Author Archives

Longreads
The staff of Longreads.

Choire Sicha: Five Longreads from 2010: Boundary Issues

Choire Sicha is (of course) co-founder/editor of The Awl, which also happened to publish some of my favorite longreads of 2010.

choire:

In honor of the Longreads year-end fiesta of Things That People Have Read That Are Considered Long (And Also Worthy) from 2010, herewith, five things that stuck with me.

But first, a note about what was excluded. For starters, a number of things from The Awl, which were of course my ultimate favorites. (I won’t name names, because I love everyone who writes for us equally but also in a unique and special way, but I will point out that we have a delightfully browsable Longreads tag!)

Then also, what I think is my favorite story of the year, Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” is subscription-only online. (It is here.) So it can’t be included, because, democracy now! Or something. (Attention currency now?) Likewise, Emily Witt’s excellent “Miami Party Boom” is excerpt-only online (it is here) and so must also be excluded. (But you should buy that issue just to read it. And I do mean “just”! (I’m kidding, n+1! Love you! Because also the second part of the Elif Batuman travelogue about Samarkand in that issue is totally worth reading.)

Preamble over!

So here are five complicated, thorny, sometimes even aggravating pieces of writing that stuck with me throughout the year, usually for better, only rarely for worse. These address, in different ways, issues of how we we write. With what sort of language? What do we disclose and when? How do we discuss ourselves? What is the value of talking to other people when writing about our experiences? And then what do we do with that information? Most importantly, exactly how can and should we write about others? (That is another reason why the Janet Malcolm piece was so important.) What obligations do we have?

• Maureen Tkacik, “Look at Me!

• Jay Caspian Kang, “The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High

• Emily Gould, “Death and Blogging

• Sady Doyle, “13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon

• Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, “wrote this last night on my blackberry at
the forever 21 flagship launch party

I, Reader by Alexander Chee

I, Reader by Alexander Chee

Deadly Medicine

Deadly Medicine

The Sports Infidelity Equation

The Sports Infidelity Equation

The New Gawker Media

The New Gawker Media

Jamie Dimon: America's Least-Hated Banker

Jamie Dimon: America’s Least-Hated Banker

Chris Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Chris Jones is a writer at large for Esquire. (His stories are on many of your Top Fives.) He’s currently blogging at My Second Empire.


David Grann: The Mark of a Masterpiece, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010

Just a perfectly constructed, painful reveal of the sinister side of the art world, starting at its origins, with the artist’s fingerprints.

Michael Kruse: Stories of LeBron and sportswriter intertwined, tangled, The St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 21, 2010

Maybe the best way to approach an over-covered subject: write about him by writing about someone else. (See Breslin, Jimmy. Digging JFK Grave was His Honor.)

Eli Saslow: For a look outside the presidential bubble, Obama reads 10 personal letters a day, The Washington Post, March 31, 2010

For a look inside the presidential bubble, report the hell out of the story of a single letter.

CJ Chivers: A Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja, The New York Times, April 19, 2010

Every time CJ Chivers heads off to war and sends back a story, I feel like less of a man and less of a writer.

Tom Junod: Eating the Whole Animal, from the Inside-Out, Esquire, April 2010

Pure entertainment by one of the all-time great magazine writers. Also contains the sentence: “The veins are what freaked me out.” Impossible to resist. Reading, not eating, that is.

The Quaid Conspiracy

The Quaid Conspiracy

Kate Silver: Top Five Long Reads of 2010

I always love Kate Silver‘s #longreads picks. Here’s her Top 5.

frontofbook:

Longreads asked for a top five. Here are a few that stand out:

Christopher Hitchens, “Martin, Maggie, and Me” (Vanity Fair)
The Hitchens-Amis bromance is the ultimate had-to-be-there of Thatcher-era intelligentsia. Bottoms up.

Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17 Dots)
Pop fans and glossy geeks will find plenty to love in this broad Q&A — like My Dinner with Andre if it were shot for VH1.

Julian Barnes, “Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer” (London Review of Books)
While plenty has been written about Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, Barnes’ thorough historical breakdown and downright passionate prose make this lo-ooong read a must.

Jessica Flint, “Vampire Weekend’s Mutinous Muse” (VF.com)
Admittedly, I rolled my eyes when my Twitter feed filled up with Ann Kirsten Kennis, the unwitting Contra cover girl who is suing Vampire Weekend over the use of her image. This engossing, in-depth piece hooked me in. It points a finger at photographer Tod Brody, who claims the rights to the snapshot. Brody was recently subpoenaed in the case, but apparently he can’t be found.

Mara Altman, “Whit Stillman Is Running Late” (First Things) (registration required)
b/w Alex Carnevale, “The Last Tantrum” (This Recording)

The ’90s are dead. Long live the ’90s!

Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010

aldridge:

My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic:

The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired
“Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”

The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”

The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”

Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy
Jon Ronson, The Guardian
“I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. Shaggy nods quietly. ‘I get anxiety and shit a lot,’ he says. ‘And reading that stuff people write about us… It hurts.’”

See my (much longer) list of the best long-form journalism of 2009.

Follow @longreads, or search for #longreads on Twitter. Or follow me, @mpaldridge.