Micro-scale real estate. Marvelous birds with better memory than yours. Neighbors recording neighbors. Love among seniors. A profile of a woman who’s been both ubiquitous and anonymous for 15 years. All that—and more!—in this week’s edition.

1. Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures

Scott Huler | Esquire | November 20, 2023 | 5,653 words

In summer 2020, I ordered a miniature house kit, thinking it would be the first of many cute dioramas I’d construct while stuck at home. As I write this, however, I glance over at the unopened box, a bit embarrassed that I have yet to experience the joy of making it. For Esquire, Scott Huler immerses himself in the world of working miniaturists, and a movement that exploded during lockdown and grew even more popular thanks to Instagram and TikTok. Speaking with collectors and artists, such as professional miniaturist Robert Off, Huler explores the why behind this art. What makes a roombox—the boxed display that houses a miniature 3D environment—so irresistible? I love what Huler discovers: for many miniature makers and viewers, a roombox provides a way to focus, a place of relief. An entire world in which to escape, or to control. An outlet to imagine and dream that “just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway.” This piece brought me joy, not just because I was wowed by the skilled craftsmanship of miniaturists working today, but it also reminded me of the peace we can find within our interior world, and the power of our own imagination. —CLR

2. Last Love: A Romance in a Care Home

Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | November 23, 2023 | 4,036 words

I had to take a moment after reading this essay to sit and untangle the mess of feelings it brought up. It’s joyful, desperately sad, and a poignant reflection on aging: a standout piece. Sophie Elmhirst introduces us to two lovers, Mary and Derek. Theirs is teenage love, pure and easy, with no responsibility to weigh it down. But Mary and Derek are no teenagers; their meet-cute is in a care home. With just a few choice words, Elmhirst brings their characters to life, mixing their love story with memories to remind us of what came before a life of inconveniences and incontinence pads. She uses short, crisp sentences, jumping from place to place and emulating the way fragments of memory come bright and clear before fading and falling out of reach. It was as if I was sitting with Mary, listening as she grasped for a memory before finding another. In a few paragraphs, we have a snapshot of two lives, swinging from love to tragedy, the way life can—a history that makes the love story even more beautiful. “It’s different, meeting someone late in life,” Elmhirst explains. “You know you won’t have long, so the love feels more urgent.” (Even if this leads to awkward noises from the home’s bedrooms.) When the love is lost, it hits with a jolt, and Mary is shocked into facing the truth that she will never go home again. Yet, her final pragmatism is inspiring. An essay that made me think about aging in a way I never have before. —CW

3. How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

Lauren Smiley | WIRED | November 7, 2023 | 7,704 words

Last April, law enforcement in San Francisco’s Marina District responded to 911 calls about an unhoused man who was beating a local resident with a metal object. The suspect was quickly arrested and the story soon went viral, in no small part because there was a video of the incident. But there were other videos—as Lauren Smiley writes, “In San Francisco, there’s always another video”—and in time they revealed there was more to the story, particularly as it pertained to the supposed victim. I don’t want to give the rest away, because this feature should be read in its entirety. It’s a masterful retelling of events, certainly, but it’s also a razor-sharp, much-needed analysis of the way San Franciscans now police one another via cell phone videos, Ring cameras, and other devices. This citizen surveillance, as Smiley shows, is feeding the national narrative about San Francisco as a place of squalor and violence. Tape something on your doorstep and before long, “the cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In with Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk.” —SD

4. The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay

Brian Payton | Hakai Magazine | November 14, 2023 | 3,700 words

First, let us have a moment of appreciation for this banger of a headline, in tribute to Judith Viorst’s classic childhood read, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I was powerless to resist this piece and was well rewarded for my time. Brian Payton’s Hakai story about the winged wizard known as the Canada jay is satisfying beginning to end. This is no paltry plumed profile; Payton weaves fact, anecdote, and story together so deftly that these 3,700 words evaporate before your very eyes. I could have read a story double the length and still would have wanted more. You’ll meet 81-year old Dan Strickland, a naturalist who is the world’s foremost authority on the bird species, his knowledge gained from decades spent observing and interacting with the cunning corvids in the boreal and subalpine forests where they make their home. “Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information,” writes Payton. “London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.” Not only is this story about a jay a real joy, it’s a rare treasure that reminds me of why I fell in love with reading in the first place: learning about those with such deep interests is deeply interesting. —KS

5. Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | November 25, 2023 | 4,690 words

I always feel just a twinge of guilt recommending a story that has already become The Thing Everybody Read This Week. In my defense, though, I read the story before This Week had even officially begun, and immediately knew that it would be my Top 5 pick. Also in my defense, the first line is perfect. “One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth.” Why is this perfect? Well, because it tells you everything you need to know about what the story will be about, and what this story will be. It will be funny (as Caity Weaver’s profiles always are). It will be clear-eyed. It will be armed with some well-earned cynicism about how companies—or, rather, their vaporous and often uncanny incarnations known as “brands”—operate. The one thing this sentence doesn’t quite prepare you for is how generous the story is. How generous its subject is. And how generously you might think about things thereafter. We all have aspirations. Sometimes our life realizes those aspirations, sometimes it doesn’t. But sometimes even when it doesn’t, it does. Stephanie Courtney, the comic actor once bent on getting to Saturday Night Live and now in firm possession of a far more fulfilling gig, knows that better than anyone. —PR

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

If my visit to the “Superstore” set can be taken as representative, being closely involved with the production of popular TV commercials for large national brands is the best possible outcome for a human life. The scale and complexity of the operation at the center of Courtney’s work is eye-popping. Every fleeting football-game-interrupting Progressive ad is the product of hours of labor from more than a hundred people. On set, a cat wrangler stood just out of frame, ready to pounce with a backup cat if the primary cat failed. Trays of lickerish delights — crostini with prosciutto, cups of ethereal parfait — were discreetly proffered, at frequent intervals, to people scrutinizing monitors. Every lens, light and politely anxious face was turned heliotropically toward Courtney, in a rented living room, trying to remember, while delivering her line, that Progressive was offering deals “for new parents” rather than “to new parents” — a possibly meaningful distinction. This wasn’t a critically acclaimed Hulu series; there was actually a lot riding on this. It needed to be the same, but slightly different, and every bit as successful as the 200 that had come before it, so that everyone would be asked to return to this job — not necessarily, perhaps not exactly, the job of their dreams, but a better job than anyone could ever hope for, bolstered by friendly faces and fantastic catering and a sumptuous corporate budget — in perpetuity.

Cruise still takes part in promotional junkets and convivial late-night-talk-show chats, but his refusal to participate in the sort of in-depth journalistic interviews that (in theory, anyway) reveal some aspect of his true self has coincided, somewhat paradoxically, with an incredible surge in his commitment to infusing cinematic fantasies with reality. For unknown reasons it could be interesting to explore in an interview, reality has become very important to Cruise, who reveres it as a force more powerful than magic. It is vital to Cruise that the audience of “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” have the opportunity to witness not a C.G.I. production of a feat, or even a seasoned stunt performer executing a dangerous act, but real footage of him, Tom Cruise, the 61-year-old father of three from Syracuse, N.Y., riding a motorcycle off a cliff. 

This fetish for reality has become a keystone of Cruise’s persona, to the extent that many of his public appearances now take place in flying vehicles. Rather than accept an MTV Movie & TV Award in person in May, Cruise filmed his acceptance speech from the cockpit of a fighter jet as he piloted it through clouds, politely shouting, “I love entertaining you!” over the engine’s roar. Delivering “a special message from the set of @MissionImpossible” to his followers on Instagram, Cruise screamed while dangling backward off the side of an aircraft, “It truly is the honor of a lifetime!”

But reality does not exist only in movies. What is missing from Cruise’s fervid documentation of ultrarisky, inconceivably expensive, meticulously planned real-life events are any details about the parts of his real life that do not involve, for example, filming stunts for “Mission: Impossible” movies. My own mission, then, was simple: I was to travel to the ends of the Earth to see if it was possible to locate the terrestrial Cruise, out of context—to catch a glimpse, to politely shout one question at him, or at least to ascertain one new piece of intelligence about his current existence—in order to reintegrate him into our shared reality.

