Search Results for: New Yorker

“We all knew there was no hope for anything to get better in North Korea,’’ she told me. “Sometimes we’d say, ‘Hey, if we crossed the river we’d be in China, but there are too many soldiers.’ ’’ Song-hee also knew that, if she crossed the border, she could be picked up by the Chinese police and sent back to face sentencing in a labor camp. The customary term is anywhere from six months to three years. But her friend had a relative living in China, and contacts who knew the best places to cross. “I decided if I did not take this opportunity I might not have another,’’ Song-hee said.

“Nothing Left: Is North Korea Finally Facing Collapse?” (July 12, 2010) — Barbara Demick, The New Yorker

See the Longreads archive on North Korea

When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he’d say, “It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse, the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed above all others. Wodehouse was the Master. When we met for another lunch, one that lasted only five hours, he was all a-grin with pride as he handed me a newly minted paperback reissue of Wodehouse with “Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.” “Doesn’t get much better than that,” he said, and who could not agree?

“Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011.” — Christopher Buckley, The New Yorker

See also: “Trial of the Will.” Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair

5280 Magazine's Geoff Van Dyke: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Geoff Van Dyke is deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, and Men’s Journal.

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• “The Food at our Feet,” by Jane Kramer, The New Yorker

Kramer can almost make you smell and taste the stuff she’s picking: mint, asparagus, fennel, mushrooms. Plus, maybe my favorite lead sentence of the year: “I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes.”

• “The Kill Team,” by Mark Boal, Rolling Stone

The disturbing investigation into an Army unit in Afghanistan that was killing civilians for sport.

• “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” by Jonathan Franzen, New York Times

I kind of didn’t want to like this piece, but Franzen’s assessment of “consumer technology products,” and our fraught relationships with them, feels right on.

• “The Day that Damned the Dodgers,” by Lee Jenkins, Sports Illustrated

As a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan, it was heartbreaking to read this chronicle of how the Giants’ greatest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, have gone from one of the most respected organizations in sports to one of the most dysfunctional.

“What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?” by Edward Jay Epstein, The New York Review of Books

A fascinating investigation that suggests Dominique Strauss-Kahn was set up, perhaps even by people associated with French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

BONUS

Pretty much anything by Charles P. Pierce at Grantland, but especially his piece on the beginning of the end of NCAA sports and his unflinching essay on Jerry Sandusky and Penn State.

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“Dear Residents of Tivoli Garden,” the don had written. “I hope you are all fine and this letter reaches everyone in the best of health. As for me I’m doing all right and my health conditions are fine.” Coke thanked Tivoli for sending him postcards and said he was sorry for the pain of the past year. For the future, he looked to God. “My deepest sympathy and condolences goes out to the families who loss their love ones and to those that were injury… . When the community cry, I cry too.” One sentence could be construed as a warning: “Don’t let anyone mislead you to do anything that is not right in the sight of God.”

“A Massacre in Jamaica.” — Mattathias Schwartz, The New Yorker

Bethlehem Shoals: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Bethlehem Shoals is an editor at The Classical and the founder of FreeDarko.com.

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• “Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas,” Zach Baron, The Daily 

Hunter S. Thompson has a tendency to overshadow his subject matter, as if he invented the entire world in his own image, and this were a tenet of non-fiction. The dirty little secret of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that Las Vegas was, and is, pretty damn weird in its own right. It may have made Thompson, or at least his most famous work, as much as he made it. The Daily dispatches Zach Baron to Sin City, where he deftly balances archaeology and immersion. When it becomes impossible to separate the two, Baron just goes with it, exactly the kind of impulse that got Thompson into trouble in the first place—and made him something other than a mere egoist. (Part OnePart Two)

