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Writer Jessica Lussenhop: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages. See her stories on her Longreads page or find her on Twitter. 

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The ones I couldn’t stop thinking about.

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• Jon Ronson , “Robots Say the Damndest Things,” GQ, March 2011

Besides the fact that Ronson is such a consistently fascinating writer, now when people ask me what kind of journalist I’d like to be, ultimately, I can now say, “You know that piece where Jon Ronson gets to fly all over the world and meet all the robots? That kind.”

• Joe Eskenazi, “The Art of the Steal,” San Francisco Weekly, March 2011

 A fascinating portrait of a very uncool and very successful art thief. Also, orchid club crasher. Definitely one of the most memorable characters of 2011.

• Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “My Ex-Gay Friend,” New York Times Magazine, June 2011

Really haunting, and in large part because of this turn: “I told Michael about a recent conversation I had with our former boss … who surprised me by wondering aloud if Michael was ever truly gay.”

• Tim Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory,” Rolling Stone, May 2011

Masterful storytelling and as someone who never really knew a world without Fox News, this one just really took me to school.

• Jeanne Marie Laskas, “The People V. Football,” GQ, March 2011

MVP Longread: This year was the year of chronic traumatic encephalopathy stories (rounded out by the amazing New York Times series on hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard), but Laskas’s skill elevates former Viking Fred McNeill and his struggle with early onset Alzheimer’s far beyond poster-child-dom. I ran around recommending this to just about everyone I know after reading it.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Ruettimann had visited Hereaux at a time when he knew his friend would be alone. In the modest but cozy living room, Ruettimann handed Hereaux a heavy brown accordion file. He wrote a name down on a scrap of paper, the name of a local journalist.

“If anything happens to me,” Ruettimann said, “give this to the reporter.”

After Ruettimann’s death, Hereaux took the file down off his desk. Inside was a thick stack of loose-leaf documents, a manila folder stuffed with letters, and a catalog-size clasp envelope labeled “Reports.”

Written in black permanent marker in the margin of the envelope was the reporter’s name: mine.

“Deputy Dan Ruettiman’s Suicide Rocks Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department.” — Jessica Lussenhop, City Pages

See more #longreads from Jessica Lussenhop

The Top 10 Longreads of 2011

I should preface this by saying I didn’t plan to do a list, because all of your Top 5 Longreads of 2011 really represent what the Longreads community is all about. But, in true WWIC form, I couldn’t resist. 

Thank you for an incredible year. Special thanks to the entire Longreads team: Joyce King Thomas, Kjell Reigstad, Hakan Bakkalbasi and Mike Dang. 

-Mark Armstrong, founder, Longreads


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1. Travis the Menace

Dan P. Lee | New York Magazine | Jan. 24, 2011 | 24 minutes (6,096 words)

The heartbreaking, horrifying story of a chimp named Travis and the Connecticut couple that raised him like a son. Lee followed Travis’s path from local celebrity to fully grown (and violent) adult:

“Stamford’s animal-control officer was more concerned. After contacting primatologists, she spoke with Sandy, arguing that Travis was by now a fully sexualized adult (chimpanzees in the wild have sex, nonmonogamously, as often as 50 times a day); that he had the strength of at least five men; that adult chimpanzees are known to be unpredictable and potentially violent (which is why all chimp actors are prepubescent); and that maintaining Travis for the duration of his five- or six-decade lifetime was not viable. Sandy seemed to pay an open mind to the officer’s warning but ultimately concluded that Travis had never exhibited even the slightest capacity for violence.”

“Travis” was the first in a “tabloid-with-empathy” trilogy from Lee: He also brought humanity to the story of Anna Nicole Smith (“Paw Paw & Lady Love”) and wrote about Harold Camping, the elderly doomsayer who never quite got his apocalypse calendar right (“After the Rapture”). 

More Lee: “Body Snatchers” (Philadelphia Magazine, 2008)

 

2. Vanishing Act

Paul Collins | Lapham’s Quarterly | Dec. 17, 2010 | 15 minutes (3,837 words)

A child-prodigy author mysteriously disappears. Barbara Follett was 13 when her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in 1927:

“Through the door could be heard furious clacking and carriage returns: the sound, in fact, of an eight-year-old girl writing her first novel.

