The Couple Who Started the Textbook Wars



Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday, and it’s been a thrill to watch this community grow since we introduced this service and Twitter hashtag in 2009. Thank you to everyone who participates, whether it’s as a reader, a publisher, a writer—or all three. And thanks to the Longreads Members who have made it possible for us to keep going.
To celebrate four years, here’s a rundown of some of our most frequent #longreads contributors, and some of their recent recommendations:
#1 – @matthiasrascher
The Master of Nasty – A homage to Raymond Chandler. j.mp/12wOiOZ #literature #longreads
— Matthias Rascher (@matthiasrascher)
#2 – @hriefs
“A House on the River.” @esquiremag #longreads on how Bill Petit put his life back together after losing his family bit.ly/ZhAM1U
— Howard Riefs (@hriefs)
#3 – @roamin
In John They Trust / Smithsonian Magazine ow.ly/khqNh #longreads #cargocults
— roamin (@roamin)
#4 – @jalees_rehman
Now, Without Any Further Ado, We Present … The Digital Public Library of America! #longreads @dpla fb.me/23mV5kHft
— Jalees Rehman (@jalees_rehman)
#5 – @LAReviewofBooks
“Jonathan Rosenbaum is one of our keenest observers of contemporary ‘film culture.’” | Goodbye, Cinema: owl.li/kap1b #longreads
— LA Review of Books (@LAReviewofBooks)
#6 – @TheAtlantic
‘Going to the woods is going home’: John Muir on his beloved Yosemite Valley theatln.tc/11eVFYo #EarthDay #longreads
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic)
#7 – @nxthompson
Dick Cheney and the bureaucracy vs a satellite and climate science. @popsci #longreads popsci.com/technology/art…
— Nicholas Thompson (@nxthompson)
#8 – @faraway67
On the Brink of Extinction: A Closer Look at Endangered Species bit.ly/10HzpHP #extinction #environment #longreads
— Barbara Mack (@faraway67)
#9 – @PocketHits
“The Tyranny of the Taxi Medallions.” @priceonomics bit.ly/120veIK #MostSaved #longreads
— PocketHits (@PocketHits)
#10 – @legalnomads
Your Sunday reading, all in one place: top 5 #longreads of the week: bit.ly/13IAxzt
— Jodi Ettenberg (@legalnomads)
#11 – @brainpicker
Wow. Mapping marine ecologist Bob Paine’s academic family tree j.mp/XeBMxt From @edyong209‘s ace #longreads j.mp/XeBNS9
— Maria Popova (@brainpicker)
#12 – @LineHolm1
Pulitzer winner 2013, feature writing is @nytimes‘ “Snow Fall” – recommended #longreads pulitzer.org/works/2013-Fea…
— Line Holm Nielsen (@LineHolm1)
#13 – @Guardian
.@guardiang2: Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people gu.com/p/3e298/tw #longreads
— The Guardian (@guardian)
#14 – @stonedchimera
When an American learnt by spending a summer at an Indian Call Center bit.ly/QDnA1m . Essential reading from Mother Jones. #Longreads
— Sairam Krishnan (@stonedchimera)
#15 – @MosesHawk
An anthropologist joins the ranks of the under appreciated sanitation workers of New York City. bit.ly/15Cupsp #longreads
— Moses Hawk (@MosesHawk)
#16 – @James_daSilva
Unearthing the Complete and Total Disaster That Was ‘The Chevy Chase Show’ | Splitsider splitsider.com/2013/04/uneart… #longreads
— James daSilva (@James_daSilva)
#17 – @chrbutler
Inspiring WIRED profile of Primer director Shane Carruth: bit.ly/ZbkgdJ #longreads
— Christopher Butler (@chrbutler)
#18 – @eugenephoto
Enjoying this: how to spend 47 hours on a train and not go crazy. nytimes.com/2013/03/03/mag… #travelreads #longreads
— Eugene (@eugenephoto)
#19 – @jaredbkeller
All is not well at the @todayshow nym.ag/ZNIUoh #longreads tip @mediagazer
— Jared Keller (@jaredbkeller)
#20 – @morgank
True Crime: How a Mysterious Beaumont, Texas, Murder Was Solved | Vanity Fair vnty.fr/ZI48bb #longreads
— Potato Crypts (@morgank)
#21 – @dougcoulson
Curses! Archduke Franz Ferdinand and His Astounding Death Car | Past Imperfect blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/0… via @smithsonianmag #longreads
— Doug Coulson (@dougcoulson)
#22 – @LaForgeNYT
Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012? | New York Magazi… lgrd.co/OzjhpQ #longreads
— Follow @Palafo (@LaForgeNYT)
#23 – @stephen_abbott
Let’s Get Physical: The Psychology of Effective Workout Music by @ferrisjabr scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id… via @aeonmag cc @biobeatslive #longreads
— Stephen Abbott (@stephen_abbott)
#24 – @venkatananth
<opInside Ajmal Amir Kasab’s mind. “What turned a village boy to a cold-blooded killer” #longreads by @barneyhenderson – telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews…
— Venkat Ananth (@venkatananth)
#25 – @weegee
#deepinterviews called “liberating the essay.” Really called “Written for Kevin” bit.ly/ZyQsbn #longreads (cc: @kimthedork)
— Kevin Smokler (@Weegee)
A New York media legend, exposed:
“At 58, Kaplan is the editorial director of Fairchild Fashion Media, a Condé Nast family that includes Women’s Wear Daily and Footwear News. He has an aging movie star’s smooth, youthful face and, like a star, the capacity to fill a room with outsized gawky charm. When he’s feeling gregarious, which he often is, he dons a barroom grin and says such things as There ya go! and Have a ball! (The latter is the subject of much speculation among Kaplan’s past associates, some of whom experience it as a kind of hex; ‘”Have a ball!” half the time meant “Go fuck yourself,”‘ former Observer staffer Choire Sicha explains.) His verbal style includes a lot of thoughtful pauses, during which he lingers on conjunctions like somebody leaning on a walkup buzzer (aaaaaaaaaaaaaand). And when there’s irony to be detected—there always is around New York—he has a way of registering it mostly in his right eyebrow, which lifts and swags abruptly like a kite in wind. Sometimes, though, extroversion fails him and a warier, more fretful Kaplan shows through. At those moments, the blue eyes go distant, the brow knits, and the mouth droops to an enigmatic grimace. It is the face of a guy seeing something ominous from a great distance, and it gives him an aspect of quiet gravity, of deep worry roiling beneath the neat gray hair.”
