→
Featured Longreader: Inc. Magazine senior writer Burt Helm. See his story picks from Miami New Times, Forbes, GQ and more on his #longreads page.
Featured Longreader: Inc. Magazine senior writer Burt Helm. See his story picks from Miami New Times, Forbes, GQ and more on his #longreads page.

Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen.
***
I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled me to re-read them, over and over, but I do know that you’ll find yourself doing the same. In any case, you don’t need me to explain how to enjoy these stories, or why you should adore them. They speak for themselves. So, in the spirit of the season: gifts that keep on giving!
“‘It’s Too Bad. And I Don’t Mean It’s Too Bad Like “Screw ‘Em”,’” Jessica Pressler, New York: Lloyd Blankfein goes to a diner.
“Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference,” Wells Tower, GQ: Starbury goes to China.
“The Hangover Part III,” Brett Martin, GQ: Aziz Ansari, David Chang and James Murphy go to Tokyo.
“The History and Mystery of the High-Five,” Jon Mooallem, ESPN The Magazine: Hand goes high.
“Why John Calipari Can’t Catch a Break,” S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated: Coach goes to Kentucky.
“It’s The Economy, Dummkopf!” Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair: Michael Lewis goes to Germany.
“Danny Meyer on a Roll,” Sean Wilsey, The New York Times Magazine: Restauranteur goes… everywhere?
“Jennifer Egan on Reaping Awards and Dodging Literary Feuds,” Boris Kachka, Vulture: Jennifer Egan goes to Brooklyn.
“The Confessions of a Former Adolescent Puck Tease,” Katie Baker, Deadspin: Teenager goes to the Internet.
“American Marvel,” Edith Zimmerman, GQ: I’m not sure who goes where, or when, or why, but what!
***
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.

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.
•••
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.

Molly Lambert is a writer covering pop culture at Grantland. (She’s also featured in our Top 10 Longreads of 2011)
***
These are some Longreads I enjoyed this year:
• “The Bell Jar At 40”: Emily Gould on Sylvia Plath (Poetry Foundation)
• “The J in J. Crew”: Molly Young on Jenna Lyons (New York magazine)
• “The Recessionary Charms Of American Horror Story”: Tess Lynch (Grantland)
• “The Movie Star”: Bill Simmons on Ryan Reynolds and Will Smith (Grantland)
• “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia”: Colson Whitehead at The World Series Of Poker (Grantland)
• “Crass Warfare”: Emily Nussbaum on Whitney and 2 Broke Girls (The New Yorker)
• “Frantically Impure”: Alex Carnevale on Susan Sontag (This Recording)
• “Beauty”: Durga Chew-Bose on Barbara Loden (This Recording)
• “God Knows Where I Am”: Rachel Aviv (The New Yorker, sub. required)
• “What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier Of Female Sexuality”: Amanda Hess on James Deen (GOOD)
• “‘Make Me Proud’: Does Drake Actually Care About Women?”: Emma Carmichael (The Awl)
• “Free The Network”: Allison Bland (The Awl)
• “The Celebrity Rehab Of Dr. Drew”: by Natasha Vargas-Cooper (GQ)
***
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.
Peter Smith has written about food and science for GOOD, Wired, and Gastronomica. He’s based in Maine, and, in 2011, he covered pickle juice, patented sandwiches, and the last sardine cannery in North America. This is his first attempt at Top Five Longreads.
***
Here are my (somewhat arbitrarily selected) #longreads that, er, explore unexpected, underexplored, and purposely obfuscated aspects of the world—sometimes involving the curious things we put in our mouths.
***
1. “The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus,” Adam Rogers, Wired
Mycology hardly gets the kind of attention we reserve for charismatic megafauna—whales and wolves and wooly mammoths—but Adam Rogers explains how a conspicuous black growth in distillery in Lakeshore, Ontario led to the discovery of a previously undiscovered fungal microparadise.
