Skip to content →

Drugs, Planes, Bail: The Wild Story of George Jones’s Lost Recordings

Decades later, it remains something of a mystery how in 1966 George Jones and his band ended up at Nugget Studios, a backwater building just north of Nashville that advertised itself as a place for “country music recorded in the quiet of the country at country prices.”

Jones, a country music legend in the making, had slipped a bit since his hits “White Lightning” and “She Thinks I Still Care,” and he was known to disappear on marathon benders. But he was still a major attraction, popular enough to fill honky tonks and auditoriums between Texas and New York.

Over many hours, Jones and his band churned out dozens of songs — his own hits and others by his idol, Hank Williams. One peppy number, “Ship of Love,” was something Jones had co-written with a friend, Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery, and Johnny Paycheck, who sang harmony and played bass with the band.

All were recorded under contract to a company partly owned by a little-known promoter and producer, Donald Gilbreth, who down the road would become better known for the things he did wrong than for the things he did right.

Read more at the New York Times

Leave a Comment

Everything He Wrote Was Good

The Pieces of Johnny Greene


I’ve just about decided one of two things: (1) I have a special tendency to meet crazy and weird people, or (2) every single person in New York is either crazy or weird.

—Letter to Martha Jane Patton, October 18, 1971

“Unlike Willie, my plane never turned ‘North towards Home,’” Johnny wrote in a letter to a friend in Alabama, referring to Willie Morris’s bestselling 1967 memoir. Morris, who was from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and edited Harper’s from 1967 to 1971, considered the 1960s New York literary world one “of awesome brilliance, even when its brilliance was a little predictable, and excepted for three or four notable operators, not very colorful.” Morris later reflected, “To escape the South—all of what it was and is—I would have to escape from myself.”

Johnny went the opposite of Morris. He refrained from diving into the New York literary scene—“a slicker lot than the Chukker crowd.” He found work as a typist at the American Civil Liberties Union and, in his spare time, read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (according to a letter, it was the only Southern newspaper Columbia’s library kept stocked) and indulged in Alabama sports clips his mother sent, hiding from the “groans and growls of New York.”

In a breathless letter to his friend and fellow Selma Project volunteer, Martha Jane Patton, he described an incident at a dinner at the Park Avenue penthouse of a Cue magazine editor, who called Johnny out: “Do you enjoy playing the Alabama hick?”

Johnny shot back, “I notice your mama and daddy never taught you how to hold a knife and fork.”

Read more at the Oxford American

 

“Obsession and Release: 10 Years to Write a Longread,” an interview with the author.
Longreads reviews Johnny Greene, “The Names You Know and the Names You Don’t.”
Leave a Comment

New York Times Morning Briefings

May 29, 2019

Banana specialists from around the world are arriving in Miami this week for the eighth International Banana Congress. A primary discussion point is Panama disease, a fungal infection that rots the fruit from the inside.

It’s been spreading for decades across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Growers have tried containing it, mostly without success.

Part of the problem is that cultivated bananas are a single variety, the Cavendish. Another, the Gros Michel, used to be similarly dominant, until a related fungus wiped it out in the 1950s.

Biodiversity would offer disease resistance. But industry supply chains prefer monocultures, which offer uniform growth patterns, harvest times, shipping resilience and ripening processes.

“If the banana industry sticks to a single breed that is susceptible to this incurable disease, they’re going to run into trouble,” said Dan Koeppel, who has written about the history of the banana and who also writes for Wirecutter, a product review website owned by The New York Times.

Scientists are studying the fungus and mapping its pathways, trying to keep Latin America from being next.

May 14, 2019

The straw

Around the world, limits are being imposed on plastics, which break into particles that end up permeating the oceansthe airthe earth and even our bodies.

One common target is the drinking straw.

In the U.S., hundreds of millions of straws are used daily. Seattle has banned them. In Los Angeles, if you want a straw, you have to ask for it. Many bars are switching to paper versions.

But humans and straws go way back. The Sumerian civilization (about 4,000 B.C.) in southern Mesopotamia used hollow reeds or golden tubes to sip beer, bypassing gunk left from fermentation.

In 19th-century America, an inventor, Marvin Stone, wrapped paper strips around a pencil, glued and waxed them, and patented his creation in 1888.

Forty years later, another inventor, Joseph Friedman, put a screw in a straw. Wrapping floss around the screw’s thread created small ridges that made the straw bendable, which proved helpful for hospital patients drinking from cups.

