Three years ago, Sarah Menkedick launched Vela Magazine in response to the byline gender gap in the publishing industry, and to create a space that highlights excellent nonfiction written by women. Last week, Menkedick and her team of editors launched a Kickstarter campaign to grow Vela as a sustainable publication for high-quality, long-form nonfiction, to pay their contributors a competitive rate, and to continue to ensure that women writers are as recognized and read as their male counterparts. Menkedick chatted with Longreads about her own path as a writer, the writer’s decision to work for free, building a sustainable online publication, and the importance of featuring diverse voices in women’s nonfiction.
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Let’s talk about Vela’s origins. You created Vela in 2011 as a space for women writers in response to the byline gender gap — yet it’s not a “women’s magazine.” Can you explain?
Like so many women writers, I was discouraged by the original VIDA count in 2011. I was also a bit disenchanted with a certain narrowness of voice and focus in mainstream magazine publishing, which tended to be very male, because men tend to dominate mainstream magazine publishing. Talking about the alternative to that gets really dicey, because it’s icky to talk about a “womanly” or “female” voice. I wanted to say: nonfiction and literary journalism written by women doesn’t have to sound like this sort of swaggering male writing, or like the loveable snarky-but-sweet meta writing of John Jeremiah Sullivan or David Foster Wallace. It can be like . . . and there we run short on models, because there aren’t very many women being widely published whose work falls into that middle zone between “creative nonfiction” — which tends to be more academic, more experimental, more the types of essays appearing in literary magazines — and traditional journalism.
I don’t think I was the only one who had trouble holding it together. We had come all this way and cashed in so much good fortune for the outside chance that we might see those eight Emperor penguins pick their way across the ice. And we did. In a world that can seem purpose-built and calculated for us, engineered for our safety and convenience, every part of that long-shot day, the entire lunatic trip, felt as fleeting as luck itself. That feeling is what I remember, and that’s why Antarctica remains impervious to memories and maps and the mental thumbtacks we might stick in them.
All of its settlements are temporary. Its borders migrate. Its landmarks are seasonal. Its ports are killer whales, and its capital cities are penguins.
Gay Talese’s classic 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra with annotations from the author:
“The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers. Do you have a photographic memory?-eg I go over stuff so much, and go over it again and again and again, that I can remember it forever, almost.-gt A couple of years ago, you told Chris Jones, ‘I don’t take notes in front of people.’-eg Right.-gt So what techniques to do you use to remember such a complicated scene or extended dialogue? You’re describing — in great detail — movement, wardrobe and the location of the various parties. This strikes me as something that would be difficult to capture even in real time.-eg Every night, if I don’t sneak notes in during the day going to the bathroom or something — which I do — I go home and before I go to sleep I write down notes from the whole day, what’s in my mind.-gt”
“The purpose of this course is to teach students how to write publishable magazine-length narrative non-fiction: In other words, my aim is to help you learn how to write good, long, true stories. The course outline will mirror a typical writer’s progress through the birth of an idea to a finished, polished piece, including reporting, writing, editing, and fact-checking. In addition to classroom discussion, course readings will help students understand the difference between good and bad work. My hope is that by the end of the semester, you will have written the Best Story of Your Life So Far (BSOYLSF) and it will help you reach your future potential as an award-winning literary journalist.”
“The subculture of journalism is no longer as confident of its success. Its old values are increasingly under question. The topic of this course is therefore a moving target. We shall approach it with two organizing principles:
“A critical study of traditional journalistic values, the historical forces that created them. An evaluation of social and technological changes that threaten that subculture – and possibly its value system.”
“The goal of this course is to help you create a distinctive body of work and, eventually, a capstone piece of literary reportage. It has three basic components. First, it will guide you through the research, reporting and thinking to refine and focus the project you will begin in Portfolio I. Second, it will introduce you to some of the authors, editors and publications of the genre. Third, it will familiarize you with some of the journalistic strategies you will use in your own work.”
“I’m happy to share a syllabus, although they’ve gotten more and more abbreviated over the last few years. That’s because, as you know, investigations never seem to follow a planned path. Basically these days, I just do an oral presentation and assignments and we build deadlines, etc. in to the semester, depending on where we are. We do a lot of oral reports and feedback in this class and in the last month of the semester, we start writing/fact-checking/filling in gaps based on the information we’ve assembled.”
“This course will explore the art of telling stories – true stories. The craft is often called Literary Journalism or Creative Nonfiction. The writer John McPhee calls it The Literature of Fact, which I prefer for its lack of pretention and for its lack of ambiguity. In this class, we’ll talk about finding story, about reporting and of course about writing, about how one goes about making sense of the tale at hand. I want to push people to find stories outside of the familiar. “It’s what makes this craft so exhilarating, to find yourself in places you’d never have reason to be or with people you’d never have reason to meet. What could be more exciting. More challenging.”
