EDITORS' NOTE: Happy long Fourth of July weekend! Our guest editor is Matthew Hiltzik, the president and CEO of Hiltzik Strategies, a highly regarded strategic communications and consulting firm with offices in Manhattan and LA. He has worked closely with industry leaders in film, finance, sports, philanthropy, tech, music and entertainment and public affairs.
As an attorney as well as adocumentaryproducer, Matthew has enjoyed a fascinating career as the quintessential “guy” behind the guy (or the woman). He often does his best work in ways that are invisible to the public (though not necessarily journalists) but appreciated by his clients. After graduating from Cornell and Fordham Law School, Matthew began his career in politics as press secretary and deputy executive director of the New York State Democratic Committee. From there, he moved to Hollywood, as the head of corporate communications for Miramax Films while serving as a spokesman and advisor to Harvey Weinstein. In 2005, Matthew left Miramax to become President and CEO of the U.S. office of the U.K based publicity firm Freud Communications before founding Hiltzik Strategies in 2008.
Matthew is a big fan and enthusiastic supporter of this newsletter and, come to think of it, the first non-journalist to help us with curation. We’re happy to report he tackled the guest editing opportunity on a very busy week for him and a challenging one, too, as there was an avalanche of dazzling journalism.
Matthew, take it away….
P.S. A note about a big career move by one of our friends/contributing editors: Taffy Brodesser-Akner was hired by The New York Times to work as a staff writer for its magazine and culture desk. Congratulations, Taffy!
As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, it's an especially important time to salute the members of the media for their extraordinary contributions to our democracy and for fully exercising our First Amendment rights and freedoms to make us a more educated and informed (and fun) society.
I am grateful to Jacob and Don for making an exception and letting me—a comms guy from the other side of the media tracks—crash The Sunday Long Read Community party, which includes so many creative, trusted and trailblazing writers, editors and columnists.
My grandfather, who worked his way through college and law school as a painter, always thought that seeing someone's name in the paper was a sign of how important they were. He got great joy from seeing any Hiltzik in the news (we are all related) and was glad that he lived long enough to see his grandson get a few mentions in the NY Times and NY Post.
So reading newspapers was always something important in my household. I surprised my parents before my 4th birthday when I read them an article from the Times' sports section; my father's friend Ira got a subscription to the NY Post sent to me at sleepaway camp starting when I was 9; and I had my first letter to the editor published in the Times at 16—'how bout those Devils.' When I got to college, I wrote my first feature about the Cornell cycling team for the Cornell Daily Sun sports section and remember Sun legend and future ESPN superstar Jeremy Schaap, a graduating senior when I was a freshman, holding court at Rulloff's in Collegetown. And during law school, I was quite proud to be a named "column co-conspirator" in Peter Vecsey's basketball column in the Post, and Alana Newhouse indulged me by publishing two columns of mine in Tablet.
While I have certainly had my share of "passionate" exchanges with journalists during my career, my default approach is to always try and cooperate with reporters and encourage clients to engage as much as possible, because not participating usually leaves a significant part of the story untold. It's painful to watch some of the most dynamic and potentially history changing businesses and political campaigns become unnecessarily complicated because of adversarial relationships with the press and a lack of interest (or authorization) to grind out the reporting and fact checking process, even if the end result is just making the story a little less bad. I have been blessed with the chance to work with some uniquely talented (and sometimes difficult) bosses, clients, and companies over the years. I know that the system still generally works, but it does require everyone involved, including on the reporter side, to stop once in a while and ask if they are operating as responsibly as they should be, or if they are cutting corners or rooting or hoping for an outcome and working backwards from a pre-determined conclusion, instead of working towards where the facts actually take them.
While it's great that more Americans than ever seem to be learning and paying attention to how the federal government actually works (or doesn't, depending on your personal perspective), the unprecedented never-ending political news cycle has drawn important resources away from reporting on what's happening in the rest of America. This is unfortunate, because it's harder to pay attention to everything else happening in this amazing country of ours. One of the important benefits of The Sunday Long Read is that it provides a weekly opportunity to step away from the daily partisan political grind and focus on everything beyond the Beltway.
While there was no shortage of insightful political pieces this week (and seemingly every week), I deliberately stayed away from partisan political stories in my selections. Thankfully, there is a tremendous amount of great journalism being produced, enough to provide for a slightly super-sized edition of The SLR for this extended holiday weekend... including this slightly super-sized introduction.
