When Sanders reappears, he explores the range of his instrument, sometimes letting out cries that suggest the falsetto leaps of a soul singer, at others descending, with a quietness bordering on secrecy, into the lower registers of the horn—all the while never losing the thread of the melody. Halfway into the piece he plays his signature flutter, but it’s unusually understated for Sanders, and instead of rising to a scream he descends, accompanied by Muñoz and Neil, into the softest of whispers, until we hear nothing but his mouthpiece—something a more “professional” recording might have corrected, but which only adds to the music’s sensuousness. After the sounding of a gong, Bedria Sanders enters on harmonium, producing a drone that moves toward us and recedes, a sound that Pharoah mimics with long, undulating tones.

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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.

In “The Food of My Youth” at The New York Review of Books, Melissa Chadburn describes a childhood in which getting enough to eat was a much bigger concern than it should ever be. Eventually, she was removed from her mother’s care and put into a group home. There were regular meals there, but three meals a day doesn’t erase the scars of a childhood defined by want.

It was lonely there, but at least I didn’t have to worry about going hungry. I didn’t like to eat food prepared by other people—I was afraid I would taste their emotions—so I learned to cook the food provided by the county. It was largely frozen, prepared in bulk. Salad was a sturdy iceberg with sliced carrot slaw; the ground beef came in a fat tube. The group home kitchen, with all its canned food, and dates on plastic containers, resembled a bunker in the Midwest, as if we were all preparing for the apocalypse.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home. But we found ourselves in limbo, guarding our hearts, biding our time before the Unknown, waiting to see where we would end up. In that place of permanent temporariness, food was the only thing we had some control over; the rest was all court dates and social workers and group therapy and anger management.

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Pamela Colloff, Amanda Fortini, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Ira Glass, and Linda Holmes.

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1. Blood Will Tell, Part One

Pamela Colloff | ProPublica | May 23, 2018 | 43 minutes (10,897 words)

Mickey Bryan’s husband, a beloved high school principal, was charged with killing her. Did he do it, or had there been a terrible mistake?

2. What Happened in Vegas

Amanda Fortini | California Sunday | May 21, 2018 | 31 minutes (7,805 words)

Las Vegas has long been more of a metaphor than a city, a place to lose yourself—or at least lose your money. But now also it’s a city tied up with a new identity of death and mourning, a city that is #VegasStrong. “The city passed all the expected emotions to pivot to strength,” writes Amanda Fortini. “What about #VegasSad, they joked, or #VegasAngry, or #VegasDepressed?”

3. The New Passport-Poor

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian | New York Review of Books | May 21, 2018 | 10 minutes (2,652 words)

Drawing borders around people might give us a more orderly and predictable world. But for all the promised benefits of a frictionless experience of journeying, it may not be a more humane one.

4. Ira Glass’s Commencement Speech at the Columbia Journalism School Graduation

Ira Glass | This American Life | May 17, 2018 | 22 minutes (5,503 words)

Ira Glass challenges young journalists to tear up old models and find new ways to fight the “massive machine churning out non-factual stories” and come up with “new ideas about how to reach people and what to reach them with.”

5. Under The Skin: Why That ‘Arrested Development’ Interview Is So Bad

Linda Holmes | NPR | May 24, 2018 | 9 minutes (2,343 words)

“But maybe it was this interview because the disrespect felt so benign in the delivery and so destructive in the effect.”

Real estate interests are buying up historic buildings around Union Square and forcing New York City’s psychotherapists to move all over Manhattan, or leave for other boroughs. This is the city’s new tech corridor. At The New York Review of Books, Jeremiah Moss eulogizes the passing of his office building, the 165-year-old St. Denis. The St. Denis once housed hundreds of psychotherapists. Moss is now one of two dozen remaining. The building is threatened with demolition, and the district’s larger shift threatens its very identity.

Moss chronicles his building’s long life, in order to show that when a city loses a building, it loses all the lives and eras that imprinted themselves on that building. As he puts it, “Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?” The same goes for a future Manhattan without the physical embodiment of its history. “This is not just a building,” said one tenant. “It was a cohesive community.”

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, is advocating for a zoning to protect the area and its architectural jewels. “The Tech Hub is accelerating the changes,” he told me. What’s coming, he says, are more “high-end high-rise developments—condos, hotels, and tech office buildings.” And there is no limit to how high they can go, thanks to a current zoning that Berman says is “very generous to developers.”