By Elizabeth Blackwell

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When the first season of Survivor premiered more than 20 years ago, I was immediately hooked by the concept: real people battling the elements and each other — while I got to watch from the comfort of my couch. Like the millions of Americans who tuned in alongside me, I assumed the winner would be someone who could fish and hunt, start a fire from scratch, and charm their fellow contestants — not a guy who lied his way to the big payout (and later went to jail twice for failing to pay taxes on those winnings). When Big Brother premiered not long afterward, I couldn’t understand how anyone in that pre-Twitch live stream era would agree to be on camera 24 hours a day.

America — and I — have since become a lot less naive.

“Reality TV” is often used as shorthand for the genre of entertainment that Survivor and Big Brother ushered in: competition-based, personality-driven shows featuring finger-waving drama queens, buff would-be influencers, and first-person “confessionals” where shade is thrown and scores are settled. They’re the broadcast version of fast food: a guilty pleasure, shunned by some. I’ve become a reality TV connoisseur over the years — from MTV’s The Real World when I was fresh out of college, to the full spectrum of HGTV makeover shows as a mother-of-three suburbanite. And while there’s plenty to mock, the rise of so-called unscripted television has also brought a revolutionary change in the kind of people we see on our screens and our perception of others’ lived “reality.” 

The original Queer Eye celebrated its five gay cast members as unthreatening, all-around good guys at a time when the U.S. government was seriously considering a Constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Two decades later, even the most mainstream home-design shows regularly feature same-sex couples, with no one batting an eye. Influential shows such as Project Runway and Top Chef demonstrate the staggering amount of work it takes to create a work of art, whether a gala-worthy gown or a perfectly puffed souffle. American Idol and its many successors show us how much talent exists in overlooked pockets of our country — and how quickly the musical-industrial complex spits out the small-town singers whose hopes they’ve raised. 

For all the critiques of reality TV as trashy and stupid, it’s one of the few spaces in entertainment that’s genuinely inclusive, age-wise and socioeconomically. You may not want to watch a Love Island hookup with Grandma and the kids, but the vast majority of reality shows avoid sex, swearing, and violence, an underappreciated factor in the genre’s popularity. With the rise of prestige TV — and its tortured Mafiosi, drug-dealing science teachers, and dour 1960s ad execs — reality shows became a refuge for audiences who preferred to avoid gruesome killings and anguished moral dilemmas during family TV time. Once I had children, reality programming became our go-to choice: So You Think You Can Dance when my daughter was a toddler, twirling her way across the family room; The Amazing Race when my kids were in elementary school and getting curious about the larger world; Selling Sunset this summer, with my oldest back from college, the two of us cackling over the latest manufactured catfight. 

Is it so terrible to crave the simple, straightforward, lowest-common-denominator entertainment that reality TV provides? In our current frayed-nerves world, you could even argue it’s a public service. 

The writers in this list demonstrate that reality TV is a rich source for cultural commentary, whether you’re a superfan, a critic, or someone who understands when a cooking show isn’t really about cooking. 

Rachel Lindsay Has No Roses Left to Burn (Rachel Lindsay as told to Allison P. Davis, Vulture, June 2021)

The Bachelor, which premiered in 2002, was a show at which I initially rolled my eyes, thinking: It will never last. (Around the same time, I decided not to put my paltry work retirement savings into Amazon stock, for similar reasons.) But The Bachelor not only survived; it’s now been around long enough to face some well-deserved backlash for its creaky view of gender relations and lack of diversity. Attorney Rachel Lindsay was cast as the first Black Bachelorette in an attempt to shift that narrative. She agreed because she wanted viewers to see a woman like her “at the center of a love story.” In a sense, it worked: Lindsay is now married to a man she met on the show. 

But things weren’t so picture-perfect behind the scenes. In this piece, Lindsay calls out the ways the franchise and its producers betrayed her trust, superficially embracing change while casting potential suitors based on their potential to get into racially tinged fights. A pull-no-punches account of the real-life hurt reality dating shows can leave behind, Lindsay’s story offers a pointed lesson in self-empowerment. If someone claims they’ve changed but resists repeated attempts to fix the problem — whether it’s a boyfriend or a long-running TV powerhouse — it’s best to walk away. 

