How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained →

Dan Nosowitz, writing for Atlas Obscura:

“Don’t eat gabagool, Grandma,” says Meadow Soprano on an early episode of The Sopranos, perhaps the most famous depiction of Jersey Italian culture in the past few decades. “It’s nothing but fat and nitrates.” The pronunciation of “gabagool,” a mutation of the word "capicola," might surprise a casual viewer, although it and words like it should be familiar to viewers of other New Jersey-based shows like the now-defunct Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, where food often drives conversation. The casts are heavily Italian-American, but few of them can actually speak, in any real way, the Italian language. Regardless, when they talk about food, even food that’s widely known by the non-Italian population, they often use a specific accent.

And it’s a weird one.

A pesky kid, I learned the answer to where all the end vowel-dropping came from a long time ago, but I’m glad the rest of the Atlas Obscura-reading world gets to know now too.

Faces of Cuba: A Photo Essay About Life on the Island →

Johnny Harris, writing (and photographing) for Vox:

Earlier this summer, I pitched my editors on an idea: a week-long trip to Cuba with a camera. I wanted to go there to see how people live and communicate in a country so disconnected from the world. The trip resulted in multiple videos about the state of the Cuban internet and the outcomes of a distorted economy. My reporting helped me better understand what it’s like to live in isolation and under economic oppression — a story best told through some of Cuba’s 11 million residents. Through hundreds of stories, I glimpsed the power of human creativity, on display everywhere as Cubans are forced to invent ways to survive in a controlled and lifeless economy.

I spent my days in Cuba wandering the cobbled streets on foot and in the backs of 1950s Chevys turned public taxis, listening to Cubans of all walks of life generously share their opinions and stories, their frustrations and passions. The nurse who makes $40 per month and the taxi driver who makes $40 per day. The retired man who illegally sells cigars to survive. The military man who loves the Castros' oppressive regime and would die to defend it. These are stories that helped me understand life in isolation and oppression, and turned Cuba from just another topic in international news into a profound example of human struggle and creativity.

Wonderful images; important stories.

‘Vote and support Ben Car-son/For the next president, he’d be awesome’ →

Inae Oh, writing for Mother Jones:

Ben Carson has made his contribution to the annals of awkward rap ads promoting Republican presidential hopefuls, and it's awful.

It’s easy—too easy—to mock this ridiculous, pandering piece of audio. So instead, when I heard it, I thought about one of my favorite pieces of wisdom regarding the creative process. It came during a discussion about some big Hollywood bust, a movie (I don’t remember which one now) that was obviously deeply flawed from conception and destined to fail, and the terrible box office numbers and reviews it eventually received were a foregone conclusion. The advice went like this: always remember that nobody sets out to make a bad movie.

How to (Actually) Be a Writer →

Todd Moss, writing for Penguin Random House, on Medium:

That was just the beginning. Putnam asked for three more books in the Ryker series, one per year. This meant I needed a disciplined system to write and still hold down my day job. (I also drive my son to high school, coach middle school basketball, and pick up my fourth grader from dance class.) Thus the questions: Where do you find the time? How can you keep everything straight in your head? Do you ever see your family? When do you sleep?
Every author has their own system that works best for them. Here’s mine.

Look past the link bait-y title of this piece. This is about as close as I’ve ever seen to what the optimal setup of a functioning writer looks like. It’s a little dry for my taste (he’s not creating what I would call Literary Fiction, which demands a bit more of Artistic Process) but it’s a damn good starting point. They should hand something like this out to all the 20-somethings in MFA programs who (as I once did) think that hanging out with our buddies Charles Bukowski, Jim Beam, and Nat Sherman is the only way to write anything of worth.

The Many Lives of St. Mark’s Place →

Ada Calhoun, writing for The New Yorker:

Of course, the sentimentalists are right: I did miss a lot. My parents have lived in their top-floor walk-up on St. Marks Place since 1973. By the time I was born, in 1976, many of the street’s most defining eras had passed. Gone were the days of Thelonious Monk playing the Five Spot jazz club, Andy Warhol hosting the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and the New York Dolls ambling down the street in hot pants. The poet W. H. Auden, who once lived at No. 77 and promenaded to St. Mark’s Church each Sunday wearing his slippers, died in Vienna the same week my parents moved onto his old block.

But the history of St. Marks Place is more complex than even many of its cheerleaders realize.

I remember the first time I went into The City (what everyone in the other four boroughs calls Manhattan) by myself. I headed straight for St. Mark’s.

Spooky (Science) Stories →

The New York Times:

Gather around your laptops and smartphones, friends. It’s time for the crypt keepers of our Science department to share some seasonally appropriate stories (spooky alert).

Flying. Snakes.

