EDITORS' NOTE: While we prepare our Best of 2016 Newsletter-palooza for next week (if you have any suggestions for that edition, please email us), Sara Benincasa was kind enough to round out our 2016 guest editor class with pizzazz.
Sara is the editor in chief of The Stories, which launches today. She’s the author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don’t Teach You In School) (essays!), DC Trip(dirty fictional hijinks!), Great (queer teen Gatsby!), and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom (feelings!) as well as the Amazon bestseller Tim Kaine is Your Nice Dad (dad jokes!). Half the proceeds went to Great Expectations. Her next book, Hillary Clinton is Hiking (REI fan fic!), is out this week. 25% of proceeds will go to the ACLU. She’s adapting DC Trip as a film with Bona Fide Productions (Little Miss Sunshine, Nebraska, Election), Gunpowder & Sky, and Adaptive Studios; Agorafabulous! for TV with Diablo Cody; and Great for TV with Muse Entertainment USA. Recent roles include The Jim Gaffigan Show on TVLand and the critically acclaimed short film The Focus Group, which she also wrote. In 2017, she can be seen on Comedy Central’s “Hampton Deville” and a Netflix series that she can’t name yet but it’s probably going to be really great. She’s from Jersey. She lives in a studio/witch den in Los Angeles. The floor is yours, Sara...
Hot damn, do I love reading real stories. It’s a weird time for ‘em, in that they’ve fallen out of fashion. It was an honor to edit this edition of your #SundayLR. Thanks, Don and Jacob, for pointing out the good true stories each and every week.
Good, real, true storytelling remains a vital component of a functioning democracy. In these dark and often difficult days, I take heart in the abundance of excellent independent and citizen journalism in the United States (some examples are below). And I am delighted by Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue, both of which have taken up the truth-telling task in the absence of sufficient real journalism by mainsteam TV news this year (there are exceptions: hi, Jake Tapper.) Unsurprisingly, hardworking young women writers like Lauren Duca of Teen Vogue (daaaaaaaaaaaaamn) and Prachi Gupta of Cosmopolitan ain’t about that Trump life. I feel lucky to get to read their work. And I try to remember, as I recently did in this essay for Eater, that there are many good, kind warriors for justice in this world.
Many us are stressed these days. Perhaps you are, too. Fun may seem impossible at times. But please listen to the late, great Molly Ivins: “You got to have fun while you're fightin' for freedom, 'cause you don't always win." Her 1993 essay in Mother Jones, “The Fun’s in the Fight," guides my work and my life. This January, she’ll have been gone 10 years. She remains my hero, and I miss her presence acutely. But there are young Mollys all around us today, if we look for ‘em (they’re not hard to find – they may not be famous yet, but they’re loud as hell. Duca and Gupta ain't shutting up anytime soon, Lord knows.) And they appear to be having some fun, despite it all, or perhaps because of it.
Here's one more from Molly before I go: “So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
‘Tis the season for some white media liberals and politicians to suddenly bemoan the loss of the white working class. It’s notable that that so few of these hand-wringers mention or perhaps even think of the brown and black working class, who suffer disproportionately under GOP policies. As Derek Thompson so ably illustrates, Hillary Clinton worked for and with struggling workers of color and proposed numerous policies to assist all working class people. In an analysis of both candidates’ speeches, Clinton actually spoke about jobs more than Trump did. He and his supporters use their supposed healthy interest in more jobs as a transparent cloak for racism and homophobia so virulent that the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center are both busier than ever. Thompson writes that “among the 52 percent of voters who said economics was the most important issue in the election, Clinton beat Trump by double digits.” Thompson’s opinion, which I clearly share, is that the real problem most white Trump voters had with Hillary Clinton was her vision for what makes a civil society. This idea, shared by the real Left and enshrined in the most progressive party platform in American history, celebrates a diverse nation inclusive of people of all genders, races, sexual orientations, and ethnic backgrounds, including and particularly when it comes to economic advancement. Thompson writes, “After the election, some people called for an end to “identity politics” that promotes niche cultural issues over economic policy. But any reasonable working-class platform requires the advancement of policies that may disproportionately help non-whites.” It’s easy to complain about “identity politics” when the legitimacy of your own identity and right to exist has never been called into question. It is incumbent upon people of conscience to fight back as hard as we can, and to volunteer to help the communities who will be hit hardest by GOP economic abandonment. One suggestion: your local LGBTQ center (here’s mine), which will be tasked with providing real economic support to refugees from Trump’s America, especially queer teens and elders of color.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pamela Paul, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Geraldine Brooks, Dwight Garner, and Russell Shorto
(~15 minutes)
Some stories are just a pleasure all the way through. Let Ta-Nehisi Coates (repping Eso Won Books in Los Angeles), Pamela Paul (Hatchards in London), Juan Gabriel Vásquez (San Librario in Bogotá), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Jazzhole in Lagos), Geraldine Brooks (Fullers in Hobart), Dwight Garner (The Strand in Manhattan), and Russell Shorto (Boekhandel Van Possum in Amsterdam) take you shopping. And if you've got any time left, I suggest going to Malaprops Bookstore and Cafe in Asheville, North Carolina and The Clinton Book Shop in Clinton, New Jersey.
