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New York Times Writer Jenna Wortham: My Top Longreads of 2011

Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr.

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SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s everything, plus Doree flagged that amazing Kolker piece and Michelle laid claim to Paul Ford’s staggering essay on IVF. But these are the stories that I sent to my Kindle and the links that recurred with the most frequency in my drafts/Gchats folders on Gmail, so I think it’s safe to say that they are my top picks of 2011.

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• Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble is Different.” (Businessweek, April 14, 2011)

A cutting, high-level look at the current boomlet in the tech biz—the kind that makes you kick yourself till the end for not being smart enough to have pitched it yourself. Ashlee takes a step back from the funding frenzy, sky-high valuations and feverish IPO rumors to examine the current ad-think consuming the tech world. He asks, what if instead of focusing on getting people to click on ads, buy group coupons and digital goods for their virtual farms, our engineers and entrepreneurs were trying to solve big problems in health and science?

• Lev Grossman, “The Boy Who Lived Forever.” (Time, July 7, 2011) 

I adored this piece because it shed light on a very particular corner of the Web—fanfic—without falling into the clichéd trap of portraying the more obscure recesses of the Internet as a place only inhabited by cr33p3rs and neckbeards. Instead, Lev lightly celebrates the creativity of the subculture and the communities and alternative realities people craft around their favorite characters and books.

• Jessica Pressler, “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age.” (New York Magazine, Sept 18, 2011)

I couldn’t get enough of the vivid, and at times lurid, details in this profile of Diane Passage, Ken Starr’s fourth wife. I mean, this phrase alone: “when she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily,” hooked me, line and sinker. Plus who doesn’t love a sordid glimpse into an underbelly, especially one in New York? The sharp observations and imagery from the first few grafs make you feel like a fly on the wall of a party you didn’t want to go to in the first place but can’t wait to see how it all shakes out.

• David Kushner, “Murder by Text.” (Vanity Fair, November 27, 2011)

A heartbreaking read about the gruesome murder of a 18-year-old girl named Kim Proctor and the two teenaged boys who killed her and then bragged about it on World of Warcraft, which ultimately led to their arrest. Kusher smartly weaves the role of technology and the concept of (im)permanence online into the piece for a compelling narrative.

• Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant.” (The New York Times, June 22, 2011)

I thought this was one of the most important pieces published this year, along with “The Life of Illegal Immigrant Farmers,” for giving the touchy subject of immigration a living, breathing human face. I read this stunning graf at least a half dozen times:

“And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.”

Honorable Mention:

While I was waiting for my copy of Sullivan’s Pulphead to be delivered, I stumbled across the work of Matt Bell, and immediately devoured two of his Kindle shorts—“A Tree or a Person or a Wall” and “A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way” and could not put them down. For such a stark, minimalist writer, his pieces are so evocative and rich with imagery that its hard not to be sucked into them almost immediately.

I also thought that this year brought out some hilarious and clever writing that touched on the way we consume and use technology and how it’s shaping our interactions, culture and lives.

Here’s a quick n’ dirty rundown of a few faves:

• Katie Heaney, “Reading Between the Texts” (The Hairpin, June 16, 2011)

• Leigh Alexander, “Five Emotions Invented By The Internet” (Thought

Catalog, January 12, 2011)

• Frank Smith, “Will the Real Frank Smith Please Stand Up” (The Morning

News, March 25, 2011)

Clive Thompson, “On Secret Messages in the Digital Age” (Wired

magazine, Jan 31, 2011)

Jonah Lehrer, “How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect.”

(Wired.com, October 2011)

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

I used to think a union started like this: You round up all the hotheads, get them in one room, and storm the castle. Which would be great if it were true because then it would only take a couple of weeks out of people’s lives instead of years. First you have to build a good organizing committee. Ideally, that means getting people from all jobs and shifts, ethnicities, genders-about one person for every ten workers-so you can talk to each other in some kind of sane fashion. These were things I’d learned talking to union folks at the WTO protests and I wanted to pass them on. My plan, if you could call it one, was to get people together in a room and get out of the way. It wasn’t my place to weigh in on their future. But I had to find the people who could find the right people, not just anybody who was frustrated. They had to really love their jobs and love the company because those are the only people who would stick around to make it better. All of which meant that the people I was looking for were the ones who believed in Amazon and Bezos the most. But why would they talk to me? I was a temp.

