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Our Longreads Member Pick: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis

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This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains:

I first arrived in Libya at the end of February 2011, less than ten days after the uprising began when peaceful protests were attacked by Col. Qaddafi’s forces. I spent a few months there on that trip and witnessed the beginnings of the armed conflict and the NATO intervention and, accidentally, the inside of the Libyan prison system.  In September of 2011 I returned to report on the final phases of the war and the eventual execution of Qaddafi by rebel forces.

Like nearly every journalist who covered the conflict, and over 90% of the Libyan population, I had spent all my time in Libya on the Mediterranean coast. When I returned in February 2012 for the one-year anniversary of the uprising, I was determined to see more: the vast southern deserts had always fascinated me with their promise of oil-fields, tribal peoples, camels and oases. That month an age-old friction between the Tubu and Zwaya ethnic groups broke out into open battle in Kufra, some hundred miles north of the Chadian border. Despite claiming around 100 lives, it got almost no media attention, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go south. 

We—my Ukrainian colleague Vadim Naninets (whose photographs were in the piece), our driver and I—set out before the break of dawn to make the 620-mile drive south from Benghazi. Fully stocked with bread, cheese, dates, and many cigarettes and bottles of water for the trip, the only real concern we had was bandits on the road. Since fighting in the city had ended, and it was fully ‘liberated,’ under the control of anti-Qaddafi rebels, we didn’t worry about politics in town. That was our first mistake…

On arrival we were immediately taken to the military council headquarters, where the questioning started off fairly innocuously (‘where are you from,’ ‘what are you doing here?’). Within an hour or two we were being questioned separately, our answers transcribed. Local newspapers wrote of our detention, prompting anxious Facebook discussions and phone calls from the temporary consulate in Benghazi. Ten hours later we were released into the custody of the National Army, the Benghazi-based outfit which had come south to quell the battles. 

I quickly understood that in the Sahelian region of Libya—where lighter-skinned Zwaya and darker-skinned Tubu live together—the revolution had a very different meaning from the straight politics of the coast. Pro- and anti-Qaddafi factions were largely based on ethnicity and the history of relations between each ethnic group and the onetime Leader.

The ride home was much swifter and livelier than the ride down: National Army gave us a night-time lift in a C-130. In flagrant violation of any extant aviation law, we rode in the cockpit (I took a turn in the pilot’s seat), each of the ten or so men in the flight crew chain-smoking and explaining what all the dials were for, and pointing to distant red flares burning in the darkness which marked locations of oil fields. 

I was struck yet again by the unimaginable vastness of the deserts, and the sense that we can never fully know what goes on there.

Read an excerpt here

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Freefall Into Madness,' from Students at Fresno State

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s her inaugural pick:

There’s a lot of great writing on the Internet, but not as much great reporting. And that’s what we mean when we talk about “the death of newspapers.” It’s less about the end of a product and more about the dearth of watchdogs. Investigative reporting is expensive. It takes time, people and money. When it’s done well, it’s often upsetting, and not something that advertisers rally around.

But exposing injustice, malfeasance, waste, fraud, courage, humanity, and truth are the most important things journalists can do with their talents, skills and platforms. With that in mind, we selected an investigative piece as the inaugural #college #longreads selection.

Students at Fresno State, under the guidance of former Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, produced “Freefall Into Madness: The Fresno County Jail’s Barbaric Treatment of the Mentally Ill.” Through their reporting, the team learned that Fresno County Jail denies medication to mentally ill inmates. “Because they are not mentally competent to stand trial, they bounce back and forth in a perverse revolving door between the county jail and state mental hospitals, costing taxpayers even more money,” the article notes in a chilling early paragraph.

Students interviewed inmates, judges, lawyers, and elected officials—on the record, a rarity in itself—for a piece published in the independent monthly paper, The Community Alliance. In a note that accompanied the story, editor Mike Rhodes wrote: “This is our best argument that even in the world of the Internet, Facebook and smartphones, quality journalism will survive. I believe readers need and will continue to demand in-depth information about the world around them.”

We agree.

Freefall into Madness: The Fresno County Jail’s Barbaric Treatment of the Mentally Ill

Reported and written by Fresno State journalists Sam LoProto, Damian Marquez, Angel Moreno, Jacob Rayburn, Brianna Vaccari, Liana Whitehead and their professor Mark Arax.

