Recommends Increasing Abdominal Definition With An Exercise He Calls ‘Cat Vomiting'”

August 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"He preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto." (Image by Olivier Ezratty.)

If you haven’t had a chance yet to read Rebecca Mead’s great New Yorker profile of souped-up self-help guru, Timothy Ferriss, don’t let it slide. Ferriss is the best-selling author behind the 4-Hour Workweek and other similarly alluring titles. The article is hilarious and sums up the age we live in, the desperation people feel to find some way to the other side of this very discomfiting paradigm shift we’re experiencing. An excerpt;

“Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was turned down by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Crown, and he recounts this statistic with pride. But it’s easy to understand the caution of those twenty-six. Ferriss’s aesthetic is a pointed rejection of the culture of constant BlackBerrying, corporate jockeying, and office all-nighters that is celebrated in most business-advice books, and in films such as The Social Network. The 4-Hour Workweek was inspired by a personal epiphany. In 2004, Ferriss, feeling burned out as the C.E.O. of a sports-nutrition company, where he worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, discovered that he preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto. He also found that, by automating his business operations to the largest extent possible, he was able to pull this off. (To a point, at least. Kane Ng, a Hollywood executive who is Ferriss’s friend, told me, expansively, ‘Tim is a total fraud, you know. ‘Four-hour workweek’? He is constantly busting ass.’ Of course, it was Seneca who said that hyperbole ‘asserts the incredible in order to arrive at the credible.’) Ferriss advises would-be members of the New Rich to check e-mail no more than twice a day, and to set automated responses advising correspondents of the recipient’s unavailability. (Anyone who e-mails Ferriss these days immediately receives in her inbox an automated response, with the cheery sign-off ‘Here’s to life outside of the inbox!’) The book counsels readers to take what Ferriss calls ‘mini-retirements’ now—a month in Costa Rica, three months in Berlin—rather than saving up the prospect of leisure for the final decades of life. And it recommends funding all this by discovering a ‘muse,’ which Ferriss defines, as Seneca did not, as ‘an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.’

Finding one’s muse, like catching one’s rabbit before cooking it, is more easily said than done, but Ferriss’s advocacy of liberation from the workplace has had a wide appeal, especially among younger people to whom the workplace may be unattainable in the first place, given the unemployment rate. Similarly, his latest book, The 4-Hour Body, speaks to the peculiar obsessions and insecurities of the young American male. Ferriss tells readers how they might lose twenty pounds in thirty days without exercise—eggs, spinach, and lentils are crucial—and how to triple their testosterone levels. (Gentlemen, put your iPhone in the pocket of your backpack, not the pocket of your jeans.) The book, which is five hundred and forty-eight pages long, contains a lot of colorfully odd advice—he recommends increasing abdominal definition with an exercise he calls ‘cat vomiting’—but it also reassures readers that they need not go so far as to have Israeli stem-cell factor injected into the cervical spine, as Ferriss did in the name of inquiry. Nor need they necessarily incorporate into their regimen Ferriss’s method for determining the effectiveness of controlled binge eating: weighing his feces to find out exactly what kind of shit he was full of.”

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“The four-hour workweek is possible, but you need to completely unplug and reset”:

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“Kaufman’s Most Enduring Contribution To Entertainment, At Least Thus Far In His Career, Is As Co-Creator Of Mr. Magoo”

May 5, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Millard Kaufman's first novel.

From “First at Ninety,” a 2007 New Yorker article about the debut novel of nonagenarian Millard Kaufman, by the always excellent Rebecca Mead:

“Kaufman grew up in Baltimore. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, he moved to New York and became a copyboy at the Daily News for thirteen dollars and seventy cents a week. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted in the Marines, with whom he participated in the campaign to win Guadalcanal and landed at Guam and Okinawa. ‘I weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds when I went overseas, and when my wife met me afterward she didn’t recognize me—I weighed a hundred and twenty-eight,’ Kaufman said. ‘I had dengue fever and malaria, and I didn’t really feel like I could spend the heat of the summer or the cold of the winter in New York anymore.’

