Search Results for: BuzzFeed

Reading List: Amazing People for Desperate Times

Longreads Pick

This week’s list from Emily includes stories from BuzzFeed, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, and Left Field Project.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 10, 2013

A Very Dangerous Boy

Longreads Pick

On the trial of Joseph Hall, who murdered his neo-Nazi father when he was 10 years old. (For more background on the story, see Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Feb. 2013 piece.)

Did an atmosphere of hate drive Joseph to kill? Did his stepmother? Or was it his childish misreading of a TV show? Or a complicated amalgam of factors, tangled together in a damaged brain? Was Joseph confused or deranged, a victim or a victimizer? Had he simply changed his story and implicated Krista because he was tired of being locked up? Or did he finally find the strength to tell the truth, months after the killing, because he was no longer under her sway? There were many questions, but Judge Leonard focused on one: Did Joseph know when he pulled the trigger that what he was doing was wrong?

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 4, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,279 words)

Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

For cosplayers, dressing up isn’t just once a year on Halloween. It’s part of a complex identity and community lifestyle.

1. “Cosplayers are Passionate, Talented Folks. But There’s a Darker Side to this Community, Too.” (Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku, January 2013)

The author interviews two (female) cosplayers who share why they cosplay and what motivates them, despite sexual harassment and other injustices.

2. “I’m a Black Female Cosplayer … and Some People Hate It.” (Chaka Cumberbatch, February 2013, Racialicious)

“After my pictures started making the rounds on deviantArt, Tumblr, and 4chan, it became pretty clear that my cosplay brings all the racists to the yard, and they’re, like, white cosplay is better than yours.”

3. “Meet the World’s Most Intense Disney Fans.” (Jordan Zakarin, Buzzfeed, August 2013)

A WHOLE NEW WOOOORRRRRRRLLLLLD of costly cosplay in California.

4. “Magical Girls, Heroines, and Anime Amazon: Field Notes from Otakon 2013.” (Rose, Autostraddle, August 2013)

Rose explores how women are represented in panels and treated in person at one of the most popular anime convention in the United States.

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Photo: Pat Loika

Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Kotaku, Racialicious, Buzzfeed, and Autostraddle.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 27, 2013

“My grandmother and I still haven’t spoken about what happened during the summer of 1999, or why it was the last time I visited her by myself, and how it came to be that she watched a pastor put a curse on her youngest daughter.”

-In case you missed it, here’s Saeed Jones’s essay from BuzzFeed. It’s also featured in our Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Reading List: Misunderstood

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Feeling misunderstood has been the bane of teen angst for millennia, fodder for pop-punk anthems, and the basis of existential crises. Here, four people delve into the facets of their lives that don’t jibe with the expectations of others—some with disturbing consequences.

1. “I Was A Suspected School Shooter.” (Gina Tron, Vice, January 2013)

In a a small town post-Columbine, Tron’s nonconformity makes her a target. She begins to embody what she is suspected to be.

2. “Why I Stay Closeted in Asia.” (Connor Ke Muo, Buzzfeed, October 2013)

Traveling home for the first time in years, Muo grapples with his parents’ extreme homophobia, cultural stigma, and his father’s reluctance to embrace him — literally.

3. “Hot Girl #2.” (Melissa Stetten, Aeon Magazine, October 2013)

“I like it when people ask if I’m a model, but I hate it when they ask: ‘What do you do?’ and I have to say: ‘I’m a model.’ That makes sense, right?”

4. “Daniel Radcliffe’s Next Trick is to Make Harry Potter Disappear.” (Susan Dominus, October 2013, New York Times)

Radcliffe claims one of the most iconic roles in recent film history, but being Harry Potter isn’t without its cost. Here, the reporter delves into Radcliffe’s upcoming roles (Allen Ginsberg!), his struggle with alcohol and his nuanced relationships with family, friends and fans.

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Photo via Vice

Reading List: Misunderstood

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Vice, Buzzfeed, Aeon Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 13, 2013

A Brief History of ‘It’ Girls

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“It isn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just ‘It’.”