We are less than two weeks from the ESPYs, which includes awards in memory of Jimmy V and Arthur Ashe—two men who represented some of the best America has to offer. So I will send you off into this week's selections of stories with inspirational quotations from each of them to mark this Independence Day:
“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.”
—Jim Valvano (describing a great day, but laughing, thinking, and crying also best describe emotions about our current political situation, and the great articles we find here at The SLR)
"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can."
—Arthur Ashe
As we celebrate, let's remember all of the men and women of our military who continue to make so many sacrifices for our country and our freedom, and let's thank their families for loaning their best and brightest to serve and represent us with honor around the world.
This one speaks for itself. As a lawyer I appreciated the crime, as a communication person I appreciated the subject's willingness to engage with the media, and from my days at the State Democratic Party, I appreciated that the best stories often happen in Upstate New York. Thankfully, I read this story a few hours after sitting in the dentist chair, because if I had read it before, my mind might have wandered while looking up at Dr. Blau.
A perfect example of great story telling: it is colorful, graphic and detailed, followed by a gripping narrative about surviving some of the most depraved circumstances you'll ever read.
Immigrants often offer the most American stories. This profile from a few weeks back of my high school classmate Elisha Wiesel, the son of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, is a reminder of America's embrace of its immigrants and the challenges and opportunities for the next generation to build upon the successes of their parents.
As a PR person, I wanted to bring some sort of exclusive to the table for SLR. And thankfully Alana Newhouse at Tablet allowed me to do just that with this online version of an upcoming Tablet print edition. The subject speaks for itself.
Continuing with the theme of immigrants, here's a story I would have never thought to choose if I hadn't met Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer-winning journalist with whom I collaborated on his "coming out" as being undocumented in 2011. As executive producer for his documentary "Documented," I learned how unaware I was of this community. This story captures the ongoing challenges facing dreamers and undocumented immigrants like Jose.
In somewhat the same genre, Lauren Smiley has 6,000 powerful words on the murder of an Indian tech worker in Kansas.
There is an old poem that concludes, "Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or the faster man, but sooner or later the man who wins is the one who thinks he can." Henry Burris is a football player who thinks he can—and this is his story.
A thought-provoking story by Amy Sun, who worked for over three years at Uber and brings a perspective not only as a woman but as a minority in a tech role. "I learned and grew more in my time at Uber than at any other time in my career," she writes, "and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything in the world."
In a time when we are constantly bombarded by news and information, we are multi-tasking like our lives depend on it and many of us have attention spans that rarely last longer than a 0:15 pre-roll ad, America should be craving the return of public intellectuals. Thankfully, history shows that the smartest minds tend to emerge when the country has been sharply divided. Let's hope history repeats itself.
Speaking of maps, I have been fascinated by the "art" of redistricting since researching a paper on the constitutionality of North Carolina's congressional district as part of a legislative process at Fordham Law School. Sadly, gerrymandering has become an even more divisive tactic over the years, but thankfully someone seems to have found a formula to capture the true inequities and abuses.
The world of media and journalism keeps changing. The Pulitzer-winning former veteran NYT investigative reporter Jeff Gerth explores how the New York Times leadership is attempting to balance its long-held editorial priorities with a difficult array of economic realities.
Abraham Lincoln was a slow writer, Garry Wills tells us in this feature adapted from his book Lincoln at Gettysburg, and a dramatic reader who practiced oratory by reading hours and hours of Shakespeare aloud. At Gettysburg, he gave a speech that "worked several revolutions, beginning with one in literary style," Wills writes, as he fused the American vernacular to the established tropes of classic rhetoric. "Hemingway claimed that all modern American novels are the offspring of Huckleberry Finn. It is no greater exaggeration to say that all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address," he argues. I don't know that Lincoln rewrote the Constitution with his address, as Wills alleges, but who can doubt his assertion that it is now "an authoritative expression of the American spirit"? Best consumed on the Fourth with a craft brew and a grilled hot dog with Chuck Berry's "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" playing in the background.
This was behind the wall at Spotify for a while, but now it’s available to all and that’s a very good thing. The first couple episodes make it clear that through Lighty, you can tell the story of hip-hop, and I’m looking forward to this starting to get personal as well. Dive in, or wait a few weeks and binge once the six-episode run is over.
Jody Avirgan is the host of FiveThirtyEight’s politics podcast and is heading up the new “30 for 30” podcast documentary series from ESPN.