“In 1923, typewriters were hardly a child’s plaything, but to those following the family of critic and editor Wilson Follett, it was a grand educational experiment. He’d already written of his daughter Barbara in Harper’s, describing a girl who by the age of three was consumed with letters and words. ‘She was always seeing A’s in the gables of houses and H’s in football goalposts,’ he recalled. One day she’d wandered into Wilson’s office and discovered his typewriter.

“‘Tell me a story about it,’ she demanded.

“This was Barbara’s way of asking for any explanation, and after he demonstrated the wondrous machine, she took to it fiercely. A typewriter, her parents realized, could unleash a torrential flow of thoughts from a gifted child who still lacked the coordination to write in pencil.”

This was from December 2010, but it came out after last year’s best-of list was published. It’s also on The Awl editors’ best-of-2011 listI still think about this story constantly.

More Collins: “The Molecatcher’s Daughter” (The Believer, 2006)

 

3. In Which We Teach You How to Be a Woman in Any Boy’s Club

Molly Lambert | This Recording | Feb. 22, 2011 | 11 minutes (2,825 words)

A manifesto for the modern woman:

“‘What If I Love Being The Only Girl In The Boys Club?’ Megan Fox Syndrome, aka Wendy from Peter Pan. It is the delusion that you can become an official part of the boys’ club if you are its strictest enforcer, its most useful prole. That if you follow the rules exactly you can become the Official Woman. If you refuse other women admission you are denying that other women are talented, which makes you just as bad as any boys’ club for thinking there would only be one talented girl at a time.

“You will never actually be part of the boys’ club, because you are a woman. You are Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas.’ You are not Italian, therefore you are never going to get made. And you don’t want to be a part of the boys’ club, because it is dedicated to preserving its own privilege at your expense. Why wouldn’t you want to know and endorse the work of other women who share your interests? How insecure are you?”

I can think of at least ten other personal essays that blew me away this year, but Lambert’s seemed to completely take over our conversations, online and off.

More from This Recording in 2011: “Where We All Will Be Received” (Nell Boeschenstein)

 

4. A Murder Foretold

David Grann | The New Yorker | March 28, 2011 | 57 minutes (14,318 words)

A political conspiracy in Guatemala and the murder of lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, who created a video predicting his own killing in 2009:

“Rosenberg told friends that his apartment was under surveillance, and that he was being followed. ‘Whenever he got into the car, he was looking over his shoulder,’ his son Eduardo recalled. From his apartment window, Rosenberg could look across the street and see an office where Gustavo Alejos, President Colom’s private secretary, often worked. Rosenberg told Mendizábal that Alejos had called him and warned him to stop investigating the Musas’ murders, or else the same thing might happen to him. Speaking to Musa’s business manager, Rosenberg said of the powerful people he was investigating, ‘They are going to kill me.’ He had a will drawn up.”

Obviously, with David Grann, it’s never so straightforward.

More from the New Yorker in 2011: Clarence Thomas, Michele Bachmann, a small-town pharmacist and a Jamaican drug lord

 

5. A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home

Michael Kruse | St. Petersburg Times | July 22, 2011 | 10 minutes (2,735 words)

A reporter retraces the last years of a woman who slipped away from society:

“Kathryn Norris moved to Florida in 1990. She was intelligent and driven, say those who knew her back in Ohio, but she could be difficult. She held grudges. She had been laid off from her civil service job, and her marriage of 14 years was over, and so she came looking for sunshine. She knew nobody. Using money from her small pension, she bought the Cherie Down townhouse, $84,900 new. It was a short walk to the sounds of the surf and just up A1A from souvenir stores selling trinkets with messages of PARADISE FOUND.

“She started a job making $32,000 a year as a buyer of space shuttle parts for a subcontractor for NASA. She went out on occasion with coworkers for cookouts or cocktails. She talked a lot about her ex-husband. She started having some trouble keeping up at the office and was diagnosed in December of 1990 as manic depressive.

“After the diagnosis, she made daily notes on index cards. She ate at Arby’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s. Sometimes she did sit-ups and rode an exercise bike. She read the paper. She got the mail. She went to sleep at 8 p.m., 1:30 a.m., 6:30 a.m. Her heart raced.

“‘Dropped fork at lunch,’ she wrote.

