Longreads Best of 2012: Jodi Ettenberg

Jodi Ettenberg is the founder of Legal Nomads, a contributing editor to Longreads and Travelreads, and the author of The Food Traveler’s Handbook.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 27, 2012

Longreads Best of 2012: Geoff Van Dyke

Geoff Van Dyke is the editorial director of 5280 Magazine in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 27, 2012

The Tip of the Spear

A journalist reexamines what happened to him more than 20 years ago during his five-year investigation of the Church of Scientology for The Los Angeles Times:

“One morning my wife, a kindergarten teacher, was leaving for work when a process server sent by the church’s lawyers jumped out from behind a hedge with a subpoena for me. Another day I listened to Bob on the phone at work as he struggled to calm his wife. She was home alone and somebody had dropped Forest Lawn burial brochures on their doorstep. It would happen more than once, and one afternoon she even saw somebody scurrying away. Then there was the night when upwards of four California Highway Patrol cars, lights flashing, pulled Bob over as he drove home on the 710 freeway. He was ordered out of his car and given a sobriety test. After he passed, Bob asked why he’d been stopped; an officer said they’d been told he was weaving dangerously.

“The next day the Times’s security chief, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department official, made some inquiries and discovered that the pursuit had begun when a man called the CHP and said he was tailing a drunk and would direct units to his location. The caller said he was a Los Angeles police officer.”

Published: Dec 18, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,816 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Emma Carmichael

Emma Carmichael is the managing editor of Gawker. She lives in Brooklyn.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 26, 2012

The Story Behind Mitt Romney’s Loss

Campaign aides on both sides deconstruct where the Republican candidate went wrong:

“It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney’s political ­director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his ‘better ground game,’ could lose the key state of Ohio or the election. The race is ‘unmistakably moving in Mitt Romney’s direction,’ the memo said.

“But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called ‘state of the art’ crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day.

“To this day, Romney’s aides wonder how it all went so wrong.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Dec 24, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,599 words)

Are Babies Born Good?

Researching the moral decisions of infants:

“The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there. ‘When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,’ Charles Darwin wrote in ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,’ his classic study of his own son. Babies don’t reliably control their bodies or communicate well, if at all, so their opinions can’t be solicited through ordinary means. Instead, researchers outfit them with miniature wire skullcaps to monitor their brain waves, scrutinize them like shoplifters through video cameras and two-way mirrors, and conduct exceedingly clever and tightly controlled experiments, which a good portion of their subjects will refuse to sit through anyway. Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Dec 24, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,817 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: David Roth

David Roth is a co-founder of, writer for and editor at the sports website The Classical. He writes columns for Sports On Earth and Vice, co-writes The Daily Fix blog-column for the Wall Street Journal online, and writes for The Awl, GQ and other places when there’s time and when they’ll have him. He’s on Twitter, a lot, @david_j_roth.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Author: David Roth
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 24, 2012

Brother’s Keeper

Two brothers, two suicides:

“On the afternoon of Saturday, May 4, 2001, the nine-person cast of the Monadnock Regional High school production of Ordinary People gathered in the school auditorium in Swanzey, New Hampshire, for their first dress rehearsal. Opening night was only four days away, and the cast’s five boys and four girls were starting to feel the pressure. The mood was strained and occasionally hostile.

“The problem, most everyone agreed, was an angry Greg Kochman, who played the lead role of Conrad, a suicidal teenager coping with the death of his older brother. Then a junior at Monadnock, Greg was in one of his moods. ‘He was so angry that week, and that day was the worst of it,’ recalls Kristen Arrow, who played Conrad’s mother in the play. ‘He would just lash out at people for no reason. It was the first day that I had gotten really irritated at Greg.’

“Still, there was no denying that Greg could act. And on Saturday, the broad-shouldered, brown-haired 17-year-old was acting even better than usual.”

Published: Dec 23, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,804 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Hobbes

Michael Hobbes lives in Berlin. His essays from his blog, Rottin’ in Denmark, were featured on Longreads this year.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 22, 2012

The Secret Lives of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives

On storytelling, and the questions it answers in our own lives:

“Around the time our daughter turned four, she started making what seemed like odd requests. ‘Tell me about the sad parts of your life,’ she would say at the dinner table. Or, ‘Tell me about the scary parts of your life.’”

This phase went on for a while. I played along, telling her about my appendectomy in Africa, the time I almost fell off a cliff, the time I got a fishhook through my finger. We talked about deaths in the family, and she would sit with her eyes wide, not saying a word, listening as if her life depended on it.”

Source: Poets & Writers
Published: Dec 22, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,788 words)