“This course lies at the crossroads of journalism and literature. During the next 15 weeks we will explore the journalistic, historical and critical tangents that make up the notion of literary journalism as we read and analyze some of the best reportage ever written. In the process of reading the works of many fine journalists, we will weigh how form and content work together to create great factual literature.
“This course has a six-pronged approach. It is a smorgasbord of delectables – all, or any one of which, I hope, you will find tasty. We will explore:
“1. Literary journalism’s historical antecedents – or should we say founders?
“2. Literary journalism’s future in the age of the connected computer.
“3. The criticism literary journalism has received from friend and foe alike.
“4. The theory behind this genre.
“5. The techniques that comprise and define this genre.
“6. Ways of toppling the inverted pyramid in developing our own individual writing styles using the techniques of literary journalism.”
Via Travelreads: Chris Jones on the unique culture of Japanese baseball and 16-year-old pitching phenom Tomohiro Anraku, seen as “a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations”:
“There has been talk in America that Anraku’s arm had been destroyed weeks earlier, in April, stripped of its powers at Koshien — a high school tournament that happens twice a year in Japan, in spring and in summer. Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa and one of the West’s principal translators of Japanese culture, has a hard time capturing the meaning of Koshien, first held in 1915. ‘It’s like the Super Bowl and the World Series rolled into one,’ he says. ‘It’s the closest thing Japan has to a national festival.’ In the spring, 32 teams from across the country arrive at Koshien, the name of a beautiful stadium near Kobe but also the de facto title of the tournament that’s played there. (In the summer, 49 teams participate, one from each of Japan’s 47 diverse prefectures, plus an additional team from Tokyo and Hokkaido.) They meet in a frantic series of single-elimination games until a champion emerges. At any one time, 60% of Japan’s TV sets will be tuned in to the drama. More than 45,000 fans will be packed into the stadium, and if the games are especially good, many of those fans will be weeping.
“‘It’s not just baseball,’ says Masato Yoshii, who pitched in two Koshiens long before he joined the New York Mets. ‘It’s something else. It’s something more.'”
1. Chris Jones on the animals in Ohio. What a way to start: The horses knew first. And want to know how to make people keep reading? End paragraphs and sections with sentences like this: He saw what was unmistakably a bear, giving chase. And: Then Kopchak saw the lion. And: Next she called 911. And: … and they knew that they didn’t have enough time or tranquilizers to stop what was coming.
2. Michael Mooney’s Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever. Because of the question. Will he or won’t he? I had to know. But also because Mooney made me care about Bill Fong. He could’ve taken me anywhere. I would’ve read forever. And because come on—who doesn’t love a well-told tale with a twist at the end?
3. Kelley Benham’s Never Let Go. Granted, Kelley’s cubicle’s not too far from my cubicle, so maybe I’m not too impartial, but I feel like this is a fact: This story is one of the best things that ran in a newspaper in America in the last 12 months. Three parts. One miracle. Life.
5. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Cocaine Incorporated. Details. Details like the ghostwriter composing letters to the mistress. Like the dope-stuffed submersibles floating down the Amazon. The Sinaloa pot farm … on U.S. National Forest land … in the remote North Woods of Wisconsin … surrounded by Mexican farmers with AK-47’s. The catapult! The chili-pepper business! The air-conditioned tunnels with trolley lines! Surprises are such intoxicants. Oh, and this sentence: In the trippy semiotics of the drug war, the cops dress like bandits, and the bandits dress like cops.
“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.”
“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!’ ”
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
“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
“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.’
“(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.”
“ ‘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.”
“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.”
Nicholas Jackson is the digital editorial director for Outside magazine. A former associate editor at The Atlantic, he has also worked for Slate,Texas Monthly, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and other publications.
I was going to give this two-parter from the always-great Pamela Colloff (seriously, go back through her 15-year archive at Texas Monthly for compelling narratives on everything from quinceañeras to school prayer to a piece on David Koresh and the 1993 Branch Davidian raid that should serve as a model for all future oral history projects) the award for best crime story, but it’s so much more than that. The tale of Michael Morton, who spent 25 years wrongfully imprisoned for brutally murdering his wife, has been told before, in newspapers and on television. But it has never been told like this. Over two installments across two issues—who does that anymore?—Colloff slowly reveals the cold details and intimate vignettes that only months of hard reporting can uncover, keeping the reader hanging on to each sentence. You already know how this story ends; you’ve read it before. And that might make you wonder—but only for a split second—why it was assigned and pursued. For the handful of big magazines left, this is as compelling an argument you can make for continued existence: only with hundreds of interviews, weeks of travel, and many late nights can you craft something this complete and this strong. It’s a space most publications can’t play in; it’s prohibitively expensive—and a gamble—to invest the necessary resources. You may be able to tell Morton’s story in book form, but you wouldn’t have the tightness and intensity (just try putting this one down) that Colloff’s story has, even at something like 30,000 words. And you wouldn’t want to lose her for a year or two anyway; we’re all anxiously awaiting her next piece.
