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When two touted pop-culture events happen on the same day, people—consumers, the media, even the artists themselves—tend to frame it as a showdown. Think Kanye West vs. 50 Cent, Blade Runner vs. The Thing, Nevermind vs. Blood Sugar Sex Magik. That’s not happening with Barbie and Oppenheimer, both of which hit theaters today. To the contrary: The term “Barbenheimer” has swept into the pop lexicon to describe turning this cinematic synchronicity into a double feature. Yes, reader, that means four hours and 54 minutes of big-screen immersion.

As for why this has happened, your guess is as good as ours. It helps, of course, that both films are the product of acclaimed and accomplished directors (Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, respectively); it also helps that the two movies are so tonally disparate that they act as natural complements. But there’s also a very real joy, after three years of pandemic-fueled box-office stagnation and in this age of superhero fatigue and endless media conglomeration, at having two smart non-sequels in theaters at the same time.

But there’s one other very important thing to point out about Barbenheimer: From our standpoint, this is maybe the most Longreads-friendly meme since TikTok’s New Journalism Icons as Zodiac Signs Challenge. (Or it would be, if that existed.) Barbie and J. Robert Oppenheimer have each been the subject of numerous critical and journalistic examinations over the years, and they cast long cultural shadows well before they became central characters in $100 million films. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite reads about the weirdest dynamic duo of 2023, presented as a quartet of Barbenheimer-style doubleheaders. See you when Didion and Talese get greenlit!

The Ken Doll Reboot: Beefy, Cornrowed, and Pan-Racial

Caity Weaver | GQ | June 20, 2017 | 4,033 words

The new lineup of Ken Dolls—seeking to represent a more multicultural, physically diverse populace (read: client base)—landed earlier this week to much fanfare. Some of the reactions were laudatory; some were less so (who can resist a man-bun joke, after all?). Caity Weaver, writing at GQ, got to follow the creative process leading to the new dolls’ release. Through her eyes, we learn how even an attempt to “celebrate diversity” often requires so much semantic and design acrobatics that it’s not very clear who the celebration is for, and who might still be excluded from it.

When he debuted in 1961, Ken (legal name: Ken Carson) was a spindly, anemic fan of casual swimwear. Over the years, he has blossomed into a sculpted, perma-tanned icon of American masculinity. Even if you never played with Ken, his tiny footfall has reverberated through your life; he charges in early in the formative years of the fairer sex, setting an impossible standard for males against which you will be judged forever. Ken is the first man—or, technically, eunuch—many little girls will ever see nude. Consequently, he teaches young ladies that men are meant to have bodies like Olympic water-polo players. He’ll teach girls precisely how much taller than women men should be and (sort of) about the different ways men use the bathroom; Barbie’s Dreamhouse, a one-woman mega-mansion, features a single but quintessential nod to Ken’s existence: a toilet seat that lifts up. “That’s very important for Ken from a girl’s perspective,” says Michael Shore, Mattel’s head of global consumer insights (it means he watches kids play with dolls). “Because guys use toilets different from girls.”

Over time, Ken has been depicted as a rapping rocker (Rappin’ Rockin’ Ken), a doctor (Dr. Ken), and a sovereign of the Crystal Caves (King of the Crystal Caves Ken), but that is what he is reduced to: someone who uses the toilet in a mysterious way.

A Profile of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Lincoln Barnett | LIFE | October 10, 1949

Four years after America dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, writer Lincoln Barnett went to Princeton to interview J. Robert Oppenheimer. Barnett found a noticeably relieved Oppenheimer, deep into new research—a “revival of physics”—after years spent building a weapon that to his mind was “merely a gadget, a technological artifact that exploited principles well known before the war.” This remarkable profile, available via Google Books in its original print format, includes one of the earliest descriptions of Oppenheimer’s famous observation upon the detonation of the first atomic bomb test.

