College Longreads Pick of the Week: ‘The Shady Lady,’ by Danny Valdes, Dartmouth
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher and Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick is “The Shady Lady,” by Danny Valdes, and it comes from Dartmouth College, where professor and bestselling author Jeff Sharlet worked with his class to create 40 Towns, a new literary journalism project.
Reading List: 21 Outstanding Stories from Women’s Magazines and Websites
Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious.
The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as “serious journalism.” We’ve seen serious storytelling in both.
Now on Newsstands: Modern Farmer
One of our favorite parts about running Longreads is getting to know all the excellent magazine, book and online publishers out there producing great storytelling. We thought it would be fun to profile them—starting today with Modern Farmer. We spoke with deputy editor Reyhan Harmanci about their inaugural issue, out now.
Happy 10th Birthday, The Believer!
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, The Believer has just published a handful of classic stories for the first time on the web, and they were nice enough to share them with the Longreads community. Enjoy.
Celebrating Four Years of #Longreads
Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday, and it’s been a thrill to watch this community grow since we introduced this service and Twitter hashtag in 2009. Thank you to everyone who participates, whether it’s as a reader, a publisher, a writer—or all three. And thanks to the Longreads Members who have made it possible for us to keep going.
To celebrate four years, here’s a rundown of some of our most frequent #longreads contributors, and some of their recent recommendations.
Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2013
Longreads presents: A collection of stories awarded the Pulitzer, including The New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and more.
From the Longreads Archive: Roger Ebert
A collection of stories by and about the writer and film critic, who has died at age 70.
Robbie Adams: Recording U2’s Achtung Baby & Zooropa (1994)
Technical interview with the sound engineer on two classic U2 albums and how the band recorded them:
“The band subsequently spent almost half a year in a rented house by the sea near Dublin, using equipment rented from Audio Engineering, Ireland’s largest pro-audio hire company, before moving on to the legendary Windmill Lane studios in Dublin for the final mixes. Similarily, Zooropa was also largely recorded in improvised surroundings. These unusual recording surroundings must have awoken the muses, because the stories of the recording sessions for Achtung Baby and Zooropa recount chaotic and almost manic outpourings of creativity. They feature such unusual tales as: the band simultaneously using three rooms to record and mix and the various bandmembers overdubbing in the different studios with people running around with tapes from room to room; last minute overdubs during or even after the final mix; nightly flights home straight after European gigs to complete Zooropa; the filling of 180 2-hour DAT tapes with a procedure called ‘fatting’, complete disregard for standard recording objectives such as separation and low noise levels, and last but not least the interesting dichotomy between the intense 11 months that it took to complete Achtung Baby, endlessly sculpting the songs into perfect shape, and the attitude of ‘recklessness’ and ‘performance first’ encouraged by Daniel Lanois.”
Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2012
Longreads presents a collection of links to this year’s winners.
Why and How to Write
Ever since I began my full-length memoir Jesus Was A Pale Imitation of Myself I have been deluged with responses from fans asking me how I start writing. That’s a great question, but I usually don’t give writing advice for free, just the actual writing. Still many authors have weighed in on this subject and we can learn much from their instruction. This is the first of a four part series. (Featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein.)