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Longreads Best of 2013: Story That Shouldn't Be Overlooked

Facebook Feminism: Like It Or Not

Susan Faludi | The Baffler | October 2013 | 36 minutes (9,021 words)

 

Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) teaches media studies and writes Scandals of Classic Hollywood for The Hairpin, amongst other things.

This essay is incendiary and incisive and just didn’t get the play it deserved: maybe because it was in the (excellent) Baffler, maybe because Faludi so handily eviscerated “Lean In” feminism, or maybe Facebook itself was pulling strings behind the curtain and hiding every time someone shared the piece. Feminism has never not been fraught with tensions, but Faludi illuminates, with devastating clarity, the classism and ignorance of “leaning in.”

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Photo: mwichary, Flickr

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Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite Stories About Taxes (and Twist-Ties)

Photo: 59937401@N07, Flickr

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a writer and an editor.

Taxes aren’t boring—they’re just supremely difficult to write about in a compelling way. These three stories stand out because they illustrate the far-reaching consequences of different countries’ tax policies through a few very influential people:

1. “Marty Sullivan figured out how the world’s biggest companies avoided billions in taxes. Here’s how he wants to stop them” (Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 2013)

In his affectionate profile of tax expert Marty Sullivan, Steven Pearlstein breaks down everything that’s wrong about the US tax code in Sullivan’s nonpartisan, almost technocratic view—and goes on to explain why politics make it so hard to alter, let alone fix, the system. Not exactly action-movie material, but it’s handled so deftly that I couldn’t put it down.

2. “A Tale of Two Londons” (Nicholas Shaxson, Vanity Fair, 2013)

In Vanity Fair, longtime tax writer Nicholas Shaxson shows how the City of London became a hub for tax-free global capital through the story of One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential building, its fabulously wealthy and faceless owners, and the offshore accounts they used to buy and register the properties anonymously.

3. “Man Making Ireland Tax Avoidance Hub Proves Local Hero” (Jesse Drucker, Bloomberg, 2013)

Finally, Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker profiles Feargal O’Rourke, the man who helped transform Ireland into a “hub for tax avoidance” for multinationals like Apple and Facebook. Drucker withholds judgment (this is Bloomberg, headline and all) but O’Rourke’s mercenary wiles shine through a few well-chosen anecdotes. Choice quote, on Breaking Bad: “I don’t know what it says that we can be rooting for a guy on the dark side of the law.”

Bonus Pick: Most Fascinating Thing I Learned from a Story This Year

Twist-Ties vs. Plastic Clips: Tiny Titans Battle for the Bakery Aisle” (Paul Lukas, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2013)

My favorite business stories are the ones that reveal how much time, energy and thought goes into seemingly mundane consumer goods. This Businessweek article about the ‘bakery bag closure and reclosure market’ is a great example of that. Did you know bag closures generate about $10 million in sales per year? That studies have failed to resolve whether consumers prefer clips or twist-ties? And that there are people whose job it is to sell commercial bakeries on the virtues of these objects? All of this makes perfect sense, of course (hi, capitalism!) but it takes a story like this one to get you thinking.

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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

College Longreads Pick: 'The End of the Waffle House' by Jessica Contrera, Indiana University

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

You may have already read this week’s #college #longreads pick because someone posted it on Facebook or Twitter. Indiana University senior Jessica Contrera paid homage to the end of the local Waffle House with hours of reporting and 15 drafts. You hear the reporting in the details: An empty gumball machine. A stopped clock. Broken locks. You see the writing in the verbs: “On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.”

But you didn’t read the story because it’s a quaint look at a fading icon. Your friend didn’t send it to you because it’s better than what we expect from a student. You read it, and passed it on, because it’s just about perfect.

The End of the Waffle House

Jessica Contrera | Indiana Daily Student | 8 minutes (1,897 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

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“In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object, valued by how many times it’s been bought—or, in our electronic age, how many times it’s been clicked on. ‘Images of a certain kind of successful woman proliferate,’ British philosopher Nina Power observed of contemporary faux-feminism in her 2009 book, One-Dimensional Woman. ‘The city worker in heels, the flexible agency employee, the hard-working hedonist who can afford to spend her income on vibrators and wine—and would have us believe that—yes—capitalism is a girl’s best friend.’”

