Search Results for: BuzzFeed

Three Tragic True Crime Stories

Like you, your coworker, that person on Twitter and the woman who sits in front of you on the train, I love Serial. As I fell asleep on Wednesday night, saddened by my imminent departure from New York City, I turned to my boyfriend and reassured him that I’d feel better in the morning; Serial would be on my iPhone. And yet, even as we revel in marvelous storytelling, let us not forget these are real people, not characters, and that these horrifying events actually happened. Here are three riveting, tragic stories of true crime. Read more…

Immersive Reporting from the Bakken Oil Fields: A Reading List

Oil production in the Bakken region of North Dakota has topped 1 million barrels a day. The seven-year boom has flooded the area with new residents seeking their fortunes, and many journalists have also joined the labor force, sending dispatches from the new Wild West. Longreads recently interviewed reporter Maya Rao about her time in North Dakota, where she spent a month working as a cashier before writing a piece for The Atlantic. Below is her piece, along with four other examples of immersive reporting from the region.

“Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields.” (Maya Rao, The Atlantic, September 2014)

Rao’s dispatch from behind the counter of a local truck stop looks at the swelling labor market, and the question of just how many of the new arrivals are actually “winning.”

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Interview: Maya Rao on Spending a Month Working as a Cashier in the Bakken

Western North Dakota—at the epicenter of the Bakken oil rush—has become a new Wild West of sorts, where fortunes are made, sought and lost with alarming speed. Thousands have been drawn to the Bakken over the last seven years, including Maya Rao, a talented reporter who has cut her teeth at dailies and currently covers regional issues at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She first ventured there to write a short piece for The Awl last year about the overwhelming experience of “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil.” After her first visit to the region Rao felt there were larger stories still untold, and she returned this past summer, spending a month working as a cashier at a truck stop just south of Alexander. Her efforts culminated in “Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields,” an immersive 6,000-word piece published by The Atlantic last month. Rao spoke with us about her gutsy decision to pick up and spend a month in the Bakken, her experience as a female reporter in a decidedly male-centric environment and carving out space for longer form enterprise reporting at daily papers. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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‘Living for a Plank and Four Wheels in a Profligate Culture’

My wife, Daphne, got to something I’d been trying to figure out for years when, after reading a particularly asinine article in the February 2003 issue [of Thrasher magazine], she said: “It’s really not OK that these people are using so little of their brains.”

“Using so little.” It’s the perfect indictment of everything that’s wrong with—and the most succinct encapsulation of everything that’s brilliant about—skateboarding. The beauty of using so little in a country that uses so much. Living for a plank and four wheels in a profligate culture. And the saddening fact that Thrasher has, in many ways, been failing to move against the wind. Jake Phelps, the current editor, a San Francisco skater to the bone, wrote a sort of suicide note in the March 2003 issue: “I’ve never felt as depressed as I do now… I try to stay focused on the mag—my life is in this mag. And its life is in me… I feel distant from the spots, skaters and special people I’ve known… God this is awful.” These desperate words, especially jarring in contrast to Thrasher’s ironic dirtbag voice (it used to be ironic, big-hearted, dirtbag), were wedged into an issue stuffed with ads. An issue fifty-four pages longer than a contemporaneous Vanity Fair.

Feeling depressed by your success is a rare predicament for an editor in chief. (I wanted to tell him to try aromatherapy.) I figured Phelps was about to hang it up and let Thrasher go fully corporate. There were certainly skateboard doomsday signs aplenty. I attended a screening of Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary about the earliest days of skating, in a private theater at the Sony Corporation’s New York headquarters. The place was filled with MTV celebrities and their posses. I was the only person with a plank on wheels. A guy in a long black leather jacket pointed at me, turned to a young woman, and said: “Ooh, he brought his board,” and I felt ashamed.

Skating through midtown Manhattan that night, I remembered that I used to think skateboarding would never get too big because it hurt too much. Because you can’t take the pain out of skateboarding. Because putting yourself deliberately in harm’s way is a quick, easy, and reliable route to the truth. But what I didn’t realize is that you can take the skateboarding out of skateboarding—make the act a mere accessory to its style.