2. “Here Be Monsters,” Michael Finkel, GQ
I read very few stories on my phone, but I started reading this adventure story and could not put it down. Michael Finkel tells the tale of three boys who make a drunken escape off a tiny, isolated island and end up lost at sea, starving and trying to catch fish with the innards of their boat’s engine.
3. “Planet in a Bottle,” Christopher Turner, Cabinet
Diets are a dime a dozen—the Atkins Diet, the Blood Type Diet, the More-of-Jesus-Less-of-Me Diet, the Paleo Diet—but the CRON-diet was not one that I had ever even heard about. Christopher Turner delves into its origins in the failed experiment in the Arizona desert known as Biosphere.
4. “India’s Vanishing Vultures,” Meera Subramanian, The Virginia Quarterly Review
Subramanian’s essay on the devastating unintended consequences of a veterinary drug on India’s vultures, along with one man’s efforts to restore the birds with “vulture restaurants,” elicits a rare enthusiasm for both environmental toxicology and the scavenging creatures who eat the dead.
5. “Unnamed Caves,” John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review
Sullivan’s most recent collection—as Wells Tower put it recently—makes you want to barf with envy. After reading this extensively researched story about spelunking in Tennessee, wherein the author tries to find the meaning of 6,000-year old cave paintings, I’ll admit, I also had to pick my jaw up off the floor. (It’s only excerpted online; you’ll have to buy the paperback.)
***
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.
Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker and a frequent Longreader.
**
I’m a sucker for stories about reinvention, disappearence, and people who pretend to be someone they aren’t. The genre has cliches, and can become trite. But it can also be wonderful. And this year, the category brought us some wonderful longreads.
***
“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker
I’m biased, but the story by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker about the rapper Earl Sweatshirt is, I think, a classic. The character Earl is the reinvention of another boy, whose amazing past and origins Sanneh describes. But then there’s the second disappearence of Earl himself, and then his quandry about whether and how to return to his career. Sanneh is also, stylistically, one of the most original and graceful writers around. Every sentence is a pleasure.
“His Own Private Idaho,” Sean Flynn, GQ
This piece by Flynn about a mobster who reinvents himself in Idaho, seems familiar at first. But then it turns out the central character is much more complex than you might have thought—and he ends up undone by something surprising and redemptive. It’s great.
“My Mother’s Lover,” David Dobbs, The Atavist ($1.99)
I’m biased on this one too (I’m a co-founder of The Atavist), but Dobbs’s piece has deservedly been one of the best-selling “e-singles” of the year. It’s an amazing tale of a man discovering that his mother harbored a secret her entire adult life. And then, as Dobbs tries to resolve a mystery of his own family’s past, he gets tangled in the story of another’s.
“Dave Sanders: Fiber-Optics Exec by Day, Defender of Justice by Night”, Joshua Davis, Wired
Joshua Davis is one of the most cinematic magazine writers around; he’s wonderful at introducing groups of characters, crafting scenes, and keeping a narrative moving. This recent piece in Wired about a fiber-optics-executive who recreates himself as a (sort-of) good-guy vigilante is a classic. It’s complicated, but Davis tells the story smoothly and smartly.
“The Incredible Case of the P.I. Moms,” Joshuah Bearman, This American Life
I know this is a long “reads” list, but the lines with long “listens” are blurry, and there was a story this fall on This American Life of this type that I just loved: Joshuah Bearman’s “The Incredible Case of the P.I. Moms.” Like many of the other best stories in this genre, it takes, layer by layer, through a complicated series of reinventions and disguises. Plus it mixes in reality television, a mole, and an heroic journalist.
***
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.

Elmo Keep is a writer who has written for The Hairpin, and other places.
•••
The Tetris Effect — Justin Wolfe, The Awl
There really isn’t a way to talk about this without spoiling the reveals. Just read it, whether you understand gaming or not, it doesn’t matter: If you don’t, you will come away curious, and if you do, you will have your mind blown it’s just so clever and moving and wonderful. The narrative structure of this piece is so satisfyingly interwoven and then resolved, it’s one of those stories that makes for a totally different experience on the second reading. This is the kind of enthralling, super-long writing that I love the Internet for making space for.
