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!
I didn’t follow the great Charlie Sheen meltdown of spring 2011. But I read every word of Roseanne Barr’s Sheen-inspired treatise on sitcom fame, in which she opens a window onto the warped and warping world of celebrity. It was a brilliant assignment, sharply executed and highly entertaining.
This is about the most exhilarating piece of business writing I have ever read, mostly thanks to Lewis’s summary of the trope of shit in German culture and its relation to the European financial crisis, which I found both hilarious and totally plausible. It was like stumbling into a graduate seminar on formalist readings of macroeconomics textbooks. I mean that in a really good way.
There’s nothing flashy or attention-seeking about Ken Auletta’s profile of Jill Abramson; it makes my top five because I found it fascinating to watch a picture of her emerge from the figure she cuts in the workplace. It emerges slowly—you have to wade through a lot of meetings—but Auletta was smart to go for inspirational at the outset: as a woman in publishing, I felt invested in Abramson’s rise and in the way she’s cultivated authority, intelligence and ambition.
We all read a ton about Steve Jobs in the days after his death. Then Mona Simpson’s eulogy came along, reinvented the Jobs memoriam and blew the competition away. It was elegant, personal and lovingly attentive to detail—a tribute perfectly fitted to the man it honored. He was very lucky to have a writer for a sister.
I grew up in Cincinnati, back when WKRP was on the air and Jerry Springer was the mayor. It’s a city of in-betweens, and James Pogue’s rambling, evocative essay in n+1 captures its contradictions perfectly. I love the idea of a piece whose main goal is to take you somewhere else—in geography, in history and in memory.
This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but you usually don’t hear about it because the cruise lines keep it quiet. Ronson goes deep into the bizarre cruise culture as he tries to figure out what happened to Rebecca Coriam, who vanished from the Disney Wonder last March.
This story accomplished what seemed almost impossible, at least from an editor’s perspective: it made a compelling narrative out of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan. Even though OWS was being covered to death, this story—along with Bloomberg Businessweek’s own fine contribution, Drake Bennett’s profile of David Graeber—found a new angle on it and made it fresh and compelling.
His piece about Iceland (“Wall Street on the Tundra”) is my favorite one he’s done about the global financial crisis, but Michael Lewis’s breakdown of the fiscal disaster that is California was his best in 2011. It really makes you think about the scary place we might be headed as a country, and the scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger is priceless.
This is a parody, and it isn’t terribly long, so I’m not sure that it qualifies. But it is hilarious, and perfectly illustrates much of what is wrong with the publishing business.
I’ve read a lot of great longreads this year, but I know that a longread is truly special when I become its biggest cheerleader. I’ll casually slip the story into conversations, teasing out some of its best bits to wheedle the person into reading it later on his or her own. Here are five of those stories:
Although this story wasn’t published in 2011, it was one of my favorites from the 2011 Pen/O. Henry Prize winners published in an anthology earlier this spring. The set up is terrific:
“Something wrong with the window,” he said. “Or not the window exactly but the number of windows.” She was smiling, waiting. “The problem is the number of windows. There’s one more window on the outside than on the inside.” He covered his mouth with his hand.
Most of our casual conversations occur over e-mail threads or instant messenger, rather than the telephone. This happens so frequently that we rarely go back to read those threads and chats. In this heartbreaking longread, a woman remembers a relationship through a series of chats archived in her Gmail inbox. It compelled me to go through my own archives.
Already on many people’s Top 5 lists, this is one of the most exciting stories I’ve read. Schmidle was able to make you feel like you are with the 23 Navy SEALs who were on the ground in Abbottabad the night we got Bin Laden, even though he was only able to piece the story together by interviewing a number of people directly involved in the raid. I love how he focused on all the minute details — including a bit where the White House ordered sandwich platters from Costco before turning the Situation Room into a war room.
I write about money for a living, so I read everything about the financial crisis. Michael Lewis is one of the best financial journalists of our time, and he has pointed out time and again how terrible countries and its people can be with money (the U.S. in “The Big Short,”Iceland in a V.F. longread published in April 2009, and Greece in a V.F. longread published in Oct. 2010). Lewis continues his “financial disaster tourism” with Ireland this year, and, once again, leaves us shaking our heads.
