It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Round-up season! Here is our second annual unranked list of (some of the) best culture writing of the year. Read on for the reasoning behind our picks and excerpts from each of the selected stories.
The R. Kelly Problem, by David Marchese
New York Magazine
“Can you separate the artist from the art?” is a perennial pop culture question, but R. Kelly is an exceptional case, someone who seems to flaunt the idea of that question with every sexually explicit song he releases. The man with a well-documented, particularly graphic and disturbing history of allegedly sexually assaulting heaps of underage girls doesn’t seem to want listeners to separate his music-as-art from the substance of his lyrics. So where does that leave a listener? Marchese’s story gives R. Kelly the space to speak for himself while also pushing, hard, on what R. Kelly’s success means for the girls who have accused him of rape; it also delivers what is, by far, the best kicker of year.
Songs are better than people. And R. Kelly, in a weird way, through his sex obsession, makes that truth most obvious. The fact that his career hasn’t cratered, despite all the damning allegations, makes it clear that when people are listening to music, they’re not thinking about how powerful men often take terrible advantage of less powerful women. Or about how those men are surrounded by enablers for as long as they remain bankable. Or how the media is not responsive enough when troubling things happen to young black women. Or how legal settlements and NDAs are effective tools for suppressing damaging information. Or that part of the fun for some listeners is in how far a singer might be willing to go, lawyers and good taste be damned. Or how looking for rectitude from coddled celebrities is like looking for rainbows under rocks. Or how at the other end of our quotidian consumer pleasures is often another human being’s pain. So the answer to the question “How do you listen to songs by a singer who may be a bad person?” is devastatingly simple and sad. You just do.
Mad Style: Person to Person, by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez
Tom + Lorenzo
Missing Mad Men means missing the entire galaxy of Mad Men commentary, the cavalcade of recaps and essays and insights that flooded the internet each Monday, Christmas-morning-style, to ensure that you would not get any work done before at least 10:00 a.m. And, oh, sweet, stylish Tom and Lorenzo, I’ll miss you most of all. These pieces gave the visual language of the show the same exacting attention the oft-praised writing regularly received elsewhere, walking readers through the way the themes and personalities that drove the show were expressed through Janie Bryant’s killer, careful wardrobe choices. Tom and Lorenzo appreciate how costumes are as integral to vivid, complete storytelling as the more obviously-vital things like dialogue and plot. The result was something you could always look forward to, explainers that were knowing but never condescending, connecting dots you may not have even known were there.
He went from selling cancer to the American public to selling obesity to the American public and he did it using a message of brotherhood and tolerance that he himself would never experience because of his upper middle class trappings. This is what we mean when we say the ending is a cynical one. We don’t necessarily mean that as a bad thing. Mad Men has always been a particular combination of capitalist-fueled cynicism and family-based hope. For Don to have an emotional breakthrough and use that to sell soda pop to the masses is a perfectly Don thing to do. And like Stan and Roger said, he does this sort of thing. He has breakdowns, runs away, and comes back renewed. No, he doesn’t really change, but he gets a little better each time. That’s always been the point of Mad Men. People don’t necessarily make sweeping changes to themselves, but they can learn who they are and work within those parameters to improve themselves.
The Lost Girls, by Jason Cherkis
Highline, The Huffington Post
Jackie Fuchs never thought she would go public with her story: Kim Fowley, manager of The Runaways, raped her at a hotel party in a room full of witnesses on New Year’s Eve in 1975. But by fall of last year, the former bass player (known to fans as Jackie Fox) started seeing stories all over the place that sounded all too familiar: The now 50-plus allegations against Bill Cosby, Kesha’s lawsuit against Dr. Luke, sexual assault on college campuses.
Then Fuchs read an account of that night by bandmate Kari Krome that “perfectly matched her memory.” Fuchs decided that instead of pushing the rape out of her mind, she wanted to find out every last detail and come forward with her truth. At the time of this interview, she had 40 years worth of song lyrics she never shared with anyone; she was afraid that maybe she’d never been talented and Fowley had only recruited her for sex. She showed Cherkis some of her small notebooks of poetry. One line read: “Dear God, don’t throw me away.”
