Save the date! On Sept. 24, Longreads is presenting a night of live storytelling with the theme of “Change: stories about change and the stories that have changed us.” Our storytellers include:
It’s easy to get distracted while reading about Airbnb. First, the listings themselves range from luxurious to quaint, and if you have any sort of upcoming vacation planned … well, let’s say it’s a timesuck. Double if you have I-want-to-see-where-you-live voyeuristic tendencies. Second, Airbnb is giving away $1 million to customers who document their random acts of kindness, which is a hell of a headline and a bit of an oxymoron. Airbnb’s detractors are firm and its fans are rabid; Its prices, tempting. I’m planning a trip to Seattle in the summer—we’ll see where I end up sleeping. Here are five pieces about Airbnb hosts, the company’s founders, its guests and its implications for city politics.
Two idealistic art students founded Airbnb, and business boomed once the recession hit. But they didn’t foresee backlash from New York politicians or affordable housing advocates. Read more…
This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive. Read more…
[Not single-page] A trip to a Croatian vineyard to see Bob Benmosche, the former CEO of MetLife who came out of retirement to run AIG post-bailout:
Next, Benmosche went to rally the troops at Financial Products in Wilton, Connecticut, who were still salty about Liddy’s appearance in front of Congress and the law subsequently passed by the House taxing 90 percent of AIG pay (it never made it any further). ‘I want you to understand that what happened will not happen again,’ he told them. Then he flew to Houston, where he spoke at a town-hall meeting with 3,000 employees. After that, he headed back to Croatia. ‘It was the first Zinfandel harvest,’ he explains.
He’d informed Treasury when he’d taken the job that he needed to be in Croatia for two weeks in August, for the celebration accompanying the inaugural reaping of his vines. But they were not prepared for the image of Benmosche that flashed on their screens two weeks after he’d been hired to run one of the most troubled companies in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, showing off his villa while a British-accented voice-over noted its ‘palatial’ proportions and queried, in serious-sounding tones, whether the CEO should be so overtly relaxed.
‘I mean, I had just hired this guy,’ Millstein says now, choking back the slightly hysterical laugh that tends to bubble out of him when he talks about Benmosche. ‘And there he is, in his shorts and his polo shirt. It was just …’ he trails off. ‘You couldn’t make it up.’
[Not single-page] Tory Burch’s ex-husband Christopher Burch has a new fashion line called C. Wonder. But some in her circle wonder if it draws a little too much inspiration from her own brand:
To Chris Burch, C. Wonder is the realization of a long-held dream to provide low-to-mid-price retail in a luxury setting. To Tory Burch, he might as well have erected a giant lacquered middle finger in the front window, directly facing the orange-lacquered doors of her eponymous store a few blocks away. “It’s a rip-off, Tory knows it, and everyone knows it,” says someone we will refer to as a Friend of Tory. “The interior is blatantly plagiarized. Then there’s the snap bracelets. The wallets. The buttons … ”
Capital New York covers last night’s “Behind the Longreads” event with New York magazine, and tells writer Dan P. Lee’s story about how he reported his “Travis the Menace” story:
Lee, in a striped grey-and-black hoodie and a mop of dirty blonde hair that matched his five o’clock shadow, was participating in a panel discussion convened by the longform journalism aggregator Longreads. Sitting on a riser beside fellow New York writers Jessica Pressler and Wesley Yang, as well as the magazine’s editor in chief, Adam Moss (Lee’s story editor, David Haskell, was sipping a beer on the sidelines), the former newspaper reporter gave the hundred or so assembled Longreaders the story behind the story of “Travis the Menace.”
It began when Lee saw the Nov. 11, 2009 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” during which Nash revealed her disfigured face for the first time.
Even though the story had already been widely covered in the press, “I felt like there was still something else there,” he said. “It was the most compelling thing I had ever seen in my entire life.”
Reminder: This is next Wednesday! “Behind the Longreads” at Housing Works in NYC with New York magazine’s Dan P. Lee, Jessica Pressler, Wesley Yang and Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss.
See the latest from our community’s Top 5 lists celebrating the year’s best nonfiction and fiction. Includes picks from Jessica Pressler, Jenna Wortham, Steve Silberman, Matthias Rascher, Lev Grossman, Doree Shafrir, Alexander Chee, Elliott Holt, and more.
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!
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