Only since the polymer boom of the 1960s have straws been made predominantly of plastic.

April 16, 2019

The environment vs. population growth

In smaller U.S. cities and rural areas, demographic decline is a painful reality. Hungary is worried about a declining population. So is Japan. Even China.

It’s an economic truism: Growing populations drive economies.

But in this era of climate change, is it wiser to have fewer people to house, feed and provide power for?

Globally, a smaller population would “make a difference, certainly,” said Joseph Chamie, a former U.N. population official. “Fewer people means fewer items consumed, and fewer resources used, so your carbon footprint would be less.”

But limiting population growth, he said, can’t solve the environmental problems caused by mass production and consumption.

And companies whose business models rely on constant growth have little incentive to change. More customers and more consumption mean more profits.

“We can try to maintain the quality of the environment,” Mr. Chamie said. “But we have to change our mind-set regarding how the economy moves.”

April 3, 2019

A Virginia newspaper

Political scandals engulfed the Virginia Statehouse months ago.

The Virginian-Pilot has been among the regional papers covering the scandals and their aftermath closely. It was the first to confirm a report that Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page included a photograph of one man in blackface with another in a Ku Klux Klan robe.

The Pilot is the product of local newspaper mergers that began just after the Civil War. It first published under its current name in 1898, and was acquired by Tronc, the former Tribune Co., in 2018. (The company has since changed its name to Tribune Publishing.) Based in southeastern Virginia, The Pilot’s coverage bleeds into North Carolina.

The Pilot earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for an editorial on the evils of lynching; another in 1960 for editorials on officials’ stonewalling of school integration; and a third in 1985 for reporting on local corruption.

Last year, The Pilot was a finalist for the Pulitzer in investigative reporting, for documenting injustices in Virginia’s parole system. Who knows what 2019 might bring?

March 7, 2019

The art of preservation

If you’re about to open a can of something tasty, thank the French.

In the late 1700s, Napoleon was on the move, invading Italy, Austria and Egypt. Feeding his enormous armies was a problem — he needed a way to keep food from spoiling.

A confectioner, Nicolas Appert, spent years coming up with a successful process. He placed fruits, vegetables and meats in glass bottles, corked and wired them, then boiled the bottles for hours. He didn’t know he was killing microbes — he just knew that the more heat and less air, the better.

By 1810, Napoleon’s government handed him a 12,000-franc prize and required him to publish a book, with the catchy title “The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years.”

Glass, unfortunately, breaks. It was the British who developed the tin can.

March 5, 2019

A Mardi Gras tradition

King cake is no ordinary cake. The circular pastry shines with stripes of sugared New Orleans Carnival colors: purple for justice, gold for power and green for faith.

It’s stuffed with fruit and pecans — and a plastic baby that brings luck to the finder (along with the responsibility of providing the next year’s cake).

The notion of embedding an object in cake dates from at least the Roman Empire. For Saturnalia, a predecessor of Christmas, it was a fava bean. Whoever received the slice containing the bean ruled the day.

But the Romans also associated fava beans with death. That might be because of a genetic disorder, most common in the Mediterranean, that creates an often lethal bean allergy.

So perhaps eating a cake with a fava bean was a morbid joke, a moment on the edge, or what could be thought of as letting the good times roll.

January 31, 2019

The term “polar vortex”

The word “vortex,” derived from the Latin for “to turn,” has been in use since at least the 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s cited in centuries-old scientific theoriesto mean a swirl of something around a central axis.

The first pairing of “polar” and “vortex” is widely credited to an article published in 1853, in a magazine that Charles Dickens edited. The author, John Capper, was a merchant and journalist who lived in what’s now Sri Lanka.

His article, “Air Maps,” was a somewhat florid account of the state of the relatively new science regarding wind, a crucial factor for nautical travel and trade in the era before marine engines.

The patterns of the Earth’s major winds could be tracked, Capper wrote, and one “whirled about the pole in a continued circular gale: at last, reaching the great polar vortex.”

These days, we know the polar vortex as those swirling winds breaking out of the polar region, bringing frigid temperatures south.