Joan — Sara Davidson, ByLiner Original
This was a beautiful companion to Blue Nights, Didion’s most recent memoir. In that book, she is very adept as all memoirists are, at revealing only what she chooses to while weaving the illusion of revealing everything. Sara Davidson has known Didion for forty years and the portrait that she paints of her very affectionately is in a lot of ways more complete than the image that Didion presents of herself. A must for Joan Didion tragics like me, especially for the glimpses of her life with John Gregory Dunne written from an outsider’s perspective peppered throughout.
Blindsight — Chris Colin, The Atavist
The Atavist have really pioneered what is the logical evolution of longform writing for the web, integrating everything about the medium into tablet-only experiences that truly immerse you in a world. In this story the writer finds ways to let us experience what is happening to the protagonist — a man who has suffered an horrific brain injury — so vividly that we can for a moment inhabit is mind, a place where memory and time have been shattered and distorted. You also get the sense throughout of how much the writer cared for his subject and the result is a humane and profound portrait of resilience.
What Makes A Great Critic? — Maria Bustillos, The Awl
The Internet has been wonderful for writing for so many reasons, but also, terrible! For others! Particularly when it comes to cultural criticism (pop culture especially). In this piece Maria Bustillos does everyone a favour by pointing out that recaps are not reviews and takes a long, considered look at what makes criticism valuable when the writer really, really cares about the subject. This piece goes a long way to settling the “criticism vs review” debate and is a must read for all aspiring critics and an excellent brush-up for any working critic who might have let complacency slip in.
The Quaid Conspiracy — Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair
I loved this inversion of a celebrity profile, especially in Vanity Fair to read about people on the fringes of that machine. Not even the writer is certain what’s true and what isn’t in this caper — which is really what it reads like; being dragged along on a wildly tangential ride rife with drugs and paranoia.
The By Far Funnest Read of the Year — American Marvel — Edith Zimmerman, GQ
This gets so much love because it is *fucking awesome*, that’s why. It’s also been widely derided by old people, which is again a tick in its favour in my view. This is the exact kind of celebrity profile you want to read: It’s a publicist’s nightmare, which again, is why it’s so great. Read it! Read them all!
•••
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.
Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine.
•••
1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, what’s great is the willingness of both subject and writer to play, and the dynamic between them—these pieces exploit the “profile as date” subtext really well. It’s fun to think about them as a sort of inverse to Jennifer Egan’s brilliant satire of the profile biz in A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the Vick piece, what I like is the way that Leitch uses the PR apparatus around the process of profiling Michael Vick to reveal what’s at stake for him. He didn’t get much time with Vick, just a photo shoot and a phone call, but he used it to both explain and complicate the Michael Vick Story that the quarterback’s handlers want to tell.
2. There are a bunch of New Yorker stories I could pick—Ryan Lizza’s “leading from behind” piece on Obama’s foreign policy was so influential; Jane Mayer on Thomas Drake and state secrets was fascinating and moving; Kelefah Sanneh not only wrote a great analysis of Odd Future, he tracked down their missing member; David Grann is David Grann—but my favorite was Jeffrey Toobin’s take on Clarence Thomas. There are so many things going on here: It’s a revisionist view that frames Thomas as very smart and canny; it shows how one justice can move the entire Supreme Court over decades through the way opinions are written; it sets the stage for next year’s healthcare ruling as a culmination of Thomas’s entire mission; and it makes clear once again just what a strange, extremist man he is.
3. Overall, my favorite thing in the new New York Times Magazine is probably the Riffs section—it identified a gap in the preview-and-review saturated culture journalism market, which is (relatively) long form argument/idea-driven pieces. To pick a few highlights: Dan Kois’s piece on avant-garde movies kicked off a fierce, endless, at times kind of ridiculous debate that just about every movie critic had to weigh in on; Adam Sternbergh’s piece on jokeless comedies defined an era; Sam Anderson on Derek Jeter both mocked empty sports hagiography and read like a hilarious version of Donald Barthelme. Alternate winner in this category is the New York Review of Books, which published some of the best cultural essays this year—Daniel Mendelsohn on Mad Men and Spiderman, Lorrie Moore on Friday Night Lights, and Dan Chiasson on Keith Richards were all delightful and provocative.
