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The New Yorker's Nicholas Thompson: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker and a frequent Longreader.

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I’m a sucker for stories about reinvention, disappearence, and people who pretend to be someone they aren’t. The genre has cliches, and can become trite. But it can also be wonderful. And this year, the category brought us some wonderful longreads.

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“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker

I’m biased, but the story by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker about the rapper Earl Sweatshirt is, I think, a classic. The character Earl is the reinvention of another boy, whose amazing past and origins Sanneh describes. But then there’s the second disappearence of Earl himself, and then his quandry about whether and how to return to his career. Sanneh is also, stylistically, one of the most original and graceful writers around. Every sentence is a pleasure.

“His Own Private Idaho,” Sean Flynn, GQ

This piece by Flynn about a mobster who reinvents himself in Idaho, seems familiar at first. But then it turns out the central character is much more complex than you might have thought—and he ends up undone by something surprising and redemptive. It’s great. 

“My Mother’s Lover,” David Dobbs, The Atavist ($1.99)

I’m biased on this one too (I’m a co-founder of The Atavist), but Dobbs’s piece has deservedly been one of the best-selling “e-singles” of the year. It’s an amazing tale of a man discovering that his mother harbored a secret her entire adult life. And then, as Dobbs tries to resolve a mystery of his own family’s past, he gets tangled in the story of another’s. 

“Dave Sanders: Fiber-Optics Exec by Day, Defender of Justice by Night”, Joshua Davis, Wired

Joshua Davis is one of the most cinematic magazine writers around; he’s wonderful at introducing groups of characters, crafting scenes, and keeping a narrative moving. This recent piece in Wired about a fiber-optics-executive who recreates himself as a (sort-of) good-guy vigilante is a classic. It’s complicated, but Davis tells the story smoothly and smartly. 

“The Incredible Case of the P.I. Moms,” Joshuah Bearman, This American Life

I know this is a long “reads” list, but the lines with long “listens” are blurry, and there was a story this fall on This American Life of this type that I just loved: Joshuah Bearman’s “The Incredible Case of the P.I. Moms.” Like many of the other best stories in this genre, it takes, layer by layer, through a complicated series of reinventions and disguises. Plus it mixes in reality television, a mole, and an heroic journalist.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

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A lot of the more prominent evangelists these days seem more like motivational speakers. Some of the more popular—the Joel Osteens of the world—hardly mention Jesus until the end of their sermons, and many never mention Hell. But Jeffress believes that End Times are coming, and that there will be a reckoning for all eternity.

“Like Harold Camping, without the crazy, then?” I asked him, referencing the California radio evangelist who has, several times, incorrectly predicted the exact date of the end of the world.

“Like Harold Camping without the date,” he clarified.

So you have to understand, when Robert Jeffress says things like “Mitt Romney is not a Christian,” or “Islam is a false religion based on the teachings of a false prophet,” or that Oprah Winfrey is “a tool of Satan,” he’s not just trying to say something bombastic because he likes the attention. He says it out of love. He truly believes the culture is in decline and that he is slowing the decay and that this could prevent you personally from spending forever with your flesh on fire.

“How First Baptist’s Robert Jeffress Ordained Himself to Lead America.” — Michael J. Mooney, D Magazine

See more #longreads on religion

doddcasting: My Top Five #Greenreads of 2011

doddcasting: My Top Five #Greenreads of 2011

Dead Presidents: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Dead Presidents: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Nature's Brendan Maher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Brendan Maher is biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal.

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My selection of the best science-themed longreads for 2011 suffers from two major limitations: 1.) I couldn’t read everything, so have probably missed some very worthy entries. 2.) I purposely did not include articles from Nature, where I am an editor. For some top stories from our pages see our end-of-year special.

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1. “Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World,” Amy Harmon, New York Times

The science supporting new behavioural approaches to treating autism is slipped in subtly in this wonderful tale about a teenage boy with autism trying to engage with the world of “neurotypicals.” So is practically every other theme about the social and scientific difficulties that autism presents. The multimedia efforts are a treat, but Harmon’s writing is an absolute clinic in pacing.

2. “The Possibilian,” Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker

An obligatory nod to The New Yorker and to the ubiquitous David Eagleman, who has become something akin to the Oliver Sacks of our time (of course our time already has an Oliver Sacks). The details Bilger pulls into this profile are delicious. How could one not love a lab that studies the perception of time in which everyone seems to be wearing a broken wristwatch?

