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Longreads Best of 2012: Howard Riefs
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Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago.
Best Series
This Land, Dan Barry, The New York Times
“The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here. A place buffeted by time and the economy, a place where the expectations have been lowered, but not hopes for better days to come. A place where politicians, in this election year, say the American dream is still possible.”
Best Profile
“We Are Alive,” David Remnick, The New Yorker
“A bunch of songs later, after a run-through of the set-ending ‘Thunder Road,’ Springsteen hops off the stage, drapes a towel around his neck, and sits down in the folding chair next to me. “ ‘The top of the show, see, is a kind of welcoming, and you are getting everyone comfortable and challenging them at the same time,’ he says. ‘You’re setting out your themes. You’re getting them comfortable, because, remember, people haven’t seen this band. There are absences that are hanging there. That’s what we’re about right now, the communication between the living and the gone. Those currents even run through the dream world of pop music!’ ”
Best Collection of Stories From a Writer in 2012
Thomas Lake, Sports Illustrated
“On Feb. 17, 2000, Rae Carruth’s attorney filed an answer to Saundra Adams in Mecklenburg District Court. It was one of the more brazen counterclaims in the annals of U.S. jurisprudence: a demand for permanent custody of Chancellor Lee Adams. ‘The Defendant,’ the filing read, ‘is a fit and proper person to exercise care, custody and control of the minor child and it is in the best interest and welfare of the minor child that his care, custody and control be vested with the Defendant at the conclusion of the Defendant’s legal proceedings.’
“No, it wasn’t enough that Saundra Adams had to spend 28 days watching her only child die. Had to watch her grandson spend the first six weeks of his life in a tangle of wires and machines. Had to become a single mother again at age 42. Had to hide from reporters day and night. Had to worry about more than $400,000 in medical bills that her descendants had racked up while fighting for their lives. None of that was enough. Now she would have to draw from the little time and energy and money she had left and fight to keep the sole remaining heir to the Adams name away from the man who had wanted him dead.”
“After the autopsy, when the doctor found white blossoms of scar tissue on Wes Leonard’s heart, he guessed they had been secretly building there for several months. That would mean Wes’s heart was slowly breaking throughout the Fennville Blackhawks’ 2010—11 regular season, when he led them in scoring and the team won 20 games without a loss. It would mean his heart was already moving toward electrical meltdown in December, when he scored 26 on Decatur with that big left shoulder clearing a path to the hoop. It would mean his heart swelled and weakened all through January (25 against Hopkins, 33 against Martin) even as it pumped enough blood to fill at least 10 swimming pools.”
“Did This Man Really Cut Michael Jordan?”
“The most infamous roster decision in high school basketball history came down 33 years ago on the edge of tobacco country, between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, in an old town full of white wooden rocking chairs. The decision took physical form in two handwritten lists on a gymnasium door, simultaneously beautiful for the names they carried and crushing for the names they did not. A parade of fragile teenage boys passed by, stopping to read the lists, studying them like inscriptions in stone. Imagine these boys in the time of their sorting, their personal value distilled to a binary question, yes or no, and they breathe deeply, unseen storms gathering behind their ribs, below their hearts, in the hollows of fear and exhilaration.
“The chief decision-maker loved those boys, which made his choice all the harder. He gave them his time seven days a week, whether they needed shooting practice at six in the morning or a slice of his wife’s sweet-potato pie. His house was their house and his old green Ford Maverick was their car and his daughter was their baby sister, and he liked the arrangement. He was tall and slender, like the longleaf pines that covered Cape Fear, and when he smiled in pictures, his dark eyes were narrow, hazy, as if he’d just awakened from a pleasant dream. His nickname, Pop, evoked some withered old patriarch, but Clifton Herring was only 26, one of the youngest varsity coaches in North Carolina, more older brother than father to his boys, still a better player than most of them. They’d never seen a shooter so pure. One day during practice he made 78 straight free throws.”
