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Our Top 5 Longreads of the Weekfeaturing New York magazine, Washington Post, The Daily (RIP), Vanity Fair, The Guardian, fiction from The New Yorker and a guest pick by Reine Gammoh.

Longreads Best of 2012: Paige Williams

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Paige Williams is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose stories have been anthologized in five Best American volumes. She teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and edits Nieman Storyboard.

For elegance + acute observation in the service of theme

Belle Boggs’ “The Art of Waiting,” on fertility (Orion)

“The family as a socially isolating unit is an idea not limited to humans. In the wild, infants represent competition for resources, and it is not uncommon for a mother’s job to be primarily about hiding and protecting their infants from members of their own species. Jane Goodall observed chimpanzee mothers completely protecting their infants from contact with other nonsibling chimpanzees for the first five months of life, pulling their infants’ hands away when they reached for nearby chimps.”

And:

“Because we spend much of our young lives dramatizing and imagining ourselves as parents, it isn’t surprising that even the strongest of us let the body’s failure become how we define ourselves. But nature, which gives us other things to do, tells us otherwise. The feeling of grief subsides; we think through our options and make choices. We work, travel, find other ways to be successful. After completing The Waves, at forty-eight, Woolf writes of a feeling of intoxication that comes from writing well: 

Children are nothing to this.”

For unpretentious power + authorial restraint

Mark Warren’s “My Father’s Last Words,” on his father (Esquire)

“Of course, my father numbered his boys among the reprobates and never missed an opportunity to let us know it. He resented that we just assumed that we’d have stuff, like food and clothes. In the great ledger of material things, my family didn’t merit a mention. We had little to speak of, and as the youngest I got everything we did have last. It was just life and nobody complained. But compared with some of the boys I went to school with, we were absolutely prosperous. In my town, you showed yourself to be truly poor by showing up at school barefoot. And there were so many kids without shoes that we really didn’t think much of it. I remember one kid from my street vividly. Aiken was a fully muscled man at ten. Aiken was weathered at ten — steel-calloused hands, deep-set, weary eyes — looked like he punched a clock as a longshoreman just in time to make it to Mrs. Norris’s fifth-grade class every morning. Aiken had no shoes, and he wore the same clothes every day of the week. You’d see his mama out in the yard doing the wash on Sunday, and they’d start out clean on Monday, and by Friday they’d have fresh holes and be pretty ripe. But Aiken walked through the world unfazed by this, and even though we didn’t have a pot to piss in, either, I felt sorry for him all the same. In Aiken’s grim acceptance of the world and its privations, my father saw a lesson for me. When my brothers and I asked for extravagances, like shoes, Daddy would say, ‘You girls better marry rich wives, you’ve got expensive tastes.’ Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, surely this was meant affectionately! A little ribbing, to make men of us. But just to make sure that we knew he wasn’t joking in the slightest, he’d quickly add: ‘You’ll never amount to anything.’”

For vibrant wordplay and sentence structure

Karen Russell’s “The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador,” on the comeback of a torero after a near-fatal goring (GQ)

“Marques scoops his head toward Padilla’s face on the sandy floor, a move that resembles canine tenderness, as if he’s leaning down to lick him, but instead the bull drives his sharp left horn through the bullfighter’s jaw. When Marques tusks up, the horn crunches through Padilla’s skin and bone, exiting through his left eye socket. Cameras clock the instant that a glistening orb pops loose onto the matador’s cheek. A frightening silence descends on the crowd. Nobody knows the depth of the wound.

“Marques gallops on, and Padilla gets towed for a few feet, pulled by his cheek. He loses a shoe. Skin stretches away from his jawbone with the fragile elasticity of taffy. Then Padilla’s prone body is left in the bull’s dust. He springs up like a jack-in-the-box and hops around. His face is completely red. As the blood gushes down his cheek, he holds his dislodged eye in place with his pinkie. He thinks he must be dying. I can’t breathe. I can’t see.”

