Gillian Reagan is an editor at Capital New York. She does other stuff, too. *** My rule was to steer clear of Capital articles (although you will recognize some bylines from contributors). These articles that weren’t necessarily the best writing of the year, but have frequently popped up and rolled around in my brain long […]
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Foster Kamer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Foster Kamer (ex-BlackBook + Gawker + Village Voice) is online features and news editor at Esquire. *** 2010 was an incredible year for writing, bottom line. Despite the proliferation of things whose output is mostly antagonistic to great writing — like faceless “content farms” churning out hollow, Google-gaming information lacking anything of substance — great writing persisted. Twitter’s evolving […]
A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison
A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library. Jabbar Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors, tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once through […]
Detroitism: What Does 'Ruin Porn' Tell Us About the Motor City?
Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City? The third major subgenre of the popular Detroit narrative is a backlash against the pornographic excesses of the Lament and is, at best, an attempt to find a new definition of urban vitality. The Utopians are well-meaning defenders of the city’s possibilities. Locally, they […]
pegb: Longreads: new and old favorites
pegb: Pirate’s Booty by Dave Gardetta Technosexual: One Man’s Tale of Robot Love by Addy Dugdale Et Tu, Brooklyn? by Allison Silverman The Golden Suicides by Nancy Jo Sales Addiction Files: Recovering From Drug Addiction, Without Abstinence by Maia Szalavitz Addiction Files: How Do We Define Recovery? by Maia Szalavitz Secret of AA: After 75 Years, […]
Body Snatchers
Body Snatchers About the same time that Rose Oprea was hospitalized for her stroke, the 62nd precinct of the New York City police department, in Brooklyn, was notified of a possible case of fraud. A couple — Deborah Johnson and her husband, Robert Nelms — had recently purchased the Daniel George & Son Funeral Home. […]
(photo by Tim Knox) To his millions of readers, of course, Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother’s anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his […]
If you’ve been in Park Slope recently, you can probably guess how things turned out for the Lehane house. But you may not know why. How did the Brooklyn of the Lehanes and crack houses turn into what it is today—home to celebrities like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Adrian Grenier, to Michelin-starred chefs, and to more […]
[Not single-page] Levi Aron remained single for the bulk of his twenties, a sign that he was considered by both his family and the neighborhood shadken to be of lesser stock. For companionship, he turned to a group of like-minded Jews, most of them also single men. They called themselves rebels, one friend remembers. They […]
New York Times Writer Jenna Wortham: My Top Longreads of 2011
Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr. *** SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and […]