Best Election Story
“Obama’s Way,” Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
There are no wide-open spaces in presidential life, only nooks and crannies, and the front of Air Force One is one of them. When he’s on his plane, small gaps of time sometimes open in his schedule, and there are fewer people around to leap in and consume them. In this case, Obama had just found himself with 30 free minutes.
“What you got for me?” He asked and plopped down in the chair beside his desk. His desk is designed to tilt down when the plane is on the ground so that it might be perfectly flat when the plane is nose up, in flight. It was now perfectly flat. “I want to play that game again,” I said. “Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president.”
Best New Writer Discovery
“The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever,” Michael J. Mooney, D Magazine
“Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a ‘perfect series.’ More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track.
“Bill Fong’s run at perfection started as most of his nights do, with practice at around 5:30 pm. He bowls in four active leagues and he rolls at least 20 games a week, every week. That night, January 18, 2010, he wanted to focus on his timing.”
Best Business Story
“How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” Charles Duhigg, New York Times Magazine
“There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. ‘Can you give us a list?’ the marketers asked.”
Best Obligatory Stories from David Grann and Chris Jones
“The Yankee Comandante,” David Grann, The New Yorker
“One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, ‘She knows how to use it.’
“Her name was Olga Rodríguez.”
“Animals,” Chris Jones, Esquire
“(Sargent Steve) Blake was parked near downtown Zanesville, sipping his coffee, when his radio crackled shortly after five o’clock, two hours into just another shift. ‘I had no idea that was going to be one of the worst calls of my life,’ he says. He flicked on his lights and sirens. Maybe ten minutes after five he was at the start of Thompson’s driveway, where the fence narrowed into a pipe gate, still locked in place. Deputy Jonathan Merry, an open-faced twenty-five-year-old, arrived only a minute or two after him. They stood at the bottom of the driveway and saw the bear, now circling down by the gate. The lion was farther up and to their right. Blake told Merry to go to the Kopchak house, the second house down the road, and take a statement from Dolores Kopchak. She might help them form a clearer picture of what they now faced, and clarity was important in a situation like this. He also told Merry that if the bear or the lion pushed its way through the fence, he should shoot it.
“Sam Kopchak could see across to the bottom of the driveway from the little window in the door to his tack room, tucked away in a corner of his barn. He saw the officers talking to each other and thought, They’re going to need more than two.”
Best Food Story
“Chicken of the trees,” Mike Sula, Chicago Reader
“ ‘The favor of your company is requested,’ read the invitation, ‘for the most local of harvest meals.’ I sent this to a healthy mix of 30 eaters both adventurous and particular, and set a date. On the menu: juleps made with the mint growing from my compost pile, coconut curry simmered with the mysterious squash that had taken over the backyard, dinosaur kale, cornbread, and the main event: a thick burgoo, featuring ‘heirloom tomato, tree nut, and alley-fattened wild caught game.’
“I didn’t expect nearly all of the invitees to accept, but evidently curiosity about urban squirrel’s viability as a protein source isn’t merely a weird, solitary obsession. A few days before the event I defrosted and cut up the legs and saddles, seared them off in a pot, and deglazed it with Madeira, a la James Beard. I sauteed diced bacon, onions, and garlic, added homemade chicken stock and the squirrel pieces, and braised them slowly.”
Best Stunt Story
“What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?” Drew Magary, Deadspin
“Many times, I had to skip a question because I couldn’t figure out the answer, and then I got that paranoia that’s unique to someone taking a standardized test. I became fearful that I had failed to skip over the question on my answer sheet. So every five seconds, I’d double-check my sheet to make sure I didn’t fill out my answers in the wrong slots. One time I did this, and so I had to erase the answers and move them all forward. Only I had a shitty eraser, which failed to erase my mark and instead smeared the mark all over the rest of my sheet.”
Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Hobbes
Posted by Longreads
Longreads
Michael Hobbes lives in Berlin. His essays from his blog, Rottin’ in Denmark, were featured on Longreads this year.
