For Harper’s Bazaar, Julieanne Smolinski interviews comedy legend Carol Burnett, age 90, about her current acting roles and doing live unscripted audience Q&A to open The Carol Burnett Show in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The bit was so successful that Burnett took it on the road for 20 years after the show ended.
The questions were never vetted, the audience members never preselected. Burnett would choose on the fly, usually just by picking people out and pointing aggressively at them. On one occasion, on The Carol Burnett Show, a woman asked if she could get onstage and sing a song. Burnett let her, lending the audience member her orchestra and even joining in herself, a few bars into “You Made Me Love You.” Rather than dying of gratitude, the woman laughingly complained that Burnett had “screwed it up” by failing to harmonize during the performance’s big finish. When Burnett tells this story, it’s not “What a bitch” but “What a delight.”
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It’s taken a long time for Toronto officials to recognize a crisis: the city is running out of land to bury its dead. For The Local, Inori Roy reports on the monopolization and “McDonald’s-ization” of Ontario’s bereavement industry, and looks into one group in particular, Mount Pleasant, that has amassed $1.2 billion in assets and hundreds of millions in revenue from its cemetery and funeral services. In the past, cemeteries and family-owned funeral homes worked together in a friendly, cooperative way, but the corporatization of death care has since transformed the industry into a for-profit machine focused on money and real estate.
Back then, Hunter says, cemeteries and funeral homes were “completely different animals.” Funeral homes were responsible for collecting and preparing the deceased, hosting services, ordering flowers, and everything up to the moment the casket reached its final resting place—the rest, burial onward, was the responsibility of the cemetery. During working hours, Humphrey and Mount Pleasant Cemetery were often two limbs of a single organism, working together to lay a body to rest. After clocking off, workers would mingle. “We played hockey together, we played baseball together, we curled together, we would get together and do pub nights,” Hunter remembers. They had, he says, “a very close, intimate professional relationship.”
The governments of aging populations in dense urban centres across the world are already having to face this problem. Hong Kong has been actively encouraging its residents to be cremated; Singapore has a fifteen-year limit on burial plots, after which time the remains are disinterred and cremated. In Toronto, Hanson says, there are options. We could backfill cemeteries—interring people in the spaces between existing graves. We could introduce community burial grounds, smaller cemeteries built into local parks and parkettes. And, as much as the idea might be discomfiting to some, we could bury people in the Greenbelt—which would, in theory, only add to the need to protect and preserve it.
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What is it like to go to the Oscars? No, not the celebrity Oscars, the “normal people Oscars.” Stuart Heritage reports from up in the gods—the mezzanine high above the more famous audience, reserved for journalists, film crews, and the family of nominees. In this fun piece, Heritage discovers that the people here can be even more invested than those below.
But perhaps we are missing something by watching it on a screen. Maybe the definitive way to experience the Oscars is to go to Los Angeles and soak up the atmosphere. If you spend time around the winners, the Oscars might start to make some sense. Maybe, I thought, if I experienced the Oscars in the same way as a celebrity, everything would click into place. I might even end up a born-again Academy Awards convert.
At least, that was my intention. Unfortunately, as someone who ranks extremely low on the entertainment industry’s totem pole, I don’t possess the status to experience the Oscars in the same way as a celebrity. They get to sit close to the stage. Jimmy Kimmel makes jokes about them. People are desperate to be around them. None of that happened to me.
In a sense, that didn’t matter, because it meant I got to experience another side of the ceremony that simply isn’t available to TV viewers. That’s right, on Sunday night, I got to participate in the normal people Oscars.
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In 1973, Ariel Dorfman was a peaceful follower of Salvador Allende’s democratic government in Chile. After a military junta toppled the government he went into hiding, not knowing whether he was at risk. Over 50 years later, he got a chance find out by visiting Santiago to review the secret dossier compiled about his activism.
I have often wished that I could access at least one of the many police files that have undoubtedly been compiled about me since September 11, 1973, the day a military junta toppled Salvador Allende’s democratic government in Chile and started hounding those of us who had been his peaceful followers. What did they really know about my activism, the men who could decide whether I lived or died? Last year my wish came true. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the coup, the Comisión Provincial por la Memoria—an organization that investigates and memorializes human rights violations in Argentina—combed secret police files for information about the refugees saved by the Argentine embassy in Chile after the coup. On a recent trip to Santiago, a city I have visited frequently since democracy was restored in 1990, I was able to read an extensive dossier collected by a secret security agency, allowing me to revisit—from the perspective of the censor, the spy, the stalker—a period of my life when I constantly felt at risk.