3. “The Behavioral Sink,” Will Wiles, Cabinet Magazine

This was a weird, wild and utterly immersive history of John B. Calhoun’s Universe 25, a mouse utopia of sorts where food was plentiful, but space was not. Once the population reached maximum density, behaviour turned pathological. The results of this experiment fit neatly’with apocalyptic fears prevalent during the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired in part by the book “The Population Bomb”. These themes are fun to reflect on, without alarm, in the year that the 7 billionth human was born

4. “False Positive,” Jon Cohen, Martin Enserink, Science

“Done. Case closed. Finito, lights off, The End,” is the ironic lede to this retelling of the story of Judy Mikovits, a passionate virologist hell-bent on proving that chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a retrovirus originally referred to as XMRV. The beginning is ironic because unbeknownst to anyone, the story would erupt again and again late in the fall, when Mikovits was sued by her former employer for allegedly stealing lab notebooks and then arrested as a fugitive from justice in a soap-opera-worthy postscript. I’ll note (in the gentle, ribbing way of a friendly competitor) that we called the death of this hypothesis several months prior in our pages, but Science’s take is as detailed as it is riveting.

5. “How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History,” Kim Zetter, Wired

This is one of the few things that keeps me up at night. We also did some coverage of this next evolution of computer viruses as weapons of war. Wired’s blow-by-blow account was, as you might expect, exceptional.

BONUS

“One in a Billion: A boy’s life, a medical mystery,” Mark Johnson Kathleen Gallagher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

I’m taking an extra turn because this three part series ran in late December after I had submitted my five best last year. Yes, it’s a bit obvious of me to pick a Pulitzer-Prize-winning package, but if you haven’t read this, you really should. The themes and challenges spelled out in this story of a sick child being helped by genomics will become a much larger part of the health-care discussion in the next few years.

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A. N. Devers' Top 5 Bathtub Longreads of 2011

A. N. Devers‘ work has appeared online in Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and in other publications.  Her most recent essay, about poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in Carmel, California, is in the Winter 2011 issue of Tin House. She is the founder and editor of Writers’ Houses, a website dedicated to literary pilgrimage.

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Maghag (n.): 1. A compulsive reader and hoarder of periodicals and magazines to a magnitude that endangers the well-being of the hag’s housekeeping ability, family relationships, and punctuality. Identified by a pruney skin that develops from spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathtub 2. Writer and procrastinator known as A. N. Devers.

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1. I always go for Scientology exposes. I’m cheap that way. “The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker, with its heroic fact-checking effort, is so Xenu-shattering that it inspired a rebuttal from the Church of Scientology in the form of a poor-executed satire of The New Yorker.

2. My fandom of Paul Collins goes back a ways. His work exposes my periodical-weeding inability. If you came over to my apartment and demanded some Paul Collins, I’d be able to run to dusty stacks and the file cabinet and deliver a dozen essays of awesome. So I’m not surprised that his piece about the disappearance of child-writer Barbara Follett in the Lapham’s Quarterly Celebrity issue is perfectly constructed story of intrigue and wonderment, mystery and disturbia.

3. Anything I can say about Hungarian industrial designer and ceramicist Eva Zeisel’s Prison Memoir (A Public Space, issue 14) of being arrested in Stalinist Russia doesn’t do her charm and intellect justice. Just listen to this voice: “He put a number in front of my chest and I thought, This will make me look like those pictures of criminals one sees, Wanted for Murder. Then they took me to be fingerprinted, one finger rolled in the ink after the other, and again I thought, It’s like the movies. Again, we walked through many courtyards and the funny thing was that I did not see anybody. It was all empty. Finally, I was in my cell, and I still did not know what it was all about.”

4. Once upon a time, I was a professional archaeologist. Freelance survey and excavation work paid some of my bills my last year of college and my first couple of years out of school. I was waitlisted for a PhD to study caves with a famous spelunking archaeologist at Washington University and had determined if I didn’t get in I’d go a different route. By then I realized that archaeology and literature have more in common than people realize—and I love them for the same reasons. They are both, I believe, about our need to seek and excavate truth. But archaeologists, like many breeds of scientist, aren’t natural storytellers, and I am always glad when a writer happens upon archaeology and finds a way to explore the people and projects of a fascinating field. John Jeremiah Sullivan does this in his wonderful Paris Review essay, “Unnamed Caves” (purchase req.), and it’s now in his excellent collection, Pulphead. Go spelunking with him. Here’s a bonus: another favorite writer of mine, Elif Batuman, dug into Turkish archaeology in her essay, The Sanctuary” for The New Yorker (sub. required). She visits the world’s oldest temple and deftly unravels its history and mythology.

