Search Results for: new york times

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Wired, New York Magazine, PLoS, OnEarth Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and a guest pick from Village Voice editor Francesa Stabile.

In his personal writings, Gray comes across in a more extreme way than in his theatrical persona, his anguish and need not tempered by his perceptive charm. He writes searchingly about his sexuality. He chronicles his relationships with the three major women in his life — first LeCompte, then Renée Shafransky and later Kathleen Russo — each one overlapping with the last, each becoming involved in his work. And it is evident that even as a young man, Gray was battling the demons that would eventually lead him to end his life in 2004 by throwing himself from the Staten Island Ferry into the water.

“Spalding Gray’s Tortured Soul.” — Nell Casey, New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from The New York Times

(Photo Credit: Ken Regan/Camera5 for The New York Times)

Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard, their assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers clanging against the hull. Paul activated an emergency beacon, which immediately started emitting an S.O.S., and then went up on deck. The men stank of the sea and nervous musk, and they jabbed their guns at the Chandlers.

“Stop engine!” they shouted. “Crew, crew! How many crew number?”

One pirate was particularly concerned about anything flashing, and Paul’s heart sank when the pirate stomped below deck and discovered the emergency beacon, blinking like a strobe, and promptly switched it off. The pirates ordered the Chandlers not to touch anything else, and then they demanded a shower.

This was Oct. 23, 2009. The Chandlers would be held for the next 388 days. 

“Taken by Pirates.” Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times Magazine

More #longreads: “Bootylicious.” The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 2009. On what the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts

Featured Longreader: Nick Baumann, news editor for Mother Jones. See his story picks from Grantland, The New York Times and more on his #longreads page.

“The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, ‘Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.’” 

“Flick Chicks.” — Mindy Kaling, The New Yorker

More #longreads: “A Long Day at ‘The Office’ with Mindy Kaling.” The New York Times magazine, Sept. 23, 2011

My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling

Longreads Pick

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.

Published: Sep 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,263 words)

Trust Issues

Longreads Pick

Thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb. One suspects they’d have rather gotten a new squash court.

Published: Sep 15, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,730 words)

The Secret History of Guns

Longreads Pick

Today, the NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers. In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 9, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,616 words)

The Kingdom and the Paywall

Longreads Pick

A funny thing happened on the way to the graveyard. Though the New York Times’ circulation dipped during the crash years, much of the lost revenue was made up for by doubling the newsstand price, from $1 to $2—evidence, the paper insisted, that its premium audience understood the value of a premium product. In March, after several years of planning and tens of millions in investments, the Times launched a digital-subscription plan—and the early signs were good. In fact, less than 48 hours before my interview, the Times announced it would finish paying back the Carlos Slim loan in full on August 15, three and a half years early.

Published: Jul 24, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,806 words)

Almost Amis

Longreads Pick

And so Martin Amis and his wife, the author Isabel Fonseca, are coming to Cobble Hill. And what’s it like being a writer in Brooklyn? “I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan,” Colson Whitehead once wrote in The New York Times, “but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee.” More likely, there are other writers walking in front of you. It’s a zone of infestation. Not only of novelists but reporters, pundits, poets and those often closeted scribblers who call themselves editors and agents. Not to mention bloggers, or whatever counts for being an online writer these days.

Published: Apr 26, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,132 words)