Who is Vanessa Veselka? A self-described “teenage runaway, expatriate, union organizer, and student of paleontology,” she’s relatively new to the magazine world. (Her first novel, Zazen, came out just last year—and won the 2012 PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for fiction.) But she’s spent years building up a lifetime of experiences that, while many of us may not be able to directly relate to (and would never hope to), we all want to hear about. This, her first piece for GQ, takes you back to the summer of 1985, when Veselka hitched a ride with a stranger who may have been Robert Ben Rhoades, the sadistic killer who has admitted to killing three people, including a 14-year-old girl in Illinois, and is currently serving life sentences.
Best Profile of the Year ”The Honor System” (Chris Jones, Esquire)
Chris Jones, who made a stink on Twitter (he’s infamous for making stinks of all kinds on Twitter) when his excellent profile of Roger Ebert wasn’t named a finalist for a National Magazine Award a couple of years ago, must really be bummed to learn that the American Society of Magazine Editors, the awards’ governing body, has killed the category entirely this year. I’ve had some public clashes with the guy—he can turn your mood cloudy with 140 characters or less—but on this I do commiserate, because “The Honor System,” his profile of Teller (you know him as the silent one from Vegas superstar magic duo Penn & Teller), would have finally brought home that statue of which he was robbed. And rightfully so. This story, which revolves around Teller’s attempts—legal and otherwise—to put an end to trick theft, a commonplace practice (who knew?) in that community, will leave you believing in magic.
Magazines are filled with service content: How to do this, when to do that. Readers love it, no matter what they tell you. That’s why every single month Cosmopolitan is able to convince its readers that there are 100 new things you must know about how to please your man. And why Men’s Health‘s website isn’t really much about health at all, but about lists and checklists and charts (most of them having to do with sex). Esquire‘s Father’s Day package was packed with similarly light content: how to plan for a visit from your now-adult kids, what to get dad on that special day, etc. But tucked between those graphics and croutons (the term some of the lady mags use to refer to those bite-size bits of content) was a knock-you-on-your-ass piece from the magazine’s long-time executive editor, Mark Warren, on the long and trying relationship he had (we all have) with dad.
He’s been called the first social media president and he’s even done an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. You know all about Barack Obama’s Internet prowess from the 2008 campaign: his ability to get young people to follow his every word on Twitter and donate in small amounts—but by the millions—to his election fund. The presence of Chris Hughes, a former Mark Zuckerberg roommate and a founder of Facebook, during that first cycle solidified this position for Obama. (That he was running against a 72-year-old white dude from Arizona didn’t hurt). But there’s a whole lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. In “When the Nerds Go Marching In,” Madrigal, a senior editor and lead technology writer for The Atlantic, pulls back the curtain, introducing you to Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, and Mark Trammell, Obama’s dream team of engineers, and makes you wish you would have sat at the smart table every once in a while in high school.
This is a great—and important—story about the evolving model of parenting gender-fluid children, and a reminder that we all can—and should—be a little more open-minded and accepting of others. But really, the entire staff of The New York Times Magazine deserves an award for its commitment to complicated—and controversial—pieces like this one. This year alone, under the direction of Hugo Lindgren, the magazine has produced this cover story as well as big cover stories on the new psychological science that has us pegging people as psychopaths as early as kindergarten, and the first long-form piece on the Tourette’s-like twitching epidemic that affected 18 teenagers in Le Roy, New York.
If, like me, you’ve never really appreciated classical music (and statistics show that you are, in fact, like me—at least when it comes to Mozart), you’ll probably never feel compelled to click on that little link up there. But I have an obsession with Adam Moss’ New York magazine, which is certainly the best weekly currently being produced today, and I dogear my way through a stack that slowly grows as new issues arrive until I’ve read every story and every page. That’s how I came to read classical music and architecture critic Justin Davidson’s first-person feature story on stepping up to the podium to lead an orchestra on his own. You may not have the same compulsions I do—this is where we differ—but trust me on this one.
