Search Results for: Guardian

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

Longreads Pick

The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper. What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger. With Assange detained in the U.K., the author reveals the story behind the headlines.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jan 6, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,338 words)

Paul Brady: My Top 5 Travel Longreads of 2010

Paul Brady is an editor at Condé Nast Traveler.

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This isn’t a list of the best travel writing of the year, but if this is what travel writing could be every time, the genre wouldn’t have such a shaky reputation. I didn’t pick anything from Traveler because that would be lame.

Pass the Bucks (Steve Boggan, The Guardian, Dec. 11, 2010)

The story of following the same $10 around the country for 30 days could’ve been hokey, but Steve Boggan set aside his own quest to write about the characters he meets, their lives and the places they live.

All Amanda Can Jet (Tumblr)

This was the second year JetBlue released its All You Can Jet pass, spawning a mountain of mediocre tweets and poorly-managed trip-diary blogs. But Amanda Mae got it absolutely right—and the constantly updated “local beers consumed” metric was a nice touch.

My Country, My Train, My K-Hole (Hugh Ryan, The Morning News, June 30, 2010)

I’m a sucker for stories about trains, but this is on the next level: “The train is a liberating K-hole, a moment of suspended animation where it’s entirely acceptable to not answer phone calls … There are an endless number of things you can not do.”

No Country for Old Men? (Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian, Jan. 25, 2009)

This Ed Vulliamy article is from 2009, but the full-length book that grew out of it, Amexica, came out this year. Driving the entirety of the Mexican-American border, he writes a little bit about everything that makes it one of the most fascinating places on the planet: tattoo parlors, Christianity, narcoterrorism, “right-wing windbag talk radio,” and what sounds like the best La Quinta in Texas.

Boom (Sean Flynn, GQ, July 2010)

Probably the best story I read about the biggest story of the year, the oil spill, and while I probably can’t argue that it’s “travel writing,” it certainly evokes a particular place.

Bonus:

The Whistling Language of La Gomera

I have no idea when this was written, but I found it this year while researching… something. I forget. I like it because while we may spend 18 hours a day on the internet, there are still fascinating things to find out about like this utterly unique whistling language invented in and still used in the Canary Islands.

Juli Weiner: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Juli Weiner blogs for Vanity Fair.

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These are the pieces I sent out to friends with the all-caps subject line, “THIS.” These are the pieces I come back to when I’m looking to improve my own writing. These are the pieces I’ll be re-reading well into 2011.

Jon Ronson: And God Created Controversy, The Guardian, October 9, 2010

Hilarious discussion about theology with members of Insane Clown Posse.

Nathan Heller: Trench Coat, Unlit Cigar, Slate, July 13, 2010

The beautifully written deconstruction of the Wise and Cranky Kaplan Twitter feeds.

Nancy Jo Sales: The Suspects Wore Louboutins, Vanity Fair, March 2010

Dishy account of the celebrity-worship and avarice that fueled a spate of burglaries in Los Angeles.

David Grann: The Mark of a Masterpiece, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010

The history of American connoisseurship takes the form of an impossible-to-stop-reading crime drama.

David Segal: A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web, The New York Times, November 26, 2010

A gripping and legitimately terrifying account of an online conman and the insidious side-effects of poor customer reviews.

Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Jay Caspian Kang is a fiction writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High, an essay on gambling addiction that appeared in the Morning News and has been named on several “Best of 2010” lists. 

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In no particular order.

THE LEGEND OF BLACK SUPERMAN — Rafe Bartholomew, Deadspin

I’m typing this in a Starbucks in the Robinson’s Place Mall in Manila. Everywhere I go in this city, I am reminded of Pacific Rims, Bartholomew’s chronicle of the place of basketball in the culture of the Philippines

The excerpt on Billy Ray Bates was my favorite sports read of the year. Any documentary filmmaker who wants a subject…

THE MURDERERS OF MEXICO — Alma Guillermoprieto, New York Review of Books

What else could you possibly ever want out of a journalist? Fearless, measured and whip-smart with an eye for narrative detail that should be the envy of every writer who has ever read her work.

Her reflections, observations and opinions on the war in Mexico should tower over every other work on the subject, the way Orwell towers over the Spanish Civil War. Hopefully, before it’s too late, someone in publishing will drive up to Guillermoprieto’s door with a suitcase filled with money, because if there is going to be another Homage to Catalonia, it will be Alma Guillermoprieto on the Narco Wars.  

INSANE CLOWN POSSE: AND GOD CREATED CONTROVERSYJon Ronson, The Guardian

The perfect companion for the world’s most baffling music video. I wish someone had done this for the Wu, circa 1994.