Los Alamos took its toll of his physical energies, for in the final phases of the work he slept but four hours a night. By the pre-dawn of July 16, 1945, when the first bomb was raised to the test tower at Alamogordo, his weight had fallen from its normal 145 to 115 pounds. Above and beyond the fatigue he felt as he peered across the darkened desert that morning, he was beset by two complementary anxieties: he feared first that the bomb would not work; second he feared what would happen to the world if it did. And then when the great ball of fire rolled upward to the blinded stars, fragments of the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: “If the radiance of a thousands suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One…. I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” And as the shock waves and sound waves hurled themselves furiously against the distant mountains, Oppenheimer knew that he and his co-workers had acquired a promethean burden they could never shed. “In some crude sense,” he observed later, “which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” These sentiments were no sudden by-product of the explosion’s terror and fury. The moral problem adduced by their work had been debated by the Los Alamos scientists incessantly from the beginning. Oppenheimer once analyzed their ethical position in these words: “We thought that since atomic weapons could be realized they must be realized for the world to see, because they were the best argument that science would make for a new and more reasonable idea of relations between nations.” Although Oppenheimer represented the idealist wing, who thought development of the bomb might lead to some good end, many of the physicists justified their work on purely empirical grounds. This “operational” standpoint was expressed bluntly by Oppenheimer’s former teacher, Dr. Bridgman of Harvard, who pooh-poohed his famous student’s feelings of guilt, declaring, “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”

When Barbie Went to War With Bratz

Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | January 17, 2018 | 4,700 words

Jill Lepore looks at the problem of defining intellectual property when it comes to what young girls should play with: “The feud between Barbie and Bratz occupies the narrow space between thin lines: between fashion and porn, between originals and copies, and between toys for girls and rights for women.”

In 2010, Alex Kozinski, then the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who presided over Mattel v. MGA, wrote in his opinion that most of what makes a fashion doll desirable is not protectable intellectual property, because there are only so many ways to make a female body attractive. “Little girls buy fashion dolls with idealized proportions which means slightly larger heads, eyes and lips; slightly smaller noses and waists; and slightly longer limbs than those that appear routinely in nature,” Kozinski wrote, giving “slightly” a meaning I never knew it had. But only so much exaggeration is possible, he went on. “Make the head too large or the waist too small and the doll becomes freakish.” I’d explain how it is that anyone could look at either a Barbie or a Bratz doll and not find it freakish, except that such an explanation is beyond me. As a pull-string Barbie knockoff once told Lisa Simpson, “Don’t ask me! I’m just a girl!”

Oppenheimer’s Tragedy—and Ours

Robert Jay Lifton | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist | July 17, 2023 | 3,485 words

This is a fascinating dive into both Oppenheimer and the human psyche. Robert Jay Lifton proves himself to be an Oppenheimer commentator who has true knowledge, insight, and understanding, even admitting that “had I been a physicist at the time I would have readily joined that crusade.” A thought-provoking take that goes beyond the narrative into the complexities of humanity.

Underneath Oppenheimer’s promethean capacities was a vulnerable and at times deeply distraught human being. He could be needy and contradictory in his relationships with others and subject to periodic depression. During his early adult life he was at times suicidal and on at least two occasions violent toward others: He poisoned an apple of a Cambridge tutor (we do not know how much poison he used) who insisted that he engage in hated laboratory work, and on another occasion attempted to strangle a friend who told him of love and plans for marriage.

Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job

Willa Paskin | The New York Times Magazine | July 11, 2023 | 6,671 words

Anyone who grew up with a Barbie (or Ken) doll will be enthralled by this piece. It explores not just the new film, but also Barbie’s history and complicated relationship with feminism. There has been a flood of Barbie content recently, but this reporting has far more depth than most.

“Barbie,” too, is a coming-of-age story; the figure coming of age just happens to be a full-grown piece of plastic. “Little Women” would have been a fine alternate title for it. Same with “Mothers & Daughters,” a working title for “Lady Bird.” For Barbie, as in both those other films, growing up is a matriarchal affair. It is something you do with your mother, your sisters, your aunties. Or, in Barbie’s case, with the women threaded through your product history.

