Amy Wallace

Wired@20 — I’m in it!

Written by amywallace on April 16th, 2013

I’m honored to be included among the likes of Evan Ratliff, William Gibson, John Heilemann and Chris Anderson.

For two decades, WIRED has chronicled the people, ideas, and technologies that power the digital revolution. To celebrate the magazine’s 20th anniversary, the editors have chosen 20 of the most important and mind-blowing stories from the archives. With an introduction by features editor Mark Robinson and including all-new epilogues that bring the articles up to date, this anthology showcases the award-winning writing and crackling intelligence that has been the magazine’s trademark for 20 years. The future is WIRED.

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GQ Beyonce interview

Written by amywallace on January 11th, 2013

Miss Millennium: Beyoncé

This is the hottest woman of the past thirteen years

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ, February 2013

(Here’s a link to the photos)

Beyoncé is ready to receive you now. From the chair where she’s sitting, in the conference room of her sleek office suite in midtown Manhattan, at a round table elegantly laden with fine china, crisp cloth napkins, and take-out sushi from Nobu, she could toss some edamame over her shoulder and hit her sixteen Grammys, each wall-mounted in its own Plexiglas box. She is luminous, with that perfect smile and smooth coffee skin that shines under a blondish topknot and bangs. Today she’s showing none of the bodaciously thick, hush-your-mouth body that’s on display onstage, in her videos, and on these pages. This is Business Beyoncé, hypercomposed Beyoncé—fashionable, elegant, in charge. She’s wearing the handiwork of no fewer than seven designers, among them Click to continue »

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GQ profile of Judd Apatow

Written by amywallace on December 25th, 2012

“I Have a Great Idea, Maybe Like the Best Idea I’ve Ever Had”

So says Judd Apatow, whose previous ideas—Knocked Up, Funny People, and his new film, This Is 40, not to mention the approximately 7 billion other-funny-people’s ideas he has nurtured and championed—haven’t exactly sucked. Amy Wallace sits down with the reigning king of comedy and hears all about his (surprisingly mature) plans for the future

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ, January 2013

Judd Apatow sat down in his cluttered home office not long ago and introduced himself to Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher and author of the seminal book on meditation, Be Here Now. Apatow, the comic visionary and director of the seminal scene on male body waxing, has long been a fan of the octogenarian guru. So when someone from Ram Dass’s staff reached out to see if Judd would interview the old seeker, who lives in Hawaii, via Skype, Apatow had eagerly said yes.

Now, with Ram Dass’s Santa-at-Woodstock visage filling his computer screen, Apatow launched into a personal plug for the sage’s books, all of which he owns. “People, you need to get them,” he told those who might someday be listening on ramdass.org. “I’m still a deranged man, but they help me with that.” When he asked Ram Dass about his most famous work—”You don’t think it should be Be Here 10 Minutes from Now?”—a chuckle could be heard from 2,500 miles away. Then Apatow, who estimates he’s read 10,000 self-help books (with titles like Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Wisdom of Insecurity), admitted his limitations as an interviewer: “I really only want to ask you questions about me.”

Things got a bit more serious, though, when the topic shifted to storytelling, and Apatow told Ram Dass that connecting to emotion is always “where the obstacles are” in his films. At that, Ram Dass pointed Click to continue »

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Where the Sidewalk Ends — Los Angeles magazine

Written by amywallace on December 3rd, 2012

Homemade monuments to those we’ve lost are all over town, built by friends and loved ones as reminders to be careful—and as a way of saying good-bye

By Amy Wallace

Published with a photo essay that can be seen here in Los Angeles magazine, November 2012

When we see a shrine, we’re usually on the move. In that, we have something in common with the individuals these pop-up memorials are meant to honor. Those people, too, were on their way somewhere when they reached the ultimate end of the road. And then, suddenly, nothing.

Most of us don’t know the men, women, and children whose points of departure are marked with bouquets and candles and teddy bears. But we feel the loss. Maybe we’ve heard about the accident on the news—the celebrating twentysomethings who drank too much before they got behind the wheel, the mother and her two young daughters who had the bad luck to be in their minivan when a senior citizen with a suspended license lost control and veered into their lane. To read about these tragedies is to realize it could have been you. Which is probably why once a shrine goes up, it can grow quickly with offerings from strangers. Maybe, we think, if we take a moment now to mark the fallen, we’ll be better able to take our foot off the pedal later, to proceed with more care. We point out these shrines to our teenagers as cautionary tales. No texting, we say, barely able to fathom the irreparable loss we are trying to guard against.

