Choire Sicha is (of course) co-founder/editor of The Awl, which also happened to publish some of my favorite longreads of 2010. choire: In honor of the Longreads year-end fiesta of Things That People Have Read That Are Considered Long (And Also Worthy) from 2010, herewith, five things that stuck with me. But first, a note […]
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I, Reader by Alexander Chee wadcity: This is a wonderfully rambling essay over at The Morning News on reading books in the age of the iPad. Appropriately enough, I read it on my iPhone, in bed last night, thanks to Instapaper. (I didn’t post immediately because I couldn’t remember who’d directed me to it; this morning […]
Deadly Medicine During the congressional hearings, lawmakers heard from former F.D.A. scientists who had criticized their agency’s oversight of the Ketek trials and the drug-approval process. One was Dr. David Ross, who had been the F.D.A.’s chief reviewer of new drugs for 10 years, and was now the national director of clinical public-health programs for […]
The Sports Infidelity Equation John Nazarian, a former police officer, has been a private investigator for 20 years. He says that on average, he has about a half-dozen pro athletes a year as clients. Usually, it’s because they were involved in extramarital affairs and the mistress is seeking money for her silence. He says he […]
The New Gawker Media The problem with Gawker Media’s current model—and this is true of many other sites, too, including the Huffington Post—is that it’s based on pageviews and those tyrannical CPMs. It’s essentially a junk-mail direct marketing model, which Batty is very comfortable with: watch him talk about how Gawker Media has “massively scaled […]
Jamie Dimon: America’s Least-Hated Banker At Bank One, Dimon had ceased buying mortgages from outside brokers because their performance was poor. At Chase, he bought them. When I asked why, Dimon said underlings convinced him they were exercising proper caution, adding, “It was a huge business, packaging and selling [the loans] to Fannie Mae.” Turning […]
Chris Jones is a writer at large for Esquire. (His stories are on many of your Top Fives.) He’s currently blogging at My Second Empire. David Grann: The Mark of a Masterpiece, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010 Just a perfectly constructed, painful reveal of the sinister side of the art world, starting at its […]
The Quaid Conspiracy “They wanted to separate us,” says Randy Quaid, “because Evi is very intuitive and very smart. She’s the smartest person I know. You can call her crazy, you can call her whatever you want, but she is my lifeline, and if she wasn’t with me, I don’t know where I’d be.” By […]
I always love Kate Silver‘s #longreads picks. Here’s her Top 5. frontofbook: Longreads asked for a top five. Here are a few that stand out: Christopher Hitchens, “Martin, Maggie, and Me” (Vanity Fair) The Hitchens-Amis bromance is the ultimate had-to-be-there of Thatcher-era intelligentsia. Bottoms up. Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17 Dots) Pop fans […]
aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic: The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired “Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger […]
The House That Thurman Munson Built “They call Thurman Munson grouchy, brutish, stupid, petty, greedy, oversensitive. It becomes a soap opera: Thurman Munson pours a plate of spaghetti on one reporter’s head and nearly kicks another’s ass. But the fans—all they see is this walrus-looking guy who plays like he’s a possessed walrus. During a […]
Aileen Gallagher is Assistant Professor of Multiplatform Journalism at Syracuse University. agallagher: Don Peck’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America (The Atlantic, March 2010) Bleak, but I’ve never read a better numbers story. Nick Blakeslee’s Alex Jones is About to Explode (Texas Monthly, March 2010) Jones is sort of Glenn Beck meets Art […]
Divided We Eat “In America,” epidemiologist Adam Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.” He points to an article in The New York […]
Jared Keller, in addition to being in charge of the whole internet, is also social media editor for The Atlantic. michellelegro: Trust in what Jared says. He’s in charge of, like, the whole internet. Or at least the portion of it housed in the Watergate building. jbkeller: Dan Baum, “Happiness Is A Worn Gun” (Harpers, […]
Inside the Wild, Wacky, Profitable World of Boing Boing “We know what happens next: This hobby morphs into a successful business. But Boing Boing’s version of that tale is a little different. Mark Frauenfelder and his partners — Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz — didn’t rake in investment capital, recruit a big staff […]
The Courage of Jill Costello “When she asked her doctors about rejoining the team, they looked at her as if she were crazy. Crew? She’d need all her strength just to make it through each day. Jill didn’t care. She told her mom she saw cancer as ‘just another thing on my plate.’ Besides, she’d […]
Unwanted: Inside Colorado’s Dysfunctional Foster Care System “Foster care parents have long battled the stigma that they profit from the kids who come into their homes, that foster care is a booming business. Righter was paid $23 a day for the baby, $32.28 for Daniela, and $23.38 for Josefina. Without a job, and without daycare […]
verygoodyear: The Empty Chamber – The New Yorker The Hamster Wheel – Columbia Journalism Review The Raging Septuagenarian – New York MagazineNo Secrets Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency. –> The Great CyberHeist – The New York Times George Lucas Stole Chewbacca – But It’s OK – Binary Bonsai
Michelle Legro is an editor for Lapham’s Quarterly (who you should be following on Tumblr!) michellelegro: If you aren’t one of the more than 10,000 people who follow @longreads on Twitter, or get the Longreads Instapaper feed on your iPhone or iPad, then do so immediately. Every day there are perfectly curated features of long-form journalism, […]
Don Draper’s Revenge “All these little companies with fun names,” says David Lubars, “we’ve kicked their butts.” Lubars is chairman and chief creative officer of Omnicom’s BBDO North America, an 82-year-old Madison Avenue agency with more than 17,000 employees. On a recent Friday afternoon, Lubars was sitting in his Midtown Manhattan office. He gestured at […]
On the Death Sentence Similarly, local elections affect decisions of state prosecutors to seek the death penalty and of state judges to impose it. “In states where judges were until recently empowered to override jury sentences,” Garland explains, “elected judges typically used this power to impose death rather than life. In Alabama the death-to-life ratio […]
Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown “You’ll see why Michael called this place Neverland,” says Tom Barrack, the newest owner of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch. Barrack is a 63-year-old billionaire with a gleaming shaved head, summer-in-Sardinia tan, personally trained muscles, and sockless tasseled loafers. He is sitting on the lawn beside the Tudor-style, panic-room-equipped main house, […]
Inside the Bloody World of Illegal Plastic Surgery When she wakes up at 3 a.m., the anaesthetic is long gone. Her body is screaming, racked with pain, and if a doctor were there, he’d probably tell her she was going into shock. She shakes violently but manages to toss herself into the bathroom to inspect […]
Letter from ‘Manhattan’ The characters in these pictures are, at best, trying. They are morose. They have bad manners. They seem to take long walks and go to smart restaurants only to ask one another hard questions. “Are you serious about Tracy?” the Michael Murphy character asks the Woody Allen character in Manhattan. “Are you […]
A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web “When I fly to Las Vegas I look down and see all these houses,” he starts. “If someone in one of those houses buys from DecorMyEyes and ends up hating the company, it doesn’t matter. All those other houses are filled with people, too, and they will […]
The Searchers Zhou’s nightmare began when he was 6. He and his older brother — Zhou thinks his name was Chengjiang — were leaving school when they met a couple who claimed to be friends of their parents. The man and the woman said they were there to take them home. They asked Zhou what […]
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