Excerpt From ‘American Prometheus’

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin | Penguin Random House | 2005 | 2,552 words

In this first chapter of American Prometheus, we meet the parents of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic era. Robert’s father Julius was a German-born clothier; his mother Ella, an American artist. Oppenheimer had a privileged upbringing in New York City, in a home filled with piano lessons and paintings by the likes of Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, and Van Gogh. “Excellence and purpose” were considered words to live by.

Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child

James Vlahos | The New York Times | September 16, 2015 | 6,303 words

What happens when you try to program a doll to have a real conversation with a child? A look at the new A.I.-powered Barbie doll hitting the market this Christmas.

This summer, when I visited Mattel’s sprawling campus in El Segundo, a prototype of Hello Barbie stood in the middle of a glass-topped conference table, her blond tresses parted on the right and cascading down to her left shoulder. She looked like your basic Barbie, but Aslan Appleman, a lead product designer, explained that her thighs had been thickened slightly to fit a rechargeable battery in each one; a mini-USB charging port was tucked into the small of her back.

A microphone, concealed inside Barbie’s necklace, could be activated only when a user pushed and held down her belt buckle. Each time, whatever someone said to Barbie would be recorded and transmitted via Wi-Fi to the computer servers of ToyTalk. Speech-recognition software would then convert the audio signal into a text file, which would be analyzed. The correct response would be chosen from thousands of lines scripted by ToyTalk and Mattel writers and pushed to Hello Barbie for playback — all in less than a second.

‘‘Barbie, what is your full name?’’ Appleman asked the doll as I watched.

‘‘Oh, I thought you knew,’’ Barbie replied. ‘‘My full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.’’

On Albert Einstein

Robert Oppenheimer | The New York Review of Books | March 17, 1966 | 2,409 words

Oppenheimer’s lecture, originally given at UNESCO House in Paris in 1965—and reprinted the following year in NYRB.

Though I knew Einstein for two or three decades, it was only in the last decade of his life that we were close colleagues and something of friends. But I thought that it might be useful, because I am sure that it is not too soon—and for our generation perhaps almost too late—to start to dispel the clouds of myth and to see the great mountain peak that these clouds hide. As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.

Los Alamos took its toll of his physical energies, for in the final phases of the work he slept but four hours a night. By the pre-dawn of July 16, 1945, when the first bomb was raised to the test tower at Alamogordo, his weight had fallen from its normal 145 to 115 pounds. Above and beyond the fatigue he felt as he peered across the darkened desert that morning, he was beset by two complementary anxieties: he feared first that the bomb would not work; second he feared what would happen to the world if it did. And then when the great ball of fire rolled upward to the blinded stars, fragments of the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: “If the radiance of a thousands suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One…. I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” And as the shock waves and sound waves hurled themselves furiously against the distant mountains, Oppenheimer knew that he and his co-workers had acquired a promethean burden they could never shed. “In some crude sense,” he observed later, “which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” These sentiments were no sudden by-product of the explosion’s terror and fury. The moral problem adduced by their work had been debated by the Los Alamos scientists incessantly from the beginning. Oppenheimer once analyzed their ethical position in these words: “We thought that since atomic weapons could be realized they must be realized for the world to see, because they were the best argument that science would make for a new and more reasonable idea of relations between nations.” Although Oppenheimer represented the idealist wing, who thought development of the bomb might lead to some good end, many of the physicists justified their work on purely empirical grounds. This “operational” standpoint was expressed bluntly by Oppenheimer’s former teacher, Dr. Bridgman of Harvard, who pooh-poohed his famous student’s feelings of guilt, declaring, “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”

In this moving account of reporting her book Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World at Outside, Andrea Pitzer traces the journey of William Barents, a polar explorer who died in 1597 on his third voyage to the Arctic along with five members of his crew, in an attempt to find passage to China.

