What the Hell Are You Doing?!
‘I’m just Tess Vigeland. And I need to figure out how she’s remarkable.’
Our recent Longreads pick, Tess Vigeland’s speech at the World Domination Summit, is now up in video form. It’s our video pick of the day.
Our recent Longreads pick, Tess Vigeland’s speech at the World Domination Summit, is now up in video form. It’s our video pick of the day.

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:
Everett Cook, a rising senior at the University of Michigan, profiled former Wolverine and now NBA player Trey Burke last March. There are plenty of stories about athletic phenoms, but elite athletes are not the most innovative fodder. Cook used sophisticated storytelling techniques to reveal his subject. First, he told Burke’s story through his relationship with his father. And then he framed the profile around the father and his friends watching Trey play Penn State at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. (The setting is conflict enough.) Such a sophisticated structure is a high-level writing skill.
Everett Cook | The Michigan Daily | March 18, 2013 | 13 minutes (3,158 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.

This week’s Member Pick is from the new book by Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and a writer who’s been featured on Longreads frequently in the past.
This Town, published by Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, is Leibovich’s insider tale of life inside the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C., and how the social lives of political lifers, journalists and hangers-on complicate the truth about what really goes on in the capital. The prologue and first chapter, featured here for Longreads Members, take place at the funeral for NBC Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert.
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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad; photo from Wikimedia Commons

Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
In light of the recent Zimmerman trials, I’d like to share these four pieces. I’ve thought a lot about this blog post by Mary, who writes, “Another thing I’ve noticed is that people are more concerned with being the best ally than they are with the concerns/oppression of the marginalized group(s) that they’re allying with. When the focus becomes about you and your feelings instead of the people facing discrimination, you’re being a really shitty ally.”
Here are four pieces for you to ponder:
The first is Questlove’s response to the George Zimmerman verdict…
The second is a response to Questlove’s piece by Kim Foster, a white woman and mother living in Harlem.
The third is “Ally-phobia: The Worst of Best Intentions.”
And the fourth is “Why the Foster Article Exposes Our Racism.”
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Photo: Brennan Schnell

Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the St. Louis Riverfront Times. She is a proud alumnus of the Minneapolis City Pages.
More than you ever wanted to know about feral hogs and how to kill them. When federal agents are picking them off from helicopters, there’s obviously more at stake than just nuisance. Between the millions of dollars in damage and the idea of the creature as an ‘invasive species,’ I was tickled to death by the serious problem (and solution) posed by these animals, who are smart but ugly, therefore fair game for mass eradication. The issue is beautifully explained by Gwyneth Doland. This is, to me, a classic, successful alt-weekly story — take something that’s under the snout of normal people, zoom in, examine. ‘Some species just don’t play nice with others.’
Also, after a week of layoffs from some of the country’s bigger newspaper chains it is worth saying — support your local alternative newsweekly!

“I must admit that it was intended consciously as a social document. … [but] the storyteller’s first duty is to the story.”
-From the 1991 documentary “The Complete Citizen Kane,” on the Orson Welles masterpiece. The film features interviews with Welles from 1960 and 1982, as well as an interview with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, whose history of the film was published in 1971.
The Cinephilia and Beyond blog has a full list of “essential documentaries” on Orson Welles.

Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words)
Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison, by Sabine Heinlein.
Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. Read more…

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:
The Internet may have turned us all into self diagnosticians, but we still crave health guidance from the media. “Eat this, not that,” admonishes Dave Zinczenko. Exercise 30 minutes a day, three times a week. Or 10 minutes, three times a day. But writer Stephanie Maris suggests that it’s not just conflicting science that confuses us, it’s bad health reporting. In her compelling critique of health journalism, Maris identifies why readers love health and wellness news, and how journalists can sometimes confound more than elucidate.
“…[I]n many ways health reporting has come to mimic tabloid entertainment: stories on nutrition, fitness and lifestyle are ubiquitous and hard to sift through, which makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. The result is a cycle of (often inaccurate) “bad for you” and “next big thing” stories that risk discrediting the entire health beat. On top of that, in place of real health help, readers and viewers are left following a potentially harmful “Media Diet” based on miracle cures, fad diets, superfoods and food scares.”
Stephanie Maris | Ryerson Review of Journalism | Jan. 8, 2013 | 14 minutes (3,561 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.
Do you enjoy this service? You can support us by becoming a Longreads Member.
Today’s video pick is Modern Comedian’s short documentary on comedian Sara Schaefer, who fell deep into debt even while she was pursuing her dream career and earning two Emmys as a writer for Jimmy Fallon. (Schaefer now co-hosts the MTV series Nikki & Sara LIVE, which has its second season premiere on July 30.)
For further reading on debt from the Longreads archive:
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Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
The student journalist, the Afghani mother, the elderly custodian, the Chinese orphan boy: each of these pieces forces the reader to stop and consider the extraordinary stories of seemingly ordinary people.
Feature writing wizard DeGregory has found an incredible subject: the wonderful Mr. Newton, who has worked for over 84 years and hasn’t stopped yet.
Jessica Lum, photojournalist, understood the empathetic necessity of storytelling. She practiced her art until she died of cancer at age 25.
“We met when I was 15 and he was 7. Matthew was always ‘my little brother in China’ … But how can I pretend to really know what it was like to grow up in the situation he did?” Yellis tries to raise a troubled Chinese teen at his parents’ orphanage.
Delving into the daily lives of Afghani women, Chuang meets Amina, whose steadfastness saw her family through war, changing regimes and the disappearance of her youngest brother at the hands of KGB soldiers.
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Photo by Andrew Yellis
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