I couldn’t be like the Bachelorettes who had come before — somebody who was still living at home with her parents, who had “pageant queen” on her résumé. I was a lawyer. My father was a federal judge. I had a squeaky-clean record. I had to be a good Black girl, an exceptional Black girl. I had to be someone the viewer could accept. And I was a token until I made sure I wasn’t. 

Inside the Real Housewives’ Feminism (Sadaf Ahsan, This Magazine, November 2021)

The Real Housewives franchise has long had a wink-wink, nudge-nudge understanding with its audience, which Sadaf Ahsan acknowledges in this appreciation of a show that cultural scolds take all too seriously. We all know that these women’s lives aren’t “real.” Whether they live in Atlanta, Beverly Hills, or Dubai, the cast members’ faces have been Botoxed and dermabrasioned to a smooth, uncanny sameness; the outfits are blinged out and cleavage-baring; and someone will inevitably claim to hate “drama” while loudly repeating the shady thing her so-called friend said at a drunken dinner party. By reframing the show as a “televised comic book,” Ahsan argues that these ladies are subversive superheroes. Sure, they may look cartoonish, but how often does traditional entertainment put older women at the center of the action? Can’t every woman — self-avowed feminist or not — identify with their hunger to stay relevant in a society that’s all-too-ready to write them off?

While there is no mistaking that they can be brash, tacky ($25,000 for a pair of sunglasses!), and oh so ear-piercingly loud … it’s also ignorant to say they are only this. For 15 years, these women have lived their lives on screen, experiencing the greatest heartbreak—from their partners’ deaths to their children moving out and on—and have showcased the powerful bond of lifelong friendships at an older age like no other television series has since Sex and the City. There is bad, certainly, but there is also tremendous good that comes with a side of laughter.

The Reality Behind ‘Below Deck’ (Caity Weaver, The New York Times, June 2020) 

Thanks to what I assume are ironclad NDAs, it’s rare to hear stories from behind the cameras of reality TV. Who designs all those over-the-top obstacle courses for Survivor? Exactly how staged is any given Kardashian conversation? And how in the world do you capture all the antics of the crew and passengers in the confined spaces of a luxury yacht? It’s a question that’s nagged at me ever since I got sucked into the world of Below Deck, my latest I-know-I-should-stop-watching-but-maybe-just-one-more-episode obsession. 

Luckily for me, Caity Weaver was invited aboard to find out. With the glee of an unabashed fan, she explains how the boat is wired for sound and stocked with hidden cameras to catch every minute of the action (on this show, at least, nothing is staged). She watches as the producers’ affection for the cast (“Don’t hurt yourself!” one pleads while watching footage on a monitor) battles against “their incurable addiction to drama.” It’s an entertaining lesson in how much reality TV is created in the editing room, where small-scale mishaps are transformed into high-stakes action. 

Just as one needn’t be a wind turbine technician to appreciate a warm summer breeze, no knowledge of, or even interest in, boats, or the sea, is required to enjoy 900 hours of “Below Deck.” The most fundamental element is the ship’s hierarchy, which simultaneously commands and receives no respect. Multiple seasons in, the landlocked viewer may yet be unable to articulate even one specific duty of a lead deckhand — but what the viewer will know, and will demand, is that he not speak to the bosun like that ever again if he wants to continue serving on this ship.

Season 2 of ‘Love on the Spectrum’ Is A Reminder Of What’s Wrong with Neurotypical Dating (Jae L., Autistic Discovery, May 2021)

The best reality television shows capture a truly human experience. Little People, Big World — which has been running off and on since 2006 — depicts a family with dwarfism not as oddities or objects of pity, but simply as farmers living their lives. Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum — which showcases autistic people navigating the dating world — may have intended to fill a similar niche. However, in this essay, Jae L. — who is also autistic — points out the inherent contradiction in the concept: If dating is about finding a person you genuinely connect with, why does the show have a “relationship coach” who teaches the importance of eye contact, body language, and polite listening, which are skills that many autistic people struggle with? Why should they have to mold themselves to the conventions of neurotypical behavior? Reading this piece made me realize how even the most well-meaning attempts at inclusion can fall short, especially when people are forced into a TV format that pathologizes their differences. 