I read news when I want to be entertained. I read features when I want to learn something. Here’s nine articles I read this year that changed the way I look at the world, and made me wonder how I seem when it looks back.
“Diary of a Mad Fact-Checker,” James Pogue, Oxford American
It’s been a bad year for truth. From Mike Daisey and Jonah Lehrer to Rush Limbaugh and Mitt Romney, 2012 felt like a yearlong debate about the role of exaggeration, hyperbole, fact-checking and outright fabrication in the pursuit of an argument. Pogue’s piece, a kind of letter from the extreme-pedant end of the spectrum, illustrates how fidelity to facts can obscure the truth, and how embellishment can reveal it.
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“Lost in Space,” Mike Albo, Narrative.ly
Maybe I only feel like I learned something from this essay because I’m in essentially the same position as Albo. I’ve been single for almost 10 years, and I’m realizing that if I had applied all the hours I’ve wasted on the promiscu-net to something useful, I could have knitted a quilt, learned French, mastered Othello and read all of Wikipedia by now.
If our society has learned anything from the first 20 years of internet access, it’s that looking for what you want isn’t always the best way to get it, and that getting it is a great way to stop wanting it. Albo’s essay couldn’t have been written by any gay man in America because they’re not as good at writing as he is, but I get the feeling it’s been lived by most of them.
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“The Innocent Man,” Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly
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“The Caging Of America,” Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
OK, so it’s not exactly earth-shattering news that America’s prison system is problematic and that “Texas justice” is an oxymoron. But this year brought a new impetus for action, partly due to new numbers (the widely reported stat that 1% of America’s population is incarcerated), legislative action (Obama’s plan to combat prison rape, scorchingly reported in the New York Review of Books) and, qualitatively but no less essentially, longform pieces like Gopnik’s and Colloff’s.
People are always quoting the MLK-via-Obama line “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” and articles like these—one a macro view of the problem, one micro—is what that bend looks like.
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“Does Mitt Romney Have a Soul?” Wells Tower, GQ
It’s easy now to forget that this was an election year, and that we spent basically all of it squabbling, speculating and pontificating about its outcome, which we now say we knew all along.
Most election reporting is disposable, either gaffe play-by-plays (“Binders Full of Women: Interactive Timeline”), instantly obsolete hypotheticals (What if Romney picks Christie for VP?) or politically orchestrated profiles (“Obama’s audacious plan to save the middle class from Libyan airstrikes”). If you remember these articles past ctrl+w, it’s only until events catch up, and then they poof out of your consciousness forever.
Towers’s Romney profile is one of the few still worth reading after the election. Nominally a standard “let’s hang out in the campaign bus!” piece, it transcends its premise by capturing the conflicting forces tugging at the hem of the Republican party, and how Romney’s sheer empty-vesselness managed to please, and displease, everyone at once.
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Maybe it’s just the ubiquity of its subject, now the most-viewed-ever video on YouTube, but no article stuck with me this year quite like Fisher’s. In a culture that strains to call itself postracial, sharing “Gangnam Style” on Twitter and Facebook was a safe, quiet way to shout ‘look how weird Koreans are!’ and invite your friends to gawk alongside you.
According to Fisher, “Gangnam” isn’t an expression of Korean culture, but a satire of it. Psy was saying the same thing we spectators were, only in a visual language (and, obviously, a verbal one) we couldn’t understand. He was laughing at his culture too, he just had no idea how easy it was to get the rest of the world to join him.
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“The Truck Stop Killer,” Vanessa Veselka, GQ
It’s all in the execution, they say, and nothing demonstrated that this year better than Veselka’s harrowing investigation into whether the guy who kidnapped and then released her on the side of the road in 1985 was a serial killer.
She never finds the answer to her question. But who cares! It’s a great piece, super interesting, suspenseful, creepy, introspective in all the right places. We all know that compelling stories don’t always need happy endings. In this case, it doesn’t need one at all.
