Google and YouTube exec Robert Kyncl’s plans for the future of web TV—and the company’s big bet on professional content: “Kyncl’s relationships in Hollywood would help in securing premium content; and, more important, he understood entertainment culture. He brought ‘the skill set of being able to bridge Silicon Valley and Hollywood—an information culture and an […]
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[Not single-page] Chen, a 19-year-old who grew up in New York’s Chinatown, joins the Army. Nine months later, he’s found dead in Afghanistan from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, after facing constant abuse from his superiors: The Army recently announced that it was charging eight soldiers—an officer and seven enlisted men—in connection with Danny Chen’s death. […]
Cain, writer of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce,” on the pros and cons of living in Southern California in the 1930s: There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference, and that is the one thing the human imagination cannot […]
In 1990, a trash bag with human remains was found in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The investigation soon expanded to killings in Albania and Belgium, and focused on the activity of a Yugoslavian former cab driver named Smajo Dzurlic: “Smajo Dzurlic, who is now 71, shuffled into the room, his wrists and ankles […]
An investigation of the many scams of Minkow—who goes from prison, to church, and then back to prison: Minkow was the boy-wonder business phenom of the 1980s. In 1982, at age 16, he started ZZZZ Best, a carpet-cleaning company, from his parents’ garage in Reseda, Calif., in the San Fernando Valley. The business expanded rapidly […]
The origins and the politics of the New York-based Freelancers Union—now 150,000 members strong: The shift toward short-term contracts was underway long before the 2008 financial crash. Charles Heckscher, director of the Center for Workplace Transformation at Rutgers University, sits on the board of the Freelancers Union, and likes to describe this shift in terms […]
The comedian on his early influences, stand-up career and his hatred of traditional sitcom writing: I was explaining to my girls, we went by a Chinese restaurant that has the big LED sign, and it has this sweeping pattern, then flashes red, then blue, then blue sweeps across from left to right, right to left, […]
On the 1988 presidential campaign: Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these “events” they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (“They hope […]
A brief history of the many attempts during the 19th Century to build a tunnel under the Thames River in London: Another bridge was out of the question—it would deny sailing ships access to the Pool of London—and ambitious men turned their thoughts to driving a tunnel beneath the Thames instead. This was not such […]
On the Japanese workers—some 18,000 of them—who have ventured into the radioactive exclusion zone following the meltdowns at Fukushima, and the work of radiation expert Dr. Robert Gale: The worries about the spread of radiation have hardly abated, but the workers remain all but nameless and faceless; they rarely speak to the press—for fear of […]
One person’s mission to get Americans to embrace science again. A profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History: Although he is a card-carrying astrophysicist with a long list of scientific papers in publications like Astrophysical Journal, Tyson has turned […]
Three years after the seizure of materials from Hauser’s lab, theBoston Globe leaked news of a secret investigating committee at Harvard that had found Hauser ‘solely responsible’ for ‘eight counts of scientific misconduct.’ Michael Smith, Harvard’s dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, confirmed the existence of the investigation on August 20, 2010. Hauser […]
Most of the time we just hung out, in front of the newly opened Baskin-Robbins, on the corner of Montague and Henry Streets. This corner was the epicenter of Brooklyn Heights, a community unaccustomed to seeing its daughters straddling mailboxes and flicking cigarette butts into the street. Nor were we used to fielding the looks […]
Lidsky Lodge: My Top Longreads of 2011 davidlidsky: Ah, procrastination! I knew I got into a deadline-driven business for a reason. Deadline pressure is the only antidote to procrastination, so here I am on December 31 organizing my Longreads thoughts. I had trouble limiting myself to five stories so I did a bunch of sublists […]
Ross Andersen is freelancer living in Washington, D.C. He has recently written about technology for The Atlantic, and is now working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He can also be found on Twitter at @andersen. *** “The Mother of Possibility,” by Sven Birkerts, Lapham’s Quarterly Procrastination being my favorite vice […]
Woodland Creature: My Top 15 Longreads of 2011 woodlandcreature: Longreads.com has been doing a great series of roundups on its Tumblr, highlighting the best longreads of the year, chosen by well-known writers. I’m not well-known and not really a writer, but here are mine (I couldn’t narrow it down to five): “Travis the Menace,” Dan […]
Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen. *** I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled […]
Kevin Purdy is a freelance writer, and a frequent Longreader. Check out his site here. Not all written in 2011, but brought to my attention and saved in 2011: In Which There’s a Girl in New York City Who Calls Herself the Human Trampoline – This Recording Graceland is truly the one album I never […]
Brian Wolly is an associate web editor at Smithsonian Magazine. ••• 1. Tom Bissell’s Breakdown of L.A. Noire on Grantland When ESPN and Bill Simmons’ Grantland debuted in early June, the knives were out and its initial reaction was mixed at best. Like many, I approached the new project with simultaneous skepticism and optimism, but it […]
Molly Lambert is a writer covering pop culture at Grantland. (She’s also featured in our Top 10 Longreads of 2011) *** These are some Longreads I enjoyed this year: • “The Bell Jar At 40”: Emily Gould on Sylvia Plath (Poetry Foundation) • “The J in J. Crew”: Molly Young on Jenna Lyons (New York magazine) • […]
Peter Smith has written about food and science for GOOD, Wired, and Gastronomica. He’s based in Maine, and, in 2011, he covered pickle juice, patented sandwiches, and the last sardine cannery in North America. This is his first attempt at Top Five Longreads. *** Here are my (somewhat arbitrarily selected) #longreads that, er, explore unexpected, […]
Evan Kindley is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. ••• Ariel Levy, “Basta Bunga Bunga” (June 6, 2011) – The New Yorker A great piece about what proved to be the Last Days of Berlusconi’s Italy, with all the virtues of the typical artfully triangulated New Yorker profile (as recently codified by […]
Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books from High School (Prometheus Books, 2013) and curator of Deep Interviews here on Longreads. *** Here on Longreads, I’m curating Deep Interviews (#deepinterviews)—lengthy interviews with interesting people—a format I’ve grown to love. It’s not quite original reporting but certainly […]
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