Search Results for: Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Red, White, and Bruised

Kyle Swenson | Longreads | July 2016 | 14 minutes (3,440 words)
My hometown isn’t very good at stomaching bad news. The word on Tamir landed on an icebox Monday afternoon deep into December. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office must have been watching the calendar—and the Doppler radar. The announcement arrived in the patch of dead static between Christmas and New Year’s when most of the country is unplugged or has hit the mental snooze button. As Prosecutor Timothy McGinty started his press conference, a perfect storm of human error, a tragic accident, winter rain began soaking the city. That night, spot protests were small in number. But the word went out: tomorrow afternoon, downtown, be there. Read more…
Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction

The National Book Awards, presented by the National Book Foundation, “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America.” There are four categories: fiction, nonfiction, “young people’s literature,” and poetry. Several of this year’s nominees have been featured on Longreads before (see: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson, Noelle Stevenson), and this reading list features the five nonfiction nominees. The winner will be announced on November 18, 2015.
1. The Radical: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
“The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, July 2015)
“Letter to My Son,” in The Atlantic, adapted from Between the World and Me
You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Legacy of Structural Neglect in Inner Cities

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is being published this week and examines what it means to black in present-day America.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells has a profile of Coates in New York magazine. Coates has made a name for himself by pointing out how structural racism continues to pervade in the U.S. An example of this can be seen in a debate between Coates and Mitch Landrieu at the Aspen Ideas Festival:
The next morning, Coates debated Mitch Landrieu, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, on the sources of American violence. The exchange was moderated by Coates’s friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg. The mayor — shaven-headed, coachlike — had made crime in black neighborhoods a political focus. It was an issue on which he was accustomed to being the good guy. The search engine Bing had sponsored an app that allowed audience members to rate the speakers in real time. Landrieu said he hoped they liked him. Coates said, a little masochistically, he hoped they hated him.
Landrieu seemed mindful of all the ways a well-meaning white liberal in a situation like this might embarrass himself. He knew all the statistics about the scale of murders in African-American communities and mentioned them; he stated the problem in a way that focused on blacks as victims of violence rather than perpetrators; he told the audience that he had recently personally apologized for slavery; he said the core issue was “a pattern of behavior that has developed amongst young African-American men since 1980.” Coates asked if the change in 1980 wasn’t simply the increased prevalence of handguns. Landrieu said that was part of it. Then he talked about personal responsibility. “If you knocked me off the chair last week, that’s on you, but if you come back and I’m still on the floor this week, that’s on me.”
“It is my fault if I knocked you off the chair,” Coates said.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” said the mayor.
“No, it’s never not my fault that I knocked you off the chair.”
Landrieu started to talk about “black-on-black crime,” then retreated, saying he might be using the wrong words. Coates said the term didn’t offend him: “I think it’s actually inaccurate.” The plain fact, he said, was that when black people killed one another, the victims were their neighbors. They didn’t kill their neighbors because they were black. Inner-city violence, he said, had everything to do with the legacy of structural neglect in the inner city and nothing at all to do with culture. Even from the cheap seats, it was clear that Landrieu was struggling, that there was some turn in the politics of race that he had not fully comprehended, some way in which the old Clintonite phrasings were failing. In their place was a more radical language, of structuralism and supremacy. Now that language has a place in Aspen.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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The search for an amateur philosopher who anonymously paid university professors thousands of dollars to review his work:
The institute’s letter claimed that a “very substantial sum” had been earmarked to help contribute to “the revival of traditional metaphysics.” Given the number of philosophers involved, that sum was at least in the neighborhood of $125,000. Who could afford to spend that much money on philosophy? And of those who could, who would want to? No one had a clue.
To judge from both the reviewer’s contract and “Coming to Understanding” itself, the institute meant business. For one thing, the manuscript, signed by one A.M. Monius, suggested the handiwork of a serious thinker—not a prankster. “It didn’t seem like a joke,” Zimmerman says. ‘“t wasn’t that funny. It was clearly the work of a fairly able writer—a smart person, one capable of making some gross philosophical errors while at the same time having some clever ideas.”
“The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician.” — James Ryerson, Lingua Franca (2001)
See also: “Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Times, May 13, 2010
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[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country:
“A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ the man asked. ‘What are you doing to this country?’ The executive turned out to be an engineering consultant whom Ghonim pegged at around 50; he might have been Ghonim himself born twenty years earlier. Ghonim is both an interested listener and not great at getting out of conversations, and so he spent the flight absorbing his seatmate’s story: The older man had supported the protests at Tahrir Square and experienced ‘the epitome of happiness’ when Mubarak had been forced down on February 11. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it.
“The Lonely Battle of Wael Ghonim.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York magazine
Writer Andrew Rice: My Top Longreads of 2011

