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Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year

Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor?

Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969

 

Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page.

In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York City mayor’s race, I’ve probably reread it a dozen times; I’ve recommended it to college kids, writers of mine, fellow editors, and when Marshall Sella and I were working on our own story about Anthony Weiner’s tragicomic run, I thought about it every single damn day. My love of it is almost hard to explain, but: It’s an adventure. It starts in a leisurely and apathetic place, ends with a startling announcement, and in between twists and turns through gossip, memoir, poetry, politics, polemic. It’s beautiful; it’s funny; it’s angry; it’s self-lacerating; it looks at the city from 10,000 feet and then zooms in at the ice in a glass. Nowadays, most magazine features hit you with a nut graph somewhere near the bottom of the first section or the top of the second, and then spend 4,000 words fulfilling your exact expectations. But Breslin surprises, again and again. You don’t even know what the story is really about until you’ve read the last line.

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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…

Stories that Magazine Editors Are Afraid Of

“It’s probably worth saying that there are editors at all sorts of magazines (myself included) who know they should never assign a story on a certain kind of subject—a Phish tour, say, or Mitt Romney, or what’s up with Cuba?—and yet they do so despite their better judgment. A writer tells you he or she is interested, you convince yourself that it’s all going to work out despite the pre-digested conclusions or the limited access or the fact that what you’re talking about is a generality rather than a specific idea. And it never, ever does, unless something remarkable and unexpected happens in the reporting or the writer brings some stunning originality to it. And these things work in a kind of horrible tandem—the lack of interesting subject matter inspiring the writer to scat out thicker and thicker layers of word jazz—resulting in so many bad magazine stories.”

Joel Lovell (formerly GQ, now The New York Times Magazine), in conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan on how they worked together—specifically on this story. Read more from GQ in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: thomasleuthard, Flickr

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Sasha Belenky on Jeanne Marie Laskas's 'The People V. Football'

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Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post.

Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most riveted, however, by her 2011 profile in GQ of Fred McNeill, former star linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings — which similarly begins in the car. It’s a heart-wrenching scene, with McNeill’s wife, Tia, fighting his dementia along with the Los Angeles traffic, and it’s a great example of Laskas’ gift for capturing language. As journalists continue to shed light on the concussion crisis in football, Laskas’ article stands out as one of the most personal, most devastating accounts of the long-term damage being done on the field.

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The Decades-Long Quest for a Malaria Vaccine

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“Hoffman rolled up his sleeve and pressed the container—mesh side down—to the inside of his forearm. He felt a tickling sensation as the mosquitoes pricked his skin. Five minutes later, he removed the canister; an Army scientist examined the mosquitoes to confirm that each had sucked Hoffman’s blood. Five other volunteers did the same.

“For the next several days, Hoffman and the other volunteers bit their nails and hoped the vaccine would keep them healthy. (Those who come down with the disease are given drugs to kill the parasites.) By day ten, three volunteers were sick, but Hoffman and two others felt fine. Excitement began to swell; no injected malaria vaccine had come close to 50-percent protection—and this was its very first trial. ‘We thought we were going to win the Nobel Prize,’ Hoffman says.”

– In the Washingtonian, Luke Mullins profiles Dr. Stephen Hoffman, who has been trying to develop a malaria vaccine for the last 30 years. He hasn’t given up. Read more about vaccines.

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Photo by: NIAID

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The Non-Mysteries of the Female Orgasm

“My initial forays into oral sex were a crutch, a way of compensating for my sexual inadequacies, and they were approached with the assumption that cunnilingus was a poor man’s second to the joys and splendors of ‘real sex’–like many, I took it for granted that intercourse was the ‘right way’ for couples to experience orgasms. But, to my surprise, I discovered that the ‘way of the tongue’ was by no means inferior to intercourse; if anything, it was superior, in many cases the only way in which women were able to receive the persistent, rhythmic stimulation, outside of masturbation, necessary to achieve an orgasm. I quickly learned that oral sex is real sex, and later in life, when I happened to come across a copy of the seminal Hite Report on Female Sexuality, I was reassured to find that women consider oral sex to be ‘one of their most favorite and exciting activities; women mentioned over and over how much they loved it.’ When it comes to pleasure, there is no right or wrong way to have an orgasm–the only thing that’s wrong is to assume that women need or value them any less than men do.”

-From She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, by Ian Kerner, Ph.D.. Read more in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: ranieldiaz, Flickr

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Marriage, Equality and Household Chores

“RG: Sometimes when people talk about women and the workforce, they say a woman cannot truly be equal to a man unless she has her own income. What do you think?

“Mom: Well. Equality. What a word. When we choose go outside in the world, when we come home, we’re still mommy. The second shift starts. Equality doesn’t exist, period, even when you share the chores. Some days it can be 70/30 and other days it is 30/70. I don’t think that’s what we should be fighting for.

“RG: What should we be fighting for?

“Mom: Men participating more in the home, but it’s petty to say 50/50, because life doesn’t allow that.”

Roxane Gay’s interview with her mother about equality in marriage in The Hairpin.

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Photo: nostri-imago, Flickr

An Encounter With a Serial Killer

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“You blink. You look again. You look at other photos. You wonder if you’re being melodramatic, if your memory is faulty. You wonder if people will believe you, or simply think your imagination has run away with you. You wonder if there is a class of neurotic people who make up false accounts of run-ins with serial killers. You realize that to be true to your story and yourself, you can’t let what you are reading create false memories.”

– In Orange Coast Magazine, a former Marine describes what it’s like to come to the realization that he may have met a notorious serial killer many years ago. See also: Vanessa Veselka’s 2012 GQ story about her possible run-in with a serial killer.

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Photo by: Dick Uhne

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“Somehow Anthony is blaming me and my 8,000-word story for the fact that everything turned to shit for him. I wish I knew if there was a word for all this. There’s probably a German word for it. And maybe I am naïve, but I am telling you that when you spend so many hours with somebody, you really do feel like you get a sense of who they are, and you make decisions based on that.”

A look inside the making of (and fallout from) a magazine profile, featuring Anthony Weiner, the New York Times Magazine and GQ.

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“Circumstances in the Tenderloin are not normal. And San Francisco is not a normal city. Barring a seismic shift in city politics, the TL is not going to gentrify the way that similar neighborhoods have in other cities. Not next year. Not in five years. Maybe never. For better or worse, it will likely remain a sanctuary for the poor, the vulnerable, and the damaged—and the violence and disorder that inevitably comes with them. The thousands of working people, seniors, and families, including many Southeast Asians, who make up a silent two-thirds majority of the Tenderloin’s 30,000 residents will remain there. And so will the thousands of not-so-silent mentally ill people, addicts, drunks, and ex-cons who share the streets with them—as well as the predators who come in from the outside to exploit them. The Tenderloin will remain the great anomaly of neighborhoods: a source of stubborn pride for San Francisco, or an acute embarrassment—or both.”

-A look at the future of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood (via San Francisco Magazine). Read more about San Francisco in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: markcoggins, Flickr

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