A couple’s personal experience dealing with Texas’s new sonogram law, which requires a woman to have a sonogram and hear a doctor describe her child before moving forward with an abortion:
“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.
See also: “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy.” — Ruth Padawer, New York Times, Aug. 20, 2011

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a writer for Wired UK, Design Observer, and The Atlantic, among others, and an MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow, spending far, far too much time curating the web’s interestingness as @brainpicker.
***
I’ve always found reading, writing, and thinking to be so tightly interwoven that, when done correctly, they become indistinguishable from one another. Like architecting your life and your social circle, architecting your mind’s life is an exercise in immersing yourself in an eclectic mix of viewpoints and directions of thought. In that way, longform is like the most intense of friendships, where the time dedication and the active choice to show up far eclipse the noncommittal acquaintanceship of soundbite culture. A healthy longform diet must thus include something that breaks your heart, something that gives you hope, something by someone you find a little self-righteous, something by someone with whom you’re a little bit in love—and, ideally, the inability to fully tell which is which. With this in mind, here are the five finest pieces I laid eyes and neurons on this year, which did for me all of the above, and then some.
***
“Mark Twain in Love,” by Ron Powers (Smithsonian)
A bittersweet story about Samuel Clemens, but really about something profoundly and universally human: love, timing, and the often tragic misalignment of the two. And in that story lies a subtle reminder that unless we pursue the heart’s desire with complete clarity of purpose and intention, we’re left forever playing out those could’ve-beens, as Twain did, in our dreams.
“Thus it was Sam’s stubbornness that foreclosed any further encounter with Laura Wright. Yet they did meet, time and again, over the years, in Clemens’ dreams. And dreams, Samuel Clemens came to believe, were as real as anything in the waking world.”
“Post-Artifact Books & Publishing,” by Craig Mod
As both a marginalia obsessive and a hopeless bibliophile torn between the love of books and the mesmerism of the web, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of books—or, more accurately, about the function books have traditionally served as a medium for arguing and teasing out ideas of significance and cultural gravity. Hardly anyone fuses a bibliophile’s profound respect for books with a designer’s sensitivity to the reading experience and a digital entrepreneur’s visionary bravery more fluidly, articulately, and thoughtfully than Craig Mod.
“Manifested properly, each new person who participates in the production of digital marginalia changes the reading experience of that book for the next person. Analog marginalia doesn’t know other analog marginalia. Digital marginalia is a collective conversation, cumulative stratum.”
“How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)
Gopnik is one of my favorite nonfiction authors working today. And this is no ordinary book review of what eventually became my favorite history book of 2011—it paints a riveting connect-the-dots portrait of information’s history and future through such fascinating and surprisingly related subjects as African drum languages, the Morse Code, Marshall McLuhan, and Google.
“Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.”
“Lessons According to Salt,” by Liz Danzico
There is something magnificent and magical that happens when we open ourselves up to the poetry of possibility—of “overlookedness,” if you will. (Lesson #1.)
“The saltbox itself as an object is unremarkable. Alone, it communicates nothing. Says nothing about its role. Its intention. Its history as a gift born out of a romance between my maternal grandparents. Says nothing of its possibilities.
But add people, and it becomes a central iterative device. The license to change, to iterate, to test, to add, to make, to make over, to create (clearly, with food). It gives license and latitude to stray from what has been written (recipes) for those too shy to do. Therefore, it gives strength. It gives iterative powers to those not comfortable with version control. With its subtlety comes comfort in change.
One might say the saltbox, and access to it, is magic.”