No one wants to be the one who—out of grief or anger or a need for closure—assembles the ordinary items that make for such extraordinary public gestures. But when we see a shrine, for a moment we understand the person who built it. Because a shrine is more than a mock headstone. It is a reminder that life can be too short, horrible things can happen to anybody, and—and here’s the important part—when you love someone, sometimes you have to say it out loud to anyone who will slow down long enough to listen.

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The Daily Swarm interviews me about D’Angelo & Frank Ocean

Written by amywallace on November 29th, 2012

A Rational Conversation: Amy Wallace Explores How D’Angelo and Frank Ocean Transcend Soul Stereotypes…

BY ERIC DUCKER

Posted to The Daily Swarm, November 29, 2012

NOTE TO READERS: THIS IS MORE FUN TO READ ON THE SITE, WHERE THERE ARE VIDEOS, SO CLICK LINK ABOVE. BUT HERE’S THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVIEW:

A Rational Conversation is a column by editor and writer Eric Ducker. Every week he gets on iChat or Gchat or Skype or whatever with a special guest to examine a subject that’s been on his mind.

Two of the most important music stories of 2012 proved the return of D’Angelo and the rise of Frank Ocean, who put out the great Channel Orange album days after revealing on his Tumblr that his first love had been a man. Writer Amy Wallace wrote extensive pieces on both the artists for GQ, where she currently serves as a correspondent; she’s also an editor-at-large for Los Angeles Magazine, and over her career has contributed to prestigious publications spanning The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired.

For her D’Angelo feature – one of the year’s most insightful, illuminating, in-depth pieces of music journalism, if not this decade’s – Wallace enjoyed unprecedented access, spending considerable time with the enigmatic soul legend and even travelling to Europe with him on his first tour in over ten years. In her recently published Frank Ocean story, she spent a day with the headline-grabbing singer in New York and spoke to him about his momentous year, creating a revealing portrait that proved far more dimensional than any mere celebrity profile. Ducker and Wallace discussed the similarities between D’Angelo and Frank Ocean, and issues of masculinity in R&B (sort of, more on that soon).

Eric Ducker: Do you listen to a lot of R&B?

Amy Wallace: I do – old and new. I grew up in a small town in Ohio that was kind of the cradle of R&B of that time. The Ohio Players, Earth, Wind & Fire, The O’Jays, the Isley Brothers – the list of musicians who formed me could go on and on. Plus, I have a 15-year-old son who is hip-hop-obsessed: Miguel is on in the car a lot.

ED: Not a bad car soundtrack.

AW: Indeed. You said at the outset that you wanted to discuss masculinity in R&B. I have a caveat to that, if you will permit me. I feel I should say that the two male R&B singers I’ve had the good fortune to interview lately, D’Angelo and Frank Ocean, aren’t comfortable with the label of R&B. Neither one of them is particularly fond of labels in general, but this one in particular rankles. D’Angelo, who’s long been labeled the King of Neo-Soul as well, said he didn’t want to be put in the R&B or the neo-soul box. He told me, “I hate the term R&B, because that acronym robs us” – by “us,” he meant black musicians – “of our proprietorship of rock & roll. Because that’s our shit.” For his part, Frank Ocean spent a fair bit of time with me refusing to be labeled, either musically or in terms of sexual orientation. But of R&B specifically, he said, “It’s really racially charged and kind of archaic.” “Demeaning?” I asked. “I don’t know about ‘demeaning.’ I think ‘inaccurate,’” he said. “So what do you call your music?” I asked. “Music,” he responded. “I call it post-modern, and people look at me like I’m being an asshole.” I say all this not to derail your interview, but because I think the issues are related. Part of what is going on in black popular music – in its forms and in the topics it continues to tackle – is a resistance to being labeled one thing or another.

FOR MORE, CLICK ON THIS LINK!