The date-as-interview approach is awkward for anyone: no-one likes to be interrogated. But open-ended questions can be especially confronting for autistic people. For as long as I can remember, I’ve experienced low-level panic every time someone asks, “What are your hobbies?” or “What music do you like to listen to?” Yet this particular practice is drummed into the cast members. Unsurprisingly, the conversation is stilted and has nowhere to go. 

The Great British Baking Show and the Meaning of Life (Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic, October 2020)

During the early months of the pandemic lockdown, I steadfastly avoided The Great British Baking Show when it occasionally popped up on my Netflix suggestions. I’d heard it had a cult following, but with my family home 24-7, I’d been doing more cooking than ever before. Escapism, for me, meant watching anything that didn’t involve food. 

And then, one insomnia-plagued night, I succumbed — and couldn’t stop. Once I acknowledged that I’d never make any of those complicated pastries myself, it was fun to watch other people tackle them, but it was the “British” part of the show that kept me hooked. Hearing terms like “Victoria sponge” and “Eton mess” tossed around in a range of regional accents gave me the same Anglophile rush I used to get from Downton Abbey. 

The Brits have long romanticized the “simple pleasures situated in some lovely part of rural England,” writes Eliot A. Cohen in this Atlantic piece. What makes The Great British Baking Show so appealing, he says, is its embrace of traditional aesthetics — the immaculate white tent on the grounds of a historic home — alongside modern Britain’s multicultural reality. Teacakes are baked with Indian spices; a Caribbean family recipe is transformed into high art. Though it may represent the “imaginary, comfortable Britain for which many Americans have a particular fondness,” Cohen makes the case that this particular flavor of reality TV might restore our faith in humanity. It did for me. 

The bakers are (carefully curated, no doubt) representatives of the British nation. There are college students and grandmothers; carpenters and lawyers; soldiers, sailors, and personal trainers; immigrants (or their descendants) of varying hue from Hong Kong and Jamaica and Mumbai. They are remarkably nice to one another. 

To watch The Great British Baking Show is to believe that the average guy and gal can do remarkable things, that good nature is compatible with excellence, that high achievement will be recognized, that honest feedback can lead to improvement, that there are things to life beyond work. It is to believe that spectacular creativity can actually be scrumptious. 

***

Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. Safer Than Childbirth

Tamara Dean | The American Scholar | March 4th, 2022 | 3,700 words

Anti-abortion advocates seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade would have you think that the practice of terminating pregnancies is a new phenomenon, brought on by the rise of feminism and the (imaginary) moral decay of America. As Tamara Dean lays bare in this essay, this is nothing short of a lie. Surveying historical literature and using Nancy Ann Harris, a woman who died in 1876 in a rural Wisconsin county, as a lens into the past, Dean shows how abortion was a legally and morally acceptable way for a woman to care for her health, until misogynistic, racist forces decided it shouldn’t be. “Every woman, including Nancy, would have known friends, sisters, or cousins who died or were debilitated while giving birth,” Dean writes. “They would have known those who took pains to avoid it.” This essay is a necessary corrective, and beautifully written to boot.  —SD

2. The Lost Jews of Nigeria

Samanth Subramanian | The Guardian | April 26, 2022 | 6,635 words

As a kid growing up Jewish in a very not-Jewish part of the country, I was always fascinated to hear about places where communities had taken root in seemingly very not-Jewish parts of the larger world. Ethiopia. India. China. Yet, before reading Samanth Subramanian’s deeply descriptive travelog in The Guardian, I was unaware of a much newer version of the phenomenon happening in Nigeria. Estimates vary, but thousands of native Nigerians have taken up the faith in the past few decades, drifting first to messianic Christianity and then to full Old-Testament sidelocks-and-prayer-shawl orthodoxy. There’s a sense of cultural commonality in there, for sure — most Nigerian Jews are of the Igbo people, and attribute the surprising amount of ritual overlap to a lineage descended from the tribe of Gad — but in their internet-enabled assimilation of “conventional” Judaism, adding the sanctioned to the syncretic, there’s also a thrumming pulse of mishpuchah. Family. Home is where you make it, and so is homeland.  —PR