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“The Bloody Patent Battle Over A Healing Machine,” Ken Otterbourg, Fortune
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“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, New York Times
I admit it: I have no idea how the international economy works. I used to feel about this the way I feel about not being able to describe asexual reproduction, or the Spanish Civil War, or how to grow tomatoes. I can see why somebody’s got to do it, I just can’t see why it’s got to be me.
Since the 2008 crash, though, knowledge of economics has gone from nice to have to can’t miss, and things like competitiveness, productivity and efficiency have taken a place in politics previously reserved for life-and-deathers like sports doping and the Ground Zero Mosque.
Patent trolling and outsourced manufacturing aren’t the only issues facing the US economy, of course, but both these articles demonstrate how businesses, governments and consumers have made the wrong thing too easy, and how the hard thing might not be the way back.
The Top 10 Longreads of 2012
Posted by Longreads
Longreads |
Longreads Members: Thanks for Your Support Longreads, now in its third year, would not be possible without our Members’ support. Join now for $3 a month and we’ll send you full text and ebook versions of our latest exclusive story picks. About This List Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Longreads community this year, and to all of our guests who shared their favorite stories of 2012. The below list represents our editors’ favorite stories of the year, for both nonfiction and fiction. Longreads is edited by Mark Armstrong and Mike Dang, with Kjell Reigstad, Joyce King Thomas, Hakan Bakkalbasi, Jodi Ettenberg and Erika Kussmann. Thanks to all the writers and publishers who create outstanding work. |
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2012 Nonfiction Picks |
1. Grace in Broken ArrowKiera Feldman | This Land Press | May 24, 2012 | 56 minutes (14,008 words) The story of a sex abuse scandal inside a Tulsa Christian school, where church leaders were in denial and where the crimes shattered the lives of victims and their families: “No more sleepovers. No more babysitting, or car rides home. No more being alone with children or ‘lingering hugs given to students (especially using your hands to stroke or fondle).’ Aaron Thompson—Coach Thompson to his PE students—sat in the principal’s office at Grace Fellowship Christian School as his bosses went through the four-page Corrective Action Plan point by point. It was October of 2001, the same month Aaron added ‘Teacher of the Week’ to his resume. “Grace’s leader, Bob Yandian—’Pastor Bob’ as everyone calls him—wasn’t there: no need, he had people for this kind of thing. Pastor Bob’s time was better spent sequestered in his study, writing books and radio broadcasts. His lieutenant, Associate Pastor Chip Olin, was a hardnosed guy, ‘ornery as heck,’ people said. Olin brought a USA Today article on the characteristics of child molesters to the meeting. At age 24, Olin explained, Aaron was acting immature and unprofessional, and someone might get the wrong idea.” More stories from This Land Press
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2. State of the SpeciesCharles C. Mann | Orion | October 25, 2012 | 32 minutes (8,232 words) A brief history of Homo sapiens—and a prognosis for our survival: “Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant. “Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we special at all? See also: “The Art of Waiting” (Belle Boggs, April 2012) Books by Charles C. Mann on Amazon |
3. The Yankee ComandanteDavid Grann | The New Yorker | May 21, 2012 | 88 minutes (22,146 words) A story of love and revolution in Cuba. William Morgan was a free-spirited American drawn to Cuba to help Castro fight, only to grow disenchanted with his embrace of communism: “One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, ‘She knows how to use it.'” See also: “The Caging of America” (Adam Gopnik, January 2012) Books by David Grann on Amazon |
4. Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel CreekJohn Branch | The New York Times | December 20, 2012 | 70 minutes (17,639 words) The story of 16 world-class skiers and snowboarders who decided to go skiing together in Washington’s Cascades in February 2012, and what happened to them when an avalanche hit: “‘Just as I had the thought about what I’m going to do, wondering if it was going to bury me, that’s right when I could feel it,’ Castillo said. ‘It was like a wave. Like when you’re in the ocean and the tide moves away from you. You’re getting thrashed and you feel it pull out and you’re like, O.K., I can stand up now.’ “Castillo saw daylight again. His camera captured snow sliding past his legs for another 13 seconds. The forest sounded as if it were full of sickly frogs. It was the trees, scrubbed of their fresh snow, still swaying and creaking around him. “Castillo turned to look back up the hill. “‘Where there were three people, there was nobody,’ Castillo said.” |
