Brendan Fitzgerald

3 weeks ago | longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald

Jackass, the MTV reality show documenting the catastrophic and grotesque stunts of Johnny Knoxville and his pals, aired just twenty-five episodes on MTV before concluding its initial run in 2001.

3 weeks ago | longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald

“Things aren’t better when they become more widely disseminated—that is not the thing.” Sasha Frere-Jones’s history of THING, once billed as “Chicago’s National Black Underground Queer Arts Magazine,” respects the short-lived publication as a cultural forerunner but pays closer, finer attention to the ways in which THING set itself apart and stayed there. Frere-Jones engages the ’zine as an appreciative outsider, sifting through the inside jokes and finding delight in the intimacies they encode.

3 weeks ago | longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald

In the past week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained immigrants at courthouses in Van Nuys, California; San Antonio, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; Miami, Florida; and perhaps a dozen other cities. At a courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri, agents arrested Carol Mayorga, 45, who had gone to the court in order to renew her employment authorization.

1 month ago | longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway once argued that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the headwaters for “all modern American literature,” adding, “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” (He also argued that the last twelve chapters of the novel were dispensable.) Plenty of writers, including William Faulkner, argued much the same.

1 month ago | longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald

On at least two occasions, Thomas Keller, the exhaustively acclaimed chef of the French Laundry and Per Se, has served mushroom soup to restaurant critics via a glass bong—an allusion to a negative review published nearly ten years ago.