The Longreads Blog

02:11:21 (Robert) On a pourtant les moteurs! Qu’est-ce qui se passe bordel? Je ne comprends pas ce que se passe. ‘We still have the engines! What the hell is happening? I don’t understand what’s happening.’

Unlike the control yokes of a Boeing jetliner, the side sticks on an Airbus are “asynchronous”—that is, they move independently. “If the person in the right seat is pulling back on the joystick, the person in the left seat doesn’t feel it,” says Dr. David Esser, a professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “Their stick doesn’t move just because the other one does, unlike the old-fashioned mechanical systems like you find in small planes, where if you turn one, the [other] one turns the same way.” Robert has no idea that, despite their conversation about descending, Bonin has continued to pull back on the side stick. 

The men are utterly failing to engage in an important process known as crew resource management, or CRM. They are failing, essentially, to cooperate. It is not clear to either one of them who is responsible for what, and who is doing what.

“What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447.” — Jeff Wise, Popular Mechanics

See also: “The Unlikely Event.” The Paris Review, Nov. 28, 2011

Matthias Rascher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a high school in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter. He is also a longtime contributor to the #Longreads community and an author for Open Culture.

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“The Possibilian: David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain,” by Burkhard Bilger (The New Yorker)

This fascinating article describes how neuroscientist David Eagleman combines different sciences such as physics, psychology and linguistics with the study of the human brain to arrive at a better understanding of time perception. His latest collaboration with Brian Eno confirmed his theory that “time is a rubbery thing.”

“My Summer at an Indian Call Center,” by Andrew Marantz (Mother Jones)

The title is pretty self-explanatory. Andrew Marantz gives a vivid account of how an Indian “culture trainer” taught him how to act Australian so that he could work in a call center in Delhi. “Lessons learned: Americans are hotheads, Australians are drunks—and never say where you’re calling from.”

“The Vision Thing—How Marty Scorsese risked it all and lived to risk again in Hollywood,” by Rick Tetzeli (Fast Company)

A wonderful tribute to Scorsese’s monumental achievements in the film industry. Also: Marty talks about why he ventured into the 3-D world with his new movie Hugo

“Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anesthesia,” by Linda Geddes (New Scientist)

This is one of my favorites from this year. Linda takes us on a fascinating journey through medicine and neuroscience to find out what we currently know about how anaesthesia actually works.

“Face to face with Radovan Karadzic,” by Ed Vulliamy (The Guardian)

My last pick is also the most recent one, from December, and it is not an easy read. Along with an ITN film crew, Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy uncovered the terrifying truth of Serbian-run concentration camps in the Bosnian war. While former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic stands trial at The Hague, Vulliamy is called as a witness—and finds himself cross-examined in a private, close encounter with the man accused of masterminding genocide.

See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

They landed in Memphis, Tennessee, and drove across the Mississippi River to West Memphis. A local reporter showed them around and explained the case in terms of certain guilt. So did everyone else they met. “Absolutely, without exception, every person we met: rotten teens,” Berlinger says. He and Sinofsky decided to embed themselves for the duration of the trials. They would film the families of the victims and the accused, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys, and they would film inside the courtroom. When it was all over, they expected to have footage they could sift and splice into a narrative of murderous, misbegotten youths. “A real-life River’s Edge,” Berlinger says now. “That’s the irony in this whole thing: We went down to do a story about rotten teens.”

That was not the point of the film they released three years later. Rather, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills is a chronicle of fear and hysteria in the aftermath of a terrible crime. But mainly it is about three innocent kids and the persecution of misfits masquerading as a prosecution.

“Three at Last!” — Sean Flynn, GQ

More from Flynn: “Boom.” GQ, July 2010

Writer Emily Gould: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever and the co-owner of Emily Books, and also she can’t stop blogging for some reason.

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1. “Letter from Astana,” by Keith Gessen (New Yorker, sub. required)

The New Yorker‘s “Letter From” essays, though they’re always entertaining and executed with finesse, can leave the reader with an impression that’s basically: “Kazakhstan (or wherever), how wacky.” Keith showed exactly how and why Kazakhstan’s history and political situation have created a unique way of life, and also those crazy skyscrapers in the middle of the steppe that make Williamsburg’s waterfront look tasteful. And he ate horse ham.  