Leave a Comment

Contributor Bylines

Police: Bus Driver, 2 Others Ejected After Hitting Center Barrier in Deadly Turnpike Crash Tribune-Review

How Banks Unwittingly Finance Mass Shootings NYT

Trump Stokes Fears in Pre-Shutdown Video, Declaring ‘We Need a Great Barrier’ NYT

Mexico Helicopter Crash Kills Governor and Her Husband, an Ex-Governor NYT

Chaos Erupts at Newark Airport as Travelers Are Evacuated From Terminal NYT

Alabama Teenager Confesses to Killing 5 Family Members, Authorities Say NYT

Leave a Comment

8 things you can do to care for the planet

Caring for the planet is one of those things that can seem out of our reach.

The problems are too big and complex to wrap our heads around. There aren’t any practical steps we can take in our everyday lives. And there’s nothing we can really do to help anyway. Right?

Nope.

Every week, The New York Times’s Climate and Environment team publishes a newsletter called Climate Fwd:, which gives you stories and insights about climate change, along with tips on what you can do.

In that spirit, we’re partnering with them this week to pull advice from a recurring featuring in their newsletter: One thing you can do. Below are eight things that you — yes, you, the person reading this — can do to care for the planet.

Read more at the New York Times

Leave a Comment

Square Pegs: The sinister normalcy of Republican imagery

It is no longer enough for politicians to send just a pleasant image; the image has to generate engagement, an immediate “sameness” quality, going beyond posing at the ranch to embellishing a more relatable suburbia, an imaginary payola, hunting photos like urgent offerings among the day-to-day. This has created a new genre of Republican visuals — Republican Instagram — which looks like an emphatic effort to socialize in a foreign medium, like an alien trying to blend into the midwest, like Governor Scott Walker enjoying a ham and cheese out of a brown lunch bag: the working man’s dose. He’s an example of the Republican sculpting the never-before really seen politician, a previously unimagined narrative far beyond the aristocratic duties of the seasonal thank-you card that can be self-imposed toward some idea of authenticity. Republican Instagram is a chance for a politician like Walker to say, “Hey, I’m not going anywhere” in low-quality, seemingly improvised photographs. It’s Speaker Paul Ryan placing himself front and center of every crowded, celebratory image, or having a lion-king Mufasa moment, looking out at the national mall with a blonde child in a photo captioned, “Everything the light touches.” Fear — or our hope — of their quick fade into irrelevancy is imaginatively stalled on Republican Instagram.

Read more at Real Life magazine

Leave a Comment

How easy should it be to buy a silencer for a gun?

Gunfire is dangerously loud. Most handguns and rifles produce peak noise levels over 150 decibels — noisier than a jet engine at takeoff, higher than the maximum threshold set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for what can cause permanent hearing damage.

The House Natural Resource Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing on whether the government should continue to tightly regulate the sale of devices that make guns somewhat less loud on Wednesday morning. The hearing was postponed after Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise, who supports silencer deregulation, and four others were shot at a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, Wednesday morning.

Read more at The Trace

Aggregated by Vice and referenced in Columbia Journalism Review,
A gun-focused news outlet on what it takes to cover firearms credibly.”
Leave a Comment

In the race to win readers, which publisher will come out ahead?

In the chaotic media industry, it is the consumers of news who occupy the driver’s seat. Their ever-shifting behavior has all the other players chasing after them. Once, they liked getting information from newspapers, then it was their desktops, then Kindles, no, forget Kindles, now phones, and Facebook. First they consumed text. Now its video. To understand their behavior, think about three factors: speed, loyalty, and mobility. Let’s take them in that order.

Read more at Columbia Journalism Review

Leave a Comment

How a leading conservative magazine views the GOP frontrunner

The website of conservative news and opinion magazine National Review has an entire section titled simply: “Against Trump.” The words also headlined a February print edition. A recent cover depicts Trump as a “clown prince,” comfortably seated in a throne while competitor-turned-ally Chris Christie kneels before him.

Trump’s anti-media rhetoric often targets the so-called liberal press, but he has also sparred with reporters from prominent conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart. The progressive magazine Mother Jones has been turned away from campaign events, but the Trump campaign has also rejected National Review’s requests for permission to cover him.

Read more at Columbia Journalism Review

Leave a Comment

The secret life of a New York bookie

“Are you a gambling man?” Vera asks me. She hands an envelope to a bartender in the Meatpacking District as she sips on a whiskey and ginger ale. The envelope contains cash for one of her customers. Vera’s a bookie and a runner, and to be clear, Vera’s not her real name.

Read more at Narratively

Leave a Comment