“‘Felt depressed in evening and cried.’

“‘Noise outside at 4 a.m. sounded like a dog.'”

Once you finish this piece, read the annotated version of this story, in which Kruse breaks down exactly how he reported each fact from Kathryn Norris’s life. Incredible. 

More from the St. Petersburg Times in 2011: “Spectacle: The Lynching of Claude Neal” (Ben Montgomery)

 

6. What Really Happened Aboard Air France Flight 447

Jeff Wise | Popular Mechanics | Dec. 6, 2011 | 17 minutes (4,253 words)

A fatal human error, repeated over and over again, as the reader observes helplessly. Writer Jeff Wise uses pilot transcripts to deconstruct, conversation by conversation, wrong move by wrong move, how bad weather and miscommunication between the pilots in the cockpit doomed this Airbus 330, which plunged into the Atlantic in 2009, killing 228 people: 

02:11:21 (Robert) On a pourtant les moteurs! Qu’est-ce qui se passe bordel? Je ne comprends pas ce que se passe. (We still have the engines! What the hell is happening? I don’t understand what’s happening.)

“Unlike the control yokes of a Boeing jetliner, the side sticks on an Airbus are ‘asynchronous’—that is, they move independently. ‘If the person in the right seat is pulling back on the joystick, the person in the left seat doesn’t feel it,’ says Dr. David Esser, a professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. ‘Their stick doesn’t move just because the other one does, unlike the old-fashioned mechanical systems like you find in small planes, where if you turn one, the [other] one turns the same way.’ Robert has no idea that, despite their conversation about descending, Bonin has continued to pull back on the side stick.

“The men are utterly failing to engage in an important process known as crew resource management, or CRM. They are failing, essentially, to cooperate. It is not clear to either one of them who is responsible for what, and who is doing what. This is a natural result of having two co-pilots flying the plane. ‘When you have a captain and a first officer in the cockpit, it’s clear who’s in charge,’ Nutter explains. ‘The captain has command authority. He’s legally responsible for the safety of the flight. When you put two first officers up front, it changes things. You don’t have the sort of traditional discipline imposed on the flight deck when you have a captain.'”

This, along with “Travis the Menace” and Wired’s “The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” was one of the most heart-stopping of the year.

See also: “The Unlikely Event” (Avi Steinberg, Paris Review)

 

7. Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World

Amy Harmon | The New York Times | Sept. 18, 2011 | 30 minutes (7,524 words)

A year in the life of an autistic teen moving into adulthood—a time when support systems can begin to fall away:

“Many autistic high school students are facing the adult world with elevated expectations of their own. Justin, who relied on a one-on-one aide in school, had by age 17 declared his intention to be a ‘famous animator-illustrator.’ He also dreamed of living in his own apartment, a goal he seemed especially devoted to when, say, his mother asked him to walk the dog.

“‘I prefer I move to the apartment,’ he would say, reluctantly setting aside the notebook he spent hours filling with tiny, precise replicas of every known animated character.

“‘I prefer I move to the apartment, too,’ his father, Briant, a pharmaceutical company executive, replied on hard days.

“Over the year that a New York Times reporter observed it, the transition program at Montclair High served as a kind of boot camp in community integration that might also be, for Justin, a last chance. Few such services are available after high school. And Justin was entitled to public education programs, by federal law, until only age 21.”

Harmon’s was one of several outstanding pieces this year on the subject of autism. Also see Steve Silberman on John Elder Robison, an author with Asperger syndrome.

More from Amy Harmon: “A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over Shrimping Life”

 

8. The Girl from Trails End

Kathy Dobie | GQ Magazine | Sept. 6, 2011 | 26 minutes (6,657 words)

Revisiting the Texas gang-rape story, and a reminder about protecting our youngest victims. Dobie spends time with the girl’s family and attempts to understand how some members of the community could jump to the defense of the 19 men and boys accused:

“While the gag order did silence the defendants and the officials, it didn’t come close to quieting the rumors and accusations, the ill-informed but passionate opinions, the confusion and muddy thinking that obscured what should’ve been a clear-cut case of statutory rape: An 11-year-old child cannot consent to having sex. But a deep misunderstanding of the law persisted—of why it exists and the morality it is meant to express, as did an even deeper ignorance of children’s brains and the true nature of vulnerability.