I know. JJS is clearly the Ryan Gosling of longreads this year. This essay was published last fall, but I didn’t get a chance to read it until I picked up Sullivan’s collections of essays, Pulphead. Sullivan recalls a time when he served as a houseboy for Andrew Lytle, a revered Southern author. The way Sullivan unfolds his story is just: magical. Other readers agree — the essay won a National Magazine Award in May.
The great thing about radio longreads — otherwise known as #audiofiles — is that producers get some poor intern to transcribe the entire broadcast so it doubles as a longread. I love the part where Terry and Jay-Z discuss the story behind “99 Problems” — really just the idea that Terry sat down to listen to Jay-Z’s records for this interview is perfect.
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.
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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.
2011 was a banner year for long-form journalism and storytelling on the web, and correlatively a time to appreciate people like Mark who have propelled the Longreads movement forward. I love how this site started as a hashtag on a soundbite-filled medium like Twitter, pulling away the noise to highlight the words and weightier pieces that engaged us all. It has never been easier to find something good to read.
And as I travel, I find myself connecting the dots between disparate countries or foods, drawing parallels within the stories I digest as I go. It’s extremely hard to whittle down the many fantastic pieces this year to a short list, but the pieces I’ve picked below are ones that had a significant impact, and are now baked into my memories of the places where they were read.
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1) The Man who Sailed His House (GQ): This piece could have been written matter-of-factly or reported as the news that it was at its base level: a man, lost at sea after Japan’s devastating tsunami, is finally rescued days later. Instead, Michael Paterniti’s beautiful prose turns this astonishing tale into the surreal, raising it above anything else I’ve read about Hiromitsu Shinkawa. Through the patchwork of photos from the tsunami and its vast scale of destruction, the sincere humanity of this story is not something you want to miss. [Read it in: Casablanca, Morocco]
2) In the New Gangland of El Salvador (New York Review of Books): I’ve been a fan of Alma Guillermoprieto’s ability to tell a heartbreaking story with grace for quite some time, and her longread about El Salvador is no exception. Returning to El Salvador after 30 years, the piece swings between descriptive travelogue and somber reporting, digging into the history of the country’s ferocious gangs and why they are so prevalent. [Read it in: Montreal, Canada]
3) The Possibilian (The New Yorker): I first discovered David Eagleman when I read Sum, 40 short stories about an imaginary afterlife. At times funny, at times sad and each packing a punch in a short two-page read, I’ve been foisting Sum on those learning English as the creativity and short chapters make it an ideal learning book. So it was fascinating to learn more about Eagleman and his own brush with death, how he has collected hundreds of stories like his, and how “they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down.” In Burkhard Bilger’s wonderful profile of the quirky neuroscientist, not only do we get insight into how and why Eagleman writes the way he does, but we learn about the philosophies behind his prose and how his own history naturally braids in, pushing him further to take risks beyond most of our comfort levels. [Read it in: Chiang Mai, Thailand]
4) Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert (The Awl): I have Wikipedia bookmarked on both mobile and laptops, and it’s an argument-solver, fact-checker (with a pinch of salt) and using the random article generator, a great way to learn about new things you had no idea existed. In her Awl piece, the talented Maria Bustillos discussed the pros and cons of the service, noting that “Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic.” Instead of being told how it is, you’re given the facts to make your own editorial decision. Great read. [Read it in: Bangkok, Thailand]
5) Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of an Octopus (Orion Magazine): One of the more unusual and vaguely discomfiting pieces of the year (“Am I really sympathizing with the brain of an octopus? Yes, yes I am”), Sy Montgomery’s loving investigation of animal we often eat but rarely personify was a wonder to read. Whether talking about the study of octopus intellect, the description of octopus behaviour or Montgomery’s awe as he spends time with a 40-pound giant Pacific octopus, I couldn’t put it down. I’ll never look at octopuses the same way again. [Read it in: Istanbul, Turkey]
Bonus reads (hard to pick only five!)
