A honky-tonk pioneer
Dwight Yoakam has Appalachia in his blood and his music, said Alex Pappademas in GQ.
At first, even country music executives balked at the Kentucky native’s self-described “hillbilly music,” but Yoakam’s modern spin on honkytonk became a 1980s juggernaut: He had the first country video on MTV, and has sold 25 million records. It was an uphill fight. Yoakam, 63, was born in what he calls “hard-core Appalachia”—Pike County, Ky.—and drove his orange VW Super Beetle to Los Angeles in the ’70s in search of musical fame. He landed at a country music bar patronized by bikers and meth dealers, winning a following with his upbeat version of country, and moved to larger venues where the audience came for punk-rock main acts. “There was a visceral release for us onstage,” he says. “Human beings respond to that, independent of genre.” Before long, he had a record deal and a blossoming career. “Art is a seed,” he says. “Some things are fastbearing, and other plants are a slow growth, but they’ll become the redwood forest, the sequoias, or the aspen. Don’t dismiss the thing that takes longer to germinate.” So what does that make Yoakam? “I’m probably just dandelions,” he says. “I go with the wind.”
scientific adviser
Ian Lipkin helped create the 2011 pandemic movie Contagion, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Telegraph (U.K.). The Columbia University infectious-disease expert served as scientific adviser to director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, and together they created a chillingly realistic portrayal of a deadly respiratory ailment that emerges from China and sweeps the world. For obvious reasons, the film is now having a second life on streaming. Having rejected a previous entreaty from a major Hollywood director, Lipkin says, he agreed to work with Soderbergh and Burns because they were “trying to build something that was going to represent the real risks of pandemics.” He spent six weeks on set, taking stars Kate Winslet and Jennifer Ehle into research labs, educating Burns about virology, even working on the script and the dialogue. Lipkin isn’t surprised by the film’s current popularity. “People are looking at it for clues about what’ll come next—to understand the nature of the public-health response.” He calls it “one of the things in my career I’m most proud of,” for its accurate rendering of science and refusal to offer “unrealistic panaceas.” And the movie did more than educate, he notes. “The number of applications for the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service went up after the film came out.”