2. “Dangerous Worlds: Teaching Film In Prison,” by Ann Snitow (Dissent Magazine)

Feminist critic and longtime New School professor Ann Snitow “leapt to join” a program that brings New School teachers to a correctional facility upstate out of “boredom”—she craved a challenge less played-out than trying to get college students to care about feminism, which she says is “everywhere and nowhere” in their lives. The result is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever read. Snitow confronts her own preconceived notions and white liberal guilt head-on, but also gives herself credit for being a good teacher. She evokes her students’ complexity by describing their surprising, varied responses to the movies she assigns. At one point she gives them a speech: “I know in all your classes and workshops you’re being taught to take responsibility for what you’ve done, and I’m not saying no to that. But responsibility is different from shame. Best to see the endless tale of one’s badness as an inadequate story, meant to make you feel like a worm. OK, take responsibility, but also move on. Everyone is dependent; total independence is a myth. Inside or out, dependency is the human condition.” “This hectoring lecture hasn’t convinced anyone,” she writes, but I think she underestimates herself. 

3. “The Smelliest Block In New York,” by Molly Young (New York Magazine, not single-page)

I’m obsessed with smells and with New York, which contains maybe the world’s best and worst smells, often in the same two-block radius.  Molly Young’s descriptions of smells are a joy.  Her descriptions in general are a joy. She’s just getting better and better and I can’t wait to see what she does next. (My fantasy would be a regular column about smells, but that’s probably unrealistic.)

4. “Willis and Happiness,” by Rich Beck (n+1)

Here, Rich Beck breaks down and rearticulates one of groundbreaking radical feminist and pop culture critic Ellen Willis’s most powerful—and most confusing—arguments.  This is a must, must, must, must read for anyone interested in the past, present and future of the fight for equality.  

5. “The Aquarium,” by Aleksandar Hemon (The New Yorker, sub. required)

This and #2, I would recommend if it’s been a while since you last wept uncontrollably. There’s really not a lot else to say about this. It’s an unsentimental examination of a cosmically unfair event, the the kind of thing no one wants to acknowledge is possible, but which happens regularly. I have no idea how the author could stand to write it, unless he also couldn’t stand not to write it. The parts about his daughter’s imaginary friend are also very funny, incredibly. 

Bonus! (Kindle Single edition)

• “How A Book Is Born,” by Keith Gessen ($1.99)

I didn’t want to be disgusting and pick 5 things by my boyfriend but I wish I could assign anyone who thinks he or she might someday publish a book to read this long examination of how publishing works. The combination of virtue and talent coinciding with luck—the endless variables that combine to make a “literary” bestseller—just boggles the mind. This is stuff that many people who work in publishing or who work in novel-writing either don’t know or don’t allow themselves to consciously know. Buy this as a gift for your friend the corporate lawyer who keeps saying he’s going to take a sabbatical year to “write his novel.” 

• “American Juggalo,” by Kent Russell ($1.99)

Psychic forecast: the year-end Longreads best-of list next year will be everything people are saying right now about John Jeremiah Sullivan, but for the words “John Jeremiah Sullivan” substitute “Kent Russell.”

(photo credit: Stephen Deshler)

Kalyn Heffernan is 24 years old, weighs 53 pounds, and measures three feet, six inches tall. She’s light enough to carry, compact enough to hide under a winter coat, and is sometimes mistaken for a child. But Kalyn, who has the brittle-bone disability osteogenesis imperfecta, is hardly innocent, precious, or inconspicuous: The Colorado native dabbles in graffiti, cusses gloriously, and has a septum piercing. She raps, scribbles rhymes, and has been known to cover the viral YouTube video “My Vagina Ain’t Handicapped.” If you ask—and even if you don’t—she’ll eagerly lift her shirt to show off the words “CRIP LIFE” inked on her stomach, an homage to Tupac Shakur’s THUG LIFE tattoo.