For 73 years, Annie Castor Glenn was the wife of a famous man. This week, she became the widow of a famous man. Travis M. Andrews chronicles her well-publicized struggle with a debilitating speech issue, which became particularly stressful as John Glenn achieved international fame as an astronaut. In her fifties, Annie Glenn found success with intensive therapy in Virginia. Eventually she became an adjunct professor with the Speech Pathology Department at Ohio State University’s Department of Speech and Hearing Science. Last year, OSU renamed a campus street after Annie and her husband. In 1983, she won the first national award from the the American Speech and Hearing Association (now the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association) for her activism. Then they up and named the award after her. In 1987, the first recipient of the Annie Glenn Award was actor James Earl Jones, who had himself wrestled with a stutter. On a personal note, I read this story and cried as I remembered my own childhood speech therapist with fondness and renewed gratitude. As a kid, I was bound and determined to be an author, no matter what. But if not for high-quality, free therapeutic intervention at Barley Sheaf Elementary School in Flemington, New Jersey, I doubt I would've become a comedian, a college speaker, a teacher, or an actress. I get to be all of those things largely because of people like Annie Castor Glenn. Follow ASHA on Twitter and learn more about their work here.
It's not often a CEO or any other human being willingly provides a step-by-step accounting of professional missteps, but Twenty20 co-founder Matt Munson does just that. Munson writes, "Perhaps my story might normalize some part of your own struggle to build something from nothing. To deal with your own inner critic. Or perhaps it might help you find the path sooner to peace. To safety." It's insightful, fascinating, and perhaps instructive. The basic lesson seems to be that one ought to focus on creating a great project with achievable goals, even if that means going slowly.
New Orleans-based writer Nick Fox talks about his father's struggle with cancer and his own struggle to forge and maintain a connection with his dad from hundreds of miles away. Music is the key here. Full disclosure: this is from my own new weekly zine on Medium, The Stories, which launches today. Two or three great true stories each and every week. Hopefully a lot more from Nick Fox, too.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is great. The Hamilton Mixtape is perfect. It's worth the price of purchase purely for "Dear Theodosia (Reprise)" by Chance the Rapper with Francis and the Lights. "Congratulations" by Minneapolis rapper/singer Dessa is great, too. It's all great. And "Wrote My Way Out," a new track from Miranda, is touching and good and dorky and smart and honest, with a sample from a Nas interview Miranda did in Hamilton's America, the Alex Horwitz-directed documentary from PBS Great Performances. Bonus points to Usher's cover of "Wait For It," which starts with a Hot 97-style airhorn. I'm fairly certain Miranda's internal creative monologue is punctuated with airhorns and samples from various Summer Jam performances in the 90s. Maybe I'm projecting. Spencer Kornhaber writes, "For all of the story’s tragic dimensions, Miranda’s creation is about love connecting people, connecting cultures, and connecting eras."