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Kate Wagner | Road & Track | March 1, 2024 | 5,474 words
I can’t claim with 100% certainty that this is the first time Longreads has ever recommended a piece that doesn’t actually exist, but 99% is good enough. In case you missed the media scandal of the week, Road and Track published this piece, then immediately nuked it. Pulled it right off the site. (Hence the fact that this writeup links to an archived version via the Wayback Machine.) Why did they do it? Hard to say. The editor in chief claims it was assigned before he became EIC, and he would have killed it in utero had he known about it. Either way, you won’t find a better example of the Streisand Effect this year. The premise was simple: R&T sent Kate Wagner—who cycling fans may know from her newsletter Derailleur, and others might know from her blog McMansion Hell—on a press junket to a Formula 1 race in Austin, Texas. This was, as Wagner reminds the reader about fiftyleven times, a setup for culture shock. Wagner is used to abiding strict ethical guidelines while covering professional cycling; the petrochemical company funding the junket sent her first class to Austin. Wagner’s a socialist; the F1 paddock is a scene of ultrawealth. The ironic juxtapositions continue. But it’s really the piece’s gonzo approach and Wagner’s unrelentingly crisp descriptive writing that makes the piece work, even after the me-versus-them stance wears thin. “The unfurling of the apparatus of the setup, groups peeling back one by one until there are only these alien cars, these technological marvels kissing the ground,” she writes of the pre-race flurry. “Before the heartbeat, they respirated.” She applies this where, at least for a car magazine, it really matters: the cars, the racing, the racers. Had this story been only an eat-the-rich critique, sure, it may still have gotten a flurry of attention. But what makes it a great piece, a memorable piece, is how Wagner gets inside the magic of spectacle. —PR
Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books | March 2, 2024 | 4,359 words
A few years ago, I wrote a book about white nationalism, which necessitated spending a lot of time in the worst corners of the internet, reading and listening to the worst people spewing the worst things. This content was laced with humor that functioned both as a delivery system and as weak moral cover—it’s just a joke! lighten up!—for abhorrent ideas. I think often of a line journalist Joseph Bernstein wrote, which I quoted in the book: “What does a racist joke do except create the cognitive distance necessary to do harm, dissolve the bonds of moral obligation?” Bernstein is right, but as this new essay by Fintan O’Toole shows, cruel humor also creates bonds: it invites people willing or even eager to laugh at its punchlines into a community of like minds. O’Toole centers his analysis on Donald Trump, considering why the disgraced ex-president’s supporters find him funny. “His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun,” O’Toole writes. “He makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.” (O’Toole then quips, “For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis.”) Trump has been honing his act for decades, “flirting with the unsayable” to see how wide he can make the Overton Window; in doing so, he’s offered his “listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion.” But as O’Toole warns, “What is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. . . . The in-joke becomes the killer line.” Even if you’re not laughing with Trump—which is to say, if you have a moral compass—don’t make the mistake of laughing at him either. —SD
Rowan Jacobsen | Bloomberg Businessweek | February 20, 2024 | 4,228 words
The agave plant, a striking succulent that grows in Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico, “blooms just once in its life, slowly storing sugars in its heart for 6 to 30 years,” writes Rowan Jacobsen. Its flower stalk, a quiote, rises when ready, alerting bats to its nectar. After the agave flowers, it dies. The way Jacobsen describes this slow, once-in-a-lifetime act is beautiful, and he applies this same respect and care to his reporting on the country’s mezcal production as a whole. Mezcal’s allure is in its artisanal nature and the centuries-old, small-batch, single-village methods of the region’s producers; the spirit is often considered the anti-tequila. That authenticity, of course, is what corporations want to capitalize on, and if the growth of the tequila industry is any indication, the global demand for mezcal could devastate the region’s villages, small businesses, and landscape. Enriched by Ruben E. Reyes’ gorgeous photographs of the Oaxacan landscape and portraits of mezcaleros, Jacobsen’s snapshot presents Mexico’s mezcal industry in the shadow of Big Liquor and the threat of “tequilization.” What is the future of the family-owned distilleries that remain in the region, and of the agave plant itself, which has thrived and supported ecosystems and Indigenous Mexican ways of life for thousands of years? —CLR
Tamara Kneese | The Baffler | January 8, 2024 | 3,360 words
I spotted the Alexa while touring our rental, pre-lease. On move-in day I unplugged it. A spy—in the bedroom, no less? Creepy++! Amazon’s Alexa has been recording everyone’s conversations for years. Now, as Tamara Kneese reports for The Baffler, Amazon has used our personal and not-so-private family banter to train AlexaLLM, their “signature large language model,” to offer our disembodied voices to our loved ones after we die. All of a sudden, it seems we are all living in these lawless, Wild West gold rush days of AI, when everything ever committed to byte or pixel is being fed back to us in increasingly disconcerting iterations. To be fair, Kneese shares examples of the good that AI can do, such as Stephanie Dinkins’ oral history project, Not the Only One, which is a “a voice-interactive AI entity designed, trained, and aligned with the concerns and ideals of people who are underrepresented in the tech sector.” As we race toward our collective, uncertain, AI-dominated future, I try to take a balanced view of what’s to come. I am here for AI that breaks down systemic barriers for marginalized communities. I am here for AI that is a genuine benefit to humanity. What I have trouble reconciling is how AI—begat by hopelessly flawed, biased, and prejudiced human beings—will somehow transcend our collective flaws and inherent biases toward creating more equitable future for all. I think I’ll leave Alexa unplugged for now. —KS
