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Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Outside Magazine, The New Republic, Esquire, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Prospect Magazine’s David Wolf.
Photo: moriza/Flickr
Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Outside Magazine, The New Republic, Esquire, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Prospect Magazine’s David Wolf.
Photo: moriza/Flickr
[Not single-page] The case of the “Waffle House terrorists,” which included 73-year-old Fred Thomas and three other 60-something men charged with plotting to commit acts of terror—and an FBI informant previously arrested on charges of molestation:
It is the central mystery of the case, one even more perplexing than the mystery of whether the old conspirators would ever have been capable of doing what they were talking about doing, or whether, if they weren’t capable, they could be guilty of any crimes. By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure pension income, and a dream home to show for it. Joe Sims, by all accounts, had lived a slippery and slovenly life that made him the equivalent of his cell-phone stamp — unknown. He was a man of unsavory associations and catastrophic divorces, a man who when he tells the truth, tells it slant, a man who stands accused of raping his stepdaughter in a house with her old swing set still planted in the backyard.
And yet Fred Thomas called him and still has his phone number on his speed dial. When Sims called Thomas, Thomas picked up the phone, and even when Charlotte took an icy message, Thomas always called Sims back.
“Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated.” — Tom Junod, Esquire
See also: “Homegrown Terror.” — Garrett M. Graff, 5280 Magazine, Nov. 1, 2011

Kevin Purdy is a freelance writer, and a frequent Longreader. Check out his site here.
Not all written in 2011, but brought to my attention and saved in 2011:
In Which There’s a Girl in New York City Who Calls Herself the Human Trampoline – This Recording Graceland is truly the one album I never get sick of. Great retrospective/place-setting piece.
New York is Killing Me – New Yorker R.I.P., Gil Scott-Heron
The People V. Football – GQ I read many, many takes on the issue of concussions in the NFL in 2011, and this is the story that still haunts me, and makes me a different kind of football fan.
My Mom Couldn’t Cook – Esquire Rightful nominee for a James Beard award. Refreshing tonic from all the Food-Network-approved anecdotes of fusing culinary traditions and “twists on comfort food” and yada yada.
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Jeremy P. Bushnell is the editor-in-chief of Instafiction.org, which links to a quality short story each weekday. He stockpiles many other links at his blog, Raccoon. He’s also on Twitter.
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“Backbone,” David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker)
During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace made massive contributions to the worlds of fiction and nonfiction alike, and I still miss his presence in the world acutely. The Pale King was a towering book of my summer, and although it didn’t quite yield the pleasures that a truly finished work might have, many of its fragments and episodes had the power of great short stories. See, for instance, this chapter, published as a standalone piece in The New Yorker.
“Zone One,” Colson Whitehead (excerpt, Esquire)
Whitehead’s Zone One is a great 2011 novel about government, bureaucracy, urban space, and human population. Oh yeah, it has zombies in it, too. Esquire gave us the first 20 pages—detailing a four-zombie attack on the book’s protagonist—right before Halloween, but it’s just as good a read now, at year’s end.
“Female Explosion Syndrome” Jessica Forcier (New Delta Review)
Women all over the globe begin spontaneously combusting. Men don’t. Feminist? Fabulist? All of the above? Either way, this one stuck with us. Thanks to New Delta Reviewfor publishing it.
“The Empty Room,” Jonathan Lethem (Paris Review)
Lethem hasn’t put out a short story collection since 2006’s How We Got Insipid, but he’s still writing short fiction, and this year he placed a memorable tale of domestic collapse with the Paris Review. The setup: Upon moving his family into a sprawling farmhouse, a father makes a decision: one room will remain empty. “The empty room is like a living organ in our family’s house,” he claims, although in actuality it becomes the hollow core around which the family implodes.
“Becoming Deer,” Rachel Levy (PANK Magazine)
This fall, in the Chicago Reader, our Associate Editor Jamie Yates praised this story (from PANK Magazine) as a story that straddles the line between “the realistic and the mythical” and derives strength from each. You could also say it does the same with the line between the human and the animal. All this line-crossing makes the story into a kind of tangled skein, humming with tension. Taut, terse, and eerie: the best of a certain kind of experimental work.
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We also featured tons of good stuff this year that didn’t make its first appearance in 2011, so if you’re looking for more good fiction from the past, check out our Instafiction “Editor’s Picks” tag.