I will never tire of stories of Prince lecturing famous people on why they shouldn't curse (Chaka Khan says she'd still do it to get a laugh sometimes). And I love that he sent Susanna Hoffs a guitar-shaped birthday cake at her parents' house. He was so generous in so many ways. Van Jones says it beautifully when he compares Prince the songwriter to a water faucet: "I don't think the faucet is sitting there thinking, 'This is the best water ever!' The faucet is just doing what the faucet does. That's kind of how he was." Bonus fact, courtesy of Misty Copeland: Prince loved Pee-wee Herman.
Ava DuVernay is one of our most important creative voices, and by "our" I mean here in the US of A and also here on planet Earth. Writer David Canfield is an intern, and I will always stan for interns, so here we go. It helps that he writes with great passion. (He's a 2016 college graduate and you might could hire him. No, we've never met, but he does good work. I've hustled for writing gigs for the past 11 years so I can make some educated guesses here. Half of you are editors anyway. Give a kid a shot.)
Liberty University, an anti-gay, ultra right-wing college, hired a new athletic director who ignored multiple allegations of gang rape among the players he oversaw at his previous school, Baylor. Writer Michael Powell says of Liberty, "The university is run by Jerry Falwell Jr., a godly sort who understands the need for occasional accommodation with the secular world. Earlier this year he strolled around the Republican National Convention with his candidate, Donald J. Trump, a thrice-married man whom numerous women have accused of sexually harassing them." Also, the school teaches that God invented the Earth over the past 10,000 years.
A very sad story from multiple reporters assigned to cover the aftermath of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland. It's about fire codes and inspections, but it's an economic cautionary tale about artists living in near-poverty in a rapidly gentrifying city, in a beautiful artistic space that may have felt safe emotionally as a haven for queer kids and experimentation. In the end, it proved to be a firetrap. Yamiche Alcindor writes, "Current and former tenants have told my colleagues that when Ms. Ng [the warehouse owner] or her daughter came by, Mr. Almena and Ms. Allison [the "master tenants" who sublet parts of the place illegally to residents] told tenants to pack away bedding and cooking supplies." The Times will update this story as it unfolds.
Peter C. Baker writes, "Over the last decade, journalists and politicians have, more than ever before, discussed the perils of the practice: how enforced isolation damages the mind, how quickly it incites and exacerbates mental illness, how frequently it encourages self-mutilation and suicide — and how disproportionately it is used for non-white prisoners." And yet the practice remains in wide use. Only last week, the governor of my home state of New Jersey vetoed a bill that would have outlawed solitary confinement for pregnant women prisoners. Baker explores the root of the practice, which is commonly recognized as torture by most developed nations.
Sidney Lumet was a friggin’ genius. My favorite quote from him of many great quotes from him is this one, which resides currently in the Twitter bio of Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times: “As a Jew, I'm very judgmental. As a street Jew, doubly so.''
Alia Shawkat has great style and her new TV show looks excellent. (I am extremely biased in this regard because we have the same hairstylist, Sabina Yannone, who actually understands curly hair.) This is a fun and fluffy read about a deeply talented actress who has managed to maintain a unique but evolving look over time. I can't imagine what it's like to grow up in front of the cameras but I can say certainly that I'm glad she did, because while she's only 27, she's been doing fantastic work for years.
A.A. Gill, who was gathered in this week, wrote unsparingly about almost everything, including his cancer. "There is barely a morsel of offal not included. I have a trucker's gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy," he offered in November. Primarily a restaurant critic, he also mastered the sketch, with his mastery on display in this meditation on Kentucky's Creation Museum. He writes, "It may be the biggest collection of kitsch in God’s entire world. ... The penchant for kitsch is something that gay men and born-again Christians share."
Gov. Chris Christie had an opportunity to join a growing movement pushing for criminal justice reform. He blew it.
(Guest Editors' note: I'm from New Jersey. We may not always be quiet, or fancy, or subtle, but you can bet we'll give it to you straight. And when one of our own acts in a reprehensible manner, we will hold his feet to the proverbial fire. NJ.com gets right to it.)
His sense of humor was really thought out. He wasn't somebody who did a lot of stuff just off-the-cuff. When we became friends, he would tell me about the kids in the neighborhood. He'd say, "This kid Jerry, he's going to try to do this…. If he ever comes up to you and says anything, his mom's name is this…." His mom had some funny name, and Prince literally had a spiral notebook with jokes that he was ready to tell in case the kid said anything to him. He had them written down. Literally. He had all this stuff. And I finally just said, "Well, why can't I just punch him in the nose?" And he said, "Oh, you don't want to do that—he's got, like, 16 brothers." I was like, "Okay, what's that joke again?"