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. (See recent longreads by Rice.)
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Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and listed in no particular order. Full disclosure: I’ve written for several of the publications cited on this list, but I’ve excluded from consideration any writer with whom I’m personally acquainted.
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“The Romney Economy,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, 10/23/11
When it comes to degree of difficulty, delivering an interesting Mitt Romney profile is like nailing a reverse four-and-a-half somersault. But this story succeeded—not the least of which due to its brilliant packaging, which included a now-infamous cover photo of Romney with cash coming out of his suit pockets and the accompanying headline: “Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy.” Written without the (perhaps dubious) benefit of an interview with Romney, the story nonetheless managed to summon up the Republican candidate’s history of creative destruction, and tied that to the big story of the moment, the Occupy Wall Street protests. If Romney ends up becoming the Republican nominee, as still seems likely, the themes of Wallace-Wells’ profile will likely define the coming political year.
“How to be Good,” Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, 9/5/11 (sub. req.)
Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit argues, MacFarquhar writes, that “personal identity is not what matters.” But a profile is, by definition, an evocation of a person’s identity. How do you fulfill the requirements of the form on Parfit’s own, rather forbidding, terms? MacFarquhar didn’t make use of any scenes, or quotes of the traditional “he said” variety, conveying Parfit as a sort of disembodied intelligence. By all rights, this experiment should have been about as interesting to read as, well, a philosophy textbook. But the power of Parfit’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and ethics—and MacFarquhar’s skill at conveying them colloquially—made the piece sing to me.
“The God Clause,” Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek, 9/1/11
Are you interested in reading about a shadowy industry that attempts to predict and profit from gigantic, multibillion-dollar disasters? Great—me too. Now that I’ve got you interested, I will disclose that this article is actually about the reinsurance industry. This is the bait-and-switch trick that Greeley pulls off admirably in this piece. This was the cover story for Businessweek’s 9-11 anniversary issue, and aided by some very good cover art—something the magazine has been justly praised for lately—the piece managed to tell its readers a story that touched on the past while telling them something new.
“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 5/23/11 (sub. req.)
A detective story masquerading as a celebrity profile—or maybe it’s the other way around?—this was in an issue that kind of hung around on my endtable for a few months before I got around to sticking it into my bag for a long plane flight. Then it completely sucked me into its world. I won’t even pretend that I’m young enough to care about the rap collective Odd Future, or the fate of its missing member Earl Sweatshirt, but the outcome of this story, which I won’t spoil, offered an (ahem) oddly plaintive reminder that so many of our musical idols are, after all, just kids.
“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine, 6/2/11
This was my absolute favorite story of the year. Journalism from Africa often conveys the continent in broadly collective terms: tribes rival with one another, rebels fight the government, the downtrodden suffer or rise up. Bearak, who used to be stationed in the Times’ Johannesburg bureau, took one of those distressing mass phenomena that fill the inside pages of every day’s newspaper—an outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa’s township slums—and gave the story a terrible specificity. I particularly admired the way Bearak dissected the chance intersections and misunderstandings that led to a lynching, and dispassionately explained the cosmological worldview of the victim’s family about his death. In the end, Bearak resists the natural tendency to isolate a single villain and hold that person up to condemnation, despite the murky evidence, because that’s what the mob did, albeit in an incomparably more brutal fashion.
Bonus: Longreads Logrolling List
I’m lucky enough to be friends with a bunch of really talented writers, and it seems a shame to exclude them simply on the grounds of our acquaintance. So, here’s a list of really great articles written this year by people that I happen to know and like. You can take these endorsements with a grain of salt, of course, but I urge you to click and judge for yourself.
“Getting Bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, 8/8/11
The best account, so far, of the most stunning news event of this year.
“The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox,” Nathaniel Rich, Rolling Stone, 6/24/11
I was fascinated by this lurid miscarriage of justice. This story went way beyond the tabloid narrative of the persecuted innocent abroad.
“The Idealist,” Jason Zengerle, The New Republic, 1/13/11
A rising Democratic star finds his life derailed when he gets enmeshed in a bizarre political dirty tricks plot.
“Cheating, Incorporated,” Sheelah Kolhatkar, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2/10/11
The real, profitable and Canadian (!) company behind those lubricious Ashley Madison TV ads.
“The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 12/8/11; “The Casino Next Door”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 4/21/11
These two stories made me ache with jealousy.
“The Gulf War,” Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 3/14/11
The Gulf oil spill turned out to be less overwhelmingly catastrophic than some doomsayers predicted, but it still left behind some troubling lessons. This is the story of a disaster that happened beneath the surface, and in conveying that narrative with great depth and nuance, the story pulls off a truly difficult feat.
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Marty Peretz in Exile
In September, writing on his New Republic blog The Spine, Peretz homed in on a familiar villain: Islamic terrorists who target other Muslims. “Frankly,” he wrote, “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” He got himself wound up: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” Nicholas Kristof began his Sunday New York Times column by denouncing the post; Peretz’s sentiments, he wrote, showed how “venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become.”
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