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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Orion Magazine, The New York Times, GQ, Business Insider, McSweeney’s, plus a guest pick by sportswriter Ben Cohen.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Orion Magazine, The New York Times, GQ, Business Insider, McSweeney’s, plus a guest pick by sportswriter Ben Cohen.

The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted.

“The Movie Set That Ate Itself.” — Michael Idov, GQ

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Featured Longreader: Todd Olmstead, grad student at NYU’s Studio 20, and community intern at Mashable. See his story picks from GQ, Grantland and more on his #longreads page.

For the last several years, the big ticket in town has been the teen melodrama One Tree Hill, which was on the WB and is now on the CW Network. Don’t let the off brands fool you, though; a surprising number of people watch it, maybe even you, for all I know. It’s one of the worst TV shows ever made, and I seriously do not mean that as an insult. It’s bad in the way that Mexican TV is bad, superstylized bad. Good bad. Indeed, there are times when the particular campiness of its badness, although I can sense its presence, is in fact beyond me, beyond my frequency, like that beep you play on the Internet that only kids can hear. Too many of my camp-receptor cells have died. Possibly One Tree Hill is a work of genius. Certainly it is about to go nine seasons, strongly suggesting that the mother of its creator, Mark Schwahn, did not give birth to any idiots, or if she did those people are Schwahn’s siblings. The One Tree character who supposedly lived in our house was Peyton, played by one of the stars, Hilarie Burton, a striking bone-thin blonde. Think coppery curls. I’d seen her on MTV right at the moment when I was first feeling too old to watch MTV. Superfriendly when we met her, superfriendly always.

“Peyton’s Place.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, Los Angeles Times, Sady Doyle, The Atlantic, The Telegraph, and a guest pick by our German friends, Gute Texte.

Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house. “And that’s when you know you’ve been caught out, that you’ve squandered what time you had, that you must trust this house of concrete you’ve built to stand up to the sea. Your wife joins you on the second-floor terrace, reporting that she, too, saw the neighbor’s house wash away. ‘We should run,’ she says, but you say, ‘It’s too late.’ And then: ‘We’ll be fine.’ Her arms circle your waist and lock there, while you stand stock-straight, gazing at the mountain, without daring to look back at the sea. These will be your last words to her—We’ll be fine. And you’ve already departed your body when everything seems to break beneath your feet and a roaring force crashes over you.”

“The Man Who Sailed His House.” — Michael Paterniti, GQ

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Adam Horovitz: He was a kid. He had the classic early eighties b-boy look: tight Lee jeans, adidas shell toes, fat laces going up the leg, a Kangol, Cazals, a Le Tigre shirt. And LL was just like, “Who are these people? What’s up with these white boys?” Not only that, but Rick was in this weird dorm room. I’m assuming LL expected it to be an office with a secretary and coffee—like on TV. He was just shocked. It was really funny.

LL Cool J: When Rick came downstairs, the first thing I said was, “Yo, you Rick?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I thought you was black.” He said, “Cool.”

“The Arrival of LL Cool J.” — Bill Adler and Dan Charnas, GQ

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(Photo Credit: Janette Beckman)

Featured Longreader: Laura Nelson, senior editor at the Annenberg’s Neon Tommy. Story picks from The Believer, GQ and more on her #longreads page.

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from London Review of Books, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, Orion Magazine, and a guest pick from arts journalist Suzi Steffen.