Search Results for: Esquire

Andrea Pitzer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Andrea Pitzer is writer and editor of Nieman Storyboard.

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To eliminate some of the choices that have already been popular—hello, David Grann! ;)—I haven’t included anyone I’ve met in person. All stories from 2010.

Rabbi to the Rescue, by Martha Wexler and Jeff Lunden from The Washington Post Magazine

Spiritual longing, the Holocaust, and the bitter line between the truth and a beautiful story.

TVs Crowning Moment of Awesome, by Chris Jones for Esquire

I know, everybody loved the Roger Ebert piece, but check out the surprises here, including an angry Drew Carey.

An Army of One, by Chris Heath from GQ

Meet Gary Faulkner, American patriot and would-be assassin of Osama bin Laden. 

The High Is Always the Pain, and the Pain Is Always the High, from Jay Caspian Kang on The Morning News

Yes, everyone else has already picked it too, but it’s that good. And I bet they didn’t interview him.

The Amazing Tale, by Rick Moody from Details

Read this story to the end. It will blow your mind over and over, and almost never in the way you’re expecting.

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And an honorable mention for an entry that topped my list until I realized it was from December 2009: The Last Vet, by Aminatta Forna in Granta. How much suffering can a country take, and what will it value in the aftermath? An essay on empire, war, and the last vet in private practice in Sierra Leone. 

Alex Pappademas: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Alex Pappademas is a staff writer for GQ

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Rules: Nothing not published this year, nothing from GQ, because I work there, and—in the spirit of the assignment—nothing I didn’t first read on my iPhone. (And I realize now, having done this whole thing, that everything on the main list is from a print-based publication, which should not be taken as some kind of a Statement. I still love you, Internet!)

Michael Kruse, Lonely, Stressed and Frustrated: Inside the Mind of the Pinellas Monkey (St. Petersburg Times, May 16, 2010)

Best celebrity profile I read this year, and it’s a write-around. About a monkey. “People who are alone tend to make self-destructive decisions. They might drink too much or not eat right. They start giving up. And the monkey here, he explains, isn’t all that different.”

Mark Harris, The Red Carpet Campaign (New York, 2/7/10)

Reported essay about awards-season swirl and how the pseudo-event sausage of the Academy Awards gets made. The gist: “A good Oscar narrative makes voters feel that, by writing a name on a ballot, they’re completing a satisfying plotline. Only a few of these stories are effective, and every campaign season, movies scramble to own them.” Sprawling yet surgical; managed to make me care, in February, about a subject I’m usually utterly post-give-a-shit about by Thanksgiving.

Rob Tanenbaum, The Playboy Interview: John Mayer (Playboy, March 2010)

Yeah, this is the one where Mayer rendered himself culturally leprous with a few spectacularly ill-advised comments about African-Americans and his weiner— but it’s also the best Q&A with a rock personality I read this year. Speaking as somebody who does this for a living: It’s hard to get something interesting out of a subject who’s reluctant or dumb, but it’s actually way harder to take a quote machine like Mayer— who’s historically used compulsive self-disclosure and meta-acknowledgements of what he knows about the interview process to completely run the table in these situations— somewhere he doesn’t want to go. And, uh, obviously, that’s what happened.

Chris Jones, Roger Ebert: The Essential Man (Esquire, February 2010)

I spent an embarrassing amount of time—like, months—working on a snakebit-from-the-beginning Ebert profile for GQ five years ago. It never ran, mostly because it sucked. Sucked on draft 1, sucked worse on draft 18. (Like Rog once said about certain reviews: “The bad ones take forever.”) So I was all ready to hate this Ebert story just for existing and appearing in a magazine and reminding me of how spectacularly I blew it in 2005—but I didn’t, because it’s so goddamn good it turned off the part of my brain that hates people for being better than me. That part where Ebert gets mad at Disney’s copyright police for taking down YouTube videos of him and Siskel, and because he can’t yell, he makes the font bigger and bigger? “He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.” Holy fucking shit.

Joe Hagan, The Return of Governor Moonbeam, And Other Hallucinations From The Golden State (New York, October 10, 2010)

Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman contest the California narrative as the state, fiscally gut-shot by the housing collapse, tumbles broke and stoned into the sea; Hagan weaves Jerry’s free-association and Schwarzenegger’s puny-humans ranting and Meg Whitman’s total carpetbagging bullshit in and out of a bunch of elegant set pieces—the Hyatt-ballroom rally, the pot dispensary, David Boies’ beach house. The obvious comparison to make when you’re talking about a story where a writer tries to comprehend weed-hazy apocalyptic California is Joan Didion, but the real bookend for this one—culturally, decade-wise, whatever—is the series of dispatches Hank Stuever filed from L.A. and Sacramento back in 2003, during the nutsoid recall election that led to Schwarzenegger taking office in the first place. (They’re collected in his book OFF RAMP as one essay, “Recallifornia”; the story about Gary Coleman is here. Read those and Joe’s story back to back, groove on the paradox of Californian perma-decline.)