5. The Innocent ManPamela Colloff | Texas Monthly | October 11, 2012 | 113 minutes (28,149 words) A two-part series deconstructing the case against Michael Morton, who was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife but has maintained his innocence: “Michael was breathing hard. ‘Is my son okay?’ he asked. “‘He’s fine,’ Boutwell said. ‘He’s at the neighbors’.’ “‘How about my wife?’ “The sheriff was matter-of-fact. ‘She’s dead,’ he replied. “Boutwell led Michael into the kitchen and introduced him to Sergeant Don Wood, the case’s lead investigator. ‘We have to ask you a few questions before we can get your son,’ Boutwell told him. Dazed, Michael took a seat at the kitchen table. He had shown no reaction to the news of Christine’s death, and as he sat across from the two lawmen, he tried to make sense of what was happening around him. Sheriff’s deputies brushed past him, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets. He could see the light of a camera flash exploding again and again in the master bedroom as a police photographer documented what Michael realized must have been the place where Christine was killed. He could hear officers entering and exiting his house, exchanging small talk. Someone dumped a bag of ice into the kitchen sink and stuck Cokes in it. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.” Read part two of “The Innocent Man” See also: “Portrait of the Artist as a Postman” (Jason Sheeler, September 2012) |
6. ‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out with Fiona Apple, Musical HermitDan P. Lee | New York magazine | June 17, 2012 | 29 minutes (7,287 words) A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple: “A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me: “‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?’ “The text attached read: ‘And are you western-bound? And hi there! F’ “I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX.” See also: “A Life Worth Ending” (Michael Wolff, May 2012) |
7. The Queens of Montague StreetNancy Rommelmann | January 1, 2012 | 41 minutes (10,299 words) [Ebook, 99 cents] Memories of life as a truant teen in 1970s Brooklyn: “Most of the time we just hung out, in front of the newly opened Baskin-Robbins, on the corner of Montague and Henry Streets. This corner was the epicenter of Brooklyn Heights, a community unaccustomed to seeing its daughters straddling mailboxes and flicking cigarette butts into the street. Nor were we used to fielding the looks we began to get: wary, unhappy, every father coming home from Wall Street and every mother on her way to Key Food shooting us stern, silent reprimands. It made me squirm, but it also pissed me off: What was I doing that was so horrible? And if they had something to say, why didn’t they say it? While our little petri dish of a neighborhood evidently considered hanging out anathema, I was on the fence; my dad had grown up in Greenwich Village, an Italian kid playing stickball and rolling tires in the Hudson River. Isn’t this what teenagers did?” See also: “The GOP and Me” (Rany Jazayerli, November 2012)
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8. How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold MedalistRob Trucks | Deadspin | July 31, 2012 | 21 minutes (5,369 words) A first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next: “My coach calls me up and says, ‘Listen, If you want to keep your scholarship’—by the way, he’s totally devious here—he said, ‘If you want your scholarship, all you have to do is show up for the meets. Don’t do anything else. Just show up. You don’t have to come to a single practice. You don’t have to warm up. Just show up at the meet.’ “Well, I was unhappy with how the first warmup went. I didn’t think I was in good enough shape for the first warmup, but I won all my events, OK? And so before the second time I thought, I’ll just go to a few workouts, you know. And then slowly, but surely… “He was just so spot on. So then, sure enough, I’m now going to two workouts a day. I’m lifting weights and I totally get the hunger in a big, big way and my time was the third-fastest in the country. It wasn’t like the end-of-the-year time, which would be much faster, but I was really psyched that I could go that fast and do that well with just the amount of training that I had had.” See also: “What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?” (Drew Magary, March 2012)