Jackie tried to protest, but she was frozen. “You don’t know what terror is until you realize something bad is about to happen to you and you can’t move a muscle,” she says. “I can’t move. I can’t speak. All I can do is look him in the eye and do the best I can do to communicate: Please say no. … I don’t know what it looked like from the outside. But I know what was going on inside and it was horror.” The roadie declined Fowley’s offer, and soon after, Jackie says she started to slip in and out of consciousness.
According to Roessler, Fowley stood over Jackie and began to unbutton her blouse. Jackie wasn’t wearing a bra. “Nobody seemed to really care,” Roessler says. “It was really weird. Everybody was sitting in there alone with themselves. It felt like everyone was detached or trying to pretend like nothing was going on.”
President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation
New York Review of Books
President Obama gives interviews all the time. But how often is he the interviewer? This back-and-forth between Obama and author Marilynne Robinson is such a rare, fascinating thing: A conversation. Just two intellectually curious citizens, not lobbying for anything in particular or hitting any talking points, but ruminating on fiction and language and human nature and how reading and writing continues to influence their lives.
The President: Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels anymore? And do you think that has an impact on the culture? When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.
There Is Only One Direction, by Samantha Hunt
The Cut
Hunt’s story is so many things at once: A loving, exuberant depiction of fandom at its most pure; a painful play-by-play of how someone comes to terms with a awful, unfair reality; an unsentimental but still emotional reflection on motherhood that scrubs that word clean of any associations with cuteness. This piece also includes one of the most haunting, so-true-I-can’t-believe-I-never-thought-of-it-that-way lines I’ve ever read: “No one has ever looked at my kids and said, ‘Wow. You made three deaths. You must really understand life.’ I’d like to see that Mother’s Day card.”
My 1D fandom is not part of some cute act of delayed maturity like an adult who insists she just loves eating SpaghettiOs straight from the can. I like 1D because there’s a darkness in this light music that stirs thoughts of life, death, gender, literature, and the multiple problems of aging. The boys sing and it triggers a chemical response of joy in my body so intense it sets my mind zooming through history; it unclogs stoppered neural pathways last touched in the 1980s. That sounds disgusting. I suppose it is. But it is the truth of aging. The boys shout, “I don’t care what people say when we’re together.” And I think, Okay, okay, me neither, and raise my hands in the air because it is true, I just don’t care.
Living and Dying on Airbnb, by Zak Stone
Matter
It’s all great and inexpensive and convenient to stay in an Airbnb when everything goes right. But what about when everything goes wrong? Who is responsible for what happens in the house when Airbnb positions itself as nothing more than the facilitator between hosts and guests? Zak Stone’s father died in an Airbnb while on a family vacation. Stone weaves his personal story through a deeply reported look at the shaky policies driving the rise of sharing economy behemoths like Airbnb.
The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity.
I was in bed when my mom found him. Her screams brought me down to the yard where I saw the tree snapped in two and his body on the ground. I knelt down and pulled him up by the shoulders. Blood sprayed my blue sweatshirt and a few crumpled autumn leaves. We were face-to-face, but his head hung limply, his right eye dislodged, his mouth full of blood, his tongue swirling around with each raspy breath.
Cheap Wine Sucks: A Manifesto, by Sarah Miller
Jezebel
What I love about Miller’s story is how it turns what easily could have just been your standard backlash-to-the-totally-trolly-Vox-piece into a funny, thoughtful exploration of anti-elitism. Why do people pride themselves on not knowing something, instead of celebrating the acquisition of information and expertise as an end unto itself? Why do we reward some kinds of snobbery — highbrow taste in television, for instance — but mock others? For the best reading experience, I recommend pairing this piece with your finest glass of Tami Taylor-approved white.
There’s no separating the anti-intellectualism about wine knowledge from other kinds of anti-intellectualism. The idea that knowing about wine is stupid and you can prove it is exactly the kind of thinking that is gutting our universities of their humanities programs. “Oh, this doesn’t do anything for anyone, Oh, this is just for snobs, Oh, you can’t get a job or produce revenue doing this, so screw knowing about it, what you need to learn is how to count how many people engage or create new ways of counting how many people engage or new ways to count counting engagement counters! That’s what matters!”