Honorable mentions, aka “I could have done 15 of these”:

Jay Caspian Kang, The High Is Always The Pain and the Pain Is Always the High (The Morning News, 10/8/10), which I read after everybody else put it on their Top 5 lists, so I’m not counting it, because totally arbitrary rules are rules.

Sean Witzke, Emma Peel Sessions 39 – ‘Have you seen the Lady From Shanghai? Orson Welles… that one makes no sense’ (supervillain.wordpress.com, 7/5/10)

Molly Lambert, In Which We Eagerly Await Aaron Sorkin’s Friend Request (thisrecording.com, 10/7/10)

Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17dots, 8/5/10)

Mary HK Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper, On ‘New Moon’: ‘Teenage Female Desire Manifest’ (The Awl, 11/20/10)

Oh, and it’s from 2009, but: Chris Stangl, Ghost Train: The Lost Pauline Kael Review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) (The Exploding Kinetoscope, 7/7/09)

Chris Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

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 origins, with the artist’s fingerprints.

Michael Kruse: Stories of LeBron and sportswriter intertwined, tangled, The St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 21, 2010

Maybe the best way to approach an over-covered subject: write about him by writing about someone else. (See Breslin, Jimmy. Digging JFK Grave was His Honor.)

Eli Saslow: For a look outside the presidential bubble, Obama reads 10 personal letters a day, The Washington Post, March 31, 2010

For a look inside the presidential bubble, report the hell out of the story of a single letter.

CJ Chivers: A Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja, The New York Times, April 19, 2010

Every time CJ Chivers heads off to war and sends back a story, I feel like less of a man and less of a writer.

Tom Junod: Eating the Whole Animal, from the Inside-Out, Esquire, April 2010

Pure entertainment by one of the all-time great magazine writers. Also contains the sentence: “The veins are what freaked me out.” Impossible to resist. Reading, not eating, that is.

Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010

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 alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”

The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”

The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”

Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy
Jon Ronson, The Guardian
“I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. Shaggy nods quietly. ‘I get anxiety and shit a lot,’ he says. ‘And reading that stuff people write about us… It hurts.’”

See my (much longer) list of the best long-form journalism of 2009.

Follow @longreads, or search for #longreads on Twitter. Or follow me, @mpaldridge.

The House That Thurman Munson Built

The House That Thurman Munson Built

Aileen Gallagher: My 2010 Longreads

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 Bell and Blakeslee nails the complex conflict of the man and the showman.

Tad Friend’s Sleeping With Weapons (New Yorker, August 16, 2010)

Profile of Lounge Lizard John Lurie starts off so well I use it in class: “From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face.” 

Luke Dittrich’s The Man Who Would Fall to Earth (Esquire, August 2010)

I did not expect to get through this story, let alone love it. (The story in the same issue about the perfect Price is Right bid is more my bag.) This is how you take a pontentially complicated story about an event (the freefall jump from space) and make it about people.

Dana Priest’s Top Secret America (Washington Post, July 2010)

Priest is such a meticulous, awesome reporter.  She’s sourced like Sy Hersch. This is not as readable as her Walter Reed series, but equally depressing and even more important to our country.

From Jason Fagone: my top five @longreads of 2010

jfagone:

  1. Jeff Sharlet, Harper’s, Straight Man’s Burden
  2. Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, Letting Go
  3. Patrick Symmes, Harper’s, Thirty Days as a Cuban
  4. Chris Jones, Esquire, What Happened to Roger Ebert?
  5. Moe Tkacik, Columbia Journalism Review, Look at Me!

Balance

Longreads Pick

Five men, one room, and a national crisis. The Esquire Commission to Balance the Federal Budget — Bob Packwood, John Danforth, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Lawrence O’Donnell — will now report its findings.

Source: Esquire
Published: Oct 13, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,644 words)

Greg Giraldo Before He Was Greg Giraldo

Longreads Pick

Ten years ago, Esquire profiled several young professionals who, ten years before that, had graduated from Harvard Law School and thrown away their degrees. One of them was comedian Greg Giraldo, who died on Wednesday of a drug overdose. This is the obituary of his first life.

Source: Esquire
Published: Aug 1, 2000
Length: 7 minutes (1,959 words)

Aquarius Wept

Longreads Pick

And flights of Angels sang Meredith Hunter to his rest. After Woodstock and love came Altamont and disaster, and after Altamont came its definitive history in the pages of Esquire (now available for the first time online).

Source: Esquire
Published: Aug 1, 1970
Length: 47 minutes (11,766 words)