The Longreads Blog

College Longreads Pick: 'A Canine in a Cummerbund,' Peter Kaplan (1977)

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

The New York media world grieves for editor Peter Kaplan, who died last week. Kaplan worked at several publications during his career, and he’s best known as the longtime editor of the New York Observer, but The Harvard Crimson’s archives also contain 29 of Kaplan’s student bylines, mostly reviews. One, about a 1977 Hasty Pudding production, has the seeds of the voice Kaplan would perfect at the Observer: “So much confidence in the sameness of the future do the Pudding participants have that, more interested in the project than the theater, they can put on this elaborate celebration of the way things are, were and will be.” Kaplan’s voice, bequeathed to a generation of writers, became the root editorial language of the Internet. His influence spread across platforms and mastheads across the city.

A Canine in a Cummerbund

Peter Kaplan | The Harvard Crimson | February 28, 1977 | 7 minutes (1,542 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The Complicated Relationship Between a Reporter and a Source

“The reporter-source relationship is a complicated one that defies easy description. It borrows a little from the salesman-buyer relationship, the therapist-patient relationship, the police officer-witness relationship, sometimes even the growing intimacy of a friendship. We work hard to gain access and trust, and generally we avoid doing anything that stops a source from talking once she gets started.

“‘How are you now?’ I asked at the time.

“‘I’m suffering horribly . . . but I’m not suicidal,’ she said. ‘It’s a soothing thing. I don’t really want to do it. But it helps me calm down, it helps me sleep to think about the possibilities to end the suffering.’

“If I had possessed some sort of device that could peer inside her brain and pick up some biological trace amongst the billions of nerve cells and circuits that would indicate she was likely to commit suicide, would I have stopped the interview?”

— In the Tampa Bay Times, Leonora LaPeter Anton examines the suicide of one of her sources, a woman named Gretchen Molannen who was suffering from an embarrassing genital arousal disorder. Was there anything Anton could have done to prevent the death?

Read the story

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Photo: Roger H. Goun

Longreads Best of 2013: Favorite New Writer Discovery

Above: Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr.

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Ross Andersen is a Senior Editor at Aeon Magazine. He has written extensively about science and philosophy for several publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist.

“Flinder Boyd’s piece about an aspirational streetballer and his cross-country trip to New York’s legendary Rucker Park had me from the very first word. The story is about basketball, a minor obsession of mine, but it’s also about poverty and the kinds of dreams it nurtures. Boyd gives us an unflinching portrait of his subject, an underskilled, overconfident young ballplayer from Sacramento without ever stripping him of his dignity as a human being. I read it twice, straight through.”

20 Minutes At Rucker Park

Flinder Boyd | SB Nation | October 2013 | 31 minutes (7,805 words)

More stories from Boyd in the Longreads Archive

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How To Get Your Own False Confession

“If you decide the suspect is lying, you leave the room and wait for five minutes. Then you return with an official-looking folder. ‘I have in this folder the results of our investigation,’ you say. You remain standing to establish your dominance. ‘After reviewing our results, we have no doubt that you committed the crime. Now, let’s sit down and see what we can do to work this out.’”

“The next phase—Interrogation—involves prodding the suspect toward confession. Whereas before you listened, now you do all the talking. If the suspect denies the accusation, you bat it away. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt this happened,’ you say. ‘Now let’s move forward and see what we can do.’ If he asks to see the folder, you say no. ‘There’ll be time for that later. Now let’s focus on clearing this whole thing up.’

“‘Never allow them to give you denials,’ Senese told us. ‘The key is to shut them up.’”

Douglas Starr, in The New Yorker, on how police have traditionally used The Reid Technique to get confessions—some of which have later turned out to be false.

Read the story

Photo: boelaars, Flickr

Longreads Best of 2013: The Most Surprising Piece of Cultural Criticism of the Year

Elizabeth Hyde Stevens is author of the book Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career.

“I was shocked that Todd VanDerWerff was able to write such a serious essay about the show DuckTales. As a kid, I saw every episode, and didn’t think much about why it was good, or who made it. This essay looks at why Frank Wells and Michael Eisner pumped so much money into the series, and why, sadly, such an expenditure would never happen today.

