HELLO and welcome to the 211th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about Atlantic City! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.

The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

The Art of Theater No.4: Edward Albee, interviewed by William Flanagan for The Paris Review, 1966

I saw Edward Albee speak at a library up north when I was in high school; he was always one of my favorite playwrights (and I had the privilege of seeing The Play About the Baby Off-Broadway in 2001, and a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway starring Kathleen Turner in 2005) and what I just adore about him is his totally off-putting confidence in himself and his art and his process. He basically says in this interview that there are like two other playwrights he admires and the best inspiration a fellow playwright can provide him is advice on what not to do. I remember at the library up north after he was done speaking, an audience member asked if by any chance he would make an exception to his opinion that all modern plays are worthless for Angels in America and he was like “meh.” Anyhow, he will be missed.

This is How Star Trek Invented Fandom, by Molly McArdle for GQ, September 2016

AHEM I have been to a Star Trek convention or two, seen the Trekkies documentary and also really enjoyed this article about this phenomenon and TRUTH.

A Diamond and a Kiss: The Women of John Hughes, by Soraya Roberts for Hazlitt, July 2016

Oh man remember the heart-breaking moment when you re-watched John Hughes movies post-feminist-awakening and were like “fuck!” Still though The Breakfast Club remains a fave. This article is great.

Inside the Gentrification of Grand Central Market, by Jesse Katz for LA Magazine, September 2016

I didn’t even know this place existed and now i know that and so much more about it. This piece is also just marvelously written, like the prose is ACE.

Making Sense of Modern Pornography, by Katrina Forrester for The New Yorker, September 2016

In which everybody is watching and nobody is getting paid.

How Donald Trump Lost His Mojo, by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone, September 2016

This gave me some hope. Just a wee bit of hope. A tiny teacup of hope!

The Screen Age

The Washington Post has a four-part piece about what it’s like to be a teenager in the age of smartphones et al. It’s a lot of old-fashioned hand-wringing but it’s also pretty interesting, as are the specific stories they chose to tell. I’m not sure how many more pieces in this series will debut, but here’s what we’ve got so far:

• 13, Right Now, by Jessica Contrera — This is what it’s like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing”
• Who Are These Kids, by Caitlin Gibson —  Inside the race to decipher today’s teens, who will transform society as we know it
• And Everyone Saw It, by Jessica Contrera — She sent him a sext so he would like her, and then he sent it to everybody and ruined her life!
• The Disconnected, by Caitlin Gibson — What’s it like to be a kid from a family that can’t afford laptops and smartphones?

The Last Last Summer, by Joshua Cohen for n+1, September 2016

Atlantic City, the Rise and Fall and Whatever Is Happening Now. And Donald Trump.

Now, having returned to the city—to what AC’s Chamber of Commerce used to call “America’s Playground” and now calls, with depressing deprecation, “The Entertainment Capital of the Jersey Shore”—I found that my feelings had flipped. What I’d been conditioned to regard as a madcap, hedonistic outlier of a place, an utterly, even excessively incomparable place, now struck me as not exceptional at all, but emblematic, not merely of the rest of the state but of the rest of the country off whose coast it floats. The city of my youth had seemed like a flounder in summer, that bastard flatfish that local fishermen call a “fluke.” AC 2016, however, was coming to seem like America’s “bowrider”: what captains call the dolphins that swim in front of their boats, riding the wake off their bows as if heralds.

We’re The Only Plane In The Sky, by Garrett M. Graff for Politico, September 2016

A surprisingly gripping oral history.

“Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board.”

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