Envy Apartment

“I can just kind of tell — I don’t know, it’s just a talent that I have,” Larry Clark says, via video chat from his Tribeca apartment. In the background, the screen saver on a large Apple monitor is cycling through photos of lithe young teens . “I can tell when the camera is going to like somebody and I can tell when people have a charisma that translates to film or photographs because I’ve been doing it so long.” Clark, now 70, is famous — and famously controversial — for identifying future stars among unknown teens, like the time he commissioned a 19-year-old skater he met in Washington Square Park named Harmony Korine to write the screenplay for Kids . That film also marked the debuts of Chloë Sevigny, 20 years old at the time, and 15-year-old Rosario Dawson. (While he says he’s kept in touch with Sevigny, Dawson, and Leo Fitzpatrick, he says of Korine, “I haven’t spoken to him in a while.” He hasn’t seen Spring Breakers either, he says, “but I want to see it.”) When Kids came ...

Illustration by Luke Shuman Ben Rothenberg | Racquet and Longreads | August 2017 | 9 minutes (2,122 words) Our latest Exclusive is a new story by tennis writer Ben Rothenberg and produced in partnership with Racquet magazine . To hear Alexander Zverev Sr . tell it, the tale of how his younger, golden- haired son began to play tennis has the simplicity of a fairy tale involving the Three Bears. “It was all natural for Sascha,” he said. “Mama played, Papa played, brother played . And so, he started to play.” While the Williams sisters have made family reunions in the finals of Grand Slams feel normal , multiple branches of a family tree breaking through to the top of the sport remains a rare phenomenon. This is particularly so in the men’s game, where brothers have rarely shared space in the top 200 together over the past decade. But in a sport that demands individualism, the Zverevs have managed to become the archetypal tennis family , a story line that’s become increasingly prom...