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My GQ interview with Frank Ocean

Written by amywallace on November 27th, 2012

Men of the Year

Ocean-ography

Yes, he made the album of 2012. (Just ask him, he’ll tell you.) But that was just the second biggest moment of Frank Ocean’s year. Here, while wearing the sport coats of the season and surrounded by his whole Odd Future crew, the ascendant singer opens up to Amy Wallace about his crazy year —including the bomb he dropped on the hip-hop world

Originally appeared in GQ, December 2012

If Frank Ocean wanted to play you a song, you’d drive across town in the pouring rain, right? That’s how we’ve ended up at Jungle City, a sound studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. When we walk in, Ocean leading the way, Pharrell Williams turns down the music and greets him warmly. “Here you are,” the prolific rapper and producer tells him. “You’ve walked in at the right time.”

“Sweet,” Ocean replies, picking up Pharrell’s diamond-studded gold chain that sits—fat as a tow rope—at the edge of the mixing board. Ocean, dressed in a gray Supreme hoodie, jeans, and black Wallabees, smiles as he dons the weighty necklace—it jibes with the new Rolex on his left wrist, the Cartier Juste Un Clou bracelet on his right. In a bit, he’ll Instagram a bejeweled portrait of himself, but first he unveils three new tracks, stored on his phone, that Pharrell pronounces “crazy, with a lot of comprehensive layers just sort of living harmoniously.” When Ocean says he worries a rap number called “Blue Whale” is “risky because I’m rhyming,” Pharrell shakes his head.

“That’s not risky. That thought is dead,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You know, I rhyme, too.’ ”

Turning to me, Pharrell says, “I always call him James Taylor. He’s probably the closest thing to a writer’s perfect exemplification of the unconscious. All the songs are like movies. All you need to do is close your eyes.”

Now it’s Pharrell’s turn to spin a track-in-progress. They listen, bobbing Click to continue »

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Now for something completely different: Book Review in NYT

Written by amywallace on October 6th, 2012

Off the Shelf

The Case for Calm Over Rising Health Costs

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in The New York Times, October 6, 2012

IN 1946, a British newspaper shocked its readers by running an article with this ominous-sounding headline: “Nearly Half of U.K. Student Grades Are Below Average.” Read that back to yourself slowly, and you’ll realize, of course, that the law of averages would have it no other way. But man, does it sound bad.

In his new book, “The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t” (Yale University Press) William J. Baumol uses that headline to help us understand his central idea about the diverging paths of certain costs in our economy.

Mr. Baumol and a Princeton colleague coined the term “cost disease” in the early 1960s. Put simply, it refers to the concept that the costs of health care, education, the live performing arts and several other “personal services” depend largely on human evaluative skills — a “handicraft element” that is not easily replaced by machines. These costs consistently rise at a rate much greater than that of inflation because the quantity of labor required to produce these services is hard to reduce, while costs in other areas of the economy can be brought down via technology or other factors.

What that means, writes Mr. Baumol, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University and a professor emeritus at Princeton, sounds pretty frightening: “If health care costs continue to increase by the rate they have averaged in the recent past, they will rise from 15 percent of the average person’s total income in 2005 to 62 percent by 2105.” In other words, our great-grandchildren will have less than 40 cents of every dollar to spend on everything besides their health. Like the British headline, that surely sounds like cause for alarm.

It’s a testament to Professor Baumol’s lucid prose, though, that economists and noneconomists alike will find it easy to grasp his surprisingly comforting argument for why we shouldn’t panic. In fact, he asserts, Click to continue »

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My LA mag piece on Jonah Lehrer

Written by amywallace on September 25th, 2012

Caught Getting Creative

The disgrace of wunderkind writer Jonah Lehrer, outed for manufacturing quotes, reverberates worst in the city he calls home

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, October 2012

Here’s what we thought we knew about Jonah Lehrer: Only 31 years old and dweebishly handsome—nerd-hip Clark Kent glasses below a flop of hair—he wasn’t just clever; he was supremely prolific. In addition to writing for Wired, the temple of wonk, he was contributing to The New Yorker, bantering expertly with Stephen Colbert, and “appearing” on Radiolab, the WNYC show that explains everything in a darling kind of way. Armed with an Ivy League degree in neuroscience, Lehrer had a brain that clearly functioned at a higher level than other people’s, propelling him to pop-intellectual stardom in less than a decade.

