Search Results for: Internet

Atlantic Cover Story: Mind vs. Machine

Atlantic Cover Story: Mind vs. Machine

I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait

Longreads Pick

If you Google hard enough, you can locate a thread deep within the Internet that was posted to the alt.sports.hockey.nhl.phila-flyers Usenet newsgroup on March 22, 2000. “Where oh where is Katie Baker??” reads the subject line. “What the hell happened to her?” says the post. The responses are mercifully cryptic. “Detention,” wrote one man. “Isn’t she trapped in Cambridge?” cracked another. “Harvard has a high school? :)” responded someone with the username Nastyflyersgirl. “Wow,” wrote one lady called Starr. “No one is safe with any secrets here. Like they say, the truth is bound to come out sooner or later.”

Source: Deadspin
Published: Jan 27, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,284 words)

Meet the Foreskin Restoration Movement

Meet the Foreskin Restoration Movement

The Foreskin Renaissance

Longreads Pick

Tally is short for Tallywacker, a British nickname for penis. It is also the nom de Internet of a 55-year-old, heterosexual, happily married attorney in Tennessee who is at the vanguard of the foreskin restoration movement. With evangelical zest, he shares his story, and a sequential series of photographs of his penis, to thousands of private members and hundreds of daily visitors to his websites, RestoringForeskin.org and RestoringTally.com.

Published: Jan 18, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,707 words)

Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data

Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data

The Gleeful Contrarian

The Gleeful Contrarian

The Gleeful Contrarian

Longreads Pick

A 2000 interview with Denis Dutton, founder of the Arts & Letters Daily site. (Dutton died Dec. 28, 2010.) “The site is intended to expand the reader’s sphere of interest. It’s a grave mistake in publishing, whether you’re talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago Bill Gates was boasting that we’ll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let’s expand ourselves intellectually.”

Source: Salon
Published: Nov 3, 2000
Length: 11 minutes (2,919 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.

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.

Alex Pappademas: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Alex Pappademas is a staff writer for GQ

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Rules: Nothing not published this year, nothing from GQ, because I work there, and—in the spirit of the assignment—nothing I didn’t first read on my iPhone. (And I realize now, having done this whole thing, that everything on the main list is from a print-based publication, which should not be taken as some kind of a Statement. I still love you, Internet!)

Michael Kruse, Lonely, Stressed and Frustrated: Inside the Mind of the Pinellas Monkey (St. Petersburg Times, May 16, 2010)

Best celebrity profile I read this year, and it’s a write-around. About a monkey. “People who are alone tend to make self-destructive decisions. They might drink too much or not eat right. They start giving up. And the monkey here, he explains, isn’t all that different.”

Mark Harris, The Red Carpet Campaign (New York, 2/7/10)

Reported essay about awards-season swirl and how the pseudo-event sausage of the Academy Awards gets made. The gist: “A good Oscar narrative makes voters feel that, by writing a name on a ballot, they’re completing a satisfying plotline. Only a few of these stories are effective, and every campaign season, movies scramble to own them.” Sprawling yet surgical; managed to make me care, in February, about a subject I’m usually utterly post-give-a-shit about by Thanksgiving.

Rob Tanenbaum, The Playboy Interview: John Mayer (Playboy, March 2010)

Yeah, this is the one where Mayer rendered himself culturally leprous with a few spectacularly ill-advised comments about African-Americans and his weiner— but it’s also the best Q&A with a rock personality I read this year. Speaking as somebody who does this for a living: It’s hard to get something interesting out of a subject who’s reluctant or dumb, but it’s actually way harder to take a quote machine like Mayer— who’s historically used compulsive self-disclosure and meta-acknowledgements of what he knows about the interview process to completely run the table in these situations— somewhere he doesn’t want to go. And, uh, obviously, that’s what happened.

Chris Jones, Roger Ebert: The Essential Man (Esquire, February 2010)

I spent an embarrassing amount of time—like, months—working on a snakebit-from-the-beginning Ebert profile for GQ five years ago. It never ran, mostly because it sucked. Sucked on draft 1, sucked worse on draft 18. (Like Rog once said about certain reviews: “The bad ones take forever.”) So I was all ready to hate this Ebert story just for existing and appearing in a magazine and reminding me of how spectacularly I blew it in 2005—but I didn’t, because it’s so goddamn good it turned off the part of my brain that hates people for being better than me. That part where Ebert gets mad at Disney’s copyright police for taking down YouTube videos of him and Siskel, and because he can’t yell, he makes the font bigger and 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, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.” Holy fucking shit.

Joe Hagan, The Return of Governor Moonbeam, And Other Hallucinations From The Golden State (New York, October 10, 2010)

Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman contest the California narrative as the state, fiscally gut-shot by the housing collapse, tumbles broke and stoned into the sea; Hagan weaves Jerry’s free-association and Schwarzenegger’s puny-humans ranting and Meg Whitman’s total carpetbagging bullshit in and out of a bunch of elegant set pieces—the Hyatt-ballroom rally, the pot dispensary, David Boies’ beach house. The obvious comparison to make when you’re talking about a story where a writer tries to comprehend weed-hazy apocalyptic California is Joan Didion, but the real bookend for this one—culturally, decade-wise, whatever—is the series of dispatches Hank Stuever filed from L.A. and Sacramento back in 2003, during the nutsoid recall election that led to Schwarzenegger taking office in the first place. (They’re collected in his book OFF RAMP as one essay, “Recallifornia”; the story about Gary Coleman is here. Read those and Joe’s story back to back, groove on the paradox of Californian perma-decline.)

Honorable mentions, aka “I could have done 15 of these”:

Jay Caspian Kang, The High Is Always The Pain and the Pain Is Always the High (The Morning News, 10/8/10), which I read after everybody else put it on their Top 5 lists, so I’m not counting it, because totally arbitrary rules are rules.

Sean Witzke, Emma Peel Sessions 39 – ‘Have you seen the Lady From Shanghai? Orson Welles… that one makes no sense’ (supervillain.wordpress.com, 7/5/10)

Molly Lambert, In Which We Eagerly Await Aaron Sorkin’s Friend Request (thisrecording.com, 10/7/10)

Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17dots, 8/5/10)

Mary HK Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper, On ‘New Moon’: ‘Teenage Female Desire Manifest’ (The Awl, 11/20/10)

Oh, and it’s from 2009, but: Chris Stangl, Ghost Train: The Lost Pauline Kael Review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) (The Exploding Kinetoscope, 7/7/09)