Longreads Pick
Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,” the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”
Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”
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Published: Oct 27, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,102 words)
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“The real hourly median wage in New York between 1990 and 2007 fell by almost 9 percent. Young men and women aged twenty-five to thirty-four with a bachelor’s degree and a year-round job in New York saw their earnings drop 6 percent. Middle-income New Yorkers—defined broadly by the FPI as those drawing incomes between approximately $29,000 and $167,000—experienced a 19 percent decrease in earnings.”
“The Reign of the One Percenters.” — Christopher Ketcham, Orion Magazine
See another of Christopher Ketcham’s #longreads: “Meet the Man Who Lives on Zero Dollars,” DETAILS, July 2009
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“PAUL RUDD: When I talk to people who went to camp and they’re like, “Dude, that movie totally gets it,” I don’t know how to respond to that. Which part? The part of going into town for heroin? Or your chef humping a fridge?”
“The Ultimate Oral History of ‘Wet Hot American Summer.’” — Whitney Pastorek, Details magazine
Also see another of Pastorek’s #longreads: “The Complete Oral History of ‘Party Down’” Feb. 2011
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“Yet, as a 2006 State Department report shows, U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians, the details of which have, until now, been successfully buried. And this, in turn, raises questions regarding whether U.S. officials may have knowingly violated a 1997 law that forbids assistance to foreign military units involved in human-rights violations.”
“Our Man in Kandahar.” — Matthieu Aikins, The Atlantic
See more #longreads from The Atlantic
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Longreads Pick
China’s aggressive campaign of cyber-espionage began about a decade ago, with attacks on U.S. government agencies. (The details have still not been divulged.) Then China broadened the scope of its efforts, infiltrating the civilian sector in order to steal intellectual property and gain competitive advantage over Western companies. Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee, who gave Aurora and Night Dragon their names and has written definitive studies of A.P.T. attacks, says that “today we see pretty much any company that has valuable intellectual property or trade secrets of any kind being pilfered continually, all day long, every day, relentlessly.”
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Published: Aug 2, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,411 words)
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Longreads Pick
James Curtis was part of the first generation of reporters to work what we now think of as the crime beat. Of course, criminal proceedings had always held a fascination for readers: ever since the 1600s there’d been a roaring market in broadsheets that relished the details of a crime and a malefactor’s bloody end, usually with a crude accompanying woodcut showing them dangling from a gallows.
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Published: Nov 1, 2006
Length: 40 minutes (10,128 words)
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Longreads Pick
In “The Hunger Games” Collins embraces her father’s impulse to educate young people about the realities of war. “If we wait too long, what kind of expectation can we have?” she said. “We think we’re sheltering them, but what we’re doing is putting them at a disadvantage.” But her medicine goes down easily, thanks to cliffhangers, star-crossed lovers and the kinds of details that create a fully formed universe. Collins labored for days over the construction of the arenas in “The Hunger Games,” analyzing “Rambo” clips to help her visualize the use of weaponry like crossbows.
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Published: Apr 10, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,918 words)
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Coming April 13th!
Rolling Stone and Longreads present: A night of long-form journalism.
Join us at Housing Works in NYC for a special panel with Rob Sheffield, Jeff Goodell, and more. Moderated by Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana.
7 pm. Free. More details here
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The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson
To a degree unique among the five major tribes in the South, the Cherokees used diplomacy and legal argument to protect their interests. With the help of a forward-looking warrior named Major Ridge, John Ross became the tribe’s primary negotiator with officials in Washington, D.C., adept at citing both federal law and details from a dozen treaties the Cherokees signed with the federal government between 1785 and 1819. In the 1820s, as they enjoyed one of the most promising periods in their history—developing a written language, adopting a constitution and building a capital city—Ross became the Cherokees’ principal chief, and Ridge was named his counselor.
All the while, white settlers kept coming.
By Brian Hicks, Smithsonian Magazine
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Longreads Pick
To a degree unique among the five major tribes in the South, the Cherokees used diplomacy and legal argument to protect their interests. With the help of a forward-looking warrior named Major Ridge, John Ross became the tribe’s primary negotiator with officials in Washington, D.C., adept at citing both federal law and details from a dozen treaties the Cherokees signed with the federal government between 1785 and 1819. In the 1820s, as they enjoyed one of the most promising periods in their history—developing a written language, adopting a constitution and building a capital city—Ross became the Cherokees’ principal chief, and Ridge was named his counselor. All the while, white settlers kept coming.
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Published: Feb 24, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,033 words)
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