IF YOU WANT a juicy longread to sink your teeth into, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are three to save for a moment of peace, or devour straight away.
1. Caitlyn Jenner’s public transformation
Caitlyn – formerly Bruce – Jenner has been making massive headlines over the past few weeks. But her big reveal, on the cover of Vanity Fair, was a tightly-kept secret that was part of a very successful press strategy.
(Vulture, 24 mins)
For most of 2014 and the first part of 2015, the Olympic hero had been reduced to a sideshow freak in the Kardashian circus, pummeled with equal vigor by the gossip industrial complex and late-night comics over Jenner’s changing appearance. As Buzz Bissinger makes clear in his profile of Jenner, the tabloid drums were not being beaten by Jenner in some attempt at publicity.
2. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead
It’s 25 years since this cult classic was released – and here’s a look at how it flopped at the box office, but ended gathering many fans as the years went on.
(Buzzfeed, 24 mins)
“I remember fighting for David Duchovny,” she said of the actor who would go on to play Bruce, Carolyn’s boyfriend/righthand man in attempting to expose Sue Ellen’s real age — and eventually, of course, Fox Mulder on The X-Files. “He’d done nothing! I remember somebody said to me he didn’t feel like a smart guy and I remember saying, ‘He went to Harvard!’
Ever wondered just how Clickhole works? This fascinating article goes into the newsroom and finds out exactly how the site does what it does.
(Slate, 27 mins)
ClickHole editorial meetings tweak the famous Onion meeting model, memorably portrayed in a 2008 This American Life episode, in which writers pitch headline after headline in hopes a few will be assigned as full stories. At ClickHole, instead of writers pitching a dozen of their own ideas, headline proposals are collected on a long memo without writers’ names attached, and staffers advocate for others’ ideas, not their own.
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