5. I would be lying by omission if I didn’t admit to reading a ton of celebrity dish in the tub. I think my favorite this year was “Lowe, Actually,” the excerpt in Vanity Fair of Rob Lowe’s memoir. I don’t really have a thing for Rob Lowe. Never have. (For instance, I loved West Wing but for the overuse of pancake makeup on Lowe’s face.) But I spent 6th grade idolizing S. E. Hinton for The Outsiders. And I was hooked again when I finally got to see the movie. So, yes, Rob Lowe had me at his mention of Ponyboy. Stay gold, y’all. 

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Businessweek's Sheelah Kolhatkar: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year:

“Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian

This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but you usually don’t hear about it because the cruise lines keep it quiet. Ronson goes deep into the bizarre cruise culture as he tries to figure out what happened to Rebecca Coriam, who vanished from the Disney Wonder last March.

“All The Angry People,” George Packer, The New Yorker

This story accomplished what seemed almost impossible, at least from an editor’s perspective: it made a compelling narrative out of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan. Even though OWS was being covered to death, this story—along with Bloomberg Businessweek’s own fine contribution, Drake Bennett’s profile of David Graeber—found a new angle on it and made it fresh and compelling.

“The Girl from Trails End,” Kathy Dobie, GQ

This devastating story just really stayed with me.

“California and Bust,” Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

His piece about Iceland (“Wall Street on the Tundra”) is my favorite one he’s done about the global financial crisis, but Michael Lewis’s breakdown of the fiscal disaster that is California was his best in 2011. It really makes you think about the scary place we might be headed as a country, and the scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger is priceless.

“Lady, Where’s My Magazine**?” Ann Friedman

This is a parody, and it isn’t terribly long, so I’m not sure that it qualifies. But it is hilarious, and perfectly illustrates much of what is wrong with the publishing business.

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Instafiction's Jeremy Bushnell: My Top Fiction Longreads of 2011

Jeremy P. Bushnell is the editor-in-chief of Instafiction.org, which links to a quality short story each weekday.  He stockpiles many other links at his blog, Raccoon.  He’s also on Twitter

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Backbone,” David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker)

During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace made massive contributions to the worlds of fiction and nonfiction alike, and I still miss his presence in the world acutely. The Pale King was a towering book of my summer, and although it didn’t quite yield the pleasures that a truly finished work might have, many of its fragments and episodes had the power of great short stories.  See, for instance, this chapter, published as a standalone piece in The New Yorker.

Zone One,” Colson Whitehead (excerpt, Esquire)

Whitehead’s Zone One is a great 2011 novel about government, bureaucracy, urban space, and human population.  Oh yeah, it has zombies in it, too.  Esquire gave us the first 20 pages—detailing a four-zombie attack on the book’s protagonist—right before Halloween, but it’s just as good a read now, at year’s end.

Female Explosion Syndrome” Jessica Forcier (New Delta Review)

Women all over the globe begin spontaneously combusting.  Men don’t.  Feminist?  Fabulist?  All of the above?  Either way, this one stuck with us.  Thanks to New Delta Reviewfor publishing it.

The Empty Room,” Jonathan Lethem (Paris Review)

Lethem hasn’t put out a short story collection since 2006’s How We Got Insipid, but he’s still writing short fiction, and this year he placed a memorable tale of domestic collapse with the Paris Review.  The setup: Upon moving his family into a sprawling farmhouse, a father makes a decision: one room will remain empty. “The empty room is like a living organ in our family’s house,” he claims, although in actuality it becomes the hollow core around which the family implodes.   

Becoming Deer,” Rachel Levy (PANK Magazine)

This fall, in the Chicago Reader, our Associate Editor Jamie Yates praised this story (from PANK Magazine) as a story that straddles the line between “the realistic and the mythical” and derives strength from each. You could also say it does the same with the line between the human and the animal. All this line-crossing makes the story into a kind of tangled skein, humming with tension. Taut, terse, and eerie: the best of a certain kind of experimental work. 

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We also featured tons of good stuff this year that didn’t make its first appearance in 2011, so if you’re looking for more good fiction from the past, check out our Instafiction “Editor’s Picks” tag.

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Edith Zimmerman: My Top 6 Longreads of 2011

Edith Zimmerman is a writer and co-editor of The Hairpin.

