Frog

At Harper’s Magazine, Anne Fadiman’s hilarious and poignant essay recalls Bunky, an African clawed frog the family kept as a pet until his death at age 16. After years of feeding the required “Stage Two Food Nuggets” that formed Bunky’s diet and regular tank cleanings, Fadiman feels as though the family never did quite right by the frog, despite his longevity. This is a fun and insightful read on what it means to be a pet owner.

George and I agreed that we should wait until Henry and Susannah were both home before we buried Bunky under the weeping cherry, next to Biscuit and Bean. We joked about it, but we were also serious. We never considered throwing him in the trash. We wanted to honor him in death as we hadn’t in life; otherwise we’d be like a family whose photo albums get thinner with each succeeding child, until the last one has no pictures at all. (Come to think of it, we’d never taken a single picture of Bunky.) So Bunky went into the freezer. He’d spent more than a decade on the kitchen counter, so he didn’t have to travel far.

What is a pet? Is it an animal you love, as we loved Typo? Is it an animal you are responsible for, as we were for Bunky? Do you have to be able to pet a pet? Must there be reciprocal affection, or is it enough merely to have a guest in your midst that has a different number of legs, or perhaps no legs at all? Is it enough to house, feed, and bury an animal, to keep it alive for sixteen years, or maybe seventeen, and never understand the first thing about it?

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Welcome to the No-Budget Era

The film world has long included an ecosystem of young budding auteurs doing everything on a shoestring — but as Max Cea points out, it’s never been this possible to make a movie look this good for this cheap. And those young auteurs are starting to get noticed.

Some of these filmmakers also worry that Hollywood will take the wrong lessons from these movies. At the moment, the ability to make a $50,000 feature that rivals the quality of something made for $5 million is an exciting democratization, but it’s easy to imagine how that advancement might be exploited. “The second you tell people who finance movies that they’re paying five million dollars for something they could be paying fifty grand for, we’re just going to continue to erode at the idea that anyone could ever make a living doing this,” says Free Time director Ryan Martin Brown.

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In Search of Lost Time

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, oversees just about anything measurable in the United States. It collects and calibrates samples of materials. It owns the world’s tiniest ruler. It also standardizes the units by which we measure, which means everything from the meter (distance) to the mole (substance). But it’s the second (time) that has always fascinated Tom Vanderbilt, so off he went to discover — and, by extension, to delight us with — everything he could about that slippery duration.

In this world of metrology, which has left behind the dusty archives of physical things in favor of fundamental properties of the universe, it seems a kind of cosmic joke that this intangible, evanescent unit is the one that is understood most accurately. Even so, there is something amiss in the world of the second, the world of time. In a world of staggering exactitude, there are new timepieces on the horizon, capable of even more accuracy, clocks that are moving beyond mere measurement and opening new inquiries into time, into the universe itself. These machines have helped to drive a creeping suspicion that the second—that fundamental base unit upon which our temporal kingdom is built—despite all the synchronous activity of the world, despite the advent of clocks whose fidelity could theoretically outlast human civilization itself, is not being realized as exactly as it could be. Having come in search of the origin of time, I was learning that the very thing that drives it—the standard second—is flawed.

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The Tinder Car Heist Was a Mess — and the Revenge Plot Even Messier

The subject of this piece —  a 32-year-old technology entrepreneur named Mike — is a wholly unlikeable character. The way Ian Frisch portrays him makes it hard to sympathize with the way he is scammed on Tinder, which is more a testament to his narcissism than his naivety. Nevertheless, this is a rollicking tale with some jaw-dropping moments that will keep you gripped to the end.

Mike quickly matched with a woman named Ky. She seemed cute, if somewhat inscrutable, with no biographical details and photographs that included only a mirror selfie and a snapshot of her butt in a bikini. “I am the sweetest person you will ever meet,” she would later tell him. Mike had never used Tinder before; he told Ky that he’d be happy to get together.