More than a mere scribbler, Lehrer was a brilliant personality who soothed us with his easy command of the very complex. He wrote best-selling books—first 2007’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, then two others in rapid succession. Encountering Lehrer in his off-hours only cemented the impression that he was, indeed, living the life—hiking Runyon Canyon in the afternoons with his pretty wife and sweet-faced baby, returning (fitter than when they began) to their expensive architectural gem of a house once owned by the photographer Julius Shulman. By example, Lehrer seemed to prove that youth is more vigorous, there is an explanation for everything, and you really can have it all.

At least that was the story line until this summer. First, in July Lehrer admitted to (and apologized for) plagiarizing himself by repurposing some of his past work in supposedly fresh blog posts for The New Yorker. Many journalists saw this as a misdemeanor (one likened it to stealing food from your own refrigerator). A few weeks later, though, Lehrer was approached by Michael C. Moynihan, a writer and editor who was doing a piece for Tablet, an online magazine that calls itself “A New Read on Jewish Life.” Moynihan, a self-described aficionado of all things Bob Dylan, had discovered a couple of unfamiliar quotes from the legendarily press-shy bard in the first chapter of Lehrer’s latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Since Lehrer acknowledged he’d never interviewed Dylan, Moynihan wanted to know where the quotes came from. The answer, it turned out, was Lehrer’s imagination.

It wasn’t as if Lehrer’s faux quotes were especially juicy. Mostly he altered or fused together existing statements uttered in other contexts to support his thesis. For instance, Click to continue »

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Amy Bishop Writes Her Own Ending

Written by amywallace on September 20th, 2012

With Guilty Plea, University of Alabama Shooter Amy Bishop Writes Her Own Ending

By Amy Wallace

Originally published at Wired.com, Sept. 12, 2012

“I’m done,” Amy Bishop told her husband when she called him minutes after shooting six of her colleagues at the University of Alabama in February 2010 — three of them fatally. Now, finally, so is the legal wrangling surrounding her case.

On Tuesday, Bishop, 47, pleaded guilty to one count of capital murder involving two or more people and three counts of attempted murder. The former University of Alabama-Huntsville biology professor, who had been denied tenure in the months before she went on a shooting spree in an afternoon faculty meeting, had earlier pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. In exchange for her new plea, prosecutors agreed to recommend several life sentences—but not the death penalty.

Bishop’s crimes rocked not only Huntsville, Alabama, where she and her husband and four children lived, but also another city 1,100 miles away: Braintree, Massachusetts. It was there that Bishop had killed her 18-year-old brother, Seth, with a shotgun in 1986. Bishop, then 21, and her parents always maintained that the shooting was an accident. But that case was reopened after the events in Huntsville, and Bishop was charged. Prosecutors there have yet to decide whether she will be tried for murder.

The Alabama shooting also prompted much debate about the pressures of academia in general and of the tenure process in particular. But the more I found out about Bishop’s history of aggression, the less I bought into the Tenure-Made-Her-Do-It assertion theory that gained traction at the time. Bishop was deeply troubled. All you had to do was read her unpublished fiction to see that.

I went to Huntsville for Wired after Bishop killed Click to continue »

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GQ Editor’s Note in response to Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Written by amywallace on July 18th, 2012

Originally published on GQ.com, July 18, 2012

This week, after GQ’s August profile of Joseph Gordon-Levitt hit newsstands, the actor took to his Tumblr page to challenge the accuracy of the magazine’s description of the death of his older brother, Dan, on October 4, 2010.

Because the writer, Amy Wallace, and her editors understood the pain Dan’s passing caused the Gordon-Levitt family, the story sought to be respectful—and brief—in the way it described his death, which GQ felt was a relevant fact in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s biography. The story stated that Dan, 36, who was close to his brother and often collaborated with him, “died of an alleged drug overdose in 2010. ‘It was an accident’ is all Joe will say about that.’ ”

The magazine stands by its reporting, the facts of which are fully supported—and have been confirmed in detail—by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

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