• “The History and Mystery of the High Five,” Jon Mooallem, ESPN Magazine

I’m not sure if Jon Mooallem’s cultural excavation of the high-five is a perfect piece of writing, but it pretty much epitomizes everything I think sports writing should do, or at least be allowed to do when the occasion demands it. This past week, David Remnick reviewed the new Howard Cosell biography. Before getting to Cosell, he made the case that sports are relevant because they overwhelm, overpower, and more or less preoccupy us. Sports make big noise; endless broadcast, commentary, and web opinion compel us to stick around indefinitely. It’s a grim vision of our relationship with games that, for many of us, are both a source of joy in themselves and anything but a closed system of stupid. Mooallem picks a fairly simple, if ubiquitous detail—one that connects the playing field to daily life, rather than forcing separation of imitation—and proceeds to chase down its origins, false leads and all. The high-five began in sports, but now belongs to us all. As it turns out, understanding the various creation myths behind it requires an acknowledgment that sports are never just what they seem. If sports envelope us, they do so as part of the big picture—not an alternative to it.  

• “Lonelyheart,” Kent Jones, Notebook

When a retrospective comes to New York, it’s time for the sharpest film writers to revisit old masters. This past summer, Robert Ryan got the treatment. I have a bad habit of vehemently disliking actors that any sane cinephile holds in high regard. I know them, I just can’t stand them. It always seems to be the ones who demand the deepest sympathy while unsettling audiences, anti-heroes whose heroism is a comfort to none. Ryan is one such outsider who invites no company, and Kent Jones’s piece—bloggy, to be sure, but vital and organized as any manicured feature—brought me that moment of conversion. The actor I couldn’t stand became an object of fascination; Jones acknowledges all that’s surface about Ryan, while honing in on a peculiar kind of pain that locates a leading man trapped inside the creep. As Jones observes, no one does alone like Robert Ryan. At that point, it’s no longer about our response, but his wooly brand of gravitas. 

• “The American Behind India’s 9/11—And How U.S. Botched Chances to Stop Him,” Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica & Frontline

I originally saw this story on Frontline, which led me to ask Mark if I could include a television program on this list, since longform non-fiction television was itself a dying cult. Luckily, all Frontline stories double as ProPublica features, so on a technicality, I can slide it onto my list. “The American Behind India’s 9/11—And How the U.S. Botched Chances to Stop Him” isn’t quite the same without the solemn voiceover and grainy footage of eighties Philadelphia and military surveillance tapes. But the story of David Coleman Headley epitomizes the new narrative of terrorism. Instead of something shadowy and exotic, it’s full of plot twists and evasions that turn familiarity into something inherently sinister. Headley’s mother founded the Khyber Pass, one of Philly’s main indie venues by the time I got there in the mid-nineties. I had no idea that the name referred to mama Serrill Headley’s mysterious time in the region, or that for a time, her son—drug runner, future informant and jihadist—managed the place. “It could happen anywhere” is chilling, if contrived; “it has roots in your backyard”, this piece’s tacit refrain, is about the process of us becoming them, a delineation that really can’t comfort us for much longer. 

• “A Murder Foretold,” David Grann, The New Yorker

I’m sure that half the known world included this David Grann banger on their list, but when making these picks, Grann is pretty much the five-hundred ton elephant in the room. 

Alexander Chee's Top 5 Longreads of 2011: #Fiction and #Nonfiction

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. (See more on his Longreads page.)

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My Top Fiction Longreads for 2011:

 Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2011: Beautiful, seemingly casual, smart and terrifying, it is the story of a man worried his child will grow up to be a killer. Gaitskill at her best.

• Justin Torres, “Reverting to a Wild State”, The New Yorker, August 1, 2011: What better could you hope for than a story that begins with a beautiful man in a diaper? And for money? 

• Lauren Groff’s “Above and Below”, The New Yorker (subscription required), June 13, 2011: A young woman who slides right out of the educated class into homelessness. 

• Deborah Eisenberg’s “Recalculating”, July 14, 2011, The New York Review of Books: If you hear people tell you about short stories that do what novels do, and you don’t believe it, read Eisenberg. This is one of those stories.

• Yang Sok-Il’s “In Shinjuku” at Granta Online, April 14, 2011: A rare glimpse of the life of a Japanese Korean from a writer who is largely unknown to us in the West for being under-translated.