—André Cymone
Prince wrote music the way you write e-mails, okay? If you were transported to some world where the ability to write e-mails was some rare thing, you would be Prince. He was just writing music all the time. He slept it, he thought it. And it wasn't all great—some of it was good, some of it wasn't. But he had no expectation, he was just being himself. It's like you cut the water faucet on—I don't think the faucet is sitting there thinking, "This is the best water ever!" The faucet is just doing what the faucet does. That's kind of how he was.
"In just five hours on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Glenn joined a select roster of Americans whose feats have seized the country’s imagination and come to embody a moment in its history, figures like Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh." On October 29, 1998, in the last months of his final term, Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) got to go back into space. At 77, he was the oldest American to do so. He is survived by his wife, Annie, two children, and two grandsons.
By James Poniewozik, Mike Hale and Neil Genzlinger
(~15 minutes)
It's End-of-Year-list o'clock, and this is a good one. I particularly appreciated the shout-outs to Fleabag and to Seeso in general as well as Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ in particular.
The Strand Bookstore, last seen in the aforementioned 7 Writers On Their Favorite Bookstores, makes its second appearance in this edition of #SundayLR. They've assembled a fine list of books for you to check out.
"Since the election, most of the attention about 'news' has centered on how to get 'fake news' off of Facebook and Google. Instead, why can’t organizations that care about good journalism launch a promotional campaign to teach the American public what a real journalist is?"
From Tim: Real journos do not take a bribe.
Nor spiritous liquors imbibe.
The truth is their life.
They do not fear strife.
They never stoop to diatribe.
Tim Torkildson is a retired circus clown. His work has appeared in The New York Times and The Huffington Post. He is currently re-inventing the limerick, one anapest at a time.
I know 1000 Todds. Josh was a Bernie bro who voted for Jill Stein and now fulminates against Trump even though he and his buddies basically did everything possible to get Trump elected. Jeff is now organizing a movement to deliver organic hemp zwieback to low-income toddlers. Meet these boys and more, today! They'll make you meet them, whether or not you actually want to!
For the past few months, I've written to the Luke Cage playlist on Spotify nearly every day. You start with ODB and it takes off from there, and if you know the scene in Luke Cage that uses "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" to brilliant effect, you'll love it even more. There are too many standouts to pick but Jidenna's weird and great and Isaac Hayes is Isaac Hayes, dammit. Raphael Saadiq is always a welcome presence. Watch the series on Netflix to see performances from many of the artists included here. And you can buy the official soundtrack on iTunes (I did that too). Familiarize yourself with composer-producer Adrian Younge in advance unless you want to just fall in love completely by surprise in the moment, which is also an acceptable path. Cheo Coker is a genius who works with the best of the best. And Sharon Jones is Sharon Jones is Sharon Jones forever and ever, in this life or the next, amen.
Founder, Curator: Don Van Natta Jr. Producer, Curator: Jacob Feldman Senior Editor of Recycling: Jack Shafer Senior Limerick Editor: Tim Torkildson
Header Image: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Contributing Editor Headshot: Carol Sheridan/Iconic Pinups
Contributing Editors: Bruce Arthur, Alex Belth, Sara J. Benincasa, Sara Blask, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Chris Cillizza, Rich Cohen, Pam Colloff, Maureen Dowd, Brett Michael Dykes, Lea Goldman, Maggie Haberman, Reyhan Harmanci, Virginia Heffernan, Jena Janovy, Bomani Jones, Peter Kafka, Mina Kimes, Tom Lamont, Glynnis MacNicol, Drew Magary, Jonathan Martin, Betsy Fischer Martin, Ana Menendez, Kevin Merida, Eric Neel, Lizzie O'Leary, Anne Helen Petersen, Joe Posnanski, S.L. Price, Albert Samaha, Bruce Schoenfeld, Joe Sexton, Rachel Sklar, Dan Shanoff, Ben Smith, 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.
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