For exquisite reporting and detail

David Grann’s “The Yankee Comandante,” on the American expatriate William Morgan in revolutionary Cuba (The New Yorker)

“Her name was Olga Rodríguez. She came from a peasant family, in the central province of Santa Clara, that often went without food. ‘We were so poor,’ Rodríguez recalls. She studied diligently, and was elected class president. Her goal was to become a teacher. She was bright, stubborn, and questioning—as Rodríguez puts it, ‘always a little different.’ Increasingly angered by the Batista regime’s repressiveness, she joined the underground resistance, organizing protests and assembling bombs until, one day, agents from Batista’s secret police appeared in her neighborhood, showing people her photograph. ‘They were coming to kill me,’ Rodríguez recalls.

“When the secret police could not find her, they beat up her brother, heaving him on her parents’ doorstep ‘like a sack of potatoes,’ she says. Her friends begged her to leave Cuba, but she told them, ‘I will not abandon my country.’ In April, 1958, with her appearance disguised and with a tiny .32 pistol tucked in her underwear, she became the first woman to join the rebels in the Escambray. She tended to the wounded and taught rebels to read and write. ‘I have the spirit of a revolutionary,’ she liked to say.

“When Morgan met her, he gently teased her about her haircut, pulling down her cap and saying, ‘Hey, muchacho.’ Morgan had arrived at the camp literally riding a white horse, and she had felt her heart go ‘boom, boom, boom.’”

For humor + descriptiveness + a masterful sense of the absurd

Devin Friedman’s “The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy,” about the Vegas superclub Marquee (GQ)

“Going to a nightclub, like going on vacation, sometimes gives rise to this really stressful internal-feedback loop that initiates when some dark part of your brain transmits a pretty obvious question: ‘Am I having fun?’ Then: ‘Is this fun? What about that?’ Or, ‘Those people look like they’re having fun—are they pretending like I am?’ Or, ‘I should be having fun, but am I really? How about now? Or…now?’ And then this other part of your brain says, ‘Shut up, this is your dedicated night for fun, you paid all this money for it, and if you’re not having fun now, maybe you’re not capable of fun, so please for the love of God just shut up.’ ‘Okay. Okay… But how about now?’”

And:

“You can kind of see how the chemistry between Jason and Noah works. Jason is handsome and prone to fixing his hair while he speaks to you. He is just tan enough so that you wonder whether he is naturally that color. He’s superserious about electronic dance music and keeps the satellite radio in his Denali tuned to ‘Electric Area’ and presents as the kind of guy you want to be with on the night when occasion lands you at a fancy nightclub. It’s wrong to say that Noah is a lovable schlub, because he’s not that schlubby. I’m not implying that he isn’t handsome, though I am implying that he is bald and sweats more than Jason, and I don’t think he’s ever had a tan in his life. When he opens his mouth, accentwise, the Manhattan of the 1990s, of the Beastie Boys and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, comes out. Jason is pals with millionaire DJs from Amsterdam; Noah is friends with, like, Jay-Z and Paris Hilton. And also everyone. It’s just very, very easy to like him.”

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012

Longreads Member Exclusive: Deconstructing Mare Island

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This week, we have a Longreads Member Exclusive recommended by one of our members, Boston Review Web Editor David V. Johnson. His pick is Richard White‘s ”Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,” published in Boom: A Journal of California. Here’s an intro from David:

Eureka! Boom: A Journal of California launched in the Spring of 2011. The quality of writing and artwork has been absolutely superb. There are so many articles I could recommend, including one by the aforementioned Solnit, but I was especially captivated recently by ‘Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,’ a piece on the Carquinez Strait by American West historian and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient Richard White. Before reading the story, I had experienced the Strait exactly the way White says most Californians do: by driving over it. Little did I know that in that body of water and its environs you can trace the rise and fall of California and the nation.

You can read an excerpt here.

p.s. You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Photo Credit: Jesse White

Longreads Best of 2012: Edith Zimmerman

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Edith Zimmerman is founding editor of The Hairpin and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. She’s also written for GQ, Elle, The Awl and This American Life

I’m not a doctor, but … (always a confidence-inspiring way to start a sentence!), these pieces on healthcare were two of the best articles I read this year.

Atul Gawande’s “Two Hundred Years of Surgery,” New England Journal of Medicine

I like everything by Atul Gawande, who is somehow both an accomplished surgeon and a New Yorker staff writer—I don’t know if I’d rather be his mother, wife, or patient, although I would DEFINITELY not want to be his daughter. (“Hey Dad, I just got eight retweets for my joke about yogurt, are you proud?”) Anyway, this piece was a fascinating look at the history of surgery, told with warmth and humor.

Michael Wolff’s “Let My Mother Die,” New York magazine

On the current state of end-of-life care in America, and how it can and should be improved. One of the most affecting, excellent articles I’ve ever read.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012


(Photo by Victor G. Jeffrys II)

Longreads Best of 2012: Kiera Feldman

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Kiera Feldman is a reporter for The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. She wrote “Grace in Broken Arrow” for This Land Press, which was featured on Longreads in May.

I’m of the belief that a good murder story should put you out of commission for a while. There is a storyworld to journey into, and it is a doozy. But most of what we get on a day-to-day basis is just cheap entertainment: lurid play-by-plays and gleeful reveling in the perpetrator’s villainy. In one of my favorite murder stories of 2012, Vanessa Veselka writes, ”It seems our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims.” The unifying theme of my 2012 picks is simply that these pieces honor the stories of the people who were wronged. 

1. “The Truck Stop Killer,” by Vanessa Veselka (GQ)

2. “A Daughter’s Revenge” by Robert Kolker (New York magazine)

3. “The Innocent Man” (parts I and II) by Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly)

4. “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama” by Tom Junod (Esquire) 

5. “The Throwaways” by Sarah Stillman (The New Yorker)


Notable mentions

“The Hit Man’s Tale” by Nadya Labi (The New Yorker)

Delving into a murderer’s mind, not for kicks but for understanding

“After the Massacre” by Lee Hancock (Dart Society)

The long view of Fort Hood, as seen by both the victims’ families and the shooter’s family

“Los Tocayos Carlos” by James S. Liebman, Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White, and Daniel Zharkovsky (Columbia Human Rights Law Review)

An anatomy of a wrongful execution

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012

Sam Mullet, an Amish sect leader from Bergholz, Ohio, was convicted of hate crimes for his role in an odd string of beard-cutting attacks last year, and was accused of sexually preying on women and tormenting men in his community. What led up to the attacks?

According to Mullet, the violent beard-clipping spree against outsiders began with an incident at a large Amish-run machine sale in Geauga County, Ohio. One of Mullet’s nephews, who lived at Bergholz and was part of the community, was mocked by his own parents — Mullet’s sister and brother-in-law, both defectors from Bergholz — for being, essentially, a beardless sissy.

‘If God was with you, your beard would not have been cut,’ the father, Martin Miller, told his son, Allen Miller. ‘If God is with me, my beard will not be cut.’

‘You said a mouthful,’ Allen said. ‘And if that ever happens, you know it’s true.’

Mullet recalled hearing about the heated exchange when the Miller kids returned home that night. ‘We talked about it,’ he said.

Perhaps the father’s boast was too enticing — within a matter of weeks, Allen and several of his siblings and their spouses went to the home of Martin and Barbara Miller and cut his beard and her hair. ‘God is not with you! God is not with you!’ Allen shouted at his parents after the attack.

“A Bishop Behind Bars.” — M.L. Nestel and Jebediah Reed, The Daily

Longreads Best of 2012: The New Yorker's David Grann

David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.  

I am never sure how to choose the “best” story as there are too many. But here’s a list of some of the most notable and memorable stories I read in 2012. Pamela Colloff’s two-part series, “The Innocent Man,” which appeared in Texas Monthly, was one of the best crime stories—and, indeed, best pieces of journalism in any category—that I read. Many of my favorite longreads are works of history, and, in that category, I would include two notable pieces published in the magazine that I work for, The New Yorker: they are Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition,” a book excerpt that details, through the eyes of Lyndon Johnson, the terrifying day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; and Jill Lepore’s “The Lie Factory,” which chronicles the first political consulting firm in the United States, and helps explain everything that is rotten about our politics today.

Finally, I would include a category for the best longreads from the vault—those long ago published pieces that you suddenly discover or rediscover. This year, I read two remarkable pieces in this category. One was James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” which originally appeared in Harper’s, in 1955; it’s the kind of essay that is almost no longer done, and that uses autobiography to tell the story of a nation. The other old piece was David Foster Wallace’s “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” published in 1994, which begins as a predictable takedown review of Austin’s memoir and then becomes a totally unexpected meditation on the nature of athletic greatness and storytelling.


Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012

On the 1962-1963 printers strike in New York that effectively shut down the seven biggest newspapers in the city, killed four of them, and made names for writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron:

A city without The New York Times inspired rage and scorn, ambivalence and relief. A ‘Talk of the Town’ item in The New Yorker lamented a weekend without the ‘fragrant, steamy deep-dish apple pie of the Sunday Times.’ James Reston—pillar of the Establishment, Washington bureau chief and columnist for the Times, and intimate of the Sulzberger family, to whom he directed a controversial entreaty to use non-union shops—was allowed to read his column on New York’s Channel 4 in early January 1963: ‘Striking the Times is like striking an old lady and deprives the community of all kinds of essential information. If some beautiful girl gets married this week, the television may let us see her gliding radiantly from the church. But what about all those ugly girls who get married every Sunday in the Times?’

A city without newspapers was a city in which civic activity was impeded, as two out-of-work Times reporters hired by the Columbia Journalism Review soon documented. Without the daily papers, the Health Department’s campaign against venereal disease was ‘seriously impaired.’ So was the fight against slumlords: ‘There’s a distinct difference,’ the city’s building commissioner said, ‘between a $500 fine and a $500 fine plus a story in the Times.’ The New York chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality discovered that, without newspaper attention, its boycott of the Sealtest Milk Company was considerably undermined. The newspaper strike, the C.J.R. study concluded, had ‘deprived the public of its watchdog.

“The Long Good-Bye.” — Scott Sherman, Vanity Fair

Longreads Best of 2012: Wired's Mat Honan

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Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired’s Gadget Lab.


Best story about a monkey that’s really about the role of government that’s really about nature’s place in the modern world that’s actually, maybe, really just about a monkey.

“What’s a Monkey to Do in Tampa?” (Jon Mooallem, New York Times Magazine)

This is the story I’ve linked and forward more than any other this year. I just loved this damn funny, poignant narrative about a renegade macaque monkey on the loose in Tampa, the people trying to catch him, and the others who want to let him remain wild and free, if lonely, among the billboards and greenways of Tampa. 

The citizenry of Tampa Bay was adamantly pro-monkey. People had long been abetting the animal, leaving fruit plates on their patios. A few people, one F.W.C. officer told me, called the agency’s monkey hot line to report that they’d seen the macaque several hours or even a couple of days earlier—offering totally useless intelligence, in other words, presumably just to stick their thumbs in the government’s eye. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay, as people called it, had very quickly become a celebrity. 



Best Adventure Story That Descends into Madness 

“The Last Stand of John McAfee” (Joshua Davis, Wired)

I continue to be fascinated by the John McAfee train wreck. I’ve known the McAfee antivirus founder casually online for several years, and wrote about him when his compound was raided by the Belize Gang Suppression Unit this past Spring. But that was just the carrot top. My colleague Josh Davis spent the five months this year interviewing McAfee to file this amazing report on a millionaire gone South. 

McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity, his light blue eyes sparkling. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia. “Let’s put the gun down,” I tell him. I’d come here to investigate why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure. But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do a demonstration?” He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver and spins the cylinder. “This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head. My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit. “We don’t have to do this.” “I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. 



Best Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

“We Are Alive: Bruce Springsteen at Sixty-Two” (David Remnick, The New Yorker)

I’m not sure what to say about this other than it’s a great read and BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE!!!

Springsteen came to glory in the age of Letterman, but he is anti-ironical. Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. He makes you wonder if it is harder to play the riffs for “Street Fighting Man” or to dangle a cigarette from his lips by a single thread of spit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. There always comes a moment in a Springsteen concert, as there always did with James Brown, when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his cape bearer, the aide who would enrobe him and hustle him offstage. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then, regaining consciousness, shakes off the sweat—No! It can’t be!—and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas. “I want an extreme experience,” he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!


Best Story About Math

“The Man Who Broke Atlantic City.” (Mark Bowden, The Atlantic)

Everyone has a fantasy about beating the house at a casino. (No? Just me? Okay, then.) And that’s because it basically never happens. Except to this guy. Don Johnson. (No. Not that Don Johnson.) Johnson beat not just one house, but three—The Tropicana, Ceaser’s and Borgata in Atlantic City, taking home $15 million from the blackjack tables in the process. Mark Bowden has the story of how he pulled it off. 

But two years ago, Johnson says, the casinos started getting desperate. With their table-game revenues tanking and the number of whales diminishing, casino marketers began to compete more aggressively for the big spenders. After all, one high But two years ago, Johnson says, the casinos started getting desperate. With their table-game revenues tanking and the number of whales diminishing, casino marketers began to compete more aggressively for the big spenders. After all, one high roller who has a bad night can determine whether a casino’s table games finish a month in the red or in the black. Inside the casinos, this heightened the natural tension between the marketers, who are always pushing to sweeten the discounts, and the gaming managers, who want to maximize the house’s statistical edge. But month after month of declining revenues strengthened the marketers’ position. By late 2010, the discounts at some of the strapped Atlantic City casinos began creeping upward, as high as 20 percent.


Best Story About Race in Modern America

“Fear of a Black President” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)

I’m aware of the disconnect of a well-off, culturally elite, Left coast-dwelling, white guy picking a “best” story about race relations in modern America. So let me say, in a year when Trayvon Martin was needlessly shot dead and when race was an oft-used political poison during the election, this was the story (along with Kiese Laymon’s “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”) that made me pause and think about race. “Fear of a Black President” is a brutal and depressing read and yet also a vital one. It’s also story that I think will stand the test of time. Ta-Nehisi Coates essay will be one that we look back on, in years to come, to understand where we were as a culture in 2012. And finally from a purely stylistic point, I found the deft touch with which he lands the closing paragraphs, after such a sprawling essay, both inspiring and intimidating. If only I could write so well.

In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012


(Photo: Jon Snyder)

A writer visits the home of Bryan Saunders, an artist known for his self-portraits created under the influence of a variety of drugs:

We turn to the next one. ‘Whoa,’ I say. This one could not be less Xanax-like. The drawing is spindly and paranoid, and the page is patterned with real-life bullet holes. They pepper Bryan’s stomach and neck. I ask Bryan how they got there and he explains that he used a gun borrowed from a friend. He propped up the page from the sketchbook and repeatedly shot it. ‘I remember bouncing into the walls like a fly going bong, bong, bong,’ he says. The drug that elicited this reaction was called Geodon.

‘Geodon?’ I say.

Bryan Googles it. ‘It’s for symptoms of schizophrenia,’ he reads, ‘so it’s an anti-psychotic agent, I guess.’

‘Did you get it from somebody with schizophrenia?’ I ask.

‘No, I got it from a doctor,’ Bryan says. And this is when Bryan tells me the other way he acquires many of his drugs. He sometimes visits psychiatrists, tells them about the art project, and asks them for ‘samples of some pain pill or sedative I’ve never tried. I say, ‘Can you write me a prescription for just one so I can do my drawing?’ And I take my book with me and show them my art project. And they always give me some crazy, crazy anti-psychotic pill instead.’

“Bryan Saunders: Portrait Of The Artist On Crystal Meth.” — Jon Ronson, The Guardian