“In the Wake of Protest: One Woman’s Attempt to Unionize Amazon.” — Vanessa Veselka, The Atlantic

See more #longreads about Amazon

Alexander Chee's Top 5 Longreads of 2011: #Fiction and #Nonfiction

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. (See more on his Longreads page.)

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My Top Fiction Longreads for 2011:

 Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2011: Beautiful, seemingly casual, smart and terrifying, it is the story of a man worried his child will grow up to be a killer. Gaitskill at her best.

• Justin Torres, “Reverting to a Wild State”, The New Yorker, August 1, 2011: What better could you hope for than a story that begins with a beautiful man in a diaper? And for money? 

• Lauren Groff’s “Above and Below”, The New Yorker (subscription required), June 13, 2011: A young woman who slides right out of the educated class into homelessness. 

• Deborah Eisenberg’s “Recalculating”, July 14, 2011, The New York Review of Books: If you hear people tell you about short stories that do what novels do, and you don’t believe it, read Eisenberg. This is one of those stories.

• Yang Sok-Il’s “In Shinjuku” at Granta Online, April 14, 2011: A rare glimpse of the life of a Japanese Korean from a writer who is largely unknown to us in the West for being under-translated.

My Top Nonfiction Longreads for 2011

• Porochista Khakpour’s “Camel Ride” at Guernica, Feb. 15, 2011: “I learned English through watching the Twilight Zone.” Porochista is a friend and also a favorite writer, and this, I think, is one of her best of the memoirs she is publishing.

• John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mr. Lytle” at the Paris Review is the record of an extraordinary apprenticeship. 

• Paul Ford’s “Facebook and the Epiphinator” at New York Magazine was a revelatory essay on Facebook’s impact on our lives but also our narratives. A lot of people try to write about “what Facebook means” but Paul really did it.

• Eileen Myles’ “Being Female”, at The Awl: ”When I think about being female I think about being loved.” Amazing. The sentences just blow everything up.

• Nell Boeschenstein’s “Now That Books Mean Nothing”, at The Morning NewsShe is a new favorite of mine, and this is a powerful essay about the author’s discovery that books have lost their ability to console her in difficult times.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Ruby Session was shaking as she read on. The year was 2007, and the letter was addressed to her son Timothy Cole. “I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of.”

Ruby sat down, stood up. A picture of Tim in a tuxedo, taken at his junior prom, smiled from the mantle. Before his trial the prosecutor had offered him a deal to plead to lesser charges. “Mother,” Tim had said, “I am not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do.” He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Thirteen years later, he died behind bars.

The Texas criminal-justice system has long had a harsh reputation, but it has drawn renewed scrutiny with Gov. Rick Perry’s run for president. During the past 11 years, Perry has presided over 238 executions, including the infamous case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was put to death based on a dubious arson investigation. In a September debate, Perry famously said that he had lost no sleep over the possibility of an innocent man being executed on his watch.

“No Country for Innocent Men.” — Beth Schwartzapfel, Mother Jones

See more #longreads on the death penalty

Joan Williams said it best herself when confronted with William Faulkner’s curious and cutting response to a book-jacket-blurb request from her editor. “It was obviously,” she said, “a very petulant kind of thing. Why couldn’t he have just given me a nice quotation?”

Yet she knew why. For five years, 1949 to 1953, Williams and Faulkner experienced an ongoing tug of war over the personal and professional. Faulkner tried the personae of mentor, father figure, and literary conduit in an effort to have a love affair that trumped the other roles. Williams at 20 was no match for Faulkner at 50. She knew she had much to gain in the literary world from his affection and attention — and much to learn from him about the craft — but her reluctance to have sex with Faulkner made a sustainable love affair impossible.

“Literary Transactions and Their Vicissitudes.” — E. C. McCarthy, Lisa C. Hickman, Los Angeles Review of Books

See more #longreads from LARB

Rolling Stone's Doree Shafrir: My Top Longreads of 2011

Doree Shafrir is an editor at Rolling Stone, where she hangs out with the Misfits on a regular basis. She can also be found at doree.tumblr.com.

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When I went back into my Kindle and my Twitter and Tumblr and email and all the other places where I noted or saved especially noteworthy stories from the past year, I found that many of them fell into certain categories. And so, here they are. (There are more than five stories, just because.)

