A remarkable feat of reporting and storytelling that reveals so much about the devastating cultural losses when the Universal music vault, in an easily missed warehouse named Building 6197, burned on June 1, 2008.
The list of destroyed master recordings is mind-boggling and heartbreaking: Most of the masters from Chicago’s legendary blues label Chess Records (Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters), Decca, MCA and Impulse were lost. Also destroyed were most of the masters of Louis Armstrong, Buddy Holly, John Coltrane and R.E.M. Bill Haley & the Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, Etta James’ At Last, gone. And on and on.
It was the worst disaster in the history of the music business. But the public had no idea. The toll of the catastrophe was downplayed and covered up by executives who suggested it was “a minor mishap, a matter of a few tapes stuck in a musty warehouse.” They gloated that they had convinced a Los Angeles Times editorial writer into falsely reporting that nothing of value was lost in the flames. Jody Rosen has done a masterful job piecing together the broken and hidden pieces into a grim, incredibly detailed mosaic that will likely leave you sputtering with fury.
Man in the Window By Paige St. John for The Los Angeles Times (~15 minutes)
A riveting, four-part series about the Golden State killer, a 73-year-old “ex-cop turned truck mechanic” who is believed to be one of America’s most prolific serial killers. Joseph James DeAngelo is accused of unleashing ”an extended spasm of violence in the 1970s and ’80s: Nearly 60 home invasions; 50 rapes; 13 murders. At least 106 victims.” Arrested 14 months ago, DeAngelo is awaiting trial and faces the death penalty.
“The Syrian war has become such a fog that few Americans know the extent to which we have been involved.” Shane Bauer crossed the Tigris River to find out.
Why is Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii Congresswoman, a long-shot for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination? One explanation may be Gabbard’s upbringing in the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna offshoot.
Meet Caleb Cain, a college dropout who found direction on YouTube. The website’s vast video catalogue transported Cain into a far-right universe teeming with conspiracy theories, misogyny and racism. “I was brainwashed,” Cain says.
On eBay, a still-sealed case of Kool-Aid’s Pink Swimmingo goes for $400. Someone is asking $425 for a single packet of Yabba-Dabba-Doo Berry. And if you cough up $195, you can own a single packet of Purplesaurus Rex. An irresistible foray into the vintage Kool-Aid packet collector community, “a microcosm of broader dynamics of fan culture.”
Three Gunshots By Mike White for North & South (~70 minutes)
From New Zealand, a remarkable story about a family’s unbelievable losses—three killings across two generations—and their fight to find the truth.
Kurt Vonnegut’s catch phrase “So it goes” may not mean what you think it means. Let Salman Rushdie unlock that mystery—and so much more about the classic but very modern Slaughterhouse-Five.
The most famous (or, depending on your viewpoint, infamous) escalator ride in American political history. The people who witnessed Donald Trump’s apparent stunt four years ago describe what it was like to be there when he announced he was running for President.
Behold the future: Personalized hair masks, vitamin cocktails and facial serums. Thanks to technology and data collections, these luxuries are no longer the playthings for the fabulously wealthy. (And here’s another wonderful piece by Amanda Mull: America’s Job Listings Have Gone Off the Deep End)
S.L. Price explains why super-agent (and LeBron James bestie) Rich Paul is the NBA’s super-agent and most polarizing person. And after Saturday night’s blockbuster trade of Paul client Anthony Davis to the Lakers, you’ll want to read every word of this.
Perhaps you’ve heard that millennials are lonely, porn-addicted careerists. According to Cosmo’s data, plus interviews with “actual millennials” and experts, “we’re the most experimental, enlightened, and sexually fulfilled generation yet.”
From “The Texaco Star Theatre” (1948) to “The Good Place” (2017), a fun, illuminating look at the 25 most influential episodes in TV history, including links to stream each must-see classic.