May 2013 | 43 minutes (10,556 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.

Longreads Is Joining Forces with The Atlantic

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We have some big news to share today: Longreads is teaming up with The Atlantic, in a partnership that will allow us to expand our site and membership model—and continue to serve this community of readers, writers and publishers. 

When I first started the #longreads hashtag four years ago, The Atlantic was one of the earliest publishers to embrace it, and they understood what makes it special—the diversity of readers’ tastes, sharing the stories they love, from a mix of well-known and undiscovered publishers and writers, across both nonfiction and fiction.

We’re excited about the opportunity to work together with The Atlantic, and to continue expanding this site and community.

If you’re curious about the business side of things, here are some specifics about how the partnership is set up:

Longreads remains an independent company and editorial team, just as we always have been. We’re six people who have invested our time and resources into building Longreads—and we will continue to do what we do best, which is spotlight the best work from magazines, newspapers, books, and across the web.

Our site will be featured alongside the rest of The Atlantic’s growing network of sites, and their team will be helping us with business and operations.

By now, you’ve already seen the two big pieces of the Longreads business model, and in the spirit of transparency, I’m outlining it here:

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Our goal has been to create a business that supports readers, writers and publishers in different ways, through a mix of paid memberships and advertising.

With paid memberships, we’re creating a system where you, our subscribers, are helping to pay writers and publishers for rights to stories and book chapters that are featured as “Longreads Member Picks.” (Here’s this week’s Member Pick, a short story from Amelia Gray and Tin House.)

Through our membership, we want to keep building a secondary market for publishers and writers to make money off licensing, and we’re doing so with your financial support. (You can join for $3 a month or $30 a year.)

On the advertising front, we teamed up with Virgin Atlantic last year on Travelreads, and we’d like to continue pursuing these types of creative initiatives. Advertising, done thoughtfully, will help support new channels like Travelreads, as well our daily editor picks across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and the weekly Top 5 Longreads email.

We’re excited for what’s next, and we’re so thankful for this community’s continued support. We can’t do this without you, and we’ll share more details as things come together.

Mark and rest of the Longreads team (Mike, Kjell, Hakan, Jodi and Joyce)

Mary Gaitskill Recommends Saul Bellow

recommendedreading:


Vol. 8, No. 3

EDITOR’S NOTE

Years ago I had a conversation with a friend comparing John Updike and Saul Bellow. At the time I liked Updike a little better, but she said something on Bellow’s side that nearly changed my mind on the spot. “Updike sees,” she said. “He sees the world and he knows what he is looking at. Bellow looks and he doesn’t always know. Bellow is stunned by the world.” By that she meant that Bellow’s vision is deeper.

I’m not sure that she was right (I’m not sure, for one thing, that Updike is always so knowing), but I’m still thinking about what she said. This blunt and exquisite little beauty, “Something To Remember Me By,” is a small example and counter-example of what she was talking about. The narrator is a worldly old man with a sophisticated eye and a wise-ass sense of humor describing an incident from his boyhood. But for all his wise-assedness, he remains amazed by the force and plenitude of physical life: pocket lint, soiled snowbanks, a tile wall with gaps “stuffed with dirt,” the “salt, acid, dark, sweet odors” of strange pussy. Then there’s social life: the order of family and religion, the chaos of morality, crime, goofiness, love, deception and holy books, some of which hide money, others of which cost 5 cents and come apart in your hands. As his scornful older brother says, this boy “doesn’t understand fuck-all,” and through this boy’s eyes, who would?

The story takes place in depression-era Chicago and it is told almost like a fairy tale: the boy, whose mother is slowly dying, goes on the “journey” of his day at school and work. At its very start he kisses his bed-ridden mother; though he lives in a city, he then encounters hunters, steps over the blood they’ve spilt and enters a park (or wood). Later he enters a strange home to deliver flowers; in the dining room he sees a young girl lying in a coffin. Her frowning mother gestures with her fists. He sees “baked ham with sliced bread” on the drainboard, a “jar of French’s mustard and wooden tongue depressors to spread it;” there’s a dead body, but it’s these daily things that make him say “I saw and I saw and I saw.” Under this mortal enchantment the boy then goes to see his uncle and instead meets another girl, also supine, but naked and very much alive. The boy forgets his mother and is falsely seduced. He is humbled, does service, is punished. There is mercy and knowledge.