My Top Nonfiction Longreads for 2011

• Porochista Khakpour’s “Camel Ride” at Guernica, Feb. 15, 2011: “I learned English through watching the Twilight Zone.” Porochista is a friend and also a favorite writer, and this, I think, is one of her best of the memoirs she is publishing.

• John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mr. Lytle” at the Paris Review is the record of an extraordinary apprenticeship. 

• Paul Ford’s “Facebook and the Epiphinator” at New York Magazine was a revelatory essay on Facebook’s impact on our lives but also our narratives. A lot of people try to write about “what Facebook means” but Paul really did it.

• Eileen Myles’ “Being Female”, at The Awl: ”When I think about being female I think about being loved.” Amazing. The sentences just blow everything up.

• Nell Boeschenstein’s “Now That Books Mean Nothing”, at The Morning NewsShe is a new favorite of mine, and this is a powerful essay about the author’s discovery that books have lost their ability to console her in difficult times.

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Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Putin had a kind word for Monson (“a real man”) and paid Yemelianenko the ultimate compliment of Russian masculinity, calling him a “nastoyashii Russki bogatyr”—a genuine Russian hero. As Putin spoke, and as the national audience watched, many in the crowd started to jeer and whistle. This had never happened to Putin before, not once in two four-year terms as President, not in three-plus years as Prime Minister. And yet now, having announced his intention to reassume the Presidency in March, possibly for another twelve years, he was experiencing an unmistakable tide of derision.

“The Civil Archipelago.” — David Remnick, The New Yorker

See also: “The Concealed Battle to Run Russia.” New York Review of Books, Dec. 2010

Writer Maria Bustillos: My Top Longreads of 2011

Maria Bustillos is a journalist who writes frequently for The Awl.

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The power of Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” (The Awl) derives from the purity of its point of view, which is that of one person’s lived experience, minutely and honestly detailed. Benedikt swings gracefully between humor and searing candor in this account of her growing ambivalence toward the religious, political and cultural institutions she’d grown up taking for granted. It’s a high-wire act of great elegance and sensitivity that will stay with me for a long time to come.

In “The Fire This Time” (Los Angeles Review of Books) Reza Aslan likewise makes a compelling case in opposition to conventional wisdom. I thought it by far the best of the 9/11 pieces that came out on the 10th anniversary of the catastrophe.

“American Marvel” (GQ), Edith Zimmerman’s profile of Chris Evans, the star of Captain America, upends everything one is accustomed to think about “movie stars” and celebrity, plus she blasts many assumptions about popular writing—and about reporters describing the world we inhabit—to absolute smithereens. Flesh-and-blood people suddenly appear on the screen where one had been expecting a cartoon. Steven Mikulan’s “Dr. Drew Feels Your Pain” (Los Angeles Magazine), by contrast, conjures a nuanced portrait out of the media fun-house mirror the old-fashioned way, via the painstaking layering up of detail through long and patient, keen observation. It has a similar payoff to the Zimmerman piece, in that you’re seeing a real world spring by magic out of the Potemkin one.

Spencer Soper’s Morning Call exposé of the sweatshop conditions at Amazon’s Allentown, Pa., warehouse came just as the Occupy movement was beginning to take hold. The disparity between the friendly face that Amazon crafts for public view and the abject brutality with which they treated their employees in Allentown demonstrated perfectly and at just the right time the terrible cost of profit-obsessed corporatism (and bargain-obsessed consumerism).

At Inside Higher Education, Steve Kolowich interviews Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College, regarding the coming digital revolution in academic research and publishing. Sounds a little dry, maybe, but check it out. Fitzpatrick and her forward-thinking colleagues have identified, and are carefully nurturing, the phoenix egg from which a new and improved academy is already beginning to hatch.

Bonus:

Fiction: George Saunders, Tenth of December (The New Yorker): best fiction of any length I read all year.

Humor: David Roth, Brief Interviews with Hideous Football Players (The Awl), a comic tour de force that fans of David Foster Wallace will particularly enjoy.

