The Longreads Blog

[Fiction]

Grit was dead. There was no mistake about that. And on the very day of his burial temptation came to his widow.

Grit’s widow was “Great” Taylor, whose inadequate first name was Nell—a young, immaculate creature whose body was splendid even if her vision and spirit were small. She never had understood Grit.

Returning from the long, wearisome ride, she climbed the circular iron staircase—up through parallels of garlic-scented tenement gloom—to her three-room flat, neat as a pin; but not even then did she give way to tears. Tears! No man could make Great Taylor weep!

“Grit.” Tristram Tupper, Metropolitan Magazine (March, 1921) — Pen/O. Henry Prize

See more Pen/O. Henry Prize-winning #longreads

Featured Longreader: Bloomberg News writer Elizabeth Lopatto. See her story picks from The Atlantic, Cabinet Magazine and more on her #longreads page.

Over the past decade or more, Shanghai has grown like no other city on the planet. Home to 13.3 million residents in 1990, the city now has some 23 million residents (to New York City’s 8.1 million), with half a million newcomers each year. To handle the influx, developers are planning to build, among other developments, seven satellite cities on the fringes of Shanghai’s 2,400 square miles. Shanghai opened its first subway line in 1995; today it has 11; by 2025, there will be 22. In 2004, the city also opened the world’s first commercial high-speed magnetic levitation train line.

“Shanghai Gets Supersized.” — David DeVoss and Lauren Hilgers, Smithsonian Magazine

See more #longreads from Smithsonian Magazine

To many, Milner’s success is not just too much and too fast in a land of too much and too fast but … but … and here people start to petulantly phumpher … somehow unfair: Here’s an outsider who has handed out money at outrageously founder-friendly terms—paying huge amounts for relatively small stakes, essentially buying exclusive access to the most desirable companies on the web! It is his outsiderness that seems most irritating and even alarming. How is it that an outsider has spotted opportunities that the Valley’s best investors missed? Does Milner’s success suggest that the rest of the world is starting to horn in on what has been, to date, as American as apple pie—the Internet future and Internet riches?

“How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley.” — Michael Wolff, Wired

See more #longreads by Wired

What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-­American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a cause—and not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them “an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents.” Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda.

“The Class War Has Begun.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine

See more #longreads from Frank Rich

The story of her father’s death ran in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles, detailing how a small band of men killed him, and how a mob mutilated his corpse. They called it a spectacle lynching, and historians say it was perhaps the worst act of torture and execution in 20th century America. The killing became Florida’s shame. President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew her father’s name.

Claude Neal.

“Spectacle: The lynching of Claude Neal.” — Ben Montgomery, St. Petersburg Times

See more #longreads from the St. Petersburg Times

Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.

“The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.” — Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine

See also: “Town of Cats.” by Haruki Murakami in The New Yorker, Sept. 5 2011

From the moment Kael began as a film critic at The New Yorker, at the start of 1968, she presided over the movies in the manner of Béla Károlyi watching a gymnast on the balance beam—shouting directives, excoriating every flub, and cheering uncontrollably when a filmmaker stuck his landing. She spent much of her career chastening Hollywood’s excesses while brushing off complaints about immoderation on her own part. She did not regard this as a hypocritical endeavor. Kael wrote quickly and at length, regularly pulling all-nighters into her Tuesday deadlines with the help of cigarettes and bourbon (till she gave up both). Her kinetic passion, her chatty-seatmate prose, and her detail-heckling made her a pop-culture oracle in an era that desperately needed one.

“What She Said.” — Nathan Heller, The New Yorker

See also: ‘Memory.’ The Introduction to Roger Ebert’s New Memoir ‘Life Itself’ — July 15, 2011

Featured Longreader: Writer/editor Dan Kois. See his story picks from The New York Times Magazine, The Awl, New York Magazine and more on his #longreads page.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: New York Magazine, Texas Monthly, Fast Company, The Rumpus, The New Yorker, and a guest pick from Evan Ratliff from The Atavist.