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The Making of Tom Wambsgans

A deep dive into the character of Tom Wambsgans on the eve of Succession‘s fourth and final season? Yes, please! Alan Siegel talks to actor Matthew Mcfadyen about playing the show’s most consistently hilarious character — in the opinion of this Longreads curator — and his comedic inspiration:

When we first meet Tom, he’s standing outside a luxury jewelry store in New York, earnestly strategizing with his future wife about an 80th-birthday gift for her father, Logan. When she tells him that her dad “doesn’t really like things,” he blows right through her warning. “It needs to say,” he replies, “‘I respect you, but I’m not awed by you. And that I like you—but I need you to like me before I can love you.’”

That kind of moment — wild, tormented, funny — has become Tom’s signature. When asked, Macfadyen can’t think of other acting performances that helped him develop the character’s frenzied aura, but when he ponders playing Tom, Steve Martin sometimes comes to mind. “There’s a Steve Martin thing he does in various films, and he’s just sort of improvising wildly to try to get what he wants,” Macfadyen says. “He’s such a brilliant actor. There’s a sort of terrible panic about not getting what he wants and trying to do the right thing and pleasing.”

Early in the pilot, Tom tries to hand his still-unrevealed gift to Brian Cox’s Logan, who ignores the gesture. The far-too-eager-to-please future son-in-law finally gets his chance at the family’s annual celebratory softball game. Along with a five-figure Patek Philippe watch, Tom delivers a joke to Logan: “It’s incredibly accurate. Every time you look at it, it tells you exactly how rich you are.” Unimpressed, Logan says, “That’s very funny. Did you rehearse that?” Macfadyen improvised Tom’s response, first letting out a painfully awkward laugh, then saying, “No. Well, no. Yes, but …” Then Tom stops himself, forces a toothless smile, and shakes his head.

“That reaction he had to Logan Roy is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off because you’re going to say, ‘No,’ and then you’re going to betray yourself because you’re so intimidated you tell him you actually practiced it,” says McKay, who directed the episode. “People do that in real life. But traditionally, when you see a moment like that, it’s played for high comedy. Macfadyen’s a master. It’s a comedic moment, but still, it felt real.”

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George Saunders on Writing

Sumanth Prabhaker interviews Booker Prize winning novelist and short story author George Saunders on his work habits, how he leavens his characters to give them autonomy, and the infinite power of the short story.

I found early that, given my limited talent, one way I could reliably make drama was to manufacture some hardship for my character. In (sometimes) exaggerating that state (no sunlit days, at all, ever), the whole thing tips over into the comic and, in the process, the meaning seems to sharpen.

The short story, I’m learning, can do anything. But I do feel that there’s something innately cautionary about the form. The story states Truth A and immediately we are waiting for…well, for change. So the story you’re suggesting might start with one model for “rebuilding” but then, because it would be human beings doing the rebuilding, there would, no doubt, be a complication. That’s what makes it a story.

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The Lengths We’ll Go

“This is our version of being whole—as immigrants and as Texans.” In this movingand beautiful personal essay, Jenny Tinghui Zhang reflects on family, sacrifice, and a life of driving in Texas. Zhang describes a childhood and adulthood ruled by the road, her parents’ hard work over the decades, and a family separated by long distances.

Once, when I visited my parents in Katy over the holidays, I walked in on them riding their stationary bikes, which they had placed next to each other in front of the TV. I don’t know how long I stood there watching them. I felt melancholy seeing them together like this, pedaling in place in the same direction but still separated and going nowhere. My mother had achieved tenure at her community college, and my father was at a good place with work. Neither of them wanted to risk another bout of unemployment by giving up their job.

They shouldn’t have to pedal this hard only to stay in place, I remember thinking. They shouldn’t have to live in this disjointed fracture. I stood there watching them and I wondered: How much longer can we do this? Just how much distance can a family withstand?

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