Ronson also broke open the seal for long-form articles written specifically to explain baffling youtube videos. Like somebody please write 3,000+ words on how they got that fucking bird to dance to that Willow Smith song. Choire Sicha, I’m looking you straight in the eyes and I am saying please. 

PELE AS A COMEDIAN — Brian Phillips, Run of Play

There are so many reasons why this essay should annoy me. It’s about a really kinda bad David Foster Wallace essay, it’s about soccer and it involves a lot of footnotes. And yet, it took me about a paragraph to discard all those hang-ups and just revel in the quality of writing, the intelligence of the mind at work.

RICHARD LAWSON’S AMERICAN IDOL COVERAGE — Richard Lawson, Gawker

The only reason I still watch the show. And, along with temperate weather and Mexican food, one of the three reasons why I love living on the West Coast. Because on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I can wake up and have Lawson’s mammoth recaps already posted on Gawker.

Sometimes, I find myself typing and deleting twitter messages to Richard Lawson. Mostly, they are about how my day is going. Sometimes, they are jokes about Crystal Bowersox. Once, it was a suggestion he get cloned so he could also write about the Biggest Loser

Paul Ford: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Paul Ford was an editor at Harper’s Magazine; now he’s wandering around, looking at stuff and writing computer programs.

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Tony Judt, “Night,” New York Review of Books (January 14)

This was the year of the dying critic. Most writers would do themselves, and their readers, a service by dying without all the self-elegies (“selfegies”?). We’ve read once too often, right, of the bark of the lonely fox out the bay window. But then you had Judt in his wheelchair, climbing Everest every night, putting out a series of reflections and continuing to publish great work even post-mortem. In a different city, and a different vein, there’s Roger Ebert’s Journal, the essay that never ends—starting as a kind of testament, it transformed over many months into a mass lecture from an old newspaper hand (a man of a literally dying breed), holding forth on absolutely everything.

Dan Koeppel, “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” (Popular Mechanics, January 29)

Stuff like this is why magazines persist. It’s fun to imagine the pitch. “I’d like to write about falling thirty thou—” “You had me at falling.”

Frédéric Filloux, “Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters” (Monday Note, September 19)

Inside baseball for publishing nerds, but bangs out its point. It’s hard to find good wide-angle writing about tech. Related: “Why the OS Doesn’t Matter.” Also: Tom Bissell on cocaine and Grand Theft Auto; Fred Vogelstein on the iPhone/AT&T meltdown; and Nitsuh Abebe on the Internet Paradox.

Issendai, “How to Keep Someone With You Forever,” (Issendai’s Superhero Training Journal, June 9)

You read this, right? I’ve visited friends and read this aloud. Explains publishers, graduate school, bad jobs, and broken marriages. (Related in a way I can’t fully articulate: Given that 2010 was, in addition to being the year of the dying critic, the year of the supercilious journalist writing about the Insane Clown Posse, it’s worth going back to 2009’s “MC CHRIS IS AT THE GATHERING: A LOVE STORY,” for the nerd’s eye view—a far more subtle view than presented elsewhere—of the weirdness of Juggalism.)

Josh Allen, Chokeville. (Ongoing)

Most prose born on the Internet is highly defensive. Everyone is braced for audience attack and opens their posts with four paragraphs explaining why the remaining four paragraphs are worth reading. Chokeville is not that. It tries to explain itself, but it can’t. Sometimes I get started and then drift away to Zooborns, but I know that’s my problem, because I’ve forgotten how, and I also know that I’ll end up some weekend night in front of my monitor, zoomed in, drinking my way through every word.

P.S. We’re also several years into the flowering of history blogs. Here’s a good place to start.

Matt O'Rourke: My Favorite Longreads from 2010

Matt O’Rourke is interactive group creative director for Crispin Porter+Bogusky in Boulder.

copymattt:

For those of you that like the internet for things other than cats and boobies, I give you 5 of my favorite Longreads from the past 12 months.

Hit-and-run vicitm was quiet, dependable, co-workers say

If you’re really lucky, Andrew Meacham will still be alive when you die.

The 2010 Rapha Gentleman’s Race Report

Heidi Swift on bikes, dirt, enduring love and lots of vomit. 

5 Year-Old Slugger

A simple story told beautifully by one of the best sports-writers on earth. 

Letter From Manhattan

Joan Didion’s original review of Woody Allen’s last great movie.

And God Created Controversy

On the surface this seems like one of the dumbest interviews ever documented. It is.

Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010

aldridge:

My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic:

The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired
“Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”

The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”

The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”

Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy
Jon Ronson, The Guardian
“I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. Shaggy nods quietly. ‘I get anxiety and shit a lot,’ he says. ‘And reading that stuff people write about us… It hurts.’”

See my (much longer) list of the best long-form journalism of 2009.

Follow @longreads, or search for #longreads on Twitter. Or follow me, @mpaldridge.