The Longreads Blog

The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted.

“The Movie Set That Ate Itself.” — Michael Idov, GQ

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She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: “whore” (and its derivatives “whorey,” “whorish,” “whoriness”), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; “myth,” “emblem” (also “mythic,” “emblematic”), used with apparent intellectual intent, but without ascertainable meaning; “pop,” “comicstrip,” “trash” (“trashy”), “pulp” (“pulpy”), all used judgmentally (usually approvingly) but otherwise apparently interchangeable with “mythic”; “urban poetic,” meaning marginally more violent than “pulpy”; “soft” (pejorative); “tension,” meaning, apparently, any desirable state; “rhythm,” used often as a verb, but meaning harmony or speed; “visceral”; and “level.” These words may be used in any variant, or in alternation, or strung together in sequence—”visceral poetry of pulp,” e.g., or “mythic comic-strip level”—until they become a kind of incantation.

“The Perils of Pauline.” — Renata Adler, The New York Review of Books

See also: “What She Said.” — Nathan Heller, New Yorker

Featured Publisher: This Land Press. See stories about winemakers, Melville’s birthplace, and more on their #Longreads page.

It’s intriguing, if depressing, to imagine what the digital world would have been like if Kobun had given Jobs the opposite advice, along the lines of Jobs’ own now-infamous challenge to Pepsi CEO John Sculley: “Do you want to sell stylish electronic gadgets for the rest of your life, or come with me and vow to save all sentient beings from suffering?”

“What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really?” — Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes

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To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself. “Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms. “Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”

“Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke.” — Brook Larmer, New York Times Magazine

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: St. Petersburg Times, The New Republic, Deadspin, Capital New York, Tod Kelly, plus a guest pick from David Lidsky, articles editor at Fast Company.

Featured Longreader: B. Fitzgerald Reading, environmentalist/feminist. See her story picks from Tom Dispatch, Mother Jones and more on her #longreads page.

There was just one problem: By this point, there was hardly any real business to finance. Most of PCI’s deals were actually phantom transactions backed up by phony purchase orders that Deanna Coleman had crafted. Rather than using money from new investors to buy goods that would then be re-sold to big-box retailers, Petters was using it to pay off those investors whose money was coming due or to fund his increasingly posh lifestyle. In other words, PCI was a classic Ponzi scheme.

“The Turnaround Men.” — Mariah Blake, The New Republic

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Featured Longreader: Writer Benjamin Freed. See his story picks from The Awl, The AV CLub, The New Yorker and more on his #longreads page.

Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy Wall Street protesters tends to cluster around two things. One is the influence of money in politics. The other is debt: mortgages, credit-card debt, student loans, and the difference in how the debts of large financial companies and those of individual borrowers have been treated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street.” — Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek

See more #longreads about Occupy Wall Street