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Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Story About Storytelling

In Conversation: Robert Silvers

Mark Danner | New York magazine | April 2013 | 28 minutes (7,063 words)

 

Nicholas Jackson is the digital director at Pacific Standard, and a former digital editor at Outside and The Atlantic.

These year-end lists tend to be like the Academy Awards in that only work released during the last couple of months of the year are remembered well enough to make the cut. That’s a good thing. Sure, I’d like to recall every great quotation I read in 2013, every delightful turn of phrase. But it’s better that I can’t. It means, like movies, that there’s more work I would consider worthy of my time being produced than I could possibly make time for, and plenty that I did make the time for that’s already been displaced in my mind by just the latest of the hundreds of stories I read this year. So, I cheated. I went back through some archives to jog my memory and pulled up this comprehensive interview with Bob Silvers to mark the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books. Silvers has had his hands on several big pieces this past year (must-read stories by Zadie Smith and Nathaniel Rich; something about the favelas of Brazil; I vaguely recall an Oliver Sacks essay on, of course, memory), but ask any editor and I bet most would tell you that he’s influenced every piece on these round-ups … and any others you’ve read over the past five decades. This is a story about stories: How we make them, and why.

Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

animals-thrOur story picks of the week, featuring the Hollywood Reporter, New York magazine, Wired, Oxford American and the New York Review of Books, with a guest pick by Teddy Worcester.

How a Bubble Sheet Killed Learning

“‘There was this transformation of the whole culture—and curriculum,’ Andrea says. ‘I could see it mostly through the homework. It really looked like test prep. There were even ­bubble sheets.’ Oscar had more than a year before the third-grade test, when students start taking the New York State ­English ­Language Arts (ELA) and math tests—but the thinking goes that the sooner they learn how to take big standardized tests and the sooner any skill shortfalls can be dealt with, the better they’ll do in the long run. Oscar, however, had a paradoxical reaction. ‘His interest in school,’ says Andrea, ‘took this immediate plummet.’”

“She felt as if her son had been caught in a vortex: The school starts teaching Oscar differently, he loses whatever spark of curiosity inspired him to want to learn, and the school punishes him for it. He made it to third grade, but by then, test prep had come to dominate his classroom. Grand plans for science experiments and hands-on interactive projects, Andrea says, ‘would just kind of fizzle out and disappear because there wasn’t time to do them.’”

Robert Kolker, in New York magazine, on parents opting their children out of standardized tests. Read more on education from the Longreads Archive.

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The Birth of the Modern American Suburb

“The land Levitt found was in the largely empty farmland of Hempstead, Long Island, and Levitt amassed thousands of acres. His timing could not have been more perfect. Sixteen million G.I.’s were returning from the war, many needing a place to live. There were abundant hard-luck stories of couples living with parents, sleeping in back rooms, or, worse, in tents, boxcars, or the fuselages of old Army bombers. What’s more, the federal government had passed the G.I. Bill, which, among other benefits, gave ex-soldiers access to cheap loans. Perhaps most important, the banks were rolling out a product that was just as world-changing as the smartphone: the 30-year fixed mortgage. It made buying a house, which, for most Americans, had been a carrot on a stick—always chased but hardly ever caught—suddenly seem like no big deal.

“Levitt broke ground in Hempstead in 1947. His method was the one he’d pioneered in Norfolk—the modern suburb, with its rows of cookie-cutter sameness, is, like so many modern institutions, a relic of the Second World War. He laid the building materials every hundred feet, the 27 teams with their 27 tasks moving across the waste. It took thirteen minutes to dig a foundation. Then came walls, the roof, a refrigerator. By 1948, the Levitts were finishing 30 houses a day. One day in 1949, Levitt wrote 1,400 contracts. He worked the desk himself, says Simone. ‘He was a humble man. As brilliant as he was, he would stand there, take the hundred dollars, thank the customers, and wish them good luck.’ Four years after breaking ground, the last house in the development sold—number 17,447. By then, the village had changed its name from Island Trees to Levittown.”

Rich Cohen (New York magazine) on Simone Levitt, the wife of Bill Levitt, father of the modern American suburb. Read more profiles from the Longreads Archive.

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The Winners and Losers in the Book Business

“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

Daniel Menaker, in a New York magazine excerpt from his memoir, My Mistake, on life in publishing.

Read the story

Photo: gpoo, Flickr

How Other Political Reporters Felt About the Late Michael Hastings

“While Hastings would later speak of having received ‘the Lindsay Lohan Mean Girls’ treatment from other political journalists, of the half-dozen fellow reporters on the charter with whom I spoke, all expressed affection for Hastings. ‘The truth is he was parachuting in to do something all of us wish we can do and can’t,’ says one. ‘When someone comes in and says he’s not going to play by the rules, it touches a nerve, but also there’s respect.’”

Benjamin Wallace, in New York magazine, on the life and death of reporter Michael Hastings, and the conspiracy theories that have arisen since. Read more from Hastings.

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Vanity Fair, The Rebirth

Longreads Pick

Condé Nast executives, editors, designers and writers look back on the 1983 relaunch of Vanity Fair, which originally stopped publishing in 1936 and had been folded into Vogue:

As word leaked out that the company was pumping more than $10 million into the magazine, the sniping began. An enterprising Chicago Tribune reporter tracked down Clare Boothe Luce, who had been a V.F. managing editor in the 30s, and asked her what she made of the relaunch. “I do wish the new magazine could be as wonderful as the old,” she said, “but I don’t see how it can.” New York magazine also weighed in, long before the debut, with a skeptical piece reporting that Locke’s job was in jeopardy. Newsweek joined the fun, too, calling the prototype “aggressively ugly” and averring that there was an “uncertainty about Vanity Fair’s editorial focus.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 15, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,759 words)

On Publicly Grieving

“Stories circulate among the 26 of those who, in stabs at empathy, have said entirely the wrong thing: ‘Move on,’ or ‘This too shall pass,’ or ‘Will you hug me for me?’ The rest of the town, even those very close to the grieving, find themselves on eggshells, constantly worried they’ll misspeak, or misstep. Nelba Márquez-Greene can feel how much other people in town want her to be better. ‘We are the face of every parent’s nightmare,’ she says. But nothing makes her feel better. ‘I feel terrible, and I’m giving myself permission to say I feel terrible.’ She is a tiny, neat person, with a dispassionate way of talking, and is working for Sandy Hook Promise now, busily giving keynote speeches and a TED talk, but the idea that her work life might console her, or ease her pain, is laughable. It’s as if, she tells me evenly, you needed a liver transplant and someone came up and gave you a heart.”

Lisa Miller, New York magazine, on the grieving families in Newtown, 11 months later—and the complications that have arisen from the money and sympathy that poured in from around the world.

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Photo: billmorrow, Flickr

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A Longreads Guest Pick: Rebecca Hiscott on Mark Harris's Profile of Director Spike Jonze

Rebecca Hiscott is a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable.

I’m still marveling at ‘Him and Her’ by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix’s stony-faced cameo on the cover — and an eye into the making of Her, the quasi-sci-fi movie that aspires to be ‘a cautionary meditation on romance and technology’ and ‘a subtle exploration of the weirdness, delusiveness, and one-sidedness of love.’ The narrative follows Jonze through the process of writing, shooting and editing the film, and his subsequent efforts to correct a cinematic gamble that hasn’t paid off. Harris’s lush prose mimics Jonze’s aesthetic as a filmmaker, which the author describes as ‘disarmingly sincere, and melancholy in surprising places”; the article also has an evocative opening scene that perfectly captures the spirit of the film and its enigmatic director.

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