—Rudyard Kipling

1. “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl,” (Anne Helen Petersen, The Hairpin, May 2011)

Clara Bow was the original It girl, so much so that her 1927 film, titled—what else?—“It,” more or less defined the phenomenon. This piece, from Petersen’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood series, offers a perfectly juicy take on Ms. Bow.

2. “Almost Famous” (Katherine Stewart, Santa Barbara Magazine, Oct./Nov. 2006)

Stewart goes beyond the usual Edie clichés and delves into Sedgwick family lore, as well as Edie’s post-Factory return to Santa Barbara.

3. “Chloe’s Scene,” (Jay McInerney, The New Yorker, Nov. 1994)

McInerney’s piece—a semi-seminal take on uber-It girl Chloe Sevigny in the early days of her downtown reign—captures a weird freeze-frame in time: Sevigny pre-Kids fame, and downtown New York in its last gasps of grittiness.

4. “Welcome to the Dollhouse: New York’s Power-Girl Publicists,” (Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York, December 1998)

“Perky, pretty, and remarkably plugged-in, a pack of young publicists have become the darlings of New York’s demimonde. But be careful—they bite.” Detail-packed, with deliciously good dialogue and a healthy dollop of fun, this is classic Grigoriadis.

5. “Ksenia Sobchak: The Jane Fonda of Russia’s Dissident Movement,” ( Sarah A. Topol, Vice, July 2012)

Ksenia Sobchak is the Russian Paris Hilton, if Paris Hilton all of a sudden took an interest in revolutionary politics.

6. “The Secret Life of Cory Kennedy,” (Shawn Hubler, West, Feb. 25, 2007)

Cory Kennedy was just a regular high school hipster until party photographer Mark “The Cobrasnake” Hunter snapped her picture at an LA club. And then—practically overnight and before her parents had a chance to figure out what was going on—she was everywhere, a club kid, model, and message board fashion icon, with her very own column in Nylon. This is the making of an internet It Girl.

7. “The Trouble With ‘It Girls'” (Anne Helen Petersen, Buzzfeed, January 2015)

Update: A new piece from Anne Helen Petersen on what the label tells us about women and their work.

Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

Longreads Pick

“Modern journalism is a kind of video game…to be silent is to lose points.” How social media editors for mainstream media sites, feeding off the Reddit community, incorrectly identified a missing 22-year-old Brown University student as one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. The family of Sunil Tripathi, who was later found dead, has now been forced to pick up the pieces:

“At 2:43 a.m., a Twitter user named Greg Hughes (@ghughesca), who was previously tweeting things like, ‘In 2013, all you need [is] a connection to the Boston police scanner and a Twitter feed to know what’s up. We don’t even need TV anymore,’ shifted the now-fervid speculation to established fact: ‘BPD scanner has identified the names,’ Hughes tweeted. ‘Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.’ (Hughes has since all but disappeared from the Internet, and where he got this information is unclear.) Seven minutes later, Kevin Galliford, a journalist for a TV station in Hartford, relayed the same information to his own followers; Galliford’s tweet was retweeted more than 1,000 times in a matter of minutes. The next multiplier came from Andrew Kaczynski, another journalist at BuzzFeed, who sent out the police-scanner misinformation to his 90,000 followers and quickly followed up with: ‘Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi.’

Published: Jul 26, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,381 words)

Longreads Guest Pick: Matthew Zeitlin on Mina Kimes's story about Sears

Matthew is a business reporter at BuzzFeed.

My longread of the week is ‘At Sears, Eddie Lampert’s Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles,’ by Mina Kimes in Bloomberg Businessweek. This is not a profile of Eddie Lampert, the hedge fund manager who masterminded Kmart’s acquisition of Sears and is now running the struggling retailer. The piece, based on interviews with former Sears executives and employees, is instead an examination of what happened to Sears after Lampert took over and implemented a strategy based on his Ayn Rand inflected worldview. Lampert’s big idea is that the 30-plus different segments of Sears operate more or less independently and compete for resources and attention. Kimes is never able to actually speak with Lampert in person or see him operate, and so she paints a portrait not of the man — which is where so much business magazine journalism starts and ends — but of something far more important: the results.

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