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What It's Like to Outrun Death: The Survival Story of a New Orleans Blues Legend

Barry Yeoman | The New New South, Creatavist | December 2013 | 52 minutes (13,100 words)

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. You can read a free excerpt below.

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and ebook, or you can purchase the story at Creatavist or Amazon.

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One

He stood at the kitchen window waiting. He had memorized everything around him: the pine walls, bare of wallpaper or even paint; the wardrobe where his widowed mother kept her churn for making buttermilk; the stove fueled by the firewood he cut each morning; the two coolers, one for dairy and the other for cakes and pies. He had branded them into his memory, these artifacts of a life that, after today, would no longer be his. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About

For four years now, the Longreads community has celebrated the best storytelling on the web. Thanks for all of your contributions, and special thanks to Longreads Members for supporting this service. We couldn’t keep going without your funding, so join us today.

Earlier this week we posted every No. 1 story from our weekly email this year, in addition to all of the outstanding picks from our Best of 2013 series. Here are 10 stories that we couldn’t stop thinking about.

See you in 2014. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: Here Is What Happens After You Write a New York Times Story About Lindsay Lohan

Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie

Stephen Rodrick | New York Times Magazine | January 2013 | 31 minutes (7,752 words)

 

Stephen Rodrick (@stephenrodrick) is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, contributing editor for Men’s Journal and author of The Magical Stranger.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: Award for Outstanding Reporting

Ryan Leaf’s Jailhouse Confessions, Written By His Cell Mate

John Cagney Nash | Playboy | September 2013 | 19 minutes (4,710 words)

 

Flinder Boyd (@FlinderBoyd) is a journalist for SB Nation, Sports on Earth, and the BBC among others.

Athletes and sports writers usually come from two completely different professional worlds and as a result there is often an emotional wall between the two of them. At times, on the page, it can almost read as if two are speaking vastly different languages.

The British journalist John Cagney Nash solved this problem by somehow landing himself in the same jail in Montana as Ryan Leaf, the one-time future of the NFL and now its biggest draft bust. Over the course of a few months the two became friends and Leaf was able to open up with his fellow inmate in a way we rarely get to read about.

For years since Leaf’s retirement he’s been seen as little more than a pathetic example for all that can go wrong with the draft. Thanks to Nash’s deft touch we’re able see him as human, and at times Leaf’s honesty is downright heartbreaking.

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Illustration by Jason Mecier

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The Problem with Colin Firth

Colin Firth goes all the way home to London but as soon as he gets there he realizes he forgot his Portuguese sex slave on the baggage carousel or something. So he abandons Christmas dinner with his loving family and flies back to France. The one expression of genuine love in this movie and Colin Firth peaces-out to go hump a stranger.

He shows up at Aurelia’s front door and starts yelling at her father in shitty Portuguese. He’s like, “I am here to ask your daughter for her hand in marriage,” and the dad is like, “Say what!?” because he thinks Colin Firth means his other daughter, who is fat and gross, and that would obviously makes no sense, because women who are slightly larger than some other women deserve to be alone forever unless they’re the size–6 kind of fake fat like Natalie. Then the dad offers to pay Colin Firth to take fat daughter off his hands. Colin Firth is like “Ew, no. I only want to purchase/marry HOT women I’ve never spoken to in my life.”

Once the truth gets sorted out, fat daughter says: “Father is about to sell Aurelia as a slave to this Englishman.”

FIRST SENSIBLE LINE ANYONE’S SAID FOR THIS ENTIRE MOVIE.

-A new holiday tradition is to read Lindy West on Love Actually, in Jezebel. Happy holidays from Longreads.

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Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: New Questions About a Legendary Tennis Match

The Match Maker

Don Van Natta Jr. | ESPN | August 2013 | 34 minutes (8,461 words)

 

Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

My story, The Match Maker, was online at ESPN.com only a few hours on Aug. 25 when I heard from a California man who shrugged at the possibility that tennis champ and American hustler Bobby Riggs had thrown the famous September 1973 Battle of the Sexes match. The man’s name is Russell Boyd, and he claimed Bobby Riggs had talked openly and repeatedly with him, back in June 1973, about his intention to lose his upcoming match against Billie Jean King at the Houston Astrodome. “I didn’t realize at the time that it was such a serious matter of him playing Billie Jean King,” Boyd, 56, told me, “and that he was actually expected to make an effort to win.” Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year

Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor?

Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969

 

Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page.

In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York City mayor’s race, I’ve probably reread it a dozen times; I’ve recommended it to college kids, writers of mine, fellow editors, and when Marshall Sella and I were working on our own story about Anthony Weiner’s tragicomic run, I thought about it every single damn day. My love of it is almost hard to explain, but: It’s an adventure. It starts in a leisurely and apathetic place, ends with a startling announcement, and in between twists and turns through gossip, memoir, poetry, politics, polemic. It’s beautiful; it’s funny; it’s angry; it’s self-lacerating; it looks at the city from 10,000 feet and then zooms in at the ice in a glass. Nowadays, most magazine features hit you with a nut graph somewhere near the bottom of the first section or the top of the second, and then spend 4,000 words fulfilling your exact expectations. But Breslin surprises, again and again. You don’t even know what the story is really about until you’ve read the last line.

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Appetite of Abundance: On the Benefits of Being Eaten

Photo by born1945

J.B. MacKinnon | Orion | July 2013 | 12 minutes (2,875 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.

Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: Story That Shouldn't Be Overlooked

Facebook Feminism: Like It Or Not

Susan Faludi | The Baffler | October 2013 | 36 minutes (9,021 words)

 

Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) teaches media studies and writes Scandals of Classic Hollywood for The Hairpin, amongst other things.

This essay is incendiary and incisive and just didn’t get the play it deserved: maybe because it was in the (excellent) Baffler, maybe because Faludi so handily eviscerated “Lean In” feminism, or maybe Facebook itself was pulling strings behind the curtain and hiding every time someone shared the piece. Feminism has never not been fraught with tensions, but Faludi illuminates, with devastating clarity, the classism and ignorance of “leaning in.”

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Photo: mwichary, Flickr

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Solving an Old Problem: Our College Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

If only all universities had someone like Jesse Flickinger to explain their research projects to the masses. Flickinger takes his readers on an intellectual adventure that begins in a Kabul café and ends in a library in Missoula. He describes the problem of creating a legal system for emerging nations and how the University of Montana became a home base for the solution: Legal Atlas. “Legal Atlas is a fusion of Wikipedia, Google Maps and tomes of law knowledge offered in a slick interface freely available through the internet,” Flickinger writes. A local company developed the platform and students research and input data into the atlas. It’s an ideal research project for a university. There are hundreds of similar activities going on at schools all over the country. We’d know all about them if they had a better explainer.

Solving an Old Problem: Mapping the Law

Jesse Flickinger | Montana Kaimin | November 22, 2013 | 11 minutes (2,545 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

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