The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

–From Mark Bowden’s 2009 Vanity Fair profile of fourth-generation New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.
Photo: jamescridland

–Walt Bogdanich and Glenn Silber, in the New York Times, on the botched investigation into the death of Michelle O’Connell, the girlfriend of a Florida sheriff’s deputy. Read more from the New York Times.
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I should preface this by saying I didn’t plan to do a list, because all of your Top 5 Longreads of 2011 really represent what the Longreads community is all about. But, in true WWIC form, I couldn’t resist. Thank you for an incredible year. Special thanks to the entire Longreads team: Joyce King Thomas, Kjell Reigstad, Hakan Bakkalbasi and Mike Dang. -Mark Armstrong, founder, Longreads Support Longreads by supporting our partners: Read It Later: Save your favorite stories for reading on the iPhone/iPad, Android or Kindle Fire. You can also support Longreads by becoming an Official Member for just $3 per month, or $30 per year. 1. Travis the MenaceDan P. Lee | New York Magazine | Jan. 24, 2011 | 24 minutes (6,096 words) The heartbreaking, horrifying story of a chimp named Travis and the Connecticut couple that raised him like a son. Lee followed Travis’s path from local celebrity to fully grown (and violent) adult:
“Travis” was the first in a “tabloid-with-empathy” trilogy from Lee: He also brought humanity to the story of Anna Nicole Smith (“Paw Paw & Lady Love”) and wrote about Harold Camping, the elderly doomsayer who never quite got his apocalypse calendar right (“After the Rapture”). More Lee: “Body Snatchers” (Philadelphia Magazine, 2008)
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2. Vanishing ActPaul Collins | Lapham’s Quarterