Author Archives

Longreads
The staff of Longreads.

Featured: TMN Headlines, The Morning News’s daily news feed. See their #longreads picks here.

A former employee’s story of working inside the Sotheby’s auction house:

Hired as a researcher, I was assigned the task of going through the catalogues raisonnés of the Contemporary Art department’s top-grossing artists—Warhol, Koons, Prince, Richter, Rothko—and determining the whereabouts of every piece that had ever come onto the global market. The Excel spreadsheets I worked on each day (column 1: image, column 2: title, column 3: year, column 4: cataloguing, column 5: present owner) would serve to expedite the future searches of collectors, who might want, say, a big, mostly purple Richter from the mid-’80s. Sometimes a painting was in a museum (the auction houses hate this because it makes the work more or less permanently priceless). Other times, a prominent collector was listed as the work’s owner. Usually, though, I was trying to track down pieces in anonymous private collections. Sometimes a city or country was provided, unhelpfully. Private Collection, France. Or more often than not: Private Collection, Liechtenstein.

“On the Market.” — Alice Gregory, n+1

See also: “How to Make It As An Artist In New York 101.” — Leon Neyfakh, New York Observer, Nov. 3, 2009

What are the Gawker editors reading? Here’s their new Longreads page, with picks from The Hairpin, Warscapes, The New Yorker, plus more.

How did a blackjack player manage to win $15 million from Atlantic City casinos over the course of several months?

As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.

He was neither nervous nor excited. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He is a veteran player. Little interferes with his concentration. He doesn’t get rattled. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold.

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

See also: “The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High.” — Jay Caspian Kang, The Morning News, Oct. 8, 2010

"Why’s This So Good?" No. 33: Michael Paterniti's Painted Ghosts

Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.

This week: Thomas Curwen takes a look at Michael Paterniti’s “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy,” which was originally published in Esquire in July 2000.

The opening sequence of “The Long Fall” is a mere 500 words and, in my mind, an incantation of Gardner’s dream, one that stunningly hinges halfway through upon a couple making love (no better image of human vulnerability) seconds before the plane hit the ocean.

Before this image: a series of stills introducing Peggy’s Cove. After this image: the gathering momentum of the disaster with its disorienting and sinister intrusion upon daily life when out of the low ceiling of clouds comes first a sound – the first suggestion of a plane (“the horrible grinding sound of some wounded winged creature”) – and then silence, then an explosion and the backstory.

“Why’s This So Good?” No. 33: Michael Paterniti’s Painted Ghosts

The story of “the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker”:

The longer we sat in the small, musty room, the more the tempered side of Bout’s personality receded. I asked whether he felt any remorse. “I did nothing in my mind that qualifies as a crime,” he replied. “Sure, I was doing transportation of arms,” he said. “But it was occasionally. Three hundred and sixty days were normal shipments. For five days, I shipped arms and made a couple of hundred thousand dollars.” (Mirchev, by contrast, recalls a period of “almost daily flights” for UNITA.)

“Disarming Viktor Bout.” — Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker

See also: “Glock: America’s Gun.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, Jan. 14, 2011

A journalist’s lessons from two years working for Patch, AOL’s hyperlocal web experiment. Editors started with autonomy and generous budgets, but they were always understaffed and found little support from sales teams:

In addition to the editorial and volunteer work, we fought to get our sites noticed—on and off the clock. The marketing dollars that we were given, if any, usually came with the understanding that we would be manning booths at community events, or taking the lead in finding sponsorship opportunities, like supporting the local hayride or Little League team.

It seemed I could control every aspect of my site’s being, but making it sustainable was out of my grasp. And for me, it was aggravating to know that my site was not profitable.

“The Constant Gardener.” — Sean Roach, Columbia Journalism Review

See also: “The Human Blog.” — Emily Nussbaum, New York magazine, Oct. 1, 2006

Quick note: We’re excited to announce that longtime Longreader Jodi Ettenberg (@legalnomads) has joined Longreads as a contributing editor!

Roger Fidler was a head of innovation for Knight-Ridder who convinced his company to let him set up a lab in the early 1990s to explore the creation of tablet computers. They were next door to a lab owned by Apple:

Fidler smiles through a scruffy gray Jobsian beard. He has known the answer for a long time. In 1994, while running a lab dreaming up the future of newspapers, Fidler starred in his own video demonstrating a prototype he cooked up that was remarkably like the iPad — black, thin, rectangular, with text and video displayed on-screen.

A narrator described technology that at the time sounded like science fiction: “Tablets will be a whole new class of computer. They’ll weigh under two pounds. They’ll be totally portable. They’ll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, video, audio and graphics together. . . . We may still use computers to create information but will use the tablet to interact with information — reading, watching, listening.”

“For Tablet Computer Visionary Roger Fidler, a Lot of What-Ifs.” — Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post

See also: “The Tablet.” — John Gruber, Daring Fireball, Dec. 31, 2009

Featured: Marcus Sortijas, writer, editor and WordPress specialist. See his story picks from The Atlantic, The San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, plus more on his #longreads page.