Actually punishment comes last, but mercy and knowledge have more power—which would say that my friend was wrong, that Bellow does look and know. Except that the knowledge of the story, which comes from the world of objects and cheap books, plus people who make fun, speechify, cheat and punch hell out of the kid—this knowledge is peculiar; blunt, yet hard to read, right in your face, but off the color spectrum.

“That was when the measured, reassuring, sleep-inducing turntable of days became a whirlpool, a vortex darkening towards the bottom.”

“I myself know the power of nonpathos, in these low, devious days.”

The boy turned old man thinks both these thoughts close on each other; his knowing and his amazed unknowing come together and fall apart again.

Mary Gaitskill

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How to Stop the Bullies

Longreads Pick

How Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and members of Anonymous are finding ways to address cyberbullying:

“Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments—à la Let’s Start Drama. ‘Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren’t interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups,’ Lieberman told me. ‘For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads—you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source.’ Lieberman’s dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids’ names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic—meaning their behavior is as well.)”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 20, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,218 words)

Why Do Gay Porn Stars Kill Themselves?

Longreads Pick

A porn star reflects on the death of fellow actor Arpad Miklos, and argues that we shouldn’t make assumptions about what effect the industry had on him:

“But others who knew him even less than me flooded twitter, wrote articles, posted to facebook about what had happened. The theories appeared as soon as the news did. It was immediate, like flies to a corpse. Theories arrived before grief, before honor and love and the experience of loss. When a gay porn star dies, instead of an outpouring of grief, what we are usually witness to is a buzzing.

“All of this is to say that not even death can trump many people’s confused and hostile attitudes towards porn and porn performers. That is how deeply injured we are as a society when it comes to sex, sexuality, and love.”

Published: Feb 18, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,631 words)

Don’t Be a Stranger

Longreads Pick

On the authenticity of online friendships:

“When someone asks me how I know someone and I say ‘the Internet,’ there is often a subtle pause, as if I had revealed we’d met through a benign but vaguely kinky hobby, like glassblowing class, maybe. The first generation of digital natives are coming of age, but two strangers meeting online is still suspicious (with the exception of dating sites, whose bare utility has blunted most stigma). What’s more, online venues that encourage strangers to form lasting friendships are dying out. Forums and emailing are being replaced by Facebook, which was built on the premise that people would rather carefully populate their online life with just a handful of ‘real’ friends and shut out all the trolls, stalkers, and scammers. Now that distrust of online strangers is embedded in the code of our most popular social network, it is becoming increasingly unlikely for people to interact with anyone online they don’t already know.”

Source: The New Inquiry
Published: Feb 13, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,894 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Isaac Fitzgerald

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Isaac Fitzgerald is managing editor of The Rumpus, co-founder of Pen & Ink, and uses Twitter.

Disclaimer: I know many of the people on this list. One of the wonderful things / occupational hazards of working for a site like The Rumpus is that I’ve come to meet a lot of great writers. These stories stand on their own regardless.

I.O.U., and U., and U. (Chris Colin, The New York Times)

Chris Colin sells a $50 will call ticket to see Miranda July using Craigslist and never gets paid, spurring him to contemplate all the debts he himself owes (after some anger-fueled internet stalking, of course).

Maybe this is catching him at a hard time, I thought. But truth was, Joe seemed to be having a pretty normal time. With his ample tweeting and active Facebooking — well over 1,000 friends! — he allowed for robust stalking. There he was on a sailboat. On a golf course. With some bros. Dancing goofily. Doing his handsome face. Doing some artsy stuff. He looked like someone you’d gone to camp with. Apparently he works for some progressive-sounding start-up, the kind whose Web site speaks of community and so forth.

Eddie Is Gone (Nicole Pasulka, The Believer)

Nicole Pasulka, a former copywriter for a tourism company in Hawaii, examines the messy history of the Aloha State through the riveting life of surf legend Eddie Aikau.