Sean Wilsey, in his 2003 essay for the London Review of Books, edited for his anthology More Curious, and reprinted on BuzzFeed

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Photo: fotologic, Flickr

Cultural Changes: A Reading List

September feels like a month of changes, to me. Growing up, the first day of school was my New Year. I made resolutions; I felt like a new person, at least for a little while. Today, I chose six stories about (possibly, eventually, hopefully, revolutionary) changes in television, fashion, religion and more.

1. Netflix Programming: “BoJack Horseman is the Funniest Show About Depression Ever.” (Margaret Lyons, Vulture, September 2014)

I’m still naive enough to think cartoons will always be lighthearted, despite the crudity of Family Guy and South Park. When the credits rolled on BoJack Horseman, I turned to my boyfriend, close to tears, and said, “That … that was really sad.” And that’s not a bad thing.

2. Supermodel Culture: “Will Model Chantelle Brown-Young Redefine What It Means to Be Beautiful?” (Isabel Slone, The Globe and Mail, September 2014)

Seeing the fashion blogger I used to follow in my tween years on the front cover of the style section of the Globe and Mail is a little surreal. Slone delivers an excellent piece on supermodel Brown-Young (a.k.a. Winnie Harlow), who has vitiligo and rocked the runway this September.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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‘My Brain Was Changed Forever’

And, I found, I could not lie. I could not write fiction. So instead I wrote the truth. I started an anonymous blog on which I chronicled my stroke recovery as a writer. It connected me to friends that I have to this day.

I became an introvert. I learned to protect my energy, something that now serves me well in midlife. I learned to take better care of myself. I learned to devote my time to things that reinvigorated me, to things that were important. Write a paragraph in my journal. This person, not that. A bath and not makeup.

My brain was changed forever. The dead spot never rejuvenated. But the brain was making new paths around the destruction. In this way, blood traveled in a new way around my heart. Also in this way, there are new neural pathways in my brain.

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, in BuzzFeed, on having a stroke at age 33.

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Photo: reighleblanc, Flickr

Living During an Age of Anxiety: A Reading List

When I am wracked with anxiety, I make a list of everything that is stressing me. These lists have included “transportation plans for this weekend,” “living at home,” “Sandy [my dog] dying,” “getting props for the play” and “editing articles for The Annual.” I don’t write solutions. Sometimes, there are no solutions, or the solutions are not immediate, which makes me worry even more. Just writing down what weighs on my mind helps.

The act of writing moves these things out of my head, where they take up space in my subconscious, and makes them tangible and coherent. These lists are a part of my self-care routine—a routine I adopted when I suffered from a particularly nasty bout of depression in college. I use this ritual today, and I do other things too: I eat three meals every day; I get enough sleep at night; I read to relax; I take my medications; I clean my room; I listen to music or to podcasts; I call my friends; I sleep some more.

Here’s another list: four authors who write about their experiences with anxiety, its roots and its bedfellows.

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How a Blog Post Sparked a Retail Movement

Once in a while, a single post can spark a movement. In the summer of 2011, Gabi Gregg, who writes the blog GabiFresh, went on a quest to find a bikini; at the time, bikinis were hard to find in large sizes. When she found one, she posted a picture of herself in it, calling it a “fatkini.” (Gregg says that she got the word and the idea from a Tumblr user.) The picture, and a follow-up article for the Web site xoJane, the next summer, went viral, prompting a wave of copycat posts. Plus-size women took bikini pictures and tagged them #fatkini. Gregg ended up on the “Today” show, and the retail landscape changed. Gregg told me, “Out of nowhere, all these plus-size brands were suddenly making bikinis.”

The fatkini movement—and plus-size fashion in general—has occasionally sparked a backlash. “Being really visible when you’re a plus-size woman is not for the faint of heart,” Conley told me. Many blogs attract lewd and misogynistic comments, but the more mild-mannered critics cite health concerns. “There’s a fine line between anti-body-shaming and obesity-glorification,” one reader wrote, at the bottom of a Buzzfeed article about the fatkini trend. Another added, “Celebrating obesity seems a bit ridiculous.”

Lizzie Widdicombe, writing for The New Yorker about the rapidly evolving plus-size fashion industry. For Gabi Gregg, being a pioneer in a shifting retail landscape has been lucrative—she now designs her own line of swimwear, and her most popular suit sold out in twenty-four hours.

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Photo: Gabifresh, Instagram