TRUE CRIME

One of the best true crime pieces of the past year was that David Grann lawyer-in-Guatemala story, but everyone has already said that, so I am going to go with Robert Kolker’s “A Serial Killer in Common,” which is the devastating, horrifying story about the Long Island serial killer and the families of the women who were killed. Also, it’s not exactly true crime in the traditional sense of the term, but Kathy Dobie’s GQ story, “The Girl from Trails End,” about the 11-year-old girl in Texas who was gang-raped, repeatedly, was another really excellent crime-related story. Also, I would like someone to write a longer story about Aaron Bassler, the guy who killed two people in California and then went on the run in Mendocino County for a month before he was killed by police.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

I didn’t make a “trend piece” category because, ugh, but two stories from the past year that I thought really captured Our Moment were Molly Lambert’s “In Which We Teach You How to Be a Woman in a Boys’ Club” and Caroline Bankoff’s “On GChat”. Molly’s piece was so, so smart, and very true, and had lots of good advice, including to only apologize if you truly fucked up, and then only apologize once. Also, this part: “The only men who are turned off by ambition and success are men that are insecure about their own talents and success or lack thereof. You don’t really want to know those guys anyway, because they suck and they will constantly attempt to undermine you, and even if you are secure enough in yourself not to care it’s still really fucking annoying.” And technically, I first encountered Caroline’s piece at a reading in 2010, but since it wasn’t published for public consumption until 2011 (on Thought Catalog) I am counting it. It is a wonderful encapsulation of the ways technology has changed the ways that we interact with each other.

ADVICE

The Ask a Dude column in the Hairpin is the best advice column ever to exist in the world, if you are a woman in your 20s or 30s who is trying to navigate THIS THING CALLED LIFE, which, yes! It was really hard to pick a favorite, because they are all cocktails of good, which is how I once heard an editor at the magazine I work for describe a story. But I think perhaps “Questionably Tattooed Manchildren and Uses for Old Jars” is one of the Dude’s best, because it offers advice like this to a woman who is worried she is a drunken slut: “If all was right, there’d be a country & western singer named Tammy with a hit named ‘A Whiskey Dick or Two,’ but here we are, in a world where a woman calls herself a slut for sleeping with a number of partners that she’s not ashamed of and then apologizes for it to feminists. I don’t think I even understand where that puts us. Somewhere not good, I believe.”

THE CELEBRITY PROFILE

A bunch of people who’ve submitted these Longreads things have said that they deliberately didn’t put any of their friends on their lists, but I am going to break that non-rule because fuck it, my friends are good writers! Take, for example, this profile of Channing Tatum—“The Full Tatum”—that Jessica Pressler wrote for GQ. It is a really good celebrity profile. It is even a narrative, which most celebrity profiles are not, they are just, like, “It is 87 degrees in Los Angeles and Kim Kardashian is lying on a chaise longue by the pool at the Chateau Marmont, her white string bikini showing off her perfectly tanned, perfectly toned, perfectly I-survived-Kris-Humphries body, and she is very deliberately not eating the house salad that she so carefully ordered—’No olives, two tablespoons of walnuts and the dressing on the side’—20 minutes before,” and you’re like, TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW. (That lede could also work with Denise Richards/Charlie Sheen, or Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher, or Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise in 3 years. It’s all yours!) My other favorite celebrity profile from the past year was Lizzie Widdicombe’s “You Belong With Me,” a profile of Taylor Swift. She had so many great little details in there, including that Taylor’s father Scott wears tasseled loafers.

THE PERSONAL ESSAY

Pressler snaked me by choosing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Peyton’s Place,” which is this amazing piece about living in the house where they filmed One Tree Hill, so I am going to choose this weird, wonderful three-part thing that Clancy Martin wrote for the Paris Review about trying to get to New York to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock exhibit. It contains this paragraph:

“It’s starting to rain, I’m ten miles from home and I already recognize how eccentric, how unstable, how woebegone, how doomed this plan is; the roar of the highway is an echo of my sure failure, and I’m thinking about the trucker who’s too wise to take the little baby in Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when I hear, incredibly, like a promise from God—there will be many of these in the next twenty-four hours, but I don’t know it yet—the elongated throaty syllables of Lou Reed coming from an amiable-looking white truck with wide mirrors coming off its nose and bumpers that give it a kind of Disney Cars effect. In the movie, the trucks are always the good guys. And, better still, a middle-aged black man with a potbelly is pumping diesel into it, listening to one of the most white-boy songs of all time.”