“The most confused of all were the young people of Cleveland, the vast majority of whom sided with the boys and men and blamed Regina [not her real name]. The peer pressure to take sides—if you can even call it that, for at times it seemed like a mob versus one girl, all alone—was immense. Even the kind ones, the ones who called themselves her friends, had decided against her. In a Facebook conversation, a 13-year-old who was a cousin of one of the defendants said that Regina was ‘like my best friend n i love her’ but went on to write that ‘she ask for them to do that to her i do not care becuss thats just gross n i will never do that…. she like a slut type of girl.’ At 13, this girl could no more grasp the susceptibility of an 11-year-old than an anorexic can see herself clearly in a mirror.”

Just one of many outstanding pieces from GQ this year, including “The Movie Set that Ate Itself,” essays from John Jeremiah Sullivan“Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph High School Basketball Scandal,” and a fun collection of oral histories.

More Dobie: “The Long Shadow of War” (Dec. 2007)

 

9. A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

Mona Simpson | The New York Times | Oct. 30, 2011 | 9 minutes (2,383 words)

The final moments, and unforgettable last words, of a technology visionary’s life:

“He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

“Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

“He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

“This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

“He seemed to be climbing.

“But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

“Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.”

Steve Jobs tributes poured in during October and November, including a touching tribute from veteran tech journalist Steven Levy. Some of the best reading came from Steve himself, with his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech.

See also: The Steve Jobs archive on Longreads

 

10. Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library

Maria Bustillos | The Awl | April 5, 2011 | 38 minutes (9,439 words)

The ultimate DFW fan goes on a road trip to see what was on his bookshelves and pore over the marginalia for clues about his life:

“One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace’s library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

“Much of Wallace’s work has to do with cutting himself back down to size, and in a larger sense, with the idea that cutting oneself back down to size is a good one, for anyone (q.v., the Kenyon College commencement speech, later published as This is Water). I left the Ransom Center wondering whether one of the most valuable parts of Wallace’s legacy might not be in persuading us to put John Bradshaw on the same level with Wittgenstein. And why not; both authors are human beings who set out to be of some use to their fellows. It can be argued, in fact, that getting rid of the whole idea of special gifts, of the exceptional, and of genius, is the most powerful current running through all of Wallace’s work.”

After this was published, Bustillos kept going. In 2011 she also dissected the work of the late Christopher Hitchens, as well as Wikipedia and Aaron Swartz, among other topics.

See more longreads from The Awl in 2011

Our Top 10 Longreads of 2011

Radiolab: An Appreciation by Ira Glass

Longreads Pick

I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic. Take the opening of their show on the mathematics of random chance, stochasticity. The first aesthetic choice Jad and Robert make is that they don’t say you’re about to listen to a show about math or science. They don’t use the word stochasticity. They know those things would be a serious turn off for lots of people. In doing this, Jad and Robert sidestep most of the conventions of a normal science show – hell, of most normal broadcast journalism.

Author: Ira Glass
Source: transom.org
Published: Sep 19, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,686 words)

Foster Kamer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Foster Kamer (ex-BlackBook + Gawker + Village Voice) is online features and news editor at Esquire


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2010 was an incredible year for writing, bottom line. Despite the proliferation of things whose output is mostly antagonistic to great writing — like faceless “content farms” churning out hollow, Google-gaming information lacking anything of substance — great writing persisted. Twitter’s evolving as an aesthetic, yielding profundities from the most unlikely of sources, and a few performance artists, too. Blogging continued to evolve as a craft: some of its once loudest critics are now some of its most significant contributors. More and more people care about things being well written, and they remember them, even if they’re intended to be as disposable as a piece of produce. It’s an encouraging sign of what’s to come.

Putting together this list, I felt like I should make some omissions, like my (previous) employer, The Village Voice. There are too many great pieces I got to work with, but three worth noting were:

·  Steven Thrasher’s ranted-essay, White America Has Lost Its Mind, a pitch-perfect picture of America pre-2010 midterms.

·  All five installments of Graham Rayman’s The NYPD Tapes, undeniably some of the best investigative reporting in 2010. 