Susan Dominus | The New York Times Magazine | March 3, 2024 | 4,947 words
I was an early fan of Kate Winslet, with her unnerving performance as Juliet in Heavenly Creatures and her winsome portrayal of Marianne opposite Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. Then came Titanic. A film that launched her career into the stratosphere (and made my mother insist I take a whistle with me for any seafaring). But despite her fame, Winslet always came across as down to earth, and Susan Dominus’s lovely profile proves this to be very much the case. Known for not being precious on set, Winslet illustrates this to Dominus by being interviewed for hours in a chilly beach hut on the English coast (Winslet’s idea). I chuckled when, in response to Winslet noting she would never say on set, “I’m cold, I have to stop,” Dominus wrote, “I’m cold, I thought to myself. I have to stop.” I was also amused when Dominus got caught out by her own platitude; when she idly mentions she wishes she could have gone into the sea, cold-water swimming fan Winslet brings her back the next day to do just that. There are other tidbits thrown in—the half-eaten bowl of oatmeal Dominus spies among the detritus in Winslet’s car, the pastries she eats while expressing horror at Ozempic—that offer just as much insight as the interview itself. Not to say what Winslet recounts isn’t compelling: becoming a famous woman in the ’90s era of waif-like chic was nothing short of harrowing. But, it’s the small asides that make you come away from this piece feeling you know Winslet a little better. I’d happily swim in the sea with her, however cold. —CW
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Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim, and Daniel Boguslaw | The Intercept | February 29, 2024 | 6,445 words
In December, The New York Times published a front-page story alleging that Hamas had committed systematic sexualized violence on October 7. The piece, which was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner and two Israeli freelancers with very little journalism experience, has since come under scrutiny. The Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, even shelved an episode about the story because of serious questions about the reporting. In this damning dissection, Intercept journalists lay bare the decisions that led to the story’s publication in the first place, some of which one of the freelancers, Anat Schwartz, articulated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news. —SD
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This piece—published, then killed, by Road & Track, in a controversy that captivated the media world this week—caused ripples because of the socialist critique on its surface. But that’s not what makes the piece great. What makes the piece great is Kate Wagner’s writing, once she dispenses with the arm’s-lengthing and engages with the enormity of a Formula 1 race.
When they set off, one by one, first in the sprint, then the first shootout, what struck me was how quiet the cars were. This makes sense to me as someone who once studied acoustics in graduate school. Formula 1, again like sword fighting, is about an economy of motion. Noise is a hallmark of mechanical inefficiency. When mechanical systems work well, they work quietly. Noise at its core is excess energy. In Formula 1 cars, being perfect machines, that energy is redirected where it could be of use. The track began with a big hill, 11 percent in gradient, which made for a spectacular formal gesture, especially with the people on the lawn alongside it crowded on blankets. This, the finish line, and the straightaway coming off the final turn, were all I could see. There was a television above the opposite grandstands, but information was refreshingly scarce. When I watch F1 on TV, I’m used to the constant chattering of the commentators, the endless switching of perspectives and camera angles, the many maps. Here, I stood, and the cars merely passed, and when they passed, numbers changed on a big tower. It was so clean and almost proper, the way they flew by me in the sprint, dutifully, without savagery. Team principals and engineers were lined up on stools in their little cubbyholes crowding around laptops. In between each car was a calm lull in which calculations and feedback were made. A man with a sign walked up to the edge of the track to mark the laps for the Mercedes drivers. Then, almost bored, he sat on a stool waiting to do it again. I found this lull and surge transfixing, as though I were viewing the scaffolding behind a convincing theater set, the mundanity behind the spectacle.
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Cystic fibrosis once guaranteed an early death—but a new treatment has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now? Sarah Zhang examines the far-reaching, complex impact of a drug called Trifakta:
After a year on Trikafta, Jenny told Teresa something that she acknowledged sounded “insane” but that her sister understood immediately: “To no longer be actively dying kind of sucks,” she said. The certainty of dying young, she realized, had been a security blanket. She’d never worried about retirement, menopause, or the loneliness of outliving a parent or a partner.
Cystic fibrosis had defined her adult life. Now what? For so long, she’d just been trying to see her daughter graduate from high school. Now she faced seeing Morgan [her daughter] go off and live her own life. What then? Jenny had become active in patient advocacy, and soon after the start of the pandemic, she volunteered to moderate an online patient forum on mental health for her CF center in Utah. It went so well that her longtime social worker at the center felt compelled to give some career advice: Try social work.
Jenny enrolled in an online master’s program in 2022, and this past fall she chose a practicum with a hospice agency. Having watched the death of so many friends and contemplated her own, she felt prepared to shepherd people through the sadness and awkwardness and even humor that accompany the end of life. She understood, too, the small dignities that mean the world when your body is no longer up to the task of living. One hospice patient, she noticed, often had trouble understanding conversations because his hearing aids were never charged correctly. She got the situation fixed, and on a recent visit, he wanted to listen to music, playing for her the favorite songs of his youth. On another man’s shelf, she recognized a birding book, and she made plans for a window feeder to bring birds to him.
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