The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England. At 4:43 a.m., a security guard at the movie studio and theme park saw flames rising from a rooftop on the set known as New England Street, a stretch of quaint Colonial-style buildings where small-town scenes were filmed for motion pictures and television shows. That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. They finished the job at 3 a.m. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled. But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up.
The fire moved quickly. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors. Hundreds of firefighters responded, including Universal Studios’ on-site brigade. But the fire crews were hindered by low water pressure and damaged sprinkler systems and by intense radiant heat gusting between combustible structures.
Eventually the flames reached a 22,320-square-foot warehouse that sat near the King Kong Encounter. The warehouse was nondescript, a hulking edifice of corrugated metal, but it was one of the most important buildings on the 400-acre lot. Its official name was Building 6197. To backlot workers, it was known as the video vault.
Consider this piece, which Timothy Crouse expanded into a book of the same name in 1973, as tasting that will send you to that main course. Crouse's back-stage coverage of the campaign '72 press corps changed the way we think of campaign coverage as being dictated by "pack journalism." The best thing about the book--and this piece--is Crouse's take on the pack leaders, New York Times reporter Johnny Apple, the Washington Post's David Broder, New York's Richard Reeves, columnist Jules Witcover, and John Lindsay of Newsweek. One thing that struck me as I reread Crouse: Most of the people he wrote about are dead.
Classic Read curator Jack Shafer writes about media for Politico.
Mitch McConnell is a figure that we talk about all the time, but don’t really know that much about, come to think of it. This series from Embedded starts to build a case that McConnell is more responsible for our modern political system than any other living politician, and he’s not at all sorry.
Sunday Pod curator Jody Avirgan is the host of FiveThirtyEight's politics podcast and is heading up the new "30 for 30" podcast documentary series from ESPN.
Born in Haiti, AP photographer Dieu Nalio Chery grew up learning his craft in his uncle’s photo studio. Today, if an image from Haiti stops you in your tracks, it’s likely it was shot by Chery, a 2015 Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow. Whether it’s young men learning to swim, commuting families piled on motorcycles or breaking news, Chery has an eye for composition and natural beauty. On June 9, he captured the anger of thousands of Port-au-Prince street protestors demanding the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse, who has been implicated in government audits for the misuse of billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil aid given to fight poverty in Haiti. Framed by burning vehicles and chaos in the background, one woman conveys a country’s frustration with its government in her anguished face and outstretched arms.
Patrick Farrell, the curator of The Sunday Still, is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Breaking News Photography for The Miami Herald, where he worked from 1987 to 2019. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Management at the University of Miami School of Communication.
This is a sobering primer on the impact of artificial intelligence. This episodic series charts how marginalized communities are at the forefront of the technology and are the first to suffer from bias built into these systems.
The Long View curator Justine Gubar is an Executive Producer at Bleacher Report and the author of Fanaticus: Mischief and Madness in the Modern Sports Fan. Reach out to Justine at justinegubar@mac.com if you have a suggestion for next week's Long View.
Ann-Sofie Sundman and seven co-authors recently published an academic article entitled 'Long-Term Stress Levels Are Synchronized in Dogs and Their Owners.' Citing prior studies that found "acute stress...has been shown to be highly contagious," the researchers studied 58 human-dog duos by measuring "hair cortisol concentrations." And what did the find? According to the the new paper, "[t]he results showed significant interspecies correlations in long-term stress..."
Sunday Esoterica curator Ryan Rodenberg works as a professor at Florida State University, where he teaches research methods and sports law. He writes a lot of academic articles and some mainstream pieces too.
As we said in December of last year, when Bruce Springsteen released the soundtrack to his historically successful Netflix-captured Broadway show, when the Boss calls you into his office for an earful, you comply. With the release of Western Stars, his first proper solo studio album since 2005, the Boss is indeed ready to bring us in for a one-on-one chat.
Kelly Dearmore is a Dallas-based journalist whose work has appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Paste, American Songwriter, the Dallas Observer and Lone Star Music, among other fine outlets.