4. I just loved Paul Ford’s “The Web is a Customer Service Medium.” It’s the kind of piece that would be hard to get into a print magazine for various reasons, but it resonated instantly online. It’s a pretty abstract argument about a subject that’s not exactly under-analyzed—what is web content about, and how is it different from other forms of content?—but it opens by coining a phrase which instantly makes sense to anyone who works on the web: “Why wasn’t I consulted?” And then it goes on to make a very detailed, specific, convincing, and non-buzzword-filled argument that isn’t formulated expressly to piss off anyone who works in “old media,” which is refreshing.
5. Finally, some favorites in the emerging multimedia genre of longform tweeting. I probably read more words on Twitter than anywhere else this year, and I am grateful for the stamina of those who somehow manage to tweet and retweet extended thoughts all day, every day on specific themes. I learned as much about the Arab Spring by dipping into @acarvin’s feed as from any essays about it. @daveweigel is constantly insightful, and one of the few people capable of being funny about politics. Following @questlove’s stream is like listening to the world’s kindest, most passionate music geek.
***
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.

Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.
***
Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year:
“Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian
This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but you usually don’t hear about it because the cruise lines keep it quiet. Ronson goes deep into the bizarre cruise culture as he tries to figure out what happened to Rebecca Coriam, who vanished from the Disney Wonder last March.
“All The Angry People,” George Packer, The New Yorker
This story accomplished what seemed almost impossible, at least from an editor’s perspective: it made a compelling narrative out of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan. Even though OWS was being covered to death, this story—along with Bloomberg Businessweek’s own fine contribution, Drake Bennett’s profile of David Graeber—found a new angle on it and made it fresh and compelling.
“The Girl from Trails End,” Kathy Dobie, GQ
This devastating story just really stayed with me.
“California and Bust,” Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
His piece about Iceland (“Wall Street on the Tundra”) is my favorite one he’s done about the global financial crisis, but Michael Lewis’s breakdown of the fiscal disaster that is California was his best in 2011. It really makes you think about the scary place we might be headed as a country, and the scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger is priceless.
“Lady, Where’s My Magazine**?” Ann Friedman
This is a parody, and it isn’t terribly long, so I’m not sure that it qualifies. But it is hilarious, and perfectly illustrates much of what is wrong with the publishing business.
***
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.

Jay Caspian Kang (pictured above) is an editor at Grantland. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Morning News. His first novel, The Dead Do Not Improve, will be published by Hogarth/Random House in August 2012.
***
David Hill: “$100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino” (McSweeney’s)
This is the sort of piece you want to compare to other writers like Didion or Carver or even James Baldwin, but you hold off because you don’t want to piss off the author by getting it wrong. Yes, there’s a bit of Didion’s calmness here, a bit of Carver’s bleariness, and a bit of Baldwin’s honesty-at-all-costs, but David Hill’s prose sings with a melancholy that’s truly original. The one piece from 2011 that had me punching the wall with jealousy. By far my favorite read of the year.
Mike Kessler: “What Happened to Mitrice Richardson?” (Los Angeles magazine)
Great crime writing. Thoroughly reported and well constructed.
Alma Guillermoprieto: “In the New Gangland of El Salvador” (New York Review of Books)
My thoughts on Guillermoprieto can be found here.
Francisco Goldman: “The Wave” (The New Yorker, sub. required)
This is gut-wrenching. Goldman’s novel, Say Her Name, is somehow even more powerful.
Jon Ronson: “Robots Say the Damnedest Things” (GQ)
When this very funny piece about robots is over, you start thinking a bit differently about love. I don’t know how Jon Ronson achieved that effect, but “Robots Say the Damnedest Things,” was my most fun read of 2011.
***
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.