That night Hōkūle‘a rode fifteen-foot swells. The boat began listing from water leakage, and eventually stopped dead in the water. The panicked crew huddled to one side of the craft in an effort to balance out the lilt of the boat with their weight. Around midnight, a rogue wave capsized the canoe, tossing the crew into the water and destroying their radio. The crew clung to the boat. Waiting to be spotted by a plane, they drifted farther from the flight patterns between the islands. Huge swells hammered the vessel. Less-seaworthy members of the crew were seasick and exhausted from exposure. Eddie eventually asked if he could paddle his surfboard nearly twenty miles to the island of Lāna‘i for help. Captain Lyman refused until, seeing no other option for rescue, he gave Eddie permission to go.

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave (Mac McClelland, Mother Jones)

Mac McClelland jumps into the product-stacked trenches of a major online retailer’s shipping house to expose the truth behind how those little brown boxes get to your doorstep. 

[The shipping company] has estimated that we pickers speed-walk an average of 12 miles a day on cold concrete, and the twinge in my legs blurs into the heavy soreness in my feet that complements the pinch in my hips when I crouch to the floor—the pickers’ shelving runs from the floor to seven feet high or so—to retrieve an iPad protective case. iPad anti-glare protector. iPad one-hand grip-holder device. Thing that looks like a landline phone handset that plugs into your iPad so you can pretend that rather than talking via iPad you are talking on a phone. And dildos. Really, a staggering number of dildos.

How Men Fight For Their Lives (Saeed Jones, The Rumpus)

Saeed Jones recollects being gay bashed by a “straight” man in Phoenix, Arizona, and delves into what it means to put oneself at risk in the supposed name of art.

Daniel’s shift from sucking me to punching me happened so quickly, I could still feel my erection pressed against his stomach even as his arms came down from above me like lightning bolts. Trapped under a body I suddenly realized was all muscle, all I could do was watch the thunderstorm. It all felt so distant. He wasn’t beating me. He was beating the desire I had brought out in him. And this is one of the reasons why the phrase “gay bashing” feels misplaced. There, on the floor under him, when I looked up at Daniel, I didn’t see a gay basher; I saw a man who thought he was fighting for his life.

And, at the risk of turning this post into a longread itself, let me take one last moment to recommend pretty much any essay written by Roxane Gay and Emily Rapp this year.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Hobbes

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Michael Hobbes lives in Berlin. His essays from his blog, Rottin’ in Denmark, were featured on Longreads this year. 


I read news when I want to be entertained. I read features when I want to learn something. Here’s nine articles I read this year that changed the way I look at the world, and made me wonder how I seem when it looks back.

“Diary of a Mad Fact-Checker,” James Pogue, Oxford American

It’s been a bad year for truth. From Mike Daisey and Jonah Lehrer to Rush Limbaugh and Mitt Romney, 2012 felt like a yearlong debate about the role of exaggeration, hyperbole, fact-checking and outright fabrication in the pursuit of an argument. Pogue’s piece, a kind of letter from the extreme-pedant end of the spectrum, illustrates how fidelity to facts can obscure the truth, and how embellishment can reveal it.

“Lost in Space,” Mike Albo, Narrative.ly

Maybe I only feel like I learned something from this essay because I’m in essentially the same position as Albo. I’ve been single for almost 10 years, and I’m realizing that if I had applied all the hours I’ve wasted on the promiscu-net to something useful, I could have knitted a quilt, learned French, mastered Othello and read all of Wikipedia by now.

If our society has learned anything from the first 20 years of internet access, it’s that looking for what you want isn’t always the best way to get it, and that getting it is a great way to stop wanting it. Albo’s essay couldn’t have been written by any gay man in America because they’re not as good at writing as he is, but I get the feeling it’s been lived by most of them.

“The Innocent Man,” Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly

and

“The Caging Of America,” Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

OK, so it’s not exactly earth-shattering news that America’s prison system is problematic and that “Texas justice” is an oxymoron. But this year brought a new impetus for action, partly due to new numbers (the widely reported stat that 1% of America’s population is incarcerated), legislative action (Obama’s plan to combat prison rape, scorchingly reported in the New York Review of Books) and, qualitatively but no less essentially, longform pieces like Gopnik’s and Colloff’s.