As Dark Phoenix, the latest (and last) in Fox's long-running X-Men movie franchise, premieres, THR's Borys Kit takes a look at the man most responsible for the comic book characters' success: Chris Claremont. Though many casual fans are familiar with Wolverine and his crew, few may know of Claremont - who came to the property after the initial series (by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and various others) was cancelled, and shortly after a one-off relaunch introduced a new batch of mutant heroes. What followed was a historic, 17-year-run that saw Claremont given almost complete editorial freedom - an idea that's basically unheard of in today's corporate-controlled and silo'd "IP" management publishing world. But with freedom came waves of creativity and boundary-pushing storytelling, as Claremont paired with a murderer's row of artists, including Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr., Marc Silvestri, Jim Lee and more to redefine the concept of a superhero team book. The X-Men was consistently Marvel's top-selling and most acclaimed series, even during the company's own creative doldrums, and remains a high point in mainstream comic book storytelling. Kit gives readers a top-line look at Claremont's career with the characters, his interactions with the film side and what the legendary creator is up to know - and why he stuck around as long as he did. As an added bonus, here's a throwback piece from Vulture's Abraham Riesman, who took Claremont to a screening of Logan, the third Wolverine solo film.
Alex Segura is an acclaimed author, a comic book writer written various comic books, including The Archies, Archie Meets Ramones, and Archie Meets KISS. He is also the co-creator and co-writer of the Lethal Lit podcast from iHeart Radio, which was named one of the Five Best Podcasts of 2018 by The New York Times. By day, Alex is Co-President of Archie Comics. You can find him at www.alexsegura.com.
Founder, Curator: Don Van Natta Jr. Producer, Curator: Jacob Feldman Producer, Curator: Étienne Lajoie Senior Recycling Editor: Jack Shafer Senior Long View Editor: Justine Gubar Senior Photo Editor: Patrick Farrell Senior Music Editor: Kelly Dearmore Senior Podcast Editor: Jody Avirgan Senior Editor of Esoterica: Ryan M. Rodenberg Senior Originals Editor: Peter Bailey-Wells Sunday Comics Editor: Alex Segura
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Contributor in memoriam: Lyra McKee 1990-2019
Contributing Editors: Bruce Arthur, Shaun Assael, Nick Aster, Alex Belth, Sara J. Benincasa, Jonathan Bernstein, Sara Blask, Greg Bishop, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Maria Bustillos, Chris Cillizza, Anna Katherine Clemmons, Rich Cohen, Jonathan Coleman, Pam Colloff, Maureen Dowd, Charles Duhigg, Brett Michael Dykes, Geoff Edgers, Hadley Freeman, Lea Goldman, Michael N. Graff, Maggie Haberman, Reyhan Harmanci, Virginia Heffernan, Matthew Hiltzik, Jena Janovy, Bomani Jones, Chris Jones, Peter Kafka, Paul Kix, Mina Kimes, Peter King, Michael Kruse, Tom Lamont, Edmund Lee, Chris Lehmann, Will Leitch, Jon Mackenzie, Glynnis MacNicol, Drew Magary, Erik Malinowski, Jonathan Martin, Betsy Fischer Martin, Jeff Maysh, Jack McCallum, Lyra McKee, Susan McPherson, Ana Menendez, Kevin Merida, Heidi N. Moore, Eric Neel, Joe Nocera, Ashley R. Parker, Anne Helen Petersen, Jo Piazza, Joe Posnanski, S.L. Price, Jennifer Romolini, Julia Rubin, Albert Samaha, Bob Sassone, Bruce Schoenfeld, Michael Schur, Joe Sexton, Jacqui Shine, Alexandra Sifferlin, Rachel Sklar, Dan Shanoff, Ben Smith, Adam Sternbergh,Matt Sullivan, Wright Thompson, Pablo Torre, Kevin Van Valkenburg, Nikki Waller, John A. Walsh, Seth Wickersham and Karen Wickre.
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