He moved to California, where he took up screenwriting, winning an Oscar nomination in 1953 for a movie called Take the High Ground. (He was nominated again two years later, for Bad Day at Black Rock.) He lent his name to Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted, for a movie called Gun Crazy. ‘The only time I ever met him was at a meeting of the Writers Guild,’ Kaufman said. ‘It was such a bore, and I left and went into a bar at the hotel, and Trumbo was there. We met because some guy was standing between us who was fairly drunk, and he said, ‘What’s all that noise?’ One of us said, ‘It’s a writers’ meeting.’ He said, ‘What do they write?’ and we said, ‘Movies.’ He looked aghast and said, ‘You mean they write that stuff?” Kaufman’s most enduring contribution to entertainment, at least thus far in his career, is as co-creator of Mr. Magoo, whom he modelled in part on an uncle. ‘That is what we thought the character was based on until, twenty years later, we were accused of being nasty about people with bad eyesight,’ he said.

Kaufman began the novel after his most recent screenplay, which he undertook at the age of eighty-six, came to nothing. His alliance with McSweeney’s was a product of circumstance. ‘My literary agent, who was younger than me, had died suddenly, and I had nobody,’ Kaufman said. He is now writing a second novel. ‘Years ago, I was working in Italy, and Charlie Chaplin and his family came from Switzerland,’ he recalled. ‘We were at a beach north of Rome, and it was a very foggy day and the beach was lousy. At about three o’clock it cleared up, and Chaplin said, ‘I’m going back to the hotel. Unless I write every day, I don’t feel I deserve my dinner.’ That made an impression on me.’

Kaufman writes longhand and has a secretary type up his work. ‘The only promise to myself that I have ever kept was no more typewriters,’ he said. ‘I hate the damn thing.’ (When it was suggested to Kaufman that he might want to check his Amazon ratings after Bowl of Cherries comes out, he said that he wasn’t sure what Amazon ratings were.)”

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Mr. Kaufman:

Mr. Magoo:

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“He May Appear To Be A Serious Leftist Intellectual, But Is It Not The Case That He Is In Fact A Comedian?”

April 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"He owns neither jacket nor tie." (Image by Andy Miah.)

From “The Marx Brother,” Rebecca Mead’s smart 2003 profile of superstar Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek:

“Zizek is bearded and bearish, and restricts his wardrobe to proletarian shirts and bluejeans, with an occasional excursion into corduroy. He owns neither jacket nor tie. He speaks six languages, is made uncomfortable by conversational lapses, and avoids them through the ample use of animated monologue. He speaks English at high speed in an accent recalling that of Latka, the character of indeterminate Mitteleuropean origin played by Andy Kaufman on Taxi. If, in the progress of intellectual fashions, Jacques Derrida’s appeal was that he was fascinatingly difficult, and Michel Foucault’s was that he was sexily rigorous, then Zizek’s lies in his accessible absurdity. Unlike earlier academic superstars, however, Zizek has no disciples: there is no School of Zizek, no graduate students writing Zizekian readings of the novels of Henry James or of Star Trek for their theses. Such a thing would be impossible, since one of the characteristics of Zizek’s work is that he applies his critical methodology even to the results of his own critical inquiry, which is another way of saying that he contradicts himself all the time. Eric Santner, who teaches at the University of Chicago and is a dose friend of Zizek, says, ‘One of his fundamental gestures is this: he will present a problem, or a text, then produce the reading that you have come to expect from him, and then he will say, ‘I am tempted to think it is just the opposite.'” To a generation of students raised on Seinfeld, Zizek’s examination of the minutiae of popular culture – his observation, for example, that when he sees a tube of toothpaste advertising ‘thirty per cent free’ he wants to cut off the free third and put it in his pocket – could not be more familiar, and neither could the ironic, self-undermining gesture. As Zizek might put it, he may appear to be a serious leftist intellectual, but is it not the case that he is in fact a comedian?”

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Zizek gets philosophical about toilets:

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