·  Live from Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos. Camille Dodero took an empathetic look at a part of America that’s almost unanimously discarded, viewed like a freak museum exhibit. It was feeling, it was fair, it was compelling in every way an assessment of a subculture should be.

Putting this list together is a little torturous. That aside, these are my five favorite — and most personally important — things I read this year. I think you’ll like them. I’m very, very conscious about the omission of women — or anything really other than White Dudes — on this list, and I apologize for my narrow, singular selection. 

5. Profiling bands sucks. No matter how provocative the subject, writing about and interviewing “famous people” — but especially musicians — is a sharp, royal pain in the balls. Getting them to elaborate on their art? Inherently awkward. Both parties know exactly how fruitless and overreaching these things are. Nicholas Dawidoff’s April profile of The NationalforThe New York Times Magazineshould have been one of those things. [New York Times writer interviews five white dudes from Brooklyn making Pitchfork-approved music.] Face value: “Groan.” But Dawidoff managed to get as close to understanding this band’s creative process — really, not that complicated of one, either — as anybody in it, and we’re right there with him as it happens. It helps if you’re a fan or a young Almost Famous aspirant, but the story of just some guys becoming one of the most famous rock acts in America over a decade, and doing it without becoming celebrities or selling out fans? And writing the story well? It’s an anomaly. Some people left the piece the way a great band leaves you after a concert: wanting more, but satisfied no less. I did.

4. Michael Chabon’s introduction toFountain Cityis the most motivational thing I’ve read all year. It’s a four-chapter booklet packaged with the latest issue of McSweeney’s. It’s the epic Chabon started that he never finished, a novel “wrecked” by the author …until he decided to annotate what was written. In the introduction, Chabon — yeah, the same guy who wrote Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — writes about the terrible, beautiful way the 20-something iteration of himself that went on to write those books failed at this book. As it turns out, it’s the same panicked, procrastinating, and eventually depressing way so many of us fail, too. It’s sad, sure. But: Chabon admits he even fell short annotating Fountain City, as he only revisited the first four chapters before watching it “sink” again. Yet that failure yielded the most successful and brutally honest meditation on failing as I’ve ever read. It’s barely ten pages, if that. Hopefully, McSweeney’s or Chabon will put it online. It’s too good to sit trapped in this $24 box, lest McSweeney’s fail something they don’t have to.

3. Technically released late last year, but I read it this year while writing about job changes at the New York Observer, a 23 year-old pink, weekly paper, that’s (mostly) historically striven to be classically New York in every way a contemporary publication born here should be: brilliant, but accessible; hysterical, yet never a joke; above all, true to its citizenry – Manhattanites – for better or worse. There wouldn’t be a Gawker without the Observer. Vanity Fair wouldn’t be the same, because the Observer was the last job Graydon Carter had before he was beckoned there. It was the birthplace of Sex and the City, some of the best writers and editors in New York City, and also, too many trend pieces that took hold nationally to count. And it was the place where Peter Kaplan (the longtime, former editor of the New York Observer) was given rise. You’ll understand why after reading Peter Kaplan’s introduction forThe Kingdom of New York, the Observer ”clippings” book, which tells the entire history of a publication — and the modern era of this city — in 11-ish pages. It’s hysterical and perfect and a little heartbreaking in the way great sentimentalizing and romanticizing — the kind that will make you nostalgic for things you’ve never experienced — often is. But also, endlessly inspiring: as a writer, as a New Yorker, as a reader, and as someone who tries to recognize a good moment when it’s in front of them. And thanks to the magic of Google, you don’t even have to buy the book to read it. Whattatown.

2. Every time you hear about those people who have risen from the most adverse and traumatic conditions a kid could be presented with, into prominence, they’re celebrities or writing a memoir (or both). A blogger is, in so many ways, the furthest thing from that. Some bloggers know this guy’s name, his longtime readers from when he used to blog for The Consumerist know who he is. But none of those people likely know anybody else in the same way they now irreversibly know him after Joel Johnson’s February 2010 post entitled Why I’m Funny. Some people spend years on their memoirs, hundreds of pages of public therapy, a backwards, sick competition where brand-name writers compare how fucked up their childhood was to the next person’s. I don’t know how long Joel spent on this, which begins with the sentence “The first time I ever came in anyone’s mouth, it was into the mouth of my stepfather.” But 6,215 words later, they should all be ashamed, because I know exactly how long it’s going to stay with me: forever, or at least until I write for the last time.