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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.
Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling.
Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical combat is not rare. It’s in that spirit that you’ll find some cross pollination in the picks below. You’ll also see some good stuff that hasn’t shown up on the Top 5 lists so far. That’s on purpose. Hope you enjoy, and please know you’re welcome to come join us for last call over at gangrey.com. Drinks are on Wright.
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Wright Thompson
Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, and he lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times
“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine
“The View From Within,” Seth Wickersham, ESPN The Magazine
“Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?” Tom Junod, Esquire
“The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy,” David Von Drehle, Time
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Justin Heckert
Heckert is a writer living in Atlanta.
“The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
”The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off,” Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
“Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?” Susan Dominus, New York Times Magazine
“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home”, by Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times
“Staying the Course”, Wright Thompson, ESPN
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Thomas Lake
Lake is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated living in Atlanta.
“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times
“True Grits,” Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker (sub. required)
“Diving Headlong Into A Sunny Paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times
“Could This Be Happening? A Man’s Nightmare Made Real,” Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times
“When A Diver Goes Missing, A Deep Cave Is Scene Of A Deeper Mystery,” Ben Montgomery, St. Petersburg Times
“The Beards Are A Joke,” Justin Heckert, Atlanta Magazine, April 2011
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Mark Johnson
Johnson is a 2010 Pulitzer winner who covers health and science for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and once played guitar for a Rockford, Ill., grunge band called The Bloody Stumps.
“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine
“Punched Out,” John Branch, New York Times
“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” Rich Schapiro, Wired
“Imminent Danger,” Meg Kissinger, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Diving headlong into a sunny paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times
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Michael Kruse
Kruse, a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and contributing writer to ESPN’s Grantland, won this year’s ASNE award for distinguished non-deadline writing.
“The Lost Boys” Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly
The easiest-to-read hardest thing I read this year.
“The Lazarus File,” Matthew McGough, The Atlantic
Simple: suspense and surprise.
“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, The New York Times Magazine
My first reaction when I read this? Jealousy and awe. And when I read it a second time? And a third? Same.
“A man’s nightmare made real,” Chris Goffard, the Los Angeles Times
Riveting. The work of a master.
“God’s Away on Business,” Spencer Hall, Every Day Should Be Saturday
George Teague, college football and big thoughts.
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Ben Montgomery
Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, and he lives in Tampa.
“If I Die Young,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times
“The Guiltless Pleasure,” Rick Bragg, Gourmet
“A Lot To Lose,” Tony Rehagen, Indianapolis Monthly
“The Shepard’s Lamb,” Danielle Paquette, Indiana University Daily Student
“Voice of America,” by Coozledad, rurritable
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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.

Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago.
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It was another strong year for long-form content and journalism. There was no shortage of attention-grabbing longreads in traditional media, online-only outlets, alt-weeklies and literary journals—both in the U.S. and abroad, and written as profiles, personal essays, historical accounts and op-eds. And many take residence in Instapaper and Read It Later apps, including mine. My top five for the year:
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1. “Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times, July 22
A stirring and richly reported narrative of a Florida woman who vanished from her neighborhood and society.
“The neighbors said that they seldom saw her but that for more than a year they hadn’t seen her at all. One called her ‘a little strange.’ Another said she ‘just disappeared.’ The How could a woman die a block from the beach, surrounded by her neighbors, and not be found for almost 16 months? How could a woman go missing inside her own home?”
2. “The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off,” Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, July 21
The overwhelming majority of terrorism in the United States has always been homegrown, even while fear is diverted elsewhere in the wake of 9/11. Pierce provides an engrossing narrative of a bomb that was planted along a parade route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Spokane, Wash., this year. It didn’t go off. (Update: The man who planted the bomb was recently sentenced to the maximum 32 years in prison.)
“There’s a spot by the Spokane River where they would have built the memorial, and what would it have looked like, the memorial to the victims of the bag on the bench? Would it be lovely and muted, the way the grounds of what used to be the Murrah Building are today in Oklahoma City, with their bronze chairs and the water gently lapping at the sides of the reflecting pool? Maybe they’d buy one of the pawnshops downtown for the museum. Maybe there would be an exhibit of children’s shoes there, like the display case in the Oklahoma City museum that’s full of watches frozen at 9:02, the time at which the bomb they didn’t find went off.”