When her journey is unexpectedly lengthened, Andrea experiences both the natural wonders of the North and the shock and sadness of returning from her voyage to learn that her cousin has died, the memorial service already complete. “Joe is gone, with his PTSD, his alcoholism, his terrible jokes, and his love for so many people. He’s already been gone for more than a week, while I was out in the Arctic, heedless of his disintegration.”

Now, 423 years later, we see the long timbers that formed the base of the shelter where Barents and his men spent months praying not to die. Blizzard after blizzard came, until more than an inch of ice built up in the cabin’s interior.

Pacing out its dimensions—roughly 36 feet long by 22 feet wide—I walk through the space where the crew huddled in fear as a polar bear rampaged on their roof, trying to claw its way in. I stand on the site of the fireplace that couldn’t keep them warm, at one point nearly killing them with toxic fumes from ship’s coal they burned. I wander along the beach where the men dragged makeshift sleds over ice and snow for miles, scavenging firewood.

Wonders keep coming, day by day. A bird lands on Sasha’s head while he’s at the wheel. We spot a polar bear running on the beach. The Arctic makes itself known to us, though not always on our terms.

The trash-studying biologists have the most worthwhile mission of anyone on the boat: by scanning the ocean and exploring shorelines on foot, they’re using equipment to map where washed-up litter is and isn’t found in the Arctic. But ultimately, the sea and sky decide what they will allow. Plans for exploratory landings can blow up at the last minute. A bear sighting or fog can kill any chance to gather data from a particular spot. It becomes apparent that my ghost-chasing forays, Alexey’s meditation, and the natural challenges thrown up by the sea will make it harder for the scientists to get their work done.

Sasha appears on deck with his accordion and begins the same Doga waltz he played before. Dozens of walruses swim to where he perches near the gunwale, on the port side of the boat. They listen, watching him. Occasionally, a small mosh pit forms, then dissolves. Mostly his audience floats before him, snorting and hawing with rapt intensity while we look back.

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Sara B. Franklin | Longreads | March 2020 | 4 minutes (1,034 words)

On Saturday, March 14, the day after public schools and our twin three years olds’ daycare closed in our Hudson Valley town, I sent the kids to their sitter one final time, frantic for a couple hours to get a few things done before I turned myself over to motherhood, all day, every day, for the foreseeable future.

There were piles of laundry to do, a shopping list that needed tending, urgently. But I found myself drawn out into the garden, still covered with mulch for its wintry slumber. Poking around, I saw early signs of life; the rhubarb had poked its rippling, fuchsia crowns out of the damp earth, and the tiny frills of wild nettles were several centimeters high in the rangy, untended back corner. The chives, too, had suddenly shot up in the preceding days’ warmth. It seemed too early, I thought, running back in my mind over all my years of planting. But then, this was the winter that never was, the deep freeze that never came. The unease has been around us for months now. The geese came home early, turtles are resting on logs already, the peepers out in the beaver pond the first week of March: a full month ahead.

I wasn’t ready, but the earth was ready; the plants were telling me so. So I pulled my box of seeds from the kitchen shelf. Out back in the shed, I wrangled a sharply-tipped hoe from behind a mess of bikes and lawn chairs. In the garden, I knelt over a bed, pulled aside the browned grass clippings from the last mowing of the fall, made two shallow rows, and dropped seeds into the ground — tiny, almond-shaped lettuce seeds and those of kale and collards, like burgundy poppy seeds. It might be too early, I thought as I sprinkled the harbingers of life into place, but it’s worth a shot. Anything hopeful, right now, is worth a shot.

I should know. I’ve been here before, in another time, another life, it seems.

