Search Results for: New York Magazine

Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicaidprescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk to them now, these same Republicans seem positively baffled that anyone could have actually internalized, so literally, all the scorching resentment for government that has come to define the modern conservative campaign.

“Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.?” — Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Matt Bai

When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on Haight Street, listening to the sound of the electric typewriter coming from the other room. 

… That same summer, Jonathan Franzen, also 28, was living in Jackson Heights, Queens, and feeling “totally, totally isolated.” The neighborhood was an immigrant jumble, and Franzen was a solemn, intellectual guy from St. Louis without much occasion to leave the house. He had gotten some attention and money for his debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, but the axis of the planet had not obediently shifted. He was frustrated with living in “shared monastic seclusion” with his then-wife, he says, when he got a fan letter from a writer he knew of but had never read. David Foster Wallace, then 26, was having dire troubles of his own and wrote to praise what Franzen had done in a “freaking first novel.” 

“Just Kids.” — Evan Hughes, New York Magazine

See more #longreads from New York Magazine

(Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger/Corbis)

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

Lewis does his best to ignore what he calls “the noise.” “I’m sensitive enough to criticism that if I pay attention to it, it may make me a worse writer,” he says, maneuvering his car through the Berkeley Hills. “When I sit down to write, I like to think everybody’s going to love me,” he adds. “Or at least I don’t think anybody’s going to hate me. It’s pronoia, right, is that the word? Everybody’s out to love me, not everybody’s out to hate me? I think basically that way as I move through the world.”

“It’s Good to Be Michael Lewis.” — Jessica Pressler, New York magazine

See also: “It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!” — Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair, Aug. 10, 2011

“At Twitter, where anxiety and optimism are never far from one another, the leadership is surprisingly frank about these problems. To start with, the audience is alarmingly fickle. Nielsen estimated that user-retention rates were around 40 percent. Twitter was easy to use at an entry level, but after a while it was hard for some people to see the point. Twitter has claimed as many as 175 million registered users, but numbers leaked to the online news site Business Insider in March put the number of actual people using it closer to 50 million, correcting for dead and duplicate accounts, automated ‘bots’ and spam.”

“Tweet Science.” — Joe Hagan, New York magazine

See more #longreads about Twitter

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from London Review of Books, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Orion Magazine, and a guest pick from arts journalist Suzi Steffen.

“The real hourly median wage in New York between 1990 and 2007 fell by almost 9 percent. Young men and women aged twenty-five to thirty-four with a bachelor’s degree and a year-round job in New York saw their earnings drop 6 percent. Middle-income New Yorkers—defined broadly by the FPI as those drawing incomes between approximately $29,000 and $167,000—experienced a 19 percent decrease in earnings.”

“The Reign of the One Percenters.” — Christopher Ketcham, Orion Magazine

See another of Christopher Ketcham’s #longreads: “Meet the Man Who Lives on Zero Dollars,” DETAILS, July 2009

“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

“One recalled that as a girl, she would enact a nocturnal parental ritual in reverse: She, the child, would creep out from her bed to listen at her mother’s door for the precious sound of breathing. ‘She was just terrified,’ Morris says, ‘that her mother would die.’” 

“Parents of a Certain Age.” — Lisa Miller, New York Magazine

See more #longreads from Lisa Miller