Category: reading magazines


Our President, the Writer

Filed under: GQ, reading magazines by lucky — Leave a comment
October 17, 2009

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At least from early adulthood if not before, Barack Obama was clearly driven to write; to trace that continuing compulsion, from the days when he penned fiction and then memoir to his present speechcraft, is to recognize that writing is anything but a small part of Obama’s life. It’s basic to who he is.

“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’ [GQ]

Barack Obama’s Work In Progress

First

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To Good Health

Filed under: The Atlantic, reading magazines by lucky — Leave a comment
August 21, 2009

Read this the whole way through, or at least half, and you’ll be grateful. Also, probably angry and skeptical of the U.S. health care system if you’re not already

How American Health Care Killed My Father
by David Goldhill

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

Perhaps the greatest problem posed by our health-insurance-driven regime is the sense it creates that someone else is actually paying for most of our health care—and that the costs of new benefits can also be borne by someone else. Unfortunately, there is no one else.

For fun, let’s imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let’s add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn’t cover even five months of our health-care expenses.

Somebody else always seems to be paying for at least part of our health care. But that’s just an illusion. At $2.4 trillion and growing, our nation’s health-care bill is too big to be paid by anyone other than all of us. [The Atlantic]

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The Burden of Food

Filed under: Esquire, reading magazines by lucky — Leave a comment
August 18, 2009

This story is crazy. A guy had Crohn’s Disease, an intestinal disorder, so severe that he needed surgery and afterwards, he couldn’t eat.

The Man Who Couldn’t Eat

For the first meals after I was home from the hospital, I tried joining them at the table, a happy-meal family, but my starving presence disturbed the kids, and I’ve been marooned on the love seat or exiled to the bedroom ever since. The silver-dollar-sized burgers and petite seeded buns excite the boys, and they yammer with mouths full of food, their speech garbled by chewed meat and bread soaked in warm juices. One after another the patties fall, cutting down the pyramid of sliders, and I can only watch and listen as the plate gets swept clean. Our six-year-old kneels and turns on his chair. He has taken a momentary break from the carnage, his mouth a juicy mess, and he trains me with a severe look. “When will you eat?” he demands in a voice complicated by vulnerability, the worry that afflicts all children whose parents get sick. “Soon,” I lie. “Tell me about the burgers.” [Esquire]

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Is Free the Future?

Filed under: The New Yorker, reading magazines by lucky — Leave a comment
July 5, 2009

I’m torn on this issue of the world, and journalism, moving toward “Free.” Mostly because many of my writer friends are losing jobs because of it. Malcolm Gladwell, author and cultural critic, reviewed Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price for The New Yorker, basically arguing against the theory that Free is good. Anderson is the Editor of Wired.

Priced to Sell
Is Free the Future?

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other. [The New Yorker]

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The High Price of Fashion

Filed under: New York, reading magazines by lucky — 2 Comments
February 25, 2009

Exhale… I have been writing. Still am. I’ll post links when they’re published, but just caught up on the last three issues of New York last night and in one of them was a great story about a kid from Queens (my hood), Kevahn Thorpe, who keeps getting arrested for shoplifting, goes to jail, shoplifts, goes to jail. rinse. repeat. All so he can stay fresh.

He really seems disillusioned, unaware or perhaps uncaring of the fact that he could use his love of fashion to get a job as a consultant or launch a real career. And make lots of money off of his passion and buy his own clothes or get them for free. He’s unfazed, currently serving time in prison.

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“The Fashion Thief”

When his frustrated mother threw nine pairs of sneakers down their building’s trash chute, Kevahn waited up all night and was there when the sanitation workers unloaded the garbage compactor to retrieve them. His junior school year had started, and he was reveling in his new reputation. “If you’re walking down the street with average clothes, people won’t pay attention to you,” says Melisa. “But then you walk down the street wearing, like, a thousand-dollar outfit, people gonna look at you a certain way. He’d hide stuff from his mom and keep it here. He’d actually come from Queensbridge in the morning and get dressed and go all the way back out there.” [New York]

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The Queen Bey

Filed under: The New Yorker, reading magazines by lucky — 4 Comments
February 3, 2009

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Thanks to Michael for sliding me this link. Sasha is one of my favorite writers, with a great critical voice. “Diva” aside, Beyonce is a voice of this generation.

The Queen by Sasha Frere-Jones

Young black female singers rarely get past the red rope and into the Genius Lounge—the moody, the male, and the dead crowd that room. But with or without co-writers, Knowles does remarkable things with tone and harmony. The one time I met her, backstage at a Destiny’s Child concert in Peoria in 2000, she talked about listening to Miles Davis and Fela Kuti—affinities I didn’t know how to process until I heard “Apple Pie à la Mode,” from the following year’s Destiny’s Child album, “Survivor.” It’s a slinky song, something of a throwaway, except that Prince or D’Angelo could easily have done the throwing away. Who else in the stratosphere of R. & B. pop plays around with the conversational voice like Beyoncé? Who feels comfortable with adding so much unexpected, generous harmony to a trifle about a delicious crush? Anyone else with “Apple Pie à la Mode” in the bag would flip over backward, buy a retro-glam outfit, and construct an entire side project around it. Knowles simply kept moving. [The New Yorker]