***

I woke the morning after my mother took her last breath, on March 8, 2008, and I padded down the stairs of my childhood home in the weak late winter light. I was emptied out, exhausted, bewildered and totally unmoored. I was 21 years old. Before coffee, and without thinking, I reached for a packet of seeds; I’d ordered a whole season’s worth when I suddenly moved home to help my mom — who’d finally given up her battle with pancreatic cancer — die, planning to revive the vegetable garden she’d tended when I was a kid.

The garden had sat, abandoned, in recent years, and had become overrun with weeds. I envisioned the cathartic pleasure of ripping all those invasive weeds out, turning old manure into the dirt, pushing all my fury and confusion back into the earth as if to purge myself of it.

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That morning after her death, so many months sooner than we’d anticipated, I went through the broken screen door and onto the back steps where I’d stowed the gardening supplies. I emptied a few handfuls of cool, loamy potting soil into a plastic seed tray, and carried it back indoors. Gently, I pushed a pea seed, wrinkled and gray-green, into each compartment, then nudged a bit of soil over their tops. I took the tray to the kitchen, sprinkled the whole thing with water beside the faucet, and set it on a sunny windowsill.

The impulse had come from somewhere beneath consciousness, a desperate bid to catalyze new life in the immediate wake of death. Time had been frozen those past few weeks, as we spent idle, torturous days by my mom’s bedside, waiting for death to come for her and also desperate to keep it at bay. Pushing seeds into soil, I felt myself calling down the spirits of time, begging them to bring me back into their folds: please, let me rejoin this life. I’m emptied out, but I’m not done.

Now, 12 years later, I can’t seem to leave my garden. Something about the scene is so reminiscent of those days when we were awaiting my mother’s death — immediate family only, no one coming in, no one going out. Time was leaden, then, swimming as if through oil, distorted and heavy. Now, too, all of us, hold our breaths for the next death toll, the latest confirmation of encroaching shutdown and pending isolation.

I scroll aimlessly and endlessly on my phone as the kids stack broken bricks in the yard, or watch too much TV, or whine for my attention. I hardly hear them. I should be present to my children, I want to be, I admonish myself. But I’m hanging on the edge of time, waiting for something definitive to happen. Nothing comes, of course. Only the expansion of fear and regulation, a looming mass of edgy uncertainty that’s taken all of us into its hungry maw.

***

In the garden, on another unseasonably warm day, I straighten my body momentarily to ease the ache in my back. I’ve been shoving the pitchfork into the cool soil to turn it up over itself for upwards of an hour now. My fingers are caked in dirt, two knuckles broken open and bleeding. I relish the tiny hurt. The garden, now, is the only place I can find a pool of stillness, can channel something of reality. My children run about the yard wielding sticks and plastic construction equipment, suddenly feral with the dissolution of routine and socialization. The dogs are delighted and surprised to have us home all day, and they leap about, pulling a rubber toy back and forth between themselves and growling gustily.

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I crouch again, pull at early weeds, stomp a shovel into mulch, and turn earthworms into the compost pile. I need things here, in this garden, to hurry up and show themselves, to tell me we’re still moving forward, somehow, in this sudden suspension of time. I need to believe it’s a pause, not a cessation. Come on, I seem to be saying to it all, come on. We’ve got mettle to prove. We’re not ready to go yet. 

* * *

Sara B. Franklin is a writer and professor of food studies and oral history at NYU Gallatin and at Wallkill Correctional Facility via the NYU Prison Education Program. She is currently at work on a narrative biography of the late, legendary editor, Judith Jones. She lives in Kingston, New York with her family.

Editor: Sari Botton

At 33, Tabitha Blankenbiller believed she didn’t want any children, until — unexpectedly — she became pregnant. In this essay at Salon, Blankenbiller considers how the simple existence of her unborn child changed her perspective on motherhood and life, causing her to reconsider choices and beliefs, only to discover that just when she’d decided that this particular lemon would make great lemonade, sometimes life decides for you.