The Underground Art of the Insult, by Anna Holmes
New York Times Magazine
Holmes goes all in on one of the internet’s favorite things: Shade. She puts shade in its historical context, as a tool of subversion that originated in slave culture “that evolved to allow African-Americans a measure of assertiveness despite being in constant physical and psychological peril.” But she does this while celebrating shade’s versatility, ubiquity, and current cultural moment. She basks in the multitude of ways in which one can throw shade on the internet that are only as new as social media or that could never be done in real life.
On the Internet, a complex grammar has developed around shade, retaining much of the pleasure and humor of its older iterations but with wider-reaching effects. Take the subtweet: a tweet objecting to something someone else has said or done without actually using that person’s name. It’s the digital equivalent of talking trash about someone at a dinner table without ever acknowledging the person’s presence. Another shade-throwing tactic is to annotate a social-media outburst with stage directions like “*sips tea*” or “*side-eye*,” as if to say: “I’ll just sit back and demurely drink this beverage while I watch you act a fool and debase yourself.” Shade may be most delightfully expressed through emoji — crying faces (your predictability and pitiful intelligence make me weep), googly eyes (that assertion was so absurd it exploded my brain), emergency-vehicle sirens (alert: We have a live one here). Emoji are so innocently goofy that they make for the ideal shade delivery system, allowing a person to publicly and blisteringly respond to other people’s commentary without, you know, being blistering about it.
Miles Teller Is Young, Talented, and Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Ass What You Think, by Anna Peele
Esquire
Peele writes this piece in the second person and it totally works: You are, in fact, sitting across from the page, wondering if Miles Teller is a dick. She lets her reporting and tone tell a narrative that too much riffing and over-writing would have wrecked. She does what any generous profile writer would do: She gives Teller the opportunity to tell the world who he is. A gift from the celebrity profile gods, this one.
The waitress delivers the entrées, scallops for him and pork belly for you. The pork looks great and you offer him some. “I’ll take a little bit,” he says, sawing at it. Then: “I can’t cut this.” You have to cut his meat for him, a man who ten minutes earlier showed you an iPhone photo of his back muscles to prove how strong he is. He wants you to cut it small. “I don’t have back teeth. I literally have four teeth.” Not true. He’s right, though, this pork belly is really hard to cut. But still. “What are you, bullying me now?” he says. His goading is a habit, compulsive, almost athletic. “I didn’t know they fucking put marble on top of their pork belly.”
Then it’s back to his oeuvre. Or rather a dissertation on other people’s oeuvres and how they might affect the oeuvre of Miles Teller.
Dumber Than Your Average Bear, by Wesley Morris
Grantland
Nobody does the big culture story like Wesley Morris. But some of his most insightful culture critiques are embedded inside stories about movies that do not, on their face, appear to be worthy of serious consideration or analysis. Last year, Morris Trojan-horsed his ruminations on Ferguson into a review of Let’s Be Cops. This year, he used his piece on the aggressively bad Ted 2 to talk about race, identity, and humanity. RIP, Grantland.
MacFarlane doesn’t have a measuring stick long enough to take in the incongruity between a beaten black body and his teddy bear’s narcissism. His tolerant intolerance is lazy and incurious. The black characters are all movie-servant class1 — Dennis Haysbert might be a doctor, Ron Canada might be a judge, but it’s in the same way that Morgan Freeman’s a lawyer. In the movies, these are menial jobs for women and people of color, spending their slivers of screen time handing out advice, bits of plot, and verdicts. And add to that the scene where the cashier, Joy, demonstrates Ted and Tami-Lynn’s fitness for parenthood by pointing to a nonblack couple cooing over a baby as “those white n — –s.” Twice. That sort of comedy veers into territory beyond MacFarlane’s understanding. He’s included that line from Joy as a defense against anything on tap for later. He might have equated this teddy bear with oppressed black people who once were legally three-fifths a person. But he never called anybody the n-word.
Here’s What’s Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up, by Dee Barnes
Gawker
Headline says it all.