“Since my own work examines the behind-the-scenes money at play behind the Muppets and Sesame Street, reading this essay on AV Club was like discovering a kindred spirit. I think it takes a lot of courage to seriously exhume and explore the loves of your youth with the wary eyes of an adult. It seems to me like the most mature thing you could do with your time, but most people will dismiss it as kids stuff. But if you care about good art, I think it’s important to know how artists of the past funded their work and got it past the naysaying accountants, executives, and boardrooms. This kind of thing just fascinates me, so finding this article was such a delight!”

DuckTales Invented a New Animated Wonderland—That Quickly Disappeared

Todd VanDerWerff | The AV Club | February 2013 | 9 minutes (2,159 words)

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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

The Missing Stories of Slavery

“There are many more narratives to tell about slavery. It’s such a rich subject. It’s like the Civil War, it’s like the Second World War. … I’m happy that they want to [remake Roots] but I think there’s much more—we’ve heard that story already, we don’t have to rehash it. There’s not been a film about the Underground Railroad, I mean it’s amazing—the story, it’s amazing.”

Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, on KCRW’s The Treatment on the still untold stories of slavery. Read more on slavery.

(h/t @contextual_life)

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Photo: catnipstudio, Flickr

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A Question for Storytellers

“I want a good story, but I want it to be told for a reason. Is affirmation that the storyteller exists a good enough reason for the story to be told? Sometimes. Some stories aren’t told as often as others. I’m not saying there is a hierarchy of suitable topics for essays. Not everything should be about death or hunger or, you know, celebrity diets. But it’s really the frequent lack of quality in the story itself that bothers me, especially when it’s done for a price. Then I wonder what the fuck is going on. Then I ask myself why and what and why again, over and over. Then I feel like no one is asking why they are telling their stories. It seems like the only answer to that question is: so that I can be heard.”

Jen Vafidis, in a short post for Vol. 1 Brooklyn, on the question of why we tell stories. Read more on writing.

(h/t @legalnomads)

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Photo: catnipstudio, Flickr

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What It's Like to Be a Suspected Terrorist

“Americans continue to shake their heads over new revelations of widespread data mining and near-universal phone tapping, while Unamericans righteously defend these tactics and call for punishment of the leakers who revealed them. Were I to be shown in accurate detail why it was necessary for me to be kept under surveillance, possibly for the rest of my life, I might be able to accept these invasions of my privacy for the collective good. The ostensible purpose of this surveillance is to protect us, and our freedoms, from terrorists. What remains uncertain, since secret, is how terrifying the terrorists presently are, and to what extent rights and liberties may be undermined in order to save us from them. I cannot say how many intelligence operatives might be hampered or endangered by greater oversight; on the other hand, if the Unamericans continue to have their way we will never know how many innocent people they have imprisoned, tortured and perhaps murdered.”

Author William T. Vollmann, in Harper’s (subscription required), on being identified by the FBI as a suspected terrorist—including accusations that he was the Unabomber. Read more on spying.

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Photo: groovysoup, Flickr

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Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there are stories of people leaving cities outside of New York. Here are four essays about leaving some of these cities, and maybe coming back to them.

1. “The Last City I Loved: Omaha, Nebraska.” (Gene Kwak, The Rumpus, June 2013)

I found myself floating in the details of Kwak’s friendships and favorite places. I’ve never been to Omaha, but now I want to go. It doesn’t need promotion, though — I just need to remember it’s there. And you just need to read this essay.

2. “London’s Great Exodus.” (Michael Goldfarb, The New York Times, October 2013)

Middle-class London residents can’t afford to live in a city where property is currency and international moguls move in.

3. “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” (Elizabeth Minkel, The Millions, July 2013)

A well-written meta examination on the classic Leaving New York essay: “But New York, though — maybe it’s the preponderance of writers here, the narcissism and the navel-gazing, that turns our comings and goings into a series of extended metaphors? … When we manage to leave, if we manage to leave, escape becomes a genre in and of itself.”

4. “Why I Am Leaving New York City.” (Mallory Ortberg The Toast, November 2013)

Let’s end on a lighter note: Mallory Ortberg (perhaps the funniest human on the internet?) hasn’t lived in NYC before, but she’s not going to let that stop her from writing an essay about leaving.

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Photo: Don O’Brien

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