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Who's Funding Russia's Skinhead Terrorists?

Who’s Funding Russia’s Skinhead Terrorists?

To Have Is to Owe: A History of Debt

To Have Is to Owe: A History of Debt

Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.

John Lennon, in an interview with David Sheff for Playboy; September 8-28, 1980.  (via lindsaykap)

Jeffrey MacIntyre: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Jeffrey MacIntyre: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Paul Ford: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Paul Ford was an editor at Harper’s Magazine; now he’s wandering around, looking at stuff and writing computer programs.

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Tony Judt, “Night,” New York Review of Books (January 14)

This was the year of the dying critic. Most writers would do themselves, and their readers, a service by dying without all the self-elegies (“selfegies”?). We’ve read once too often, right, of the bark of the lonely fox out the bay window. But then you had Judt in his wheelchair, climbing Everest every night, putting out a series of reflections and continuing to publish great work even post-mortem. In a different city, and a different vein, there’s Roger Ebert’s Journal, the essay that never ends—starting as a kind of testament, it transformed over many months into a mass lecture from an old newspaper hand (a man of a literally dying breed), holding forth on absolutely everything.

Dan Koeppel, “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” (Popular Mechanics, January 29)

Stuff like this is why magazines persist. It’s fun to imagine the pitch. “I’d like to write about falling thirty thou—” “You had me at falling.”

Frédéric Filloux, “Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters” (Monday Note, September 19)

Inside baseball for publishing nerds, but bangs out its point. It’s hard to find good wide-angle writing about tech. Related: “Why the OS Doesn’t Matter.” Also: Tom Bissell on cocaine and Grand Theft Auto; Fred Vogelstein on the iPhone/AT&T meltdown; and Nitsuh Abebe on the Internet Paradox.

Issendai, “How to Keep Someone With You Forever,” (Issendai’s Superhero Training Journal, June 9)

You read this, right? I’ve visited friends and read this aloud. Explains publishers, graduate school, bad jobs, and broken marriages. (Related in a way I can’t fully articulate: Given that 2010 was, in addition to being the year of the dying critic, the year of the supercilious journalist writing about the Insane Clown Posse, it’s worth going back to 2009’s “MC CHRIS IS AT THE GATHERING: A LOVE STORY,” for the nerd’s eye view—a far more subtle view than presented elsewhere—of the weirdness of Juggalism.)

Josh Allen, Chokeville. (Ongoing)

Most prose born on the Internet is highly defensive. Everyone is braced for audience attack and opens their posts with four paragraphs explaining why the remaining four paragraphs are worth reading. Chokeville is not that. It tries to explain itself, but it can’t. Sometimes I get started and then drift away to Zooborns, but I know that’s my problem, because I’ve forgotten how, and I also know that I’ll end up some weekend night in front of my monitor, zoomed in, drinking my way through every word.

P.S. We’re also several years into the flowering of history blogs. Here’s a good place to start.

My First Time: A Political Novice Runs for Office

My First Time: A Political Novice Runs for Office

The Mystery Of Erica Blasberg: Why Did the LPGA Golfer Take Her Own Life?

The Mystery Of Erica Blasberg: Why Did the LPGA Golfer Take Her Own Life?

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

Andrea Pitzer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Andrea Pitzer is writer and editor of Nieman Storyboard.

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To eliminate some of the choices that have already been popular—hello, David Grann! ;)—I haven’t included anyone I’ve met in person. All stories from 2010.

Rabbi to the Rescue, by Martha Wexler and Jeff Lunden from The Washington Post Magazine

Spiritual longing, the Holocaust, and the bitter line between the truth and a beautiful story.

TVs Crowning Moment of Awesome, by Chris Jones for Esquire

I know, everybody loved the Roger Ebert piece, but check out the surprises here, including an angry Drew Carey.

An Army of One, by Chris Heath from GQ

Meet Gary Faulkner, American patriot and would-be assassin of Osama bin Laden. 

The High Is Always the Pain, and the Pain Is Always the High, from Jay Caspian Kang on The Morning News

Yes, everyone else has already picked it too, but it’s that good. And I bet they didn’t interview him.

The Amazing Tale, by Rick Moody from Details

Read this story to the end. It will blow your mind over and over, and almost never in the way you’re expecting.

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And an honorable mention for an entry that topped my list until I realized it was from December 2009: The Last Vet, by Aminatta Forna in Granta. How much suffering can a country take, and what will it value in the aftermath? An essay on empire, war, and the last vet in private practice in Sierra Leone. 

Don Blankenship: The Dark Lord of Coal Country

Don Blankenship: The Dark Lord of Coal Country