When I saw the footage of California Highway Patrol officer Daniel Andrew straddling and viciously punching Marlene Pinnock in broad daylight on the side of a busy freeway last year, I cringed. That must have been how it looked as Dr. Dre straddled me and beat me mercilessly on the floor of the women’s restroom at the Po Na Na Souk nightclub in 1991.
That event isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: “I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.”
But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.
The Late, Great Stephen Colbert, by Joel Lovell
GQ
It is so rare to leave a celebrity profile and feel like you really learned something about the individual being profiled. Often, you read the cover line — so-and-so “opens up” about “thing one, thing two, and thing three” — and find only the standard non-revelations inside. But Lovell finds Colbert at a particularly introspective moment in his life and career and gives his subject the space to speak in paragraphs.
He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died…. And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before — that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.
“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that’s why. Maybe, I don’t know. That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
Age of Robots: How Marvel Is Killing the Popcorn Movie, by Sady Doyle
Medium
This story does something remarkable: It celebrates the popcorn movie as a valuable, even vital, part of the cultural landscape. It would be simpler to just dismiss the whole enterprise as mindless and/or pointless, but Doyle doesn’t let what she sees as a fleet of disappointing Marvel movies off the hook. She comes from a place of believing: Believing in the worthiness of the source material, believing in the capacity for greatness even in blockbusters that aren’t gunning for Oscars, believing that these movies occupy too much real estate in our collective cultural imagination to ignore the massive influence they have on our society. Her story is like the journalistic equivalent of that classic line from your parents: She’s not mad, she’s disappointed.
Don’t let anyone tell you that silly popcorn movies don’t matter, or that they can’t be smart or beautiful or profound. A silly popcorn movie can change your life. All it has to do is create characters with identifiable, human problems, and let them work out those problems over the course of the story. Stories are about change, and about people, because ultimately, they are about you, the person sitting in a dark theater, working out your baggage by projecting it onto CGI cartoons of overly handsome actors.
Here’s another way to put it: The extent to which a movie invests in character-based, character-driven storytelling is the extent to which it recognizes, appreciates, and honors the humanity of its audience.
So when Age of Ultron doesn’t invest — when it goes by the assumption that the formula, and the formula alone, is enough to appease the popcorn-eaters — it says something pretty bad.
Why the Disproportionate Focus on Paris Over Beirut? Don’t Blame Just “The Media”, by Jill Filipovic
Cosmopolitan
In the wake of the Paris attacks, one of the hottest #hottakes burning up your newsfeed was probably some variation on “Why do Americans only care about violence when it happens in Paris? Why isn’t anyone talking about Beirut?” Filipovic flips that script and forces us, as readers, to reckon with the role that we play n the information ecosystem, while also completely dismantling the false notion that “no one” is writing about the carnage that affects people who aren’t white Westerners.
We complain that we don’t see the reporting we want. But aside from an outraged Facebook status, many of us in the U.S. don’t actually seem to want the kind of reporting we claim to value — we’re overwhelmingly not paying to subscribe to the outlets that do good, in-depth reporting about places around the world. Aside from when tragedy strikes, we’re not sharing articles on Beirut or a city we’ve never heard of in Kenya nearly as often as many of us are sharing pieces about Paris, or even 10 Halloween Costumes for Feminist Cats.
Candy Girl: The bright-pink resilience of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” by Emily Nussbaum
The New Yorker
What does it mean for a sitcom to have, as its heroine, a survivor of sexual assault? Nussbaum highlights an aspect of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that often gets left out of conversations about how well it works as a comedy: Just how daring it is for a show that is silly on the surface — wacky girl starts her new life in New York! — to have so much darkness embedded in its premise.
In the pilot, Titus tells Kimmy to go home to Indiana; he’s trying to protect her. “Protect me from what?” she snorts. “The worst thing that ever happened to me happened in my own front yard.” The line echoes an incident from Fey’s life: at five, in her family’s yard, she was slashed by a mentally ill stranger, leaving her with a scar — a distinctive but not defining feature. It’s not the type of experience that you’d think would inspire comedy, but that’s the key to “Kimmy Schmidt” ’s ambition: by making horrible things funny, it suggests that surviving could be more than just living on. It could be a kind of freedom, too.