Ten Borders: One Syrian Refugee’s Epic Escape →

Nicholas Schmidle, writing for The New Yorker:

He was taken to an interrogation room, where a plainclothes security official “wanted to know who gave me the passport, and I told him what I knew, but that wasn’t much,” Ghaith said. “When he saw my university I.D. card, he said, ‘Look at you. You’re studying law? You think you know what the law is? Look what you’re doing!’ ” Ghaith was slapped repeatedly across the face, then sent to jail, where he was strip-searched. “You reach a point when you become numb,” he recalls. “I was standing there naked. I felt like I was not a human anymore.”

He and about fifty other foreigners shared a dark cell, sleeping on the floor. They had to defecate in buckets. Ghaith didn’t know where he was, or who was in charge. In 2013, the Lebanese Center for Human Rights revealed the existence of a fetid, overcrowded detention facility for foreign nationals in a former underground parking garage in Beirut. Nadim Houry, a Human Rights Watch researcher, said that some refugees had been kept there for “weeks, months, and even years” while awaiting deportation. One day, Ghaith watched, horrified, as a pregnant prisoner fell to the floor, blood pooling around her. “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said.

Harrowing. I don’t know what the right answer is, or how to fix the multitude of problems that created this crisis, but what I do know is that stories like this demand our attention, our respect, and our concern.

Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up →

Susan Burton, writing for The New York Times Magazine:

The control room had an anticipatory backstage feel. Moments earlier, a director was gesturing like a conductor, asking an engineer to ‘‘Hit it!’’ with an audio clip. In high school, Gross wanted to be a lyricist; one of the things she loves about radio is that it has ‘‘just enough theater.’’ ‘‘Fresh Air’’ is intensely collaborative, and many staff members have been there for years, including the executive producer Danny Miller, who started as an intern in 1978.

‘‘Hello, is this Sarah? Hi, this is Terry Gross. I’ll be doing the interview with you today.’’ Gross’s voice is briskly warm, with a luster that conveys the pleasure she takes in it as an instrument. For years, she took singing lessons; she told her instructor that she wasn’t trying to become good at singing — ‘‘I just want to be inside a song, to the extent that I can be. To just have my body inside a song.’’ The goal was raptness in a form she loves.

‘‘If I ask you anything too personal — I know your book is personal, but say I cross a line, just tell me, and we’ll move on,’’ she said to Hepola. ‘‘And you can tell me anything on the record or off the record. O.K.? Swell.’’

I settled in to listen. Along a long panel of buttons in the front of the room was a white plastic square with a big red arrow under it and a label that said, TALK TO TERRY BUTTON.

The best part of this piece was realizing that I’m not the only person who has rehearsed my future Fresh Air interview.

Taylor Swift’s GQ Cover Interview →

Chuck Klosterman, writing for GQ:

Now, inside my skull, I am thinking one thought: This is not remotely crazy. It actually seems like the opposite of crazy. Why wouldn’t Justin Timberlake want to perform with the biggest entertainer in America, to an audience of 15,000 people who will lose their collective mind the moment he appears? I’d have been much more surprised if he’d called to turn her down. But then I remember that Swift is 25 years old, and that her entire ethos is based on experiencing (and interpreting) how her insane life would feel if she were exactly like the type of person who’d buy a ticket to this particular concert. She has more perspective than I do. Every extension of who she is and how she works is (indeed) “so crazy,” and what’s even crazier is my inability to recognize just how crazy it is.

So Taylor Swift is right again.

Great job by GQ. C.K. is the perfect pop culture writer to interview one of the biggest pop culture icons on the planet. It’s not easy to make being ludicrously famous look equal parts easy, difficult, humbling, and sudden, but T.S. pulls it off.

State-Sponsored Tyranny

First, Julie Bosman, writing for The New York Times:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who gave up his quest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination last month, signed into law on Friday a measure that limits a longstanding tool against political corruption that has been used in investigations of Mr. Walker and his allies.

And then, Tamar Lewin, also writing for The New York Times:

Three days after Gov. Greg Abbott announced his decision to end Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, state health department investigators showed up on Thursday at Planned Parenthood health centers in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Brownsville with orders to turn over thousands of pages of documents, including patients’ records and employees’ home addresses and telephone numbers.

Some, but not all, of the extensive records sought by the state related specifically to abortion.

Can you imagine—can you even possibly fathom—the Hurricane Patricia-esque storm of shit that would rain down upon the masses if these decisions were made by Democrats? Hillary Clinton changing a political corruption law that had been used against her? President Obama subpoenaing personal records by way of government investigators? And if both instances were as nakedly partisan as those by Walker and Abbott?

Republicans want to get big government off of our backs? They should start with their own.