1. Like The Village Voice, I should probably also omit my top Longread of the Year, because it comes from the new job I started at on Monday. But I can’t, because Chris Jones’ profile of Roger Ebert in the March 2010 issue of Esquire was undisputably the best and most memorable thing I – and plenty of others – read this year. It introduced him to a new generation of people unfamiliar with the man and his impact. It made people who couldn’t give a shit about magazine profiles or Roger Ebert sob. [I’ll admit it, I got weepy.] But maybe most significantly, it redefined Roger Ebert to America. This wasn’t investigative journalism or the most hard-hitting interview ever conducted. It was quite simply — and incredibly — the product of great magazine writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald, you want a second act? Well, here’s a third. “Old Media” publications, like Roger Ebert, are supposedly dying. Yet, neither have seemed more alive than this in the last ten years. 

‘Damn Right,’ I Said.

Longreads Pick

“Decision Points” holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. … As a postmodern text, many passages in the book are pastiches of moments from other books, including scenes that Bush himself did not witness. These are taken from the memoirs of members of the Bush administration and journalistic accounts such as Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Bush at War. To complete the cycle of postmodernity, there are bits of dialogue lifted from Woodward, who is notorious for inventing dialogue.

Published: Dec 22, 2010
Length: 14 minutes (3,594 words)

Benjamin Gold: My Favorite Longreads of 2010

benjamingold:

Hey it’s the end of 2010, publishers are still trying to figure out how to make money off their online content, and here are my favorite pieces of long form journalism that was published this year (plus one from the 90s)!


Richard Morgan, “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup,” (The Awl, August 2010)

As an struggling freelance writer, this article was, for me, especially meaningful. Morgan shows how success is totally ephemeral and relative (legions of freelancers would love for the career he describes), but also how the work can be its own reward.  


Keith Gessen, “Stuck,” (New Yorker, August 2010)

One way to tell if you really loved a story is when you bring it up all the time. Now, whenever I’m stuck in traffic with someone, I talk about what it’s like to drive in Moscow.


Michael Tedder, “Q&A: Ted Leo on Middle Class Indie-Rock Life, His Dissatisfaction With Your Karaoke Preparation, And Five-Dollar Words,” (Sound of The City, April 2010)

Thanks, in part, to this interview (and this one too) 2010 was the year I learned to love Ted Leo again. His great new album, The Brutalist Bricks, helped too.


Jason Aaron, “Where The Hell Am I?,” (Comic Book Resources, September 2010)

For his uncompromisingly close look at the life of a comic book creator, and the process it took him to get there, Jason Aaron’s series of columns is the best writing on comics I’ve read all year.


Mike McGonigal, “Temperature’s Rising: Galaxie 500,” (Pitchfork, May 2010)

I’m a big fan of Galaxie 500, and I knew the band members didn’t get along, but wow—they really don’t like each other! Beyond that, any band who manages to grab hold onto any semblance of success needs to reed this insider account of rock n’roll death.

Read More

Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Jay Caspian Kang is a fiction writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High, an essay on gambling addiction that appeared in the Morning News and has been named on several “Best of 2010” lists. 

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In no particular order.

THE LEGEND OF BLACK SUPERMAN — Rafe Bartholomew, Deadspin

I’m typing this in a Starbucks in the Robinson’s Place Mall in Manila. Everywhere I go in this city, I am reminded of Pacific Rims, Bartholomew’s chronicle of the place of basketball in the culture of the Philippines

The excerpt on Billy Ray Bates was my favorite sports read of the year. Any documentary filmmaker who wants a subject…

THE MURDERERS OF MEXICO — Alma Guillermoprieto, New York Review of Books

What else could you possibly ever want out of a journalist? Fearless, measured and whip-smart with an eye for narrative detail that should be the envy of every writer who has ever read her work.

Her reflections, observations and opinions on the war in Mexico should tower over every other work on the subject, the way Orwell towers over the Spanish Civil War. Hopefully, before it’s too late, someone in publishing will drive up to Guillermoprieto’s door with a suitcase filled with money, because if there is going to be another Homage to Catalonia, it will be Alma Guillermoprieto on the Narco Wars.  