People are always quoting the MLK-via-Obama line “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” and articles like these—one a macro view of the problem, one micro—is what that bend looks like.

“Does Mitt Romney Have a Soul?” Wells Tower, GQ

It’s easy now to forget that this was an election year, and that we spent basically all of it squabbling, speculating and pontificating about its outcome, which we now say we knew all along.

Most election reporting is disposable, either gaffe play-by-plays (“Binders Full of Women: Interactive Timeline”), instantly obsolete hypotheticals (What if Romney picks Christie for VP?) or politically orchestrated profiles (“Obama’s audacious plan to save the middle class from Libyan airstrikes”). If you remember these articles past ctrl+w, it’s only until events catch up, and then they poof out of your consciousness forever.

Towers’s Romney profile is one of the few still worth reading after the election. Nominally a standard “let’s hang out in the campaign bus!” piece, it transcends its premise by capturing the conflicting forces tugging at the hem of the Republican party, and how Romney’s sheer empty-vesselness managed to please, and displease, everyone at once.

“Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation,” Max Fisher, The Atlantic

Maybe it’s just the ubiquity of its subject, now the most-viewed-ever video on YouTube, but no article stuck with me this year quite like Fisher’s. In a culture that strains to call itself postracial, sharing “Gangnam Style” on Twitter and Facebook was a safe, quiet way to shout ‘look how weird Koreans are!’ and invite your friends to gawk alongside you.

According to Fisher, “Gangnam” isn’t an expression of Korean culture, but a satire of it. Psy was saying the same thing we spectators were, only in a visual language (and, obviously, a verbal one) we couldn’t understand. He was laughing at his culture too, he just had no idea how easy it was to get the rest of the world to join him.

“The Truck Stop Killer,” Vanessa Veselka, GQ

It’s all in the execution, they say, and nothing demonstrated that this year better than Veselka’s harrowing investigation into whether the guy who kidnapped and then released her on the side of the road in 1985 was a serial killer.

She never finds the answer to her question. But who cares! It’s a great piece, super interesting, suspenseful, creepy, introspective in all the right places. We all know that compelling stories don’t always need happy endings. In this case, it doesn’t need one at all.

“The Bloody Patent Battle Over A Healing Machine,” Ken Otterbourg, Fortune

and

“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, New York Times

I admit it: I have no idea how the international economy works. I used to feel about this the way I feel about not being able to describe asexual reproduction, or the Spanish Civil War, or how to grow tomatoes. I can see why somebody’s got to do it, I just can’t see why it’s got to be me.

Since the 2008 crash, though, knowledge of economics has gone from nice to have to can’t miss, and things like competitiveness, productivity and efficiency have taken a place in politics previously reserved for life-and-deathers like sports doping and the Ground Zero Mosque.

Patent trolling and outsourced manufacturing aren’t the only issues facing the US economy, of course, but both these articles demonstrate how businesses, governments and consumers have made the wrong thing too easy, and how the hard thing might not be the way back.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: Nicholas Jackson

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Nicholas Jackson is the digital editorial director for Outside magazine. A former associate editor at The Atlantic, he has also worked for Slate,Texas MonthlyEncyclopaedia Britannica, and other publications.

Best Argument for the Magazine
The Innocent Man, Part One” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly)
The Innocent Man, Part Two” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly)

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.

Best Crime Story of the Year
The Truck Stop Killer” (Vanessa Veselka, GQ)

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.

Best Reason to Never Skip a Service Package Again
Daddy: My Father’s Last Words” (Mark Warren, Esquire)

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.

Best Technology Story of the Year 
When the Nerds Go Marching In” (Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic)

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.

Best Story About Child Development of the Year
What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?” (Ruth Padawer, The New York Times Magazine)


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.

Best Story I Thought I Would Never Like
What Does a Conductor Do?” (Justin Davidson, 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.

Best Adventure Story of the Year
Four Confirmed Dead in Two Days on Everest” (Grayson Schaffer, Outside)

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.

Best New Writer Discovery of the Year
Riccardo Tisci: Designer of the Year” (Molly Young, GQ)

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 YorkElle, 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.

Best Trainwreck of the Year
In Conversation: Tina Brown” (Michael Kinsley, New York)

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.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.