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9. The Most Amazing Bowling Story EverMichael J. Mooney | D Magazine | June 20, 2012 | 18 minutes (4,622 words) It’s still remembered as “That Night”—when bowler Bill Fong stunned the crowd at the Plano Super Bowl: “Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a ‘perfect series.’ More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track. “Bill Fong’s run at perfection started as most of his nights do, with practice at around 5:30 pm. He bowls in four active leagues and he rolls at least 20 games a week, every week. That night, January 18, 2010, he wanted to focus on his timing.” See also: “The Honor System” (Chris Jones, Esquire)
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10. Come On, Feel the BuzzAlex Pareene | The Baffler | November 5, 2012 | 26 minutes (6,530 words) A critical look at the political newspaper and website Politico: “One classic method of unleashing irresistible Drudge bait on the Internet is to boil another outlet’s story down to a couple salacious-sounding excerpts, or (failing an effective condensing strategy) to simply reinterpret the material to fit a Drudge-friendly narrative. This past May, for example, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Maraniss’s biography of Barack Obama. (The liberal media vetting blackout continued apace, in other words.) Politico’s Dylan Byers took the excerpt and turned it into a little micro-news story: Obama admitted to Maraniss that certain figures in his first memoir were ‘compressions’—i.e., composite characters. Byers completely missed that Obama explicitly said at the outset of his own book that some characters were composites, but Drudge didn’t care. ‘Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in Memoir,’ went his headline, with a link to Politico instead of Vanity Fair—and another false right-wing meme got its wings.” See also: “Dead End on Shakin’ Street” (Thomas Frank, July 2012)
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2012 Fiction Picks |
1. Cold PastoralMarina Keegan | The New Yorker | October 5, 2012 | 28 minutes (7,023 words) A college student grapples with the death of her on-and-off boyfriend: “We were in the stage where we couldn’t make serious eye contact for fear of implying we were too invested. We used euphemisms like ‘I miss you’ and ‘I like you’ and smiled every time our noses got too close. I was staying over at his place two or three nights a week and met his parents at an awkward brunch in Burlington. A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic: making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts. I fluctuated between adding songs to his playlist and wondering if I should stop hooking up with people I was eighty per cent into and finally spend some time alone. (Read the books I was embarrassed I hadn’t read.) (Call my mother.) The thing is, I like being liked, and a lot of my friends had graduated and moved to cities. I’d thought about ending things but my roommate Charlotte advised me against it. Brian was handsome and smoked the same amount as me, and sometimes in the morning, I’d wake up and smile first thing because he made me feel safe. “In March, he died. I was microwaving instant Thai soup when I got a call from his best friend, asking if I knew which hospital he was at. “‘Who?’ I said. ‘Brian,’ he said. ‘You haven’t heard?'”
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2. Break All the Way DownRoxane Gay | Joyland | May 26, 2012 | 24 minutes (6,184 words) A baby’s arrival stirs up difficult memories: “I sat with the baby in the living room, setting her on a clean blanket. When I tired of watching her, I stretched out, resting my hand on her stomach. I fell asleep with the baby staring at me, her eyes wide open. “In the morning, my boyfriend kicked my foot with his heavy work boot. ‘What the fuck is this?’ “I sat up quickly, holding a finger to my lips. I stood and pulled him into the bedroom. ‘Anna Lisa brought the baby last night. She can’t take care of her anymore.'”
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3. Miss LoraJunot Díaz | The New Yorker | April 23, 2012 | 21 minutes (5,357 words) A teenager’s grief and its aftermath: “Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her. “You’d fuck anything, someone jeered. “And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.”