1) Breaking Caste (The Globe and Mail): Veteran journalist Stephanie Nolen reports on Sudha Varghese, the remarkable woman who built a school for the Dalit girls (India’s Untouchable caste), giving them new hope. Nolen’s writing style and obvious research make the piece that much more interesting to read and her background section on Varghese’s life gives the story an additional human connection. [Read it in: London, England]
2) When Irish Eyes are Crying (Vanity Fair): With Moneyball‘s marketing campaign in full force and Boomerang on the shelves, Michael Lewis is everywhere these days. However back in March when Vanity Fair published his longread on the Irish financial crisis, his buzz had yet to crescendo. The piece sets out the background and confluence of factors that led to the Irish economic crash, as well as some unpopular opinions on how it could have been avoided. Very interesting read. [Read it in: Mae Hong Son, Thailand]
3) My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant (The New York Times): Brave piece from Jose Antonio Vargas “coming out” as someone who has worked as a journalist and award-winning writer for years, all while hiding that he was not legally permitted to do so in the United States. Living this otherworld reality meant that Vargas went about his days in fear of being found out, something he had spent years trying to avoid. Vargas attributes his decision to share the true story after reading about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act. [Read it in: New York, NY]
Jessica Pressler is a writer for New York Magazine. See her recent stories here. (Pictured above, inexplicably, with New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2010.)
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Ok, so: There are no New York magazine articles in this Top Five, because I work there, and letting them in would clog up the list and might make for awkwardness at the office Christmas party, which is awkward enough already. None of these are by my friends, although Sarah Miller is a friend of a friend, John Jeremiah Sullivan and I once had an email correspondence that consisted entirely of sending each other links about animal attacks, and I profiled Michael Lewis this year, although I never heard from him after so maybe we’re enemies. Also, I limited myself to just one New Yorker article, because those people get enough attention.
There’s really no one other than Michael Lewis who can turn 13,000 words on the European debt crisis into an enjoyable read (If he doesn’t say so himself, ahem). He has an amazing ability to sort of ground these these ginormous, abstract events (Ireland somehow lost $34 billion Euros???) in reality and to bring characters to life, like with his description of the Irish chief regulator’s “insecure little mustache.”
Paul Haggis, what a badass. And Lawrence Wright, of course. You have to just sort of bow down to the reporting and the writing in this story, the image of the New Yorker fact checkers facing off against the Scientology bigwigs with their binders is just as awesome for me as the one of a group Scientologists ripping each other apart during a sick game of musical chairs.
Sarah Leal is the “hot-tub worthy” chick Ashton Kutcher hooked up with in San Diego and ultimately the first domino in the collapse of his marriage to Demi Moore, but that’s not why this Q&A with her is interesting. The interviewer manages to extract from her the details of the night she spent with Ashton in minute detail (“Then I had to pee..”) and it doesn’t feel airbrushed the way it can when a celebrity magazine has made promises to publicists or the subject. There’s enough moments of weird hilarity (WHY is the bodyguard wearing a priest outfit?) to kind of balance out the tawdriness, and there’s even an unexpectedly touching moment when Ashton described his life as “90% fake.” I feel like I learned more about him and his weird, lonely life than I would from a magazine profile of the man himself.
I guess it’s because of his book, but this year it kind of felt like everyone discovered the greatness of John Jeremiah Sullivan, because suddenly he is everywhere, and I think I speak for a lot of magazine writers when I say it kind of feels like your favorite indie band has become super-popular. Everyone went nuts over his Disney World story in the Times, but I’m picking the B-Side, which is a classic JJS, a 6,000 word piece that is kind of about nothing and everything all at once.
Lewis does his best to ignore what he calls “the noise.” “I’m sensitive enough to criticism that if I pay attention to it, it may make me a worse writer,” he says, maneuvering his car through the Berkeley Hills. “When I sit down to write, I like to think everybody’s going to love me,” he adds. “Or at least I don’t think anybody’s going to hate me. It’s pronoia, right, is that the word? Everybody’s out to love me, not everybody’s out to hate me? I think basically that way as I move through the world.”
The smart money says the U.S. economy will splinter, with some states thriving, some states not, and all eyes are on California as the nightmare scenario. After a hair-raising visit with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who explains why the Golden State has cratered, Michael Lewis goes where the buck literally stops—the local level, where the likes of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Vallejo fire chief Paige Meyer are trying to avert even worse catastrophes and rethink what it means to be a society.
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