Susan Faludi, in The Baffler, on the Lean In movement and the history of feminism and capitalism. Read more on Sheryl Sandberg here.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

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Public Enemies: Social Media Is Fueling Gang Wars in Chicago

Longreads Pick

Gangs in Chicago have used social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to spread inflammatory messages about rivals and incite violence:

“We naturally associate criminal activity with secrecy, with conspiracies hatched in alleyways or back rooms. Today, though, foolish as it may be in practice, street gangs have adopted a level of transparency that might impress even the most fervent Silicon Valley futurist. Every day on Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram and YouTube, you can find unabashed teens flashing hand signs, brandishing guns, splaying out drugs and wads of cash. If we live in an era of openness, no segment of the population is more surprisingly open than 21st-century gang members, as they simultaneously document and roil the streets of America’s toughest neighborhoods.”

Author: Ben Austen
Source: Wired
Published: Sep 17, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,452 words)

Portrait of a Ten-year-old Girl

Longreads Pick

An intimate look at the life of Caitlyn Pinto, a ten-year-old girl living in Canada who loves Justin Bieber and has thoughtful ideas about racism and bullying:

“Caitlyn has an iPod touch, which allows her to surf the Internet, though she uses it mostly for iMessage, and FaceTime, a kind of one-on-one video chat. She and her friends message several times a day, about dumb stuff: school, music, what are you eating, whatever. On Fridays, they group-message, with everyone texting online at once. The family rule is that Facebook is not allowed until grade seven, and Caitlyn is fine with that. After much discussion at school about cyberstalking and cyberbullying, the prospect of sharing too much in cyberspace makes her nervous. Friends talk about the suicide of Amanda Todd, the BC teen bullied so callously across the Internet and at school. Caitlyn has heard stories about grade seven girls being teased online, and this is scary: an electronic footprint fixes a young girl’s identity when she is most in flux, and it can’t be erased. ‘I like texting more than Facebook, because you know where it’s going. It’ll just go to one friend, and you can’t forward things.'”

(Related: Susan Orlean’s classic profile, “The American Male at Age Ten,” which was published in Esquire in 1992)

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Sep 11, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,622 words)

The Child Exchange

Longreads Pick

An investigation into America’s underground market for adopted children. Using online forums like Yahoo and Facebook groups, parents often advertise their unwanted children—who have a tendency to have been adopted abroad and have special needs—and give custody rights to strangers in a practice called “private re-homing,” which has little or no government regulation:

“As the Puchallas drove away, Melissa sobbed. She calls the decision ‘the hardest thing we’ve ever done in our lives.’ Quita still can’t reconcile it. ‘How would you give me up when you brought me to be yours?’ she asks.

“In the days that followed, two puppies scampered through the trailer, gifts from the Easons to Quita. The dogs lifted the teenager’s spirits, but they weren’t housebroken and no one cleaned up after them. No one did the dishes, either, or the laundry.

“More troubling, Quita says, was that the Easons took her into their bed: ‘They call me in there to sleep … to lay in the bed with them.’ In bed, “Nicole used to be naked and stuff. It was not right to me.'”

Source: Reuters
Published: Sep 9, 2013
Length: 91 minutes (22,903 words)

The Dark Night Returns for Neil Gaiman

Longreads Pick

On the book trail with author Neil Gaiman:

“Gaiman owes a lot to his fans. Once shrugged off as merely goth kids who liked comics, they’re now as diverse as the characters in his stories.

“Gaiman spends a lot of time on Twitter forging relationships, albeit fleeting ones, with his nearly 1.9 million fans. He also regularly posts on his blog, answers questions on his Tumblr, and updates Facebook.

“‘I just tweeted at him,’ longtime fan Tania Richter says, showing off a photo from CONvergence of Gaiman’s poster with googly eyes pasted on. ‘I’m hoping this’ll get a retweet.'”

Source: City Pages
Published: Aug 21, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,617 words)

How a Convicted Murderer Prepares for a Job Interview

Longreads Pick

Today we’re excited to make another recent Longreads Member Pick free for everyone. It’s a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prisonby Sabine Heinlein.

Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. (She’ll be speaking about the book this Thursday at the Mid-Manhattan Library.)

Published: Jul 31, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,132 words)