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years ago to less than a tenth of it today. The pace has quickened markedly during the past decade. There are two reasons for the decline. One is greater productivity—the same dynamic that revolutionized agriculture and forced a majority of American farmers to look for work elsewhere. The other is globalization, which has sent millions of jobs overseas, to low-wage countries or those that have been investing more in infrastructure or technology. (As Greenwald has pointed out, most of the job loss in the 1990s was related to productivity increases, not to globalization.) Whatever the specific cause, the inevitable result is precisely the same as it was 80 years ago: a decline in income and jobs. The millions of jobless former factory workers once employed in cities such as Youngstown and Birmingham and Gary and Detroit are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers.

“The Book of Jobs.” — Joseph E. Stiglitz, Vanity Fair

See more #longreads about the economy

Putin had a kind word for Monson (“a real man”) and paid Yemelianenko the ultimate compliment of Russian masculinity, calling him a “nastoyashii Russki bogatyr”—a genuine Russian hero. As Putin spoke, and as the national audience watched, many in the crowd started to jeer and whistle. This had never happened to Putin before, not once in two four-year terms as President, not in three-plus years as Prime Minister. And yet now, having announced his intention to reassume the Presidency in March, possibly for another twelve years, he was experiencing an unmistakable tide of derision.

“The Civil Archipelago.” — David Remnick, The New Yorker

See also: “The Concealed Battle to Run Russia.” New York Review of Books, Dec. 2010

Writer Lev Grossman: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Lev Grossman writes about books and technology for Time magazine. He’s also the author of the bestselling novels The Magicians and The Magician King

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• “One Man’s Quest to Outrace Wind,” by Adam Fisher, Wired

Why do I never find stories like this? Probably because I’m not working as hard as Adam Fisher. Apparently there’s this whole subculture of dirt sailing: people who race wind-powered vehicles on land. Apparently this one guy announced that he’d figured out a way to build a dirt boat that, while sailing directly downwind, can go faster than the wind that’s propelling it. Impossible, right? This whole insular community of dirt sailers got up in arms about it. But no. It was not impossible. You just have to be really, really clever to figure it out.

• “Adventures in Depression,” by Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

Writing about depression is hard, for the simple reason that when you’re depressed you can’t write, because you feel worthless, and who would want to read something written by a worthless person? I don’t know who Allie Brosh is, but this hybrid essay — half words, half pictures — gets as close as anything I’ve ever read to describing it. 

“Ads of Dragon,” by James Maliszewski, Grognardia

I’m cheating a bit here, because this is a series of posts rather than one single longread, but it’s important that people know about Grognardia, because it is the shit. Maliszewski writes brilliant and incisive essays about old-school role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Most people who go down that rabbit hole lose the ability to write about gaming with any real perspective, because when you’re obsessed with something, you lose all perspective about it. (I speak as one has been down that hole.) Somehow Maliszewski hung onto his, and it shows in this glorious series, in which he analyzes a series of ads that appeared in the gaming magazine Dragon back in the 1980s. 

• “Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?” by Errol Morris, The New York Times

There isn’t anybody else quite like Errol Morris. I thought of him as a filmmaker before I started reading these essays that he posted on a New York Times blog. They’re not flashy writing, but his patient, unhurried, relentless pursuit of truth is a model for anybody who’s trying to tease apart a historical mystery crawling with ambiguity and unreliability. Here the mystery concerns Morris’s brother Noel, who went to MIT and was part of the very early computing scene in Cambridge the late 1960s, when the protocols of the proto-Internet were being hashed out. Morris’s brother died young, and Morris interviews his colleagues and goes through his notes to try to figure out whether he and his collaborator were the first people to use e-mail. I won’t spoil it for you.    

“Peyton’s Place,” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

Sullivan is my favorite magazine writer right now, bar none. Here he talks about the fact that his house was regularly used as a location for the filming of the soapy teen show One Tree Hill, and what that felt like. Which is something I would find inherently interesting anyway. The fact that Sullivan is the guy telling it and feeling makes it something more: An Important Fable for Our Time. Whatever Sullivan writes about automatically becomes a portal into the black soul of our stupid culture, and he gazes into it and somehow manages to remain calm and funny and smart while he reports back about what he sees. 

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times, Popular Mechanics, The Morning News, GQ, London Review of Books, plus a guest pick from writer Evan Hughes.