Longreads Best of 2012: Paige Williams

Paige Williams is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose stories have been anthologized in five Best American volumes. She teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and edits Nieman Storyboard.

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Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 7, 2012
Length: 5 minutes (1,339 words)

2 Good 2 Be 4Gotten: An Oral History of Freaks and Geeks

An oral history of Freaks and Geeks, which received a huge cult following after its cancellation, and launched the careers of actors like Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and James Franco:

PAUL FEIG: We did our infamous two weeks with the writers locking ourselves in a room and telling personal stories. I wrote a list of questions for everybody to answer: ‘What was the best thing that happened to you in high school? What was the worst thing that happened to you in high school? Who were you in love with and why?’

JUDD APATOW: ‘What was your worst drug experience? Who was your first girlfriend? What’s the first sexual thing you ever did? What’s the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you during high school?’

PAUL FEIG: That’s where most of our stories came from. Weirder stuff happens to people in real life than it does on TV. It was a personal show for me and I wanted it to be personal for everybody else.

GABE SACHS (writer, ‘I’m with the Band,’ ‘The Garage Door’): We thought the questionnaires were a private thing between us and Judd and Paul, so we wrote really honest. And the next day at work we get them all bound together. We’re laughing with everyone but going, ‘Oh, man!'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,608 words)

Since 1979, Brian Murtagh Has Fought to Keep Convicted Murderer Jeffrey MacDonald in Prison

Another look at the “Fatal Vision” murder case, through the eyes of its prosecutor:

“When Errol Morris’s ‘A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald’ came out in September, Brian Murtagh sat in the study of the Oakton home he shares with Margaret, his wife of 43 years, and read it cover to cover, all 500-plus pages. He found it credulous, manipulative, a Swiss cheese of strategic omissions. To assert this, he typed out a rebuttal — a legal brief, double-spaced, 14 pages long, with Roman numerals and alphanumerically labeled paragraphs. It is not light reading. Morris, Murtagh writes, ‘doesn’t explain how 60 pieces of the pajama top, including the ripped-off pocket bearing a contact stain in Colette’s blood, could be found in the master bedroom, as well as 30 seam threads. … ‘ Murtagh didn’t file this odd document anywhere. He didn’t release it to the media. It was mostly for himself.

“Murtagh sounds exactly like a lawyer but carries himself exactly like a butler. You want to call him Jeeves. He’s punctilious, a bit formal, often greeting people with a courtly little bow. He views this whole case with an air of bemused exasperation, puzzled by its refusal to die. He knows his ‘brief’ would mostly confuse people. Only two people on Earth, he says, are really in a position to understand it — to understand what a flimsy, paltry, bankrupt case for innocence Errol Morris makes.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,594 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: Deconstructing Mare Island

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This week, we have a Longreads Member Exclusive recommended by one of our members, Boston Review Web Editor David V. Johnson. His pick is Richard White’s “Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,” published in Boom: A Journal of California. Here’s an intro from David:

“Eureka! Boom: A Journal of California launched in the Spring of 2011. The quality of writing and artwork has been absolutely superb. There are so many articles I could recommend, including one by the aforementioned Solnit, but I was especially captivated recently by ‘Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,’ a piece on the Carquinez Strait by American West historian and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient Richard White. Before reading the story, I had experienced the Strait exactly the way White says most Californians do: by driving over it. Little did I know that in that body of water and its environs you can trace the rise and fall of California and the nation.”

Source: Boom
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,455 words)

How Two Presidents Helped Me Deal With Love, Guilt, and Fatherhood

A journalist takes his son, who has Asperger’s, to meet Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and learns to be a better father after the meetings:

“Bush had connected. With an impish smile, he told Tyler about the time that rocker/humanitarian Bono was scheduled to visit the White House. The president’s aides, knowing that their boss was unimpressed by celebrities, worried that Bush would blow it. ‘[Chief of Staff] Josh Bolten comes in and said, “Now, you know who Bono is, don’t you?” Just as he’s leaving the Oval Office, I said, “Yeah, he’s married to Cher.” ‘ Bush raised an eyebrow. ‘Get it?’ he asked Tyler. ‘Bone-oh. Bahn-oh.’

“Afterward, I asked Tyler about the Bono joke. He said, ‘Sounds like something goofy you would say.’ But for me, the exchange was an eye-opener. Tyler was terse, even rude, but Bush was solicitous. Rather than being thrown by Tyler’s idiosyncrasies, he rolled with them, exactly as he had in the Oval Office nine years earlier. He responded to every clipped answer with another probing question. Bush, a man who famously doesn’t suffer fools or breaches of propriety, gave my son the benefit of the doubt. I was beginning to think that people are more perceptive and less judgmental toward Tyler than his own father is. Bush certainly was.”

Published: Nov 29, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,644 words)

Tim Cook’s Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks

Cook reflects on his early days with Apple, how the company has changed in the past year, and what Steve Jobs told him before he died:

“So we started talking about what it meant. Again, this is when I am thinking, and I’m certain he’s thinking, that this is going to go on for a long, long period where he’s the chairman and I am CEO. So I’m trying to understand—how does he see this working? He had obviously thought very deeply about it.

“And as a part of this, I asked him about different scenarios to understand how he wanted to be involved as chairman. He said, ‘I want to make this clear. I saw what happened when Walt Disney passed away. People looked around, and they kept asking what Walt would have done.’ He goes, ‘The business was paralyzed, and people just sat around in meetings and talked about what Walt would have done.’ He goes, ‘I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what’s right.’ He was very clear.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 33 minutes (8,482 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Edith Zimmerman

Edith Zimmerman is founding editor of The Hairpin and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. She’s also written for GQ, Elle, The Awl and This American Life.

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Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 6, 2012

Longreads Best of 2012: Kiera Feldman

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 5, 2012
Length: 1 minutes (268 words)

Waiting for Bigfoot

A writer joins a group of Ohioans looking for Sasquatch:

“For the past two hours, Bernie has led us down miles of dark trails. We’ve walked to the historic stone house by the lake, to the spot where Bernie and Nancy had their sighting, to the entrance of the caves that have the most nightly Bigfoot activity. We’ve taken so many turns; I have no idea where I am.

“Every once in a while, we stop so Nancy or Todd can shriek and shout gibberish into the forest. That’s how they communicate with any creatures that might be nearby. They encourage me to try it; Bigfoot is attracted to female voices. I let out a weak yelp. Nancy smiles proudly. I blush and laugh nervously, feeling totally ridiculous. Are they trying to prove something to me here? It’s really not working.”

Source: Outside
Published: Dec 5, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,472 words)

Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong and the Video Game Industry’s Big Bang

A brief history of the title that launched Atari and the video game industry:

“In 1976, Atari took a monetary hit, settling a lawsuit out of court in Chicago with Magnavox. (Alcorn remembers the settlement being $300,000; Bushnell thinks Atari coughed up $500,000; Curt Vendel, who had seen documentation surrounding the suit, notes that $1.5 million in all was paid in installments up to 1983.) The suit concerned a patent held by Baer and Magnavox regarding interaction between machine-controlled and player-controlled elements on the screen, a basic foundation of design ‘that covered just about every game developed between 1971 and the mid-1980s,’ Baer says. He was clear about the lineage of Atari’s product: He told the Computer History Museum in 2006 that ‘Pong is simply a knockoff of the Odyssey Ping-Pong game,’ and that Bushnell ‘knew he was going to lose and decided to come under contract’ with Magnavox as a licensee.”

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Dec 4, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,532 words)