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

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Matthias Rascher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

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.

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“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.”

“The Vision Thing—How Marty Scorsese risked it all and lived to risk again in Hollywood,” by Rick Tetzeli (Fast Company)

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. 

Writer Emily Gould: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever and the co-owner of Emily Books, and also she can’t stop blogging for some reason.

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1. “Letter from Astana,” by Keith Gessen (New Yorker, sub. required)

The New Yorker‘s “Letter From” essays, though they’re always entertaining and executed with finesse, can leave the reader with an impression that’s basically: “Kazakhstan (or wherever), how wacky.” Keith showed exactly how and why Kazakhstan’s history and political situation have created a unique way of life, and also those crazy skyscrapers in the middle of the steppe that make Williamsburg’s waterfront look tasteful. And he ate horse ham.  

2. “Dangerous Worlds: Teaching Film In Prison,” by Ann Snitow (Dissent Magazine)

Feminist critic and longtime New School professor Ann Snitow “leapt to join” a program that brings New School teachers to a correctional facility upstate out of “boredom”—she craved a challenge less played-out than trying to get college students to care about feminism, which she says is “everywhere and nowhere” in their lives. The result is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever read. Snitow confronts her own preconceived notions and white liberal guilt head-on, but also gives herself credit for being a good teacher. She evokes her students’ complexity by describing their surprising, varied responses to the movies she assigns. At one point she gives them a speech: “I know in all your classes and workshops you’re being taught to take responsibility for what you’ve done, and I’m not saying no to that. But responsibility is different from shame. Best to see the endless tale of one’s badness as an inadequate story, meant to make you feel like a worm. OK, take responsibility, but also move on. Everyone is dependent; total independence is a myth. Inside or out, dependency is the human condition.” “This hectoring lecture hasn’t convinced anyone,” she writes, but I think she underestimates herself. 

3. “The Smelliest Block In New York,” by Molly Young (New York Magazine, not single-page)

I’m obsessed with smells and with New York, which contains maybe the world’s best and worst smells, often in the same two-block radius.  Molly Young’s descriptions of smells are a joy.  Her descriptions in general are a joy. She’s just getting better and better and I can’t wait to see what she does next. (My fantasy would be a regular column about smells, but that’s probably unrealistic.)

4. “Willis and Happiness,” by Rich Beck (n+1)

Here, Rich Beck breaks down and rearticulates one of groundbreaking radical feminist and pop culture critic Ellen Willis’s most powerful—and most confusing—arguments.  This is a must, must, must, must read for anyone interested in the past, present and future of the fight for equality.  

5. “The Aquarium,” by Aleksandar Hemon (The New Yorker, sub. required)

This and #2, I would recommend if it’s been a while since you last wept uncontrollably. There’s really not a lot else to say about this. It’s an unsentimental examination of a cosmically unfair event, the the kind of thing no one wants to acknowledge is possible, but which happens regularly. I have no idea how the author could stand to write it, unless he also couldn’t stand not to write it. The parts about his daughter’s imaginary friend are also very funny, incredibly. 

Bonus! (Kindle Single edition)

• “How A Book Is Born,” by Keith Gessen ($1.99)

I didn’t want to be disgusting and pick 5 things by my boyfriend but I wish I could assign anyone who thinks he or she might someday publish a book to read this long examination of how publishing works. The combination of virtue and talent coinciding with luck—the endless variables that combine to make a “literary” bestseller—just boggles the mind. This is stuff that many people who work in publishing or who work in novel-writing either don’t know or don’t allow themselves to consciously know. Buy this as a gift for your friend the corporate lawyer who keeps saying he’s going to take a sabbatical year to “write his novel.” 

• “American Juggalo,” by Kent Russell ($1.99)

Psychic forecast: the year-end Longreads best-of list next year will be everything people are saying right now about John Jeremiah Sullivan, but for the words “John Jeremiah Sullivan” substitute “Kent Russell.”

(photo credit: Stephen Deshler)