3. A Cage by Another Name

Sasha Plotnikova | Failed Architecture | April 20, 2022 | 2,089 words

Can tiny homes get people off the streets safely and humanely? In this sharp, critical look into the tiny shed camps of Los Angeles, Sasha Plotnikova reports on the Arroyo Seco Tiny Home Village along the 110 freeway, which was built to help tenants transition out of houselessness. But the village’s dehumanizing rules and inhospitable conditions create anything but a safe and secure environment, and no amount of whimsy — in the form of colorful, cheery murals — can hide the carceral nature of the camp. “Tiny sheds must be understood not as homes or as housing,” Plotnikova writes, “but as an architecture of containment and banishment.” A member of Street Watch LA, an organization dedicated to protecting the poor and unhoused, said to her: It’s a housing solution not actually meant for unhoused people, but rather for the NIMBYs who prefer them to just disappear.  —CLR

4. When Are Men Dangerous? On Agency, Imagination, and What a Teacher Can Do

Steve Edwards | Lit Hub | April 15th, 2022 | 4,080 words

In this thoughtful essay at Lit Hub, Steve Edwards contemplates what it means to be considered dangerous, whether that danger is in the form of words, ideas, beliefs, or violence. As Edwards considers what danger means and the forms it can take, he looks at conscientious objectors, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as well as his own creative writing students as they struggle to make a life for themselves and earn a living in America. “Nineteen is a liminal age. Absent a chance to define ourselves, other forces stand at the ready to do so for us—family members, cultural traditions, career trajectories…Essays are made things, I tell them, equal parts critical thinking and creative engagement. I suggest that if they can change words on a page, they might also change their lives. Had Tsarnaev been a student in my class, I might have encouraged him to write about his experiences as an immigrant or what drew him to want to study sea life…Those most likely to tell the truth about their lives are the ones with nothing left to lose…Unfortunately, you can’t escape an ideology by hoping it changes. You end up becoming it instead…In my classes a pen is a tool for expanding a student’s potential, not limiting it through fear.” —KS

5. I Lived the #VanLife. It Wasn’t Pretty.

Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | April 20, 2022 | 4,410 words

Sometimes it is fun to read about someone having a terrible time. Before I am judged too harshly for this, I offer you Caity Weaver’s diverting and self-deprecating essay in defense. She spends nearly 5,000 words whinging about just how much she hated living #VanLife for a few days. (Her editor made her do it. I am glad he did.) There is something pure about such things as Weaver eating fistfuls of cheese-its in the dark when figuring out the camp stove is just too much. Her descriptions — coated in cheesy crumbs rather than sugar — are wholly relatable and throw two fingers up to the Instagram illusion. I am thankful for this, being guilty of falling into the thrall of the #VanLife tag myself, endlessly scrolling through pictures of beautiful people looking wistfully at beautiful things — all through flung-open-van-doors. I have even found myself on Craigslist looking for camper vans for sale (expensive as it turns out, I blame the tag). Fortunately, this van exposé has given me another reason to stick to my tent. —CW

You may remember Jeff Bridges for his portrayal of über-underachiever Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski in The Big Lebowski, a 1998 cult classic which has spawned infinite imitators and even a religion called, unsurprisingly, “Dudism.” If you know Bridges only as The Dude, you may be surprised to learn of an expansive career before and after his immortalization (in an over-sized knit sweater, of course) in The Big Lebowski. In this profile at GQ, Caity Weaver reminds us that Bridges has been “nominated for an Academy Award at 67, but also at 22, and five times in between.”

Bridges knows he’ll probably be remembered best for padding around grungy ’90s Los Angeles in a cozy sweater that hugged him like the fur of a hibernating bear, but prior to that his career followed a serpentine path—from boy wonder (The Last Picture Show), to brilliant engineer who accidentally becomes a video game (Tron), to alien heartthrob (Starman), to disgraced radio shock jock palling around with schizophrenic Robin Williams (The Fisher King)—yet somehow he always seemed headed in the right direction. Then, at some point post-Lebowski, Bridges evolved into the Marlon Brando of grizzled American West prospector types. His last three Academy Award nominations—for 2009’s Crazy Heart (he won best actor), 2010’s True Grit, and last year’s Hell or High Water—have all saluted his portrayal of rugged backcountry men. This fall, he’ll star in Only the Brave, a wildfire drama inspired by real events, as the retired chief of an Arizona fire department, and you’d better believe he wears a cowboy hat.