Earlier this year, we sent senior editor Grayson Schaffer to Everest Base Camp for a climbing season that turned out to be one of the deadliest in history. For six weeks, he reported from 17,000 feet while body after body fell (10, by the time the season came to a close) as a record number of climbers attempted to summit the world’s tallest peak. Everest, over the years, has become something of a sideshow, with sham outfitters promising to take anyone with a fat checkbook to the top, regardless of experience or ability. But it remains a powerful symbol, and as long as we desire a challenge (or just an escape from day to day drudgery), it’ll continue to lure people in.
A little bit of post-read Googling (and messages from a couple of Twitter followers) quickly alerted me to the fact that Molly Young, with past pieces in New York, Elle, and The Believer, among others, isn’t all that new to the game. But I had somehow never recognized her byline before. After reading her profile of Riccardo Tisci, the Italian fashion designer who currently serves as the creative director of Givenchy (“Across from me a nucleus of attendants has formed around Amar’e Stoudemire, thanks less to his fame (there are better celebrities here) than to his height, which gives him a reassuring lighthouse quality.”), I’ll make sure to never miss it again.
I was going to select a piece from Newsweek for this honor, given that this is the last year the publication will technically qualify (it’ll morph into a new product, Newsweek Global, when it transitions to online-only next year), but it hasn’t published anything this year that could crack my top 10. What does, though, is the interview between Newsweek‘s top editor, Tina Brown, and Michael Kinsley that ran in New York. It’s not great in any traditional sense—after every page you’re left wondering when Kinsley will ask this question or that question, and he never does—but it’s compelling from the first question to the last because of the oversize roles both subjects have played in our modern media.
Susan Sontag is a force that continues to be reckoned with, and the publication of her second volume of journals this year occasioned this incredible piece. I think I’ve re-read this essay three or four times now, and I just keep coming back for more.
Tacking a different walk down the same path, Chung looks to DFW’s adage about being a fucking human being and unpacks it until all that’s left is that intense feeling of being alone, but together. The problems of how to be alone and how to be with others are not new, but at the same time both Chung and Cooke cast reassuring lights onto this well worn and sort of depressing path.
Would’ve been a contender in this category, but for it being six years too early: Sheila Heti’s 2006 Trampoline Hall talk, “Why Go Out.”
Batuman has a bit of a magic touch in her ability to put you right on the scene, and she generously seems to fill your head with her knowledge and enthusiasm beforehand. For a diary entry, it’s surprising how quickly Batuman comes to seem just slightly out of frame, revealing instead the mysterious world of Orhan Pamuk’s strange, physically embodied and built literature.
It seems as though 2012 could’ve been called the year of James Deen. The charming porn star received so much media attention, and was the cause of so much hand-wringing this year, that for a time it seemed like he and his widely beloved penis were all anyone could talk about. Or maybe that was just my particular Twitter feed. Anyhow, this LARB piece was my favorite of the ones I read about Deen.
Steinberg is a perpetual favorite of mine, in part because of the offbeat and unexamined subjects he chooses to write about, but mostly because of his thoughtful and good humored sensibility. On the topic of the relationships between librarians and pornography, he is simply without parallel. Who else could trace pretty much everything great in this world back to pornos? From who else would I be able to take a question like “What was the relationship between these library fuckers and what I had been reading?” completely on its face?
Duh. One of Smith’s many gifts is her ear, and it was thrilling to see one of my favorite language manipulators enraptured fannishly before another dextrous word slinger.
Most Likely To Lead You Down a Penn and Teller YouTube Rabbit Hole
Seriously, this Chris Jones story radically altered the texture of my life; for weeks afterward I became obsessed by magic. I watched at least one episode of Penn and Teller’s Fool Us per night, but usually more than one. I sacrificed a thing I tend to hold pretty sacred (my sleep) in order to feed a hunger I haven’t felt since I was child. This story made me ravenous for real magic, for showmanship, for being told the right kind of lies. The key to the joy of this story is, I think, in how Jones refuses to give away any of his or Teller’s tricks and instead zeroes in on the delight that the magician imparts on his audience—how pleasurable it is to revel in our own foolishness, for a change, to feel that ticklish sense of wonder.
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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.
Kiera 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.”
Charles 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?
David 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.'”
John 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.”
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.”
Dan 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.”
[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?”
Rob 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.”
Michael 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.”
Alex 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.”
Marina 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?'”
“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.'”
Junot 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.”
A.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.
Elmore 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.”
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?”
Emma 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.
Chanelle 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.”
George 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.”
10. Frogs Mo Yan | Granta | October 11, 2012 | 14 minutes (3,591 words)
An aunt recalls how she met her husband:
“‘If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends got together for dinner on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk – I hadn’t drunk much, less than a bowlful, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ’63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye – to honour me, he said – but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie Xiaoque himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.'”
Cheri Lucas Rowlands 
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