My reading roundups have been getting pretty long so I am going to start dividing them in two. You’ll get culture links on Saturday and my weekly “Haterade” rant and sports reading on Sunday.
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Over at
, examines the lost art of the celebrity profile, featuring some of the best ledes from the 2010s. It includes the one from one of my favorite celebrity profiles ever written, the 2016 GQ profile of Justin Bieber by Caity Weaver: “The chicken-finger platter that has just been placed before Justin Bieber is like something out of a children’s book — an illustration from a story about a boy who becomes king, whose first and last royal decree is that it’s chicken-finger time.”Some craft observations from Katz on profile writing:
These examples highlight the importance of distinguishing the writer’s perspective from the outlet’s when presenting a profile of a celebrity. In each of those examples, the writer is making an observation about their subject that informs their perspective… It’s not part of [the celebrity’s] job description to offer up provocative, harrowing or even compelling thoughts. But it is the job of the person profiling the talent to try to lead the reader to some sort of conclusion about who they feel the person is based off of the time they’ve spent with them.
Speaking of celebrity profiles, this recent Texas Monthly profile of Jesse Plemons by Sean O’Neal is fantastic. Here’s that lede:
When Jesse Plemons goes quiet—and here on the front porch of his childhood home, thirty minutes east of Waco, Jesse Plemons has just gone quiet—you don’t know if you’re at the end of something or the beginning.
Nobody suggests so much by saying so little.
Over at The Guardian, Daisy Jones writes on the new state of sapphic cinema (I have been unsuccessfully pitching around a very similar version of this piece lolsob):
This new wave is a lot less moralistic, a lot less tragic and a lot sillier in general. Because lesbians don’t just go around giving each other pained furtive glances, hiding their sexuality like a sordid secret. We can also be amoral, and shameless, and make horny jokes about dildos.
Speaking of lesbian cinema, I loved
’s take on Love Lies Bleeding as “an elevation of the Druggy Americana film genre:”Bodybuilding and the creatures who hang around gyms already offers a unique and lived-in terrain to explore drug use. Steroids are cheap and abundant, seemingly like every other drug, all the time, and gyms are full of demanding customers. Unlike other drugs that uniquely alter the mind, the desired effect of steroids happens on the body. It’s all about the body. Molding it, sculpting it, changing and modifying it. Drugs enhance the project of mastering the body. But like every drug movie, this blade is double-edged. The more mass you gain, the harder it is to control, and then you’re spun.
Anna Merlan writes about “transvestigation”—the internet conspiracy that everyone is secretly trans—for Teen Vogue:
Transvestigation, Donovan says, belongs to a long trajectory of “digital sleuthing,” where, as she puts it, “the audience is empowered to seek out those bread crumbs and bring them back to the group to discuss them."…
For extremist communities, that can be a form of indoctrination, Donovan says, and that’s clearly what’s happening here. “These smaller accounts are doing that indoctrination work of getting people to think that the ‘trans agenda’ is real… because we’ve [apparently] been living with these celebrities who are trans for years and no one has unmasked them or shown who they ‘truly’ are.”
At
, writes about the romcom leads of our youth who sold a lie about the field of journalism:After the financial crash of 2008, the media’s pivot to digital, and the start of mass layoffs in the industry (I survived my first round of redundancies at The Independent around 2010), you’ll find that something interesting happened to the romcom female lead: hardly any were journalists anymore. If Hollywood had been selling a fantasy journalist’s life, it was around this time that perhaps they decided the realities of the media industry made it a fantasy too far. What was glamorous about overworked young women fighting for dwindling jobs and living paycheque to paycheque?
According to a study by Media Matters, 66% of stories the New York Times published about trans people failed to quote a single trans person. Another 18% of those stories included anti-trans misinformation that was not fact-checked.
Charlie Jane Anders on how to write trans stories:
Depict trans people as neither saints nor monsters
This is a huge one for me. Right now, the world is flooded with horror stories about trans folks: we're predators, we groom your children, our existence threatens civilization as we know it, and we even cheat at sports. It's awful tempting to respond to all of this demonization by showing trans people as virtuous, flawless human beings, as a kind of counterweight. Indeed, the way our oh-so-enlightened politics seem to work is that marginalized people can only ever be perfect or irredeemably evil, depending on which piece of anecdotal evidence you're consuming today.
But we shouldn't need to be angels in order to deserve basic rights — and both angels and demons are set apart from everyone else, effectively cast out of society. We need to see trans people with human foibles and a capacity for making truly grievous mistakes, who are still totally lovable.
And this one, which applies to the work I do writing about trans athletes, as well, and is one of my biggest tips for other journalists who want to do that work:
Don't focus unnecessarily on medical shit
It used to be that every trans story seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about hormones, surgery, and other interventions, as if medical treatments are what make us trans, or the medical establishment is the main thing we have to deal with. (Or it's up to medical professionals to decide if we're "really" trans.) It honestly gets kind of voyeuristic.
People will always seek beauty, and sometimes they will do so in the most surprising and ridiculous of places. They will make it out of dental fillings, they will pummel rocks and flowers and herbs and insects for pigment. We seek it out, always - it is part of who we are, a very human compulsion of the oldest kind: survival and pleasure are sisters. To dismiss it or vilify beauty is a halfway measure. We will leave people behind, who consider the fleeting moments of it worth risks, worth harm, worth loss we do not even know about yet. If it is worth that, to abandon it is to abandon them. And I refuse to abandon people.
Over at
, an examination of Selling Sunset within the context of empire:Saying you’re out to “build your empire” inherently centers you as the emperor with subjects that you (by definition) rule over. It’s an isolating mentality that pits you against everyone else — you can never have co-emperors — and turns everything into a zero-sum game. It ignores an obvious truth, which is that empires famously fall. If we were all to build our own empires, where would that leave us? As the emperors of our solitary, weak empires, ruling over no one at all or people who wish for our demise, with no allies but only enemies ready to take whatever power we’ve amassed for themselves as soon as we show weakness. It’s a neoliberal attitude that burrows into the unsustainable framework of capitalism. There can’t be infinite growth, and everyone can’t be their own emperor.
The other, more immediate treachery of the phrase assumes that setting out to build your empire is more durable than relying on anyone or any job, but in reality by striking out on our own we’re actually even more susceptible to the brutal aspects of capitalism.
Hallie Lieberman for Atavist Magazine: For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name.
On Kara Swisher’s new book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story:
I use “we” loosely because Swisher’s intended audience is not you or me, but instead those with power: she writes about and for them. Over the course of a long and storied career closely reporting on the tech industry and its titans, she has aped their motions, sat at their dinner tables, drunk their wine, gone to their weird parties, played with their baubles, repeated their lies, and offered them counsel. Swisher may style herself as Silicon Valley’s critic laureate, but she’s much closer to the court fool.
-“The Miseducation of Kara Swisher,” Edward Ongweso, Jr., The Baffler
Thanks so much for linking my work, Frankie! I’m making my way through these links, they all sound like great reads!
I missed that Justin Bieber profile in 2016, and boy it is an *illuminating* and delightful read now in 2024. 😅 Lol thank you for linking! It’s going up there with my other favorite Caity Weaver piece about the unlimited mozzarella sticks.