Search Results for: The Nation

Mister Lytle: An Essay

Longreads Pick

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” (National Magazine Award winner 2011)

Published: Oct 1, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,507 words)

The Ghost Park

Longreads Pick

If the West is ground zero for the unholy experiment being conducted on weather shifts, then Yellowstone is first up on the blasting range. The oldest and most magical of our national parks, its 2 million acres stretch to three states, boast a spectacular chain of rivers, lakes, and creeks, and sit, a vast chunk of them, on a supervolcano that spawns half the world’s geysers and hot springs. There is grandeur on all sides of you, but graveyards, too: mile after mile of zombified forests, dead from the roots but still standing.

Source: Men’s Journal
Published: Apr 18, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,002 words)

rollingstone:

If you’re in NYC, please come to our Night of Long-Form Journalism panel Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Housing Works, which we’re presenting in conjunction with Longreads.

To get you ready for the panel, we’ve collected a couple great stories from each of the three panelists: Jeff Goodell, Brian Hiatt and Rob Sheffield. 

Jeff Goodell:

The Dark Lord of Coal Country, Nov. 29, 2010: The Rolling Stone investigation that forced the resignation of Don Blankenship, the coal industry’s dirtiest CEO

As the World Burns, Jan. 6, 2010: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming

Brian Hiatt: 

Billy Corgan, Rock God Interrupted, Jan. 3, 2011: The infinite sadness and unlikely redemption of the last Pumpkin standing

Lady Gaga, New York Doll, June 11, 2009: Gaga worships Warhol. Kisses girls (for real). And she’s the biggest new pop star of 2009

Rob Sheffield:

Rocklahoma: Still Hair Metal After All These Years, Dec. 27, 2007: Welcome to the festival where Eighties hair bands and those who love them gather to headbang and ponder the passage of time

Britney Spears, Oops!…I Did It Again, album review

The Woman Who Smashed the Glass Ceiling

Longreads Pick

Today, Rachel Beer would be diagnosed as suffering from a nervous breakdown. But in 1903, the three doctors came to a radically different conclusion: the woman had clearly lost her mind. Her plight excited no interest, and within months it was as if she had never existed. Yet not only had Rachel been the very first female editor of a Fleet Street newspaper, but she had simultaneously edited both the Observer and the Sunday Times while also writing regular columns and conducting interviews that set the agenda for national debate. Another 80 years would elapse before another woman was (wrongly) hailed as the first female editor of a national paper.

Source: Daily Mail
Published: Apr 2, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,344 words)

Sardine Life

Longreads Pick

New York didn’t invent the apartment. Shopkeepers in ancient Rome lived above the store, Chinese clans crowded into multistory circular tulou, and sixteenth-century Yemenites lived in the mud-brick skyscrapers of Shibam. But New York re-invented the apartment many times over, developing the airborne slice of real estate into a symbol of exquisite urbanity. Sure, we still have our brownstones and our townhouses, but in the popular imagination today’s New Yorker occupies a glassed-in aerie, a shared walk-up, a rambling prewar with walls thickened by layers of paint, or a pristine white loft.

Published: Apr 4, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,776 words)

The History of Cricket in the United States

Longreads Pick

The rules of the game on this side of the Atlantic were formalized in 1754, when Benjamin Franklin brought back from England a copy of the 1744 Laws, cricket’s official rule book. There is anecdotal evidence that George Washington’s troops played what they called “wickets” at Valley Forge in the summer of 1778. After the Revolution, a 1786 advertisement for cricket equipment appeared in the New York Independent Journal, and newspaper reports of that time frequently mention “young gentlemen” and “men of fashion” taking up the sport. Indeed, the game came up in the debate over what to call the new nation’s head of state: John Adams noted disapprovingly—and futilely—that “there are presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs.”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Mar 31, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,257 words)

Gerald Marzorati: Five Longreads for Opening Day

Gerald Marzorati, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine, is an Assistant Managing Editor of the Times


“Early Innings,” by Roger Angell. (The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1992) (sub. required)

America’s baseball belletrist here writes of how he came to love the game.

“The Silent Season of a Hero,” by Gay Talese. (Esquire, July 1966)

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? The author finds him in retirement, uneasily.

“The Streak of Streaks,” by Stephen Jay Gould. (The New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 1988)

More DiMaggio, this from the renowned paleontologist and ponderer of evolution—contemplating, here, what it means to have a hot streak (i.e., to cheat death).

“Final Twist of the Drama,” by George Plimpton. (Sports Illustrated, April 22, 1974)

The boyishly witty inventor of field-level participatory journalism here is a careful observer—of everything surrounding Henry Aaron’s home-run that broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime record.

“Coach Fitz’s Management Theory,” by Michael Lewis. (The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2004)

A piece I coaxed Michael to write—about his high-school baseball coach, and much, much more.

Stuff Julian Schnabel Told Me In His Ex-Wife’s Living Room Last Night

Longreads Pick

“he touches Dan Colen’s painting with his fingers, moving his fingers over the birdshit lumps, and looks unimpressed. he asks me if i’ve heard of Dan Colen and i say ‘yeah because i read a lot about Dash Snow after he died.’ as we’re standing next to the bird shit painting, i tell Julian Schnabel about the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru, which is the fattest country in the world (97% of men and 93% of women are overweight or obese), because, re: the birdshit painting, the island’s chief export is guano, which is the excrement of bats, birds, and seals. the island got really rich off selling this shit to the rest of the world for fertilizer, and then the rest of the world repaid Nauru by making it the fattest country. Julian Schnabel is entertained”

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 30, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,397 words)

When Are You Dead?

Longreads Pick

The medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.

Published: Mar 29, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,271 words)

Building a Better Reactor

Longreads Pick

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. First the accident, then the predictable allegations in the postmortem: The design was flawed. Inspections were inadequate. Lines of defense crumbled, and reliable backups proved unreliable. Planners lacked the imagination or willpower to prepare for the very worst. There’s a way to break out of this pattern. Nuclear power plants will never be completely safe, but they can be made far safer than they are today. The key is humility. The next generation of plants must be built to work with nature—and human nature—rather than against them. They must be safe by design, so that even if every possible thing goes wrong, the outcome will stop short of disaster. In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be “walkaway safe.”

Author: Peter Coy
Source: Businessweek
Published: Mar 24, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,209 words)