INSANE CLOWN POSSE: AND GOD CREATED CONTROVERSYJon Ronson, The Guardian

The perfect companion for the world’s most baffling music video. I wish someone had done this for the Wu, circa 1994.

Ronson also broke open the seal for long-form articles written specifically to explain baffling youtube videos. Like somebody please write 3,000+ words on how they got that fucking bird to dance to that Willow Smith song. Choire Sicha, I’m looking you straight in the eyes and I am saying please. 

PELE AS A COMEDIAN — Brian Phillips, Run of Play

There are so many reasons why this essay should annoy me. It’s about a really kinda bad David Foster Wallace essay, it’s about soccer and it involves a lot of footnotes. And yet, it took me about a paragraph to discard all those hang-ups and just revel in the quality of writing, the intelligence of the mind at work.

RICHARD LAWSON’S AMERICAN IDOL COVERAGE — Richard Lawson, Gawker

The only reason I still watch the show. And, along with temperate weather and Mexican food, one of the three reasons why I love living on the West Coast. Because on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I can wake up and have Lawson’s mammoth recaps already posted on Gawker.

Sometimes, I find myself typing and deleting twitter messages to Richard Lawson. Mostly, they are about how my day is going. Sometimes, they are jokes about Crystal Bowersox. Once, it was a suggestion he get cloned so he could also write about the Biggest Loser

Paul Ford: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Paul Ford was an editor at Harper’s Magazine; now he’s wandering around, looking at stuff and writing computer programs.

***

Tony Judt, “Night,” New York Review of Books (January 14)

This was the year of the dying critic. Most writers would do themselves, and their readers, a service by dying without all the self-elegies (“selfegies”?). We’ve read once too often, right, of the bark of the lonely fox out the bay window. But then you had Judt in his wheelchair, climbing Everest every night, putting out a series of reflections and continuing to publish great work even post-mortem. In a different city, and a different vein, there’s Roger Ebert’s Journal, the essay that never ends—starting as a kind of testament, it transformed over many months into a mass lecture from an old newspaper hand (a man of a literally dying breed), holding forth on absolutely everything.

Dan Koeppel, “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” (Popular Mechanics, January 29)

Stuff like this is why magazines persist. It’s fun to imagine the pitch. “I’d like to write about falling thirty thou—” “You had me at falling.”

Frédéric Filloux, “Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters” (Monday Note, September 19)

Inside baseball for publishing nerds, but bangs out its point. It’s hard to find good wide-angle writing about tech. Related: “Why the OS Doesn’t Matter.” Also: Tom Bissell on cocaine and Grand Theft Auto; Fred Vogelstein on the iPhone/AT&T meltdown; and Nitsuh Abebe on the Internet Paradox.

Issendai, “How to Keep Someone With You Forever,” (Issendai’s Superhero Training Journal, June 9)

You read this, right? I’ve visited friends and read this aloud. Explains publishers, graduate school, bad jobs, and broken marriages. (Related in a way I can’t fully articulate: Given that 2010 was, in addition to being the year of the dying critic, the year of the supercilious journalist writing about the Insane Clown Posse, it’s worth going back to 2009’s “MC CHRIS IS AT THE GATHERING: A LOVE STORY,” for the nerd’s eye view—a far more subtle view than presented elsewhere—of the weirdness of Juggalism.)

Josh Allen, Chokeville. (Ongoing)

Most prose born on the Internet is highly defensive. Everyone is braced for audience attack and opens their posts with four paragraphs explaining why the remaining four paragraphs are worth reading. Chokeville is not that. It tries to explain itself, but it can’t. Sometimes I get started and then drift away to Zooborns, but I know that’s my problem, because I’ve forgotten how, and I also know that I’ll end up some weekend night in front of my monitor, zoomed in, drinking my way through every word.

P.S. We’re also several years into the flowering of history blogs. Here’s a good place to start.

Putting a Price on Words

Longreads Pick

This isn’t a lament about declining standards of quality or the rude incursions of amateur bloggers. In fact, thanks to the Internet, people probably read more good journalism than ever. That’s precisely the problem: the sheer volume of words has overwhelmed a business model that was once based on scarcity and limited choice.

Published: May 12, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,903 words)