William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:
Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. ‘The Collapse of American Criminal Justice‘ was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.
William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:
“Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.”
Three years after the seizure of materials from Hauser’s lab, theBoston Globe leaked news of a secret investigating committee at Harvard that had found Hauser ‘solely responsible’ for ‘eight counts of scientific misconduct.’ Michael Smith, Harvard’s dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, confirmed the existence of the investigation on August 20, 2010. Hauser took a leave of absence, telling the New York Times, ‘I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes,” and adding that he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.’ At the time he was working on a new book titled Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. In February 2011 a large majority of the faculty of Harvard’s psychology department voted against allowing Hauser to teach in the coming academic year. On July 7 he resigned his professorship effective August 1. Hauser has neither publicly admitted to nor denied having engaged in scientific misconduct.
A history of scientific misconduct and the investigation of Harvard scientist Marc Hauser:
“Three years after the seizure of materials from Hauser’s lab, theBoston Globe leaked news of a secret investigating committee at Harvard that had found Hauser ‘solely responsible’ for ‘eight counts of scientific misconduct.’ Michael Smith, Harvard’s dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, confirmed the existence of the investigation on August 20, 2010. Hauser took a leave of absence, telling the New York Times, ‘I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes,” and adding that he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.’ At the time he was working on a new book titled Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. In February 2011 a large majority of the faculty of Harvard’s psychology department voted against allowing Hauser to teach in the coming academic year. On July 7 he resigned his professorship effective August 1. Hauser has neither publicly admitted to nor denied having engaged in scientific misconduct.”
Truly we live, as Steve Silberman said, in a time of longform renaissance. The reading year was notable not just for the rise of many long reads and Longreads, but for the debut of The Atavist and Byliner, two new venues for publishing pieces too long for magazines but too short for books. Both, like Longreads, brought me lots of good reading. And The Atavist, which was first off the blocks, let me publish a story, My Mother’s Lover, for which I had tried but failed to find the right length and form for almost a decade. Cheers to Longreads for helping spearhead this renaissance—and to you, Constant Reader, for doing the reading that in all but the most immediate sense makes the writing possible.
Here are my top 5 longreads of 2011, plus some extras. My filter: a combination of what I thought best and what continued to resonate with me. Writing is hard. I’m moved by the dedication to craft in these pieces.
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“Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World,” by Amy Harmon, New York Times Harmon pulls off something extraordinarily difficult here: she draws on little more than straight reportorial observation to show a young autistic man moving out into a world that struggles to accommodate him. Neither is quite ready for the other; yet they engage, as they must. Gorgeously structured and an immense reward. (Bonus: She later tells how she put it together.)
“Study of a lifetime,” by Helen Pearson, Nature Pearson, Nature’s features editor, shows how fine science writing is done, following a set of researchers researching a set of people and they’re all trying to figure out the same thing: How to make sense of their lives. Lovely stuff, true to complex, incredibly valuable science about complex, richly textured lives.
“California and Bust,” by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair California as a formerly developed country. Includes deftly rendered bicycle ride with former governor Schwarzenegger. Lewis is writing some of the best stuff out there right now.
***
Okay that was 5 and then some. But these I couldn’t’ leave out:
“The Promise,” by Joe Posnanski, at Joe Blogs Promises made, broken, and kept, variously, by Bruce Springsteen, the United States of America, and Posnanski’s dad. 4 stars easy, 5 if you love Bruce. And who doesn’t?
too many Daves, by David Quigg Blatant cheating, as this is a blog, and Quigg almost always writes very short posts But he’s reading long stuff, all good, and responding to it beautifully as writer and reader; almost no one gets so much done in so little space. If you harbor even a spark of literary love, he’ll fan it.
Disclosures: The Atavist and Nature published stories of mine this year, and Wired.com (actually a separate outfit from Wired the magazine) hosts my blog.
More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and all, in Spanish. “But don’t ask them that. If you do, they might get offended.”
The Mexican soccer team defeated America 4–2, a victory sweetened by the presence of a compound American marvel, Harvard-pedigreed, Hollywood-certified, flesh-made-celluloid, celluloid-made-flesh. They signed autographs, received party invitations, and posed for iPhone pictures with locals who examined the photos as soon as they got their phones back, finger-zooming in and out with awe of self, child-like, fleetingly possessed of the primitive wonder which ascribes photography directly to magic, and once inspired fear of Xerox machines, and keeps the millions wondering why they can’t stop staring at a Web site whose greatest debt will always be to Pavlov.
More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and all, in Spanish. “But don’t ask them that. If you do, they might get offended.”
The Mexican soccer team defeated America 4–2, a victory sweetened by the presence of a compound American marvel, Harvard-pedigreed, Hollywood-certified, flesh-made-celluloid, celluloid-made-flesh. They signed autographs, received party invitations, and posed for iPhone pictures with locals who examined the photos as soon as they got their phones back, finger-zooming in and out with awe of self, child-like, fleetingly possessed of the primitive wonder which ascribes photography directly to magic, and once inspired fear of Xerox machines, and keeps the millions wondering why they can’t stop staring at a Web site whose greatest debt will always be to Pavlov.
More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and all, in Spanish. “But don’t ask them that. If you do, they might get offended.”
The Mexican soccer team defeated America 4–2, a victory sweetened by the presence of a compound American marvel, Harvard-pedigreed, Hollywood-certified, flesh-made-celluloid, celluloid-made-flesh. They signed autographs, received party invitations, and posed for iPhone pictures with locals who examined the photos as soon as they got their phones back, finger-zooming in and out with awe of self, child-like, fleetingly possessed of the primitive wonder which ascribes photography directly to magic, and once inspired fear of Xerox machines, and keeps the millions wondering why they can’t stop staring at a Web site whose greatest debt will always be to Pavlov.
Elizabeth Warren’s admirers often refer to her as a grandmother from Oklahoma. This is technically true. It’s also what you might call posturing. Warren, 62, is a Harvard professor and perhaps the country’s top expert on bankruptcy law. Over the past four years she has managed to stoke a fervent debate over the government’s role in protecting American consumers from what she sees as the predatory practices of financial institutions, and she has positioned herself as the person to oversee a new federal agency to rewrite the rules of lending. Warren is a grandma from Oklahoma in roughly the same way Ralph Nader is a pensioner with a thing about cars.
Everyone at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was Jewish—and by “everyone” I mean that while Jews comprise 2 percent of the American population roughly every third person at the conference was Jewish. I met some kids from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a group of terrifyingly bright 20-year-olds, and quickly learned, to my lack of shock, that most of them were Jews. The business majors and the MBAers were Jews; one conference organizer, a Sloan student with a distinctively Irish name told me how glad he was I was writing this story, because clearly everyone there, himself included, was Jewish. The journalists covering the conference were Jews. And Mark Cuban—his family name was Chopininski—is Jewish, too. This matters.
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