“My dentist was recently indicted for murder.” It sounds like a droll line that you’d use at a dinner party, but in my case it’s true. On October 15, 2015, Dr. Gilberto Nunez, whose patient I had been for many years, was indicted for killing his friend Thomas Kolman, of Saugerties, New York, by getting him “to ingest a substance that caused his death.” There were also two forgery counts: allegedly, Nunez had been posing as a C.I.A. agent. He’d apparently told people that he was authorized to implant tracking devices in patients’ teeth. It wasn’t the kind of news you wanted to hear about your family dentist.
“It’s the most f--ing ridiculous story, isn’t it? We went to watch f--ing dolphins, and we ended up in f--ing Syria.” Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. “I mean, it was f--ing 8am,” he told an Australian website soon afterwards, “and the last f--ing club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. We’ll blag our way on to a f--ing boat and go dolphin watching.”
"Dear John, I adore and respect you but please please keep me out of your statements that are not factually based. I've never played anyone ranked 'there' nor do I have time. Respect me and my privacy as I'm trying to have a baby. Good day sir.”
—Serena Williams, via Twitter, responding to John McEnroe saying she would be ranked 700th in the world in men’s tennis.
THE FAN LETTER
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I was a 3rd grader in Ms. Arnauer’s class at Yavneh Academy in Paterson, New Jersey. I wrote a letter to Michael Bond expressing my adoration for Paddington—and asking him a whole bunch of questions about the iconic bear. I was probably particularly drawn to Paddington because of my mother’s insistence to dress my brother and me in similar English-style toggled jackets. I was surprised and thrilled when Mr. Bond responded with a note, answering my questions, thanking me and including a drawing of Paddington Bear. I hadn’t thought about that in many years, but the passing of Mr. Bond last week reminded me of that letter. Reading his obituaries made me better appreciate the story behind Paddington Bear—and the symbolic allegory of the Commonwealth immigrants in the 1950s.
The former Mets pitcher, who died last week at the age of 51, managed to maintain his dignity, even after being the source of ridicule for setting Major League Baseball's record losing streak at 27 games. As Goldstein writes, “Mr. Young endures all this with remarkable dignity, acknowledging the pain of his predicament but never giving in to it by whining.”
In a time of increasing divisiveness and lack of respect, this animation about antisemitism shared by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and one of the great religious minds of our time, offers some important perspective. For more of Rabbi Sacks’ own insights, check out his book, Numbers: The Wilderness Years.
A fun oral history that recalls all the “scrapped storylines, partying with world leaders and how a wig reveal saved the show.”
TIM TORKILDSON'S SUNDAYLIMERICK
From The New York Times:
"President Xi Jinping of China delivered a tough speech Saturday at the end of a three-day visit to the semiautonomous Chinese city of Hong Kong, warning against politicizing disputes or challenging the authority of the central government."
From Tim:
Obtaining Hong Kong with some cant,
The Chinese are now on a rant.
They’ve told all the world
That tongues should be furled—
It’s jail for so much as a chant.
Tim Torkildson is a retired circus clown who fiddles with rhyme. All his verses can be found at Tim's Clown Alley.
This is real: "KILLEBREW, Patrick, 'Pat,' age 68, passed away peacefully at home, June 20, 2017, after watching the Washington Nationals relief pitchers blow yet another lead."
Founder, Curator: Don Van Natta Jr. Producer, Curator: Jacob Feldman Senior Recycling Editor: Jack Shafer Senior Limerick Editor: Tim Torkildson Senior Podcast Editor: Jody Avirgan
Header Image: James Yang
Contributing Editors: Bruce Arthur, Alex Belth, Sara J. Benincasa, Sara Blask, Greg Bishop, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Chris Cillizza, Rich Cohen, Pam Colloff, Maureen Dowd, Brett Michael Dykes, Lea Goldman, Maggie Haberman, Reyhan Harmanci, Virginia Heffernan, Matthew Hiltzik, Jena Janovy, Bomani Jones, Peter Kafka, Mina Kimes, Peter King, Tom Lamont, Glynnis MacNicol, Drew Magary, Jonathan Martin, Betsy Fischer Martin, Ana Menendez, Kevin Merida, Eric Neel, Joe Nocera, Lizzie O'Leary, Ashley R. Parker, Anne Helen Petersen, Joe Posnanski, S.L. Price, Albert Samaha, Bruce Schoenfeld, Joe Sexton, Jacqui Shine, Rachel Sklar, Dan Shanoff, Ben Smith, Matt Sullivan, Wright Thompson, Pablo Torre, Kevin Van Valkenburg, John A. Walsh, and Seth Wickersham
You can read more about our staff, and contact us (we'd love to hear from you!) on our website: SundayLongRead.com. Help pick next week's selections by tweeting us your favorite stories with #SundayLR.