Author Archives

Longreads
The staff of Longreads.

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from London Review of Books, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Orion Magazine, and a guest pick from arts journalist Suzi Steffen.

Remembering “Rapper’s Delight” producer Sylvia Robinson, who died yesterday.

“He would say something every now and then, like ‘Throw your hands in the air,’ and they’d do it. If he’d said, ‘Jump in the river,’ they’d have done it.” Inspiration struck. “A spirit said to me, ‘Put a concept like that on a record and it will be the biggest thing you ever had.’”

“Hip-Hop Happens.” — Steven Daly, Vanity Fair, 2005

See more #longreads from Vanity Fair

“The real hourly median wage in New York between 1990 and 2007 fell by almost 9 percent. Young men and women aged twenty-five to thirty-four with a bachelor’s degree and a year-round job in New York saw their earnings drop 6 percent. Middle-income New Yorkers—defined broadly by the FPI as those drawing incomes between approximately $29,000 and $167,000—experienced a 19 percent decrease in earnings.”

“The Reign of the One Percenters.” — Christopher Ketcham, Orion Magazine

See another of Christopher Ketcham’s #longreads: “Meet the Man Who Lives on Zero Dollars,” DETAILS, July 2009

Featured Longreader: Amy Hordes of Phaidon Press. See her story picks from the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic and more on her #longreads page.

“Some people think that arresting Bosco would unravel the peace deal between Congo and Rwanda,” he says. “I think that that’s not true. You could certainly make a case that arresting him could be stabilizing.” He’s divisive within the former CNDP. He’s become an incredibly powerful mineral smuggler, the cause of much of Congo’s conflict. Also: “He’s a living insult to international justice, and the fact that he wines and dines next to the largest peacekeeping mission in the world in full sight? And everybody knows where he is, and logistically speaking, he would not be very difficult to arrest.”

“I Can Find an Indicted Warlord. So Why Isn’t He in The Hague?” — Mac McClelland, Mother Jones

See more #longreads from Mother Jones

“Which city do you pity most?” I ask just before the elevator doors close. 

They laugh and in unison say, “Vallejo!”

“California and Bust.” — Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

See more #longreads from Michael Lewis

[Fiction]

One time we roadtripped across the country with Animal Brooks, and he almost got run over by a pickup truck partway through Alberta. It was me and my twenty-year-old girlfriend Vic and him, him in his cadpat jumpsuit, Vic in her flannel logger coat and her neon hair that glowed like a bush-lamp. We’d known Animal since grade school: the north-born shitkicker, like Mick Dundee. A lone ranger, or something. Then in 2002 the three of us crammed into his ‘67 Camaro to tear-ass down the Trans-Canada at eighty miles an hour. Vic and me had a couple hundred bucks and time to kill before she went back to university.

“The Dead Roads.” — D.W. Wilson, The Guardian, BBC National Short Story award winner

See more fiction #longreads from Pen/O. Henry award winners

“He felt something leaving his body. He felt forgiveness. What had been pure fear, pent up for years, was now compassion. He didn’t hate Mark Stroman. He pitied him. Thinking of this man sitting in a prison cell, counting down the days he has left on this planet, he wondered if he could help him in some way. He remembered what the prosecutor had told him, and he didn’t want to break the law, but Bhuiyan wanted to talk with the man. He wanted to tell the monster haunting his dreams that he had forgiven him.”

“Could You Forgive the Man Who Shot You in the Face?” — Michael J. Mooney, D Magazine

See more #longreads from Michael J. Mooney

“This should have been Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s moment in the sun. But within days, researchers began to question Wolfe-Simon’s methodology and conclusions. Many of them cast aside traditions of measured commentary in peer reviewed periodicals and voiced their criticism directly on blogs and Twitter. Then, as the conflict spilled into the mainstream, the scientific community witnessed something few would have predicted: meaningful public engagement over a serious scientific issue.”

“Scientist in a Strange Land.” — Tom Clynes, Popular Science [Not single-page] 

See more #longreads from Popular Science

“Bezos claims he doesn’t think defensively. ‘Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,’ he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs. ‘On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think that’s returned,’ he says. ‘Our cultures start in the same place. Both companies like to invent, both companies like to pioneer, both companies start with the customer and work backwards. There’s a like-mindedness.’ Pause. ‘Are two companies like Amazon and Apple occasionally going to step on each others toes? Yes.’”

“The Omnivore.” — Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek

See more #longreads from Bloomberg Buisnessweek