The Longreads Blog

“All humans want to be narrators, but many have difficulties finding listeners. Illness is often a time of vulnerability and loneliness. Narrating stories during this time of vulnerability is a way to connect to fellow human beings, which helps overcome the loneliness. The listeners can be family members, friends or even strangers. Unfortunately, many people who are ill do not have access to family members or friends who are willing to listen. This is the reason why healthcare professionals such as nurses or physicians can serve a very important role.”

Jalees Rehman on the benefits of listening and being heard. Read more from Rehman in the Longreads archive.

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A Longreads Guest Pick: Andrew Pantazi on Michael Kruse's 'The Last Voyage of the Bounty'

Andrew Pantazi writes for his hometown newspaper, The Florida Times-Union.

From the gripping first paragraph in the first chapter of the first part of this longread, ‘In the dark, in the wet, whirling roar of Hurricane Sandy, on a ship tipping so badly the deck felt like a steep, slick roof …,’ Michael Kruse drew me into a tale of desperation and desire.

And that’s just Part 1. I didn’t want to feature a story that wasn’t fully published, but The Tampa Bay Times’ The Last Voyage of the Bounty was too good to pass up. The web design is beautiful and fairly non-distracting. Kruse churns out telling details. He slows the story when the crew has to make a decision, and then he moves the story along faster and faster and faster, as the storm gets closer and closer. Also check out the reporter’s notes where he annotates how he got all the details.

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“‘We are going to be poised to benefit from the aging of America, the baby boomers,’ Foley said. Deaths in the U.S. are forecast to increase at an average annual rate of 1.1 percent over the next five years. At SCI, earnings per share rose 26 percent in the first half of 2013. ‘This growth,’ Foley said, ’was driven in large part due to the strong flu season’—i.e., a lot of old people got sick and died last winter.”

Meet the company that’s taking over the funeral industry. Then read more Longreads picks from Bloomberg Businessweek.

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“I’ve said this before, and it was said to me, but life is choice, and choice is loss. And it’s very easy I think when you’re a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what’s special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process. I will say, Arrested, I had to remind myself that it was a great joy, that even when we did it, we were both making fans and upsetting fans. It did sort of die, and like anything that dies young, nobody goes back and says, ‘You know who wasn’t a very good actor? James Dean.’ ”

Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz (via Vulture). Here are more TV stories from the Longreads Archive.

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“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

Paul Krugman, 1998 (via New York Review of Books). Read more on the past, present and future of the Internet.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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“My grandmother and I still haven’t spoken about what happened during the summer of 1999, or why it was the last time I visited her by myself, and how it came to be that she watched a pastor put a curse on her youngest daughter.”

-In case you missed it, here’s Saeed Jones’s essay from BuzzFeed. It’s also featured in our Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Starting in the last part of the nineteenth century, Washington made periodic regulatory efforts to curb the power of big business, including the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act and Clayton Act of 1914, and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The intended effect of these measures was to prevent corporations from colluding with one another to fix prices and otherwise manipulate the markets. The unintended effect, according to historian Christopher McKenna, was to accelerate the creation of an informal—but legal—way of sharing information among oligopolists. Who could do that? Consultants.

-Duff McDonald on the birth of modern management consulting. Read more from our latest Member Pick, “The Making of McKinsey,” from his new book, The Firm

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By the time he got to Oaxaca he was calling himself a journalist. “His camera was his weapon,” says Miguel, a one-named Brazilian filmmaker who produced a tribute called Brad: One More Night at the Barricades. “If you survive me,” Brad told a friend after he’d battled cops at a protest in Prague, “tell them this: I never gave up. That’s a quote, all right?” But in the end there were no noble last words. Just an image, the last one he filmed: the puff of smoke of the bullet speeding toward him.

Jeff Sharlet on the life and death of activist-journalist Brad Will. Read more stories from Sharlet in the Longreads Archive.

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‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

What It's Like to Be Gay In a Country Where It's Illegal: Our College Pick

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

Good journalism costs money. It also takes a little nerve. Sonali Kohli and Blaine Ohigashi of UCLA’s Daily Bruin have both resources. The Bridget O’Brien Scholarship Foundation annually funds an ambitious reporting project proposed by UCLA student journalists. Kohli and Ohigashi went to Malawi, where UCLA has a strong research presence, to report on the LGBT community in a country that outlaws homosexuality. The students were urged by university officials not to make the trip, but they did. The sources who spoke to the reporters did so at considerable risk to themselves and their loved ones.

Kohli and Ohigashi returned and created an ambitious multimedia package. International stories produced by student journalists tend to have a quick, parachute sensibility with little context. The Bridget O’Brien Scholarship Foundation gave Kohli and Ohigashi the time and resources they needed to do right by their story.

In the Shadows

Sonali Kohli, Blaine Ohigashi | Daily Bruin | October 2013

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


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