Think of how many passages you breach in a day. The driver’s door to your car. The turnstile of your favorite park. The impatient elevators of your building. The generous slide of the grocery store’s glass. Out of the bedroom, into the living room. One side of the tunnel, out the other. Hundreds of transitions switching backdrops, edging us forward in the routine, the occasional fresh adventure.

One in ten thousand will bookend us. We will pass through as one thing and emerge another. It will mark our Before and After. That day at work, I entered the single stall private bathroom as a drama queen clutching her pearls over a period missing for a scant blip of a week to take a test she’d managed to skip for an entire adult lifetime of Match.com horror stories and marriage and college, and then grad school bad jobs and dream vacations, first essay published and first book released, canning and handwriting and Thai cooking lessons, 40 pounds up and down five times over.

I peed on the stick, then set it on the counter while I played a game of Disney Emoji Blitz on my phone. The timer cut in for my three minutes, and I tilted the test toward me to discover the faintest line severing the woman I knew into another.

This was impossible. I took a picture in a haze and sent it to my best friend Charlotte, a parent of two.

Holy shit yeah, that is pregnant, she confirmed.

We weave hypotheticals of our lives, speaking over one another to announce what we’d do if it were us. We make lists, connections, promises. For 33 years I ran the simulation in my head of that improbable second line, and decided each time, without fail, that I did not want a child. I believed they were too expensive. I believed my life was already fulfilling and content. I believed that not all women should be mothers. I believed that the capacity and consumption of our species is unsustainable on this planet, and that some flavor of doom is inevitable. I believed that abortion is healthcare, a procedure that does not require an explanation to receive. I believed that a zygote is not a person, and a four-week-old clump of cells is a precursor to human life.

All of these convictions are still accurate. I stand by each one.

But there is the question, what would you do, and there is what happens when a sudden, impending new reality forks your life in two. Our hearts are a vast trove of too many secret reactions and desires to discover in a lifetime. And what I realized about myself is this: that I cannot name a time I have been happier than standing in our backyard gripping the back of the patio chair, demanding that Matt needed to listen to me.

“We have to keep it. I love her already.”

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Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing.

To solve these mysteries, cosmologists must make guesses about events that are absurdly remote from us. Guth’s theory of inflation is one such guess. It tells us that our Universe expanded, exponentially, a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. In most models of this process, inflation’s expansive kick is eternal. It might cease in particular parts of the cosmos, as it did in our region, after only a fraction of a second, when inflation’s energy transformed into ordinary matter and radiation, which time would sculpt into galaxies. But somewhere outside our region, inflation continued, generating an infinite number of new regions, including those that are roaring into existence at this very moment.

–Ross Andersen, in Aeon, exploring the questions we still haven’t begun to answer about the beginning of the universe.

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I always give people this advice when people ask me how to do things—and it’s not like I’m in a position to advise people on how to do anything. But I feel like we try to make these big decisions, and really we only have to make small decisions, in all moments. I don’t understand the big decision thing. What are you deciding? In fact, you can’t make the big decisions. You do not have the power to. And so it’s hilarious. I really hope that satellite out there orbits one degree to the left! Well, great, you know? There is a chance that your desire for that, depending on the course of your night, could possibly have an effect on that—but it’s unlikely. Maybe that’s where sensitivity and the Long Now match up, because I only make small decisions. But what that means is that I’m making actual decisions, not imaginary decisions. I think that probably what happens is we make a lot of imaginary decisions, and then because we’re distracted making those, we don’t make the small ones—the real ones. And we find ourselves, like, “Wait – I don’t understand how I got here!” It’s like, “Well, you didn’t make any decisions.”“But I did. I went to law school, and I picked a firm, and I decided to go to Geneva that summer,” and it’s like—but you didn’t choose what you were going to buy at the market, you didn’t chose what you were going to do the next day. So right, I never chose what I wanted to do in life because I didn’t know, and I was so angry when people asked me what I wanted to do. It was like, “Right now? I want to stop having this conversation.”

–An Everlasting Meal author Tamar Adler, in The Believer (2014).

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