Whatever protections may come, they will not save the St. Denis as it is. Like almost all of the nineteenth-century buildings in the neighborhood, it isn’t landmarked, and the area around it is not protected as a Historic District. Almost every building, from the Romanesque masterpiece at 841 Broadway to the Gothic gem at 808, can be smashed into dust. If that happens, people will talk about how “New York is always changing,” but this change will be different.

“This neighborhood has changed and adapted many times over the generations,” said Berman. “It was a fashionable district, then a honky-tonk entertainment area, and then a center for the art world. It has seen many lives, but most of those changes relied on the adaptive reuse of the existing buildings and moved at a moderate pace of change. The type of change we’re seeing now is unprecedented in the neighborhood’s history, and would erase all the layers that have accumulated over the generations.”

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Stephanie Land has a sobering personal essay in the New York Review of Books about her struggle to support herself and her two small daughters while attending college and trying to break out as a writer. The essay, written with support from the non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, details Land’s series of difficult choices: attending college in her 30s as a single mom of one child; cleaning houses for a living; living in a homeless shelter; going through with a second pregnancy after a one-night-stand; and relentlessly sticking with her commitment to learning, writing and publishing — even at moments when becoming a writer seemed a frivolous ambition.

Every time my car broke down during those years, or I had to fill out renewal forms for our food stamps, my stomach clenched in selfishness and guilt. We were struggling like this because I had chosen to get an art degree instead of work. Being on government assistance, that didn’t seem like an option for me, let alone one to accept, even though it never felt like there was any other option but that. I was a writer. I had to write.

As a full-time student (and mother), I could only work ten to fifteen hours a week, shuffling around half a dozen housecleaning clients on my own. I took out the maximum amount of loans to give us something to pay all our monthly bills, which I managed to keep around a thousand dollars. A Pell Grant and a small scholarship for survivors of domestic violence paid my tuition for the fall and spring semesters, but they didn’t cover the classes I took during the shorter winter and summer study periods. The tuition for those usually went on a credit card.

Since we’d moved away, Mia’s dad had declined to take her for the summers, leaving me to scramble to pay for child care. Eventually, I decided to do something that I’d promised him I wouldn’t—petition to double the amount he paid in child support. As a result, by the time I neared the end of my required classes, I’d racked up almost $1,000 in legal fees. Plus, I had $50,000 in student loan debt, and about $12,000 in credit card debt. My minimum monthly payments on the credit cards alone hovered around $300. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I’d have to start making the $500 monthly payments for the student loans once the six-month grace period ended after the commencement ceremony.

Coraline came only a month after I graduated college in June of 2014.

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I’m an unrepentant memoir junkie. For some reason, I have always favored true personal stories over fiction, and this year I finally completed a proposal for one of my own.

I say finally because it has taken years — decades, actually. I’m terrified of the repercussions of exposing myself, my friends, and my family members who might prefer to stay off the page. I’ve spent many hours talking with memoirists about this, asking them how they found the courage to reveal so much, and what their personal philosophies are regarding other people’s privacy.

At The New York Review of Books — in an essay about the lingering effects of having written a memoir about the political hanging of her father in Sierra Leone — novelist Aminatta Forna writes about dealing with some of these fears herself.

The writer of a memoir must necessarily reveal a great deal about herself or himself, and often about other people, too. You sacrifice your own privacy, and you sacrifice the privacy of others to whom you may have given no choice. They may enjoy the attention or be enraged by it. “People either claim it or they sue you,” the head of press at my publisher told me in the weeks before my memoir was published. I knew who might sue or come after me—members of the regime that had killed my father. I comforted myself with the belief that they had for the most part been exiled or discredited, or had gone underground. The only person I allowed to read the unpublished manuscript was my stepmother, because I was concerned about her safety even more than my own. She still lived in the country, and the violence can ricochet for months after a civil war.

In the final draft, I changed one name only—of the man who had betrayed my father for the promise of money, agreeing to give false testimony at his treason trial on behalf of the regime. He admitted this to me during our interview. I despised him and I knew other readers of the book would despise him, too. He had a pitch selling Lotto tickets in Freetown, a small city. Anyone could find him just by asking around, as I had done. Already, one or two one or two suspected former rebel soldiers had been lynched in the city.

For this reason, I changed his name, and privately decided that I would change any other names that my stepmother wanted me to. But without saying this, I let her read the book. When she gave it back to me, she made no comment. On the final page, I found a checkmark and the words “Well done, darling!” Later, she elaborated: if we were going to do it, we would go all the way.

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