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4. Hello EverybodyA.M. Homes | Electric Literature | September 12, 2012 | 27 minutes (6,868 words) A grieving family’s privileged, plastic life: “She hears his car grinding up the hill. At the edge of the driveway, the engine shudders, continuing on for a few seconds before falling silent. Walter buzzes the front gate; Esmeralda, the housekeeper, lets him in. The gate closes with a thick metallic click. “‘Where are you?’ he calls out. “‘I’m hiding,’ Cheryl yells from the backyard. “He enters the through the pool gate. “‘Shouldn’t that be locked?’ she asks. “‘I remembered the code,’ he says. “‘The pool boy’s code, 1234?’ “He nods. ‘Some things never change.'” |
5. Ice ManElmore Leonard | The Atlantic | June 22, 2012 | 9 minutes (2,351 words) A run-in with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer after a rodeo: “Victor saw Nachee and Billy Cosa looking toward the entrance and turned his head to see a Riverside County deputy talking to the manager. Some more law was outside. They’d go around to the kitchen and check on Mexicans without any papers. Victor saw the Riverside deputy look his way. No, he was looking at the white guy at the next table, the guy wearing a straw Stetson he’d fool with, raising the curled brim and setting it close on his eyes again. Never changed his expression. He had size, but looked ten years past herding cows. It was the man’s U.S. Government jacket told Victor he was none of their business.” Books by Elmore Leonard on Amazon |
6. CasinoAlix Ohlin | Guernica | May 1, 2012 | 16 minutes (4,225 words) A sisters’ weekend and an unexpected encounter bring back memories: “When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain about her workaholic husband and over-scheduled, ungrateful children. No one appreciates how much she does for them. All she does is give, give, give, without getting anything back, et cetera. I don’t really mind—I enjoy a good martini, and while Trisha rants I don’t have to worry about getting sloppy, given that she’s always sloppier—except that even her complaints are part boast. She has to mention her busy husband and the two hundred thousand he rakes in a year. Her children’s after-school activities for the gifted are just so freaking expensive and time-consuming. There’s a needle in every one of these remarks, pricking at my skin, saying See, Sherri? See?”
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7. OnwardEmma Donoghue | The Atlantic | August 24, 2012 | 17 minutes (4,385 words) A close-knit family’s struggles in Dickens-era England: “Caroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. ‘We saved you the last of the kippers,’ she says, in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning. “Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass. “His brow is wet with honest sweat, He earns whate’er he can, And looks the whole world in the face, For he owes not any man. “Pet giggles at the face he’s pulling. Caroline slides her last triangle of toast the child’s way. Pet’s worn that striped frock since spring. Is she undersized, for two years old? But then, girls are generally smaller. Are the children Caroline sees thronging the parks so twig-like, under their elaborate coats? ‘Where did you pick that one up?’ she asks Fred. “‘A fellow at the office.’ “‘Again, again,’ insists Pet: her new word this week. “Caroline catches herself watching the clock.” Books by Emma Donoghue on Amazon |
8. West of the KnownChanelle Benz | The American Reader | October 1, 2012 | 20 minutes (5,136 words) Loyalty, betrayal and a final judgment for a brother-sister duo in the Old West: “My brother was the first man to come for me. The first man I saw in the raw, profuse with liquor, outside a brothel in New Mexico Territory. He was the first I know to make a promise then follow on through. There is nothing to forgive. For in the high violence of joy, is there not often a desire to swear devotion? But what then? When is it ever brung off to the letter? When they come for our blood, we will not end, but go on in an unworldly fever. “I come here to collect, my brother said from the porch. If there was more I did not hear it for Uncle Bill and Aunt Josie stepped out and closed the door. I was in the kitchen canning tomatoes, standing over a row of mason jars, hands dripping a wat’ry red when in stepped a man inside a long buckskin coat. “I’m your brother, Jackson, the man smiled, holding out his hand.” |
9. The Semplica-Girl DiariesGeorge Saunders | The New Yorker | October 8, 2012 | 35 minutes (8,979 words) A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage daughter: “September 3rd: Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now. Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes by that time passé? Will future people know sometimes cats fought in night? Because by that time some chemical invented to make cats not fight? Last night dreamed of two demons having sex and found it was only two cats fighting outside window. Will future people be aware of concept of ‘demons’? Will they find our belief in ‘demons’ quaint? Will ‘windows’ even exist? Interesting to future generations that even sophisticated college grad like me sometimes woke in cold sweat, thinking of demons, believing one possibly under bed? Anyway, what the heck, am not planning on writing encyclopedia, if any future person is reading this, if you want to know what a ‘demon’ was, go look it up, in something called an encyclopedia, if you even still have those! “Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting cats.” Books by George Saunders on Amazon |
10. Frogs
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Longreads Your support is what keeps Longreads running every day. Become a Longreads Member and get our first exclusive, “The Power of a Crisis,” from Charles Duhigg’s bestseller, with more to come.