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“All the Single Ladies,” Kate Bolick, The Atlantic

Kate’s story on the current state of marriage, and men, and women, is sad and happy and fascinating, and just generally makes me want to give her a high-five and roll cigarettes with her, even though neither of us smoke.

“Ask an Abortion Provider,” Dolores P., The Hairpin

Dolores P. wrote this for The Hairpin, the website I edit, and when she first sent it to me—out of the blue—I cried, and then I cried again when it was published, and the comments were so beautiful, but especially when someone left this comment: “I am pro-life, and was very moved by Dolores’s article. Although I really struggle with the ethics behind abortion, I recognize that in the end it’s all about people trying to figure out the best thing to do with their lives.” I had never seen that kind of response before. Actually there must have been at least five times I cried about things having to do with that piece. It made me proud to work where I work.

“The Medium Chill,” David Roberts, Grist

If you’ve ever achieved something you always wanted, and then the happiness lasted for … a couple days, and then you wanted something else, and something else, and there’s this lingering fear that nothing will ever be enough, read this article! This dude has it figured out, and if you just read the article enough times you can maybe bore through the computer and steal his life.

“My Superpower Is Being Alone Forever,” Joe Berkowitz and Joanna Neborsky, The Awl

The illustrations and story on this one are perfect. I love it. Joe is great. I think everyone falls in love with him a little bit here.

“Precarious Beauty,” Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker (sub. required)

I didn’t really know who Daphne Guinness was before this, but rarely have I been so fascinated by anything. I wanted to be everywhere they were, look at everything they saw, not-eat everything they didn’t eat. 

“Now That Books Mean Nothing,” Nell Boeschenstein, The Morning News

Nell writes about the books she didn’t feel like reading after her prophylactic double mastectomy, and her desire to “chug YouTube straight.” She’s funny, smart, thoughtful, and unusually self-aware. It makes me want to sit by her.

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Gangrey: Our Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling. 

Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical combat is not rare. It’s in that spirit that you’ll find some cross pollination in the picks below. You’ll also see some good stuff that hasn’t shown up on the Top 5 lists so far. That’s on purpose. Hope you enjoy, and please know you’re welcome to come join us for last call over at gangrey.com. Drinks are on Wright.

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Wright Thompson

Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, and he lives in Oxford, Mississippi.


“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times

“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine

“The View From Within,” Seth Wickersham, ESPN The Magazine

“Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?” Tom Junod, Esquire

“The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy,” David Von Drehle, Time

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Justin Heckert

Heckert is a writer living in Atlanta. 

“The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker

 ”The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off,” Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

“Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?” Susan Dominus, New York Times Magazine

“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home”, by Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times

“Staying the Course”, Wright Thompson, ESPN 

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Thomas Lake

Lake is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated living in Atlanta.


 “A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times

“True Grits,” Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker (sub. required)

“Diving Headlong Into A Sunny Paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times

“Could This Be Happening? A Man’s Nightmare Made Real,” Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times

“When A Diver Goes Missing, A Deep Cave Is Scene Of A Deeper Mystery,” Ben Montgomery, St. Petersburg Times

“The Beards Are A Joke,” Justin Heckert, Atlanta Magazine, April 2011

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Mark Johnson

Johnson is a 2010 Pulitzer winner who covers health and science for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and once played guitar for a Rockford, Ill., grunge band called The Bloody Stumps.


“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine

“Punched Out,” John Branch, New York Times

“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” Rich Schapiro, Wired

“Imminent Danger,” Meg Kissinger, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Diving headlong into a sunny paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times

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Michael Kruse

Kruse, a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and contributing writer to ESPN’s Grantland, won this year’s ASNE award for distinguished non-deadline writing.


“The Lost Boys” Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly

The easiest-to-read hardest thing I read this year.

“The Lazarus File,” Matthew McGough, The Atlantic

Simple: suspense and surprise.

“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, The New York Times Magazine

My first reaction when I read this? Jealousy and awe. And when I read it a second time? And a third? Same.

“A man’s nightmare made real,” Chris Goffard, the Los Angeles Times

Riveting. The work of a master.

“God’s Away on Business,” Spencer Hall, Every Day Should Be Saturday

George Teague, college football and big thoughts.

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Ben Montgomery

Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, and he lives in Tampa.


“If I Die Young,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times

“The Guiltless Pleasure,” Rick Bragg, Gourmet

“A Lot To Lose,” Tony Rehagen, Indianapolis Monthly

“The Shepard’s Lamb,” Danielle Paquette, Indiana University Daily Student

“Voice of America,” by Coozledad, rurritable

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