Kalyn is the founding member of Wheelchair Sports Camp, a fledgling jazz-hop trio cheekily named after a week-long youth-disability program she attended growing up and, by her own admission, “corrupted.”

“Wheelchair Sports Camp’s Crip Life.” — Camille Dodero, Village Voice

More from Dodero: “Live from Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos.” Village Voice, Sept. 8, 2010

Writer Elliott Holt: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Elliott Holt is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer who is almost finished with her first novel. (See her Longreads page here.)

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I love short stories, so I decided my picks should be mostly short fiction. It’s no secret that the likes of The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, One Story and Tin House publish great fiction, but there are also a lot of excellent online literary magazines, so I wanted to include work from a couple of them here. I had to include one story from The New Yorker, though, because Alice Munro is one of my favorite writers.

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Reese Okyong Kwon, “Stations of the Sun” in Kenyon Review 

Alice Munro, “Gravel” in The New Yorker

Nahid Rachlin, “Bijan” in Guernica

Laura van den Berg, “Mansion” in Guernica

Colson Whitehead, “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia” in Grantland

Photo credit: Rebecca Zeller

In my study of African American history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and found not a shadow, but the Big Bang that brought the ideas of the modern West to fruition. Our lofty notions of democracy, egalitarianism, and individual freedom were articulated by the Founders, but they were consecrated by the thousands of slaves fleeing to Union lines, some of them later returning to the land of their birth as nurses and soldiers. The first generation of the South’s postbellum black political leadership was largely supplied by this class.

“Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

See more #longreads on civil wars

Slate's Dan Kois: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. (See his Longreads page here.)

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First of all, I am not even going to bother listing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Disney World piece because it was obviously the best thing anywhere this year but everyone agrees and has read it anyway. Here is the link just in case. But this doesn’t count as one of my five.

• I thought “The Lost Yankee,” by Bill Pennington in the Times, was really quite extraordinary. The Yankees signed Japanese pitcher Kei Igawa in 2007 to a $46 million, 5-year contract. Then they sent him to the minors after several disappointing outings, where he has pitched ever since, in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, cashing gigantic paychecks and setting minor league records. His contract just expired and I hope someone else gives him a chance.

• My favorite book review of the year was Elaine Blair’s good-hearted, incredibly funny review of Nicholson Baker’s “House of Holes” in the New York Review of Books. Best part: When she advises parents to just sneak a copy to their kids, and soon. “You will have to make sure that they accidentally stumble on it soon, before they find the Internet, if they are to have a fighting chance at being wholesome and delightful fuckers instead of hopelessly depraved ones like yourself.”

• I’m really happy that many outlets (like The A.V. Club, Vulture, and others) now publish long, in-depth interview transcripts, on the grounds that someone out there is interested in them. I particularly loved this Q&A, on Ain’t It Cool News, with Steven Soderbergh, about Contagion but also about ten million other things, like his annoyance when other people’s movies go over budget.

• Any music fan who missed it the first time around should be sure to read Chris Richards’ awesome WaPo story about trying to track down George Clinton’s lost Mothership in the woods of Prince George’s County.

• And I’m pretty sure I did not laugh as long and as hard at anything anyone wrote this year as I did at “Dressing Up My Boyfriend As Marc Anthony In His Terrible Kohl’s Clothes,” by Sarah Miller, in The Awl.

Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable person.”

Wenner apparently felt one Hunter Thompson was all he needed, so George headed instead to the Boston Phoenix, that town’s version of the Village Voice. It was the ideal place for his freewheeling reviews of poetry, books, and music. His passion, however, was sports.

“The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures of Sportswriting’s Last Badass.” — Alex Belth, Deadspin

See more #longreads from Deadspin

Featured Longreader: Karolina Waclawiak, deputy editor at The Believer. See her story picks from The Days of Yore, Senses of Cinema, and a wealth of picks from The Believer on her #longreads page.

She says to be sure to check out “In the Atomic City.” Because, “It’s super, super awesome.”