Destiny’s Child “Apple Pie A La Mode”

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Unreasonable doubt

Filed under: Esquire, reading magazines by lucky — Leave a comment
January 11, 2009

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As you get older, you’re not afraid of doubt. Doubt isn’t running the show. You take out all the self-agonizing. [Clint Eastwood, What I've Learned, Esquire]

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Benjamin Button

Filed under: Entertainment Weekly, reading magazines by lucky — Leave a comment
January 4, 2009

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Really great, unsettling, great, movie. I was going to attempt a great review, but here’s one:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

At any moment in this singular Hollywood spectacle, two marvels predominate, one technical and the other…Bradical. The movie has been in the works for years, pored over by Fincher like a favorite fairytale from his childhood. But only now has computer-driven wizardry matured enough to meet the story’s challenges so unobtrusively. Likewise, Pitt, a comely actor, is no longer the golden surprise he was 18 years ago in Thelma & Louise. What he is, though, is a phenomenon of heightened celebrity. And that rarified status, combined with good grooming and exquisite digital effects care, produces the exact force field of fame needed to take our breath away in that first moment on screen when, rid of gray hair, Benjamin is bathed in light that honors the movie-star beauty Pitt is. Was. Is. [Entertainment Weekly]

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Go to sleep!

Filed under: Wired, learn something new, reading magazines by lucky — Leave a comment
December 29, 2008

Sometimes I can’t sleep. it’s definitely not love.

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3 Smart Things About Sleeping Late

(by Daniel Dumas)

1 // You may need more sleep than you think.
Research by Henry Ford Hospital Sleep Disorders Center found that people who slept eight hours and then claimed they were “well rested” actually performed better and were more alert if they slept another two hours. That figures. Until the invention of the lightbulb (damn you, Edison!), the average person slumbered 10 hours a night.

2 // Night owls are more creative.
Artists, writers, and coders typically fire on all cylinders by crashing near dawn and awakening at the crack of noon. In one study, “evening people” almost universally slam-dunked a standardized creativity test. Their early-bird brethren struggled for passing scores.

3 // Rising early is stressful.
The stress hormone cortisol peaks in your blood around 7 am. So if you get up then, you may experience tension. Grab some extra Zs! You’ll wake up feeling less like Bert, more like Ernie.

[Wired]

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The Unemployed

Filed under: New York, reading magazines by lucky — 1 Comment
December 29, 2008

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My Laid-Off Life

Since August, 33,000 New Yorkers have lost their jobs. Here are seven recent casualties. [New York]

“If I could just get back into an office, any office, I wouldn’t be worrying about my daily existence. I also probably wouldn’t be downing shots of whiskey on Wednesday nights. I rouse myself from severance-inflicted post-drunk slumber and head out into the world. I regret feeling so sick and failing to get anything done; but what have I failed to get done? It’s these nihilistic thoughts I’m getting tired of.”

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Come As You Are

Filed under: Esquire, a post about nothing, reading magazines by lucky — 2 Comments
December 20, 2008


Eminem, one of my favorite rappers yes, is featured in one of Esquire‘s “What I’ve Learned” columns in its January issue. He says this:

“If you don’t overlook the fact of what you look like, then no one else will. I had a complex back then: if I get booed off stage, it’s probably because I’m white. There comes a time when you gotta stop thinking like that and just be you.”

I’ve said before that I don’t think anyone ever truly reveals all of themselves. Quiet ones secretly have a wild side, and those who are loud and boisterous have a very vulnerable side. Very few people get to view the full scope of another person, including close friends. It’s too scary. You don’t know what they do when they’re home alone or what they mutedly pine for. At some point in your life, though, being yourself becomes the most important thing in the world to you. Things you hated about you are now embraced and things you loved, proudly displayed. There’s less of a guise, less of a pretense, just you. This is what I’m after right now. Come as you are. And come from the heart.

Had to…

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Britney is Not Okay

Filed under: Rolling Stone, reading magazines by lucky — 1 Comment
December 3, 2008


There is a new Britney Spears Rolling Stone cover story, Britney Returns, and also, reportedly, a new Britney Spears. Except I don’t really believe she’s returned in the mental sense, just physically. The only interesting point in her documentary “For the Record,” which didn’t really say much, was when she talked about not having control over her life anymore. And then she said, “I’m sad,” and she was crying. She must be sad, after all this: “The Tragedy of Britney Spears”. A great story published in February. You might say who cares, but that’s somebody’s life.

If there is one thing that has become clear in the past year of Britney’s collapse — the most public downfall of any star in history — it’s that she doesn’t want anything to do with the person the world thought she was. She is not a good girl. She is not America’s sweetheart. She is an inbred swamp thing who chain-smokes, doesn’t do her nails, tells reporters to “eat it, snort it, lick it, fuck it” and screams at people who want pictures for their little sisters. She is not someone who can live by the most basic social rules — she is someone who, when she has had her one- and two-year-old sons taken completely out of her care, with zero visitation rights, appeared at Los Angeles’ Superior Court to convince the judge to give her kids back, but then decided not to go inside, and she’s someone who did this twice. She’s the perfect celebrity for America in decline: Like President Bush, she just doesn’t give a fuck, but at least we won’t have to clean up after her mess for the rest of our lives. [Rolling Stone]

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