3. “Getting Bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, Aug. 8
The definitive account of the top news event of the year.
“Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away…
“A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, ‘For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.’ After a pause, he added, ’Geronimo E.K.I.A.’—‘enemy killed in action.’
“Hearing this at the White House, Obama pursed his lips, and said solemnly, to no one in particular, ‘We got him.’ ”
4. “Writing Advice from George Saunders,” Patrick Dacey, BOMB Magazine, April 26
Acclaimed writer Saunders discusses the writing process, storytelling technique (“Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey”) and whether a man can ever really experience true happiness without an icicle impaling him through the head. Former student Patrick Dacey effectively guides the multi-part Q&A.
“I vaguely remember seeing something, when I was very young (maybe 3 or 4), about Hemingway’s death on TV. My memory is: a photo of him in that safari jacket, and the announcer sort of intoning all the cool things he’d done (‘Africa! Cuba! Friends with movie stars!’). So I got this idea of a writer as someone who went out and did all these adventurous things, jotted down a few notes afterward, then got all this acclaim, world-wide attention etc., etc.—with the emphasis on the ‘adventuring’ and not so much on the ‘jotting down.’ ”
5. “Little Girl Found,” Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times, Aug. 12
Waldmeir, the adoptive mother of two abandoned children, discovered an abandoned baby behind a Dunkin’ Donuts in Shanghai one winter night. In this personal essay she tracks the baby from hospital to police station to orphanage, with side trips into reflection on her daughters’ stories.
“This child’s mother had chosen the spot carefully: only steps from one of the best hotels in Shanghai, beside a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise patronised mostly by foreigners. I had been meeting my friend John there for a quick doughnut fix, and it was he who heard the baby’s cries as he chained his bicycle to the alleyway gate. ‘There’s a baby outside!’ John exclaimed as he slid into the seat beside me, still blustery from the cold. ‘What do you mean, there’s a baby outside?’ I asked in alarm, bolting out of the door to see what he was talking about.”
It’s difficult to stop at only five. A few bonus reads:
“Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy?” Noah Shachtman, Wired, March 24
“Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” Maria Bustillos, The Awl, April 5
“The Greatest Paper That Ever Died,” Alex French and Howie Kahn, Grantland, June 8
“Karen Wagner’s Life,” John Spong, Texas Monthly, Sept. 2011
“The Shame of College Sports,” Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, Oct. 2011
“Steve Jobs Was Always Kind to Me (or Regrets of an Asshole),” Brian Lam, The Wirecutter, Oct. 5
“Punched Out: Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer,” John Branch, New York Times, Dec. 3-5
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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.
Featured Longreader: The Politics Blog from Esquire. Stories from Charles P. Pierce on Barney Frank, President Obama, Rick Perry and more on their longreads page.
Featured Longreader: Josh Barone, asst. news editor at the Columbia Missourian. See his story picks from Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and more on his #longreads page.
Gerald Marzorati, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine, is an Assistant Managing Editor of the Times
“Early Innings,” by Roger Angell. (The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1992) (sub. required)
America’s baseball belletrist here writes of how he came to love the game.
“The Silent Season of a Hero,” by Gay Talese. (Esquire, July 1966)
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? The author finds him in retirement, uneasily.
“The Streak of Streaks,” by Stephen Jay Gould. (The New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 1988)
More DiMaggio, this from the renowned paleontologist and ponderer of evolution—contemplating, here, what it means to have a hot streak (i.e., to cheat death).
“Final Twist of the Drama,” by George Plimpton. (Sports Illustrated, April 22, 1974)
The boyishly witty inventor of field-level participatory journalism here is a careful observer—of everything surrounding Henry Aaron’s home-run that broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime record.
“Coach Fitz’s Management Theory,” by Michael Lewis. (The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2004)
A piece I coaxed Michael to write—about his high-school baseball coach, and much, much more.
The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson
Liam Neeson and I last spoke a week before I wrote this sentence. At that time, I asked him what he remembered about the interview I’d done with him at a restaurant in New York almost three weeks before that. He said, “I remember you told me that story about your accident, and that was pretty hard for you. I remember that you made me draw that picture of my house, and I remember that we talked about Natasha. I started to worry: Why would I tell him that? Why did I speak about the hospital? And then I thought, No, he’s a man. This is not some newspaper story. So I wasn’t sorry. Except about your accident. That was bloody awful.”
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