A Longreads Member Exclusive: The Power of a Crisis
Posted by Longreads
Longreads A Longreads Member Exclusive: The Power of a Crisis
Last year we introduced the Longreads Membership as an optional way for you to support our service. And it’s because of our members that we’re still here today. Thank you again for all your support.
Today we’re introducing something new for our Longreads Members: Exclusive access to stories that aren’t available anywhere else on the web, produced by the best publishers and writers in the world. We’re thrilled to partner with Random House and New York Times writer Charles Duhigg in presenting our first Longreads Exclusive Pick, “The Power of a Crisis,” a full chapter from Duhigg’s bestselling book The Power of Habit.
We hope to send more exclusives to you in the future. We won’t send them every week, but when we do, you’ll be sure that these exclusives come with our highest recommendation.
One other perk to being a member is that you’ll have the chance to recommend future Longreads Member exclusives. Tell us what you want to share with your fellow members (it can be a story, an excerpt, or something completely different), and if we like it too, we’ll find it and feature both you and your pick. Send us your suggestions at exclusives@longreads.com.
You can read an excerpt of our first exclusive here.
Longreads Member Exclusive: The Power of a Crisis
Longreads Pick
From our first member exclusive: An excerpt from New York Times writer Charles Duhigg’s bestselling book, The Power of Habit, which examines the science behind how we form and change our habits, and how companies are profiting off of them (sign up here to join):
“‘Some doctors were fine, and some were monsters,’ one nurse who worked at Rhode Island Hospital in the mid-2000s told me. ‘We called it the glass factory, because it felt like everything could crash down at any minute.’
“To deal with these tensions, the staff had developed informal rules — habits unique to the institution — that helped avert the most obvious conflicts. Nurses, for instance, always double-checked the orders of error-prone physicians and quietly made sure that correct doses were entered; they took extra time to write clearly on patients’ charts, lest a hasty surgeon make the wrong cut. One nurse told me they developed a system of color codes to warn one another.
“‘We put doctors’ names in different colors on the whiteboards,’ she said. ‘Blue meant ‘nice,’ red meant ‘jerk,’ and black meant, ‘whatever you do, don’t contradict them or they’ll take your head off.”‘”
Author:
Source:
Random House
Published: Aug 21, 2012
Length: 35 minutes (8,817 words)
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Posted by Longreads
Longreads The power of habits in guiding our behavior—and how companies like Target have used customer data to create new buying habits:
There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. ‘Can you give us a list?’ the marketers asked.
“How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” — Charles Duhigg, New York Times
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Longreads The harsh working conditions inside factories that make products for Apple:
“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”
“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.
“Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad.” — Charles Duhigg, David Barboza, The New York Times
Previously: “Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class.” — Charles Duhigg, Keith Bradsher, The New York Times
See also this #Audiofiles story: “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” This American Life, Jan. 6, 2012
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Posted by Longreads
Longreads How the U.S. lost out on iPhone manufacturing work, and what it means for the future of job creation in the United States:
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
“Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class.” — Charles Duhigg, Keith Bradsher, The New York Times
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