“Wikipedia And The Death of The Expert,” by Maria Bustillos (The Awl)
Picking just one of Maria Bustillos’ many brilliant pieces was excruciating, but this meditation on the future of authorship, content curation, and intellectual innovation is simply exquisite, and tickles my own restlessness about the changing currencies and sandboxes of authorship in the age of information overload.
“All these elements—the abandonment of ‘point of view,’ the willingness to consider the present with the same urgency as the past, the borrowing ‘of wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either,’ the desire to understand the mechanisms by which we are made to understand—are cornerstones of intellectual innovation in the Internet age. In particular, the liberation from ‘authorship’ (brought about by the emergence of a ‘hive mind’) is starting to have immediate implications that few beside McLuhan foresaw. His work represents a synthesis of the main precepts of New Criticism with what we have come to call cultural criticism and/or media theory.”
***
See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >
Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook.

Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a high school in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter. He is also a longtime contributor to the #Longreads community and an author for Open Culture.
***
• “The Possibilian: David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain,” by Burkhard Bilger (The New Yorker)
This fascinating article describes how neuroscientist David Eagleman combines different sciences such as physics, psychology and linguistics with the study of the human brain to arrive at a better understanding of time perception. His latest collaboration with Brian Eno confirmed his theory that “time is a rubbery thing.”
• “My Summer at an Indian Call Center,” by Andrew Marantz (Mother Jones)
The title is pretty self-explanatory. Andrew Marantz gives a vivid account of how an Indian “culture trainer” taught him how to act Australian so that he could work in a call center in Delhi. “Lessons learned: Americans are hotheads, Australians are drunks—and never say where you’re calling from.”
A wonderful tribute to Scorsese’s monumental achievements in the film industry. Also: Marty talks about why he ventured into the 3-D world with his new movie Hugo.
• “Banishing consciousness: the mystery of anesthesia,” by Linda Geddes (New Scientist)
This is one of my favorites from this year. Linda takes us on a fascinating journey through medicine and neuroscience to find out what we currently know about how anaesthesia actually works.
• “Face to face with Radovan Karadzic,” by Ed Vulliamy (The Guardian)
My last pick is also the most recent one, from December, and it is not an easy read. Along with an ITN film crew, Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy uncovered the terrifying truth of Serbian-run concentration camps in the Bosnian war. While former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic stands trial at The Hague, Vulliamy is called as a witness—and finds himself cross-examined in a private, close encounter with the man accused of masterminding genocide.
See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >
Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook.
It is not that Kagan is silent at oral argument. She is more talkative than her bow-tied predecessor, Justice John Paul Stevens, who tended to sit quietly through most of each session before gently asking, “May I ask a question?” Kagan asked ten questions on her very first day out last fall. But she actually asked the second-fewest questions this year. Only Thomas spoke less, as in not at all, and the questions Kagan has asked were incisive and quite brief. As one Court observer put it to me this spring after oral argument: “Sotomayor talks. Kagan listens.”
Gerald Marzorati, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine, is an Assistant Managing Editor of the Times
“Early Innings,” by Roger Angell. (The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1992) (sub. required)
America’s baseball belletrist here writes of how he came to love the game.
“The Silent Season of a Hero,” by Gay Talese. (Esquire, July 1966)
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? The author finds him in retirement, uneasily.
“The Streak of Streaks,” by Stephen Jay Gould. (The New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 1988)
More DiMaggio, this from the renowned paleontologist and ponderer of evolution—contemplating, here, what it means to have a hot streak (i.e., to cheat death).
“Final Twist of the Drama,” by George Plimpton. (Sports Illustrated, April 22, 1974)
The boyishly witty inventor of field-level participatory journalism here is a careful observer—of everything surrounding Henry Aaron’s home-run that broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime record.
“Coach Fitz’s Management Theory,” by Michael Lewis. (The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2004)
A piece I coaxed Michael to write—about his high-school baseball coach, and much, much more.
Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City?
The third major subgenre of the popular Detroit narrative is a backlash against the pornographic excesses of the Lament and is, at best, an attempt to find a new definition of urban vitality. The Utopians are well-meaning defenders of the city’s possibilities. Locally, they are often politically active, often young, and, it should be noted, often white. This class of Detroit story chronicles Detroit’s possibilities, with a heavy emphasis on art and urban agriculture on abandoned land. It can also take the form of human-interest stories about local entrepreneurs persevering amidst the destruction. Toby Barlow’s series of New York Times articles on bicycling and one-hundred-dollar houses in the city anticipated a gentrification-fuelled Detroit Renaissance that most honest observers must admit will never come. (If Detroit is really so full of possibilities, why do so many of the possibilities so closely resemble a cut-rate version of what western Brooklyn already looks like?)
Despite their differences, the common problem with many of the Lamenters and Utopians is that both see Detroit as an exception to the contemporary United States, rather than as one of its exemplary places. Detroit figures as either a nightmare image of the American Dream, where equal opportunity and abundance came to die, or as an updated version of it, where bohemians from expensive coastal cities can have the one-hundred-dollar house and community garden of their dreams.
By John Patrick Leary, Guernica Magazine
Paul Ford was an editor at Harper’s Magazine; now he’s wandering around, looking at stuff and writing computer programs.
***
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.