Search Results for: New Yorker

Can a Reporter Go a Whole Day Without Learning Who Won the Super Bowl?

A hundred and fourteen million Americans watched the Super Bowl on the first Sunday of this month. That same day, just over a hundred people embarked on a different kind of game, an annual, loosely organized showdown called Last Man. Last Man is the battle to be the “Last Man in America to Know Who Won the Super Bowl;” its players call themselves “runners” and report their “deaths” on Twitter. The whole thing is strictly run on the honor system. Below is an excerpt from a recent New Yorker story by Reeves Wiedeman about Last Man:

Monday is the most difficult day, and within twenty-four hours, half of the runners had been eliminated. Just getting to work was a problem. (Did you glance at the Captivate screen in your office elevator? You died.) “I think the slushercane helped,” John Carney, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and a Last Man competitor, said, of the wintry mix in New York the day after the Super Bowl. “I had to keep my eyes down, watching my step. No danger of accidentally seeing a newspaper.” Survival, he said, requires “intense eye discipline.” Getting to his desk near the Journal sports department required passing innumerable copies of the day’s paper, which had the result printed across the top of the front page. He recruited nearby coworkers to alert him to possible danger—the newsroom has enough televisions to make a Best Buy manager envious—and when an editor from another desk walked by wearing a Patriots jersey, a friend warned Carney not to look up. At one point, Carney had nineteen unread text messages and eighty-six unclicked e-mails. (A Journal colleague writes, “Are you making clear there’s no way Carney could have been doing his job effectively while avoiding all news services?”) On Tuesday, he was looking at the Pragmatic Capitalist, a Web site that typically offers “Practical Views on Money & Finance” but that day had an article titled “Game Theory Cannot Rationalize Seattle’s Super Bowl Loss.” (“It all makes me wonder if Carroll wasn’t suffering from a severe case of recency bias.”) Death by game theory.

Read the story

Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye

Lucy McKeon | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,489 words)

 

With over 100,000 Instagram followers, photographer Ruddy Roye came of age in Jamaica, and has lived in New York City since 2001. He has photographed dancehall musicians and fans, sapeurs of the Congo, the Caribbean Carnival J’ouvert, recent protests in Ferguson and in New York, and the faces of the many people he meets and observes every day. Roye is perhaps best known for his portraits taken around his neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—pictures of the homeless, the disenfranchised, and those who Roye believes aren’t often fully seen.

In Roye’s Instagram profile, he describes himself as an “Instagram Humanist/Activist,” and when looking at his portraits, the phrase that comes to mind is “up close.” Roye is closer to his subjects—who he calls his “collaborators”—than is typical in street photography, in terms of actual proximity as well as identification. Each picture, he says, contains a piece of him. With this closeness, Roye creates images that can be harrowing, disturbing, joyful and striking. If they are sometimes difficult to look at, one has more trouble looking away. Read more…

How a Great American Theatrical Family Produced the 19th Century’s Most Notorious Assassin

John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth and Junius Booth, Jr. (from left to right) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Nora Titone | My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy | The Free Press | October 2010 | 41 minutes (11,244 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book My Thoughts Be Bloody, by Nora Titone, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky, who writes: 

“This is the story of the celebrated Booth family in the final year before John Wilkes made a mad leap into historical memory that outdid in magnitude every accomplishment of his father and brothers. When the curtain rises on this chapter of Nora Titone’s book, both Edwin and John Wilkes have already staged performances for President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater; by the time it comes down, one of them will be readying to assassinate him there.” 

Read more…

Taking the Slow Road: An Interview with Author Katherine Heiny

Longreads Pick

She published a short story in The New Yorker in 1992, then seemed to all but disappear. How author Katherine Heiny took her sweet time on the path toward publishing her new story collection.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 3, 2015
Length: 14 minutes (3,683 words)

Link Rot, or Why the Web May Be Killing Footnotes

The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.

The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?

Jill Lepore, writing for the New Yorker about the Internet Archive and the difficulties of preserving information on the Web.

Read the story

A Charles D’Ambrosio Reading List

Recently, we published “This is Living,” an exclusive excerpt from Charles D’Ambrosio’s most recent essay collection, Loitering: New & Collected Essays (Tin House). Because we just can’t get enough D’Ambrosio, here’s a reading list featuring interviews old and new, another essay featured in Loitering (“Seattle, 1974”), and more.

* * *

1. “Seattle, 1974” (Charles D’Ambrosio, Front Porch, Issue 10, April 2009)

D’Ambrosio ruminates on Seattle and the dissonance in finding meaning, connection, and relevance in your own hometown:

“Seattle does have a suicide rate a couple notches above the national average and so does my family and I guess that earns me the colors of some kind of native. I walk around, I try to check it out, this new world of hope and the good life, but in some part of my head it’s forever 1974 and raining and I’m a kid and a man with a shopping cart full of kiped meat clatters down the sidewalk chased with sad enthusiasm by apron-wearing boxboys who are really full-grown men recently pink-slipped at Boeing and now scabbing part-time at Safeway.”

Read more…

The Dark Arts: A Corporate Espionage Reading List

Corporate espionage takes many forms and is known by a number of names. At its most benign, it’s “competitive-intelligence,” which is the kind of information gathering that George Chidi describes in Inc. On the other end of the spectrum is the far more exciting—and illicit—line of work seen in Richard Behar’s 1999 story about the pharmaceutical industry. Here are five stories that delve deep into the murky world of corporate information gathering.

1. “Drug Spies” (Richard Behar, Fortune, September 1999)

This story about corporate spies fighting pirated drugs in the high stakes pharmaceutical industry reads like a summer action movie, complete with former Scotland Yard detectives, solitary confinement in a Cyprus prison and multinational drug giants. Read more…

What Burns Within Us: Five Stories About Fire

Photo: Camila MP

I’m assistant stage managing a play called The Arsonists. It’s an allegory about appeasement during World War II; in a town wracked by mysterious fires, two strangers arrive on the doorstep of a well-to-do businessman. As the strangers stockpile gasoline and fuse wire in the attic, the hapless businessman and his wife can’t bear to think they might be complacent in impending destruction. In rehearsals we listen to music about fire, sung by The Doors, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen and David Byrne. Fire is on my mind, particularly its mythic proportions in the cycle of creation and destruction, and for the purpose of this list, the traditions and careers it informs and influences. Here are five pieces on fire-eaters, firefighters, fire-walkers and fire-growers.

1. “Trial By Fire.” (Dimitris Xygalatas, Aeon, September 2014)

Welcome to San Pedro Manrique. If what matters most is how well you walk through the fire, Dimitris Xygalatas and his team are there to measure how your body and your friends and family are affected by your participation in this extreme ritual. Read more…

Reservation Confirmed: A Reading List About Airbnb

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.

1. “The Dumbest Person in Your Building is Passing Out the Keys to Your Front Door!” (Jessica Pressler, New York Magazine, September 2013)

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…

10 Short Stories I Loved in 2014

Phil Klay. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Below is a guest post from Pravesh Bhardwaj, a filmmaker based in Mumbai who has been posting his favorite short stories all year.  Read more…