Lucky, then, that after half a century of making movies, Jeff Bridges doesn’t seem exhausted. If anything, he seems extremely well rested. Once he’s completed his errands for the day—talking to me, taking a field trip to a nearby artist community, checking out a socially conscious grab-and-go restaurant that he hazily half-invites me to, though he has no idea when he will be there—Bridges can return to his lawn and dance slowly through the labyrinth he himself sheared into the grass. Getting lost seems relaxing for him. Maybe we should all do it.

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Caity Weaver, Marisa Meltzer, Jiayang Fan, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Jeff Maysh.

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

Caity Weaver | GQ | June 20, 2017 | 16 minutes (4104 words)

A behind-the-scenes look at the redesign process of the new, diverse lineup of Ken dolls.

2. Roxane Gay’s New Memoir About Her Weight May Be Her Most Feminist—and Revealing—Act Yet

Marisa Meltzer | Elle | June 14, 2017 | 15 minutes (3,874 words)

Marisa Meltzer profiles Roxane Gay as the prolific author prepares to go on tour to support Hunger, a book she calls “by far the hardest book I’ve ever had to write.” In it, Gay reflects on what it’s like to live in a world that does not accommodate her body and how she “turned to food for numbness and protection” after being gang raped as a child.

3. China’s Mistress Dispellers

Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 20, 2017 | 25 minutes (6,264 words)

The mistress, or what is known in Chinese as a xiao san, or “Little Third,” has become a problem in China, and a new job has sprung up to battle these emotional and financial third wheels: the mistress dispeller. Part private investigator, part emotional confidante, the mistress dispeller is tasked with ending the relationship by any means necessary.

4. The Ideal Iceland May Only Exist in Your Mind

Taffy Brodesser-Akner | AFAR | June 13, 2017 | 16 minutes (4,000 words)

Taffy Brodesser-Akner goes to Iceland in search of relief and discovers that the island nation, with its quirky puffins and lunar landscape and crowds upon crowds of American tourists, lends itself well to the pursuit of escape.

5. The Scarface of Sex: The Millionaire Playboy Who Murdered His Way to the Top of Porn

Jeff Maysh | The Daily Beast | June 16, 2017 | 31 minutes (7,858 words)

Michael Thevis built a lucrative pornography empire in the 1960s and ’70s only to spend the end of his life in prison. His family opened his personal diaries to a journalist for the first time to get the whole, crooked, tragic story.

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. Case in point: the tortured internal discussions at Mattel around what to call the “heavier” version of Barbie’s companion — after they’d already decided not to make him fat (“You don’t want to go too much,” as Ray Cavalluzzi, a Mattel sculptor, put it).

“With Barbie [it was] clear what was offensive with the curvier doll versus what wasn’t,” says Michelle Chidoni, a polished, deftly amiable executive from the global brand communications department. We are sitting in a capacious conference room surrounded by Barbies in fashions so cutting-edge that to describe them would be illegal. But I will reveal to the reader that a great multitude of the outfits are both fabulous and fun. “People [in focus groups] didn’t want to be called ‘plus-size.’ ‘Curvy’ was the clear winner. [But] where ‘curvy’ in the female world of fashion has become something that’s desirable and sexy and positive, the men’s fashion world has not gone there yet.”

Mattel’s constant aim when describing body types is to unearth a marketing term with “a neutral-to-positive association.” They don’t always find it on the first try. Or second. Or third. Initially, in their attempt to recapture the proud spirit of “curvy” for a male doll, the Barbie team borrowed a word from the boys’ clothing industry: “husky.” Focus-group reactions were disastrous.

“‘Husky’ just turned off every guy we talked to,” says Chidoni, shaking her head. “A lot were really traumatized by that—as a child, shopping in a husky section.” “Athletic” was rejected on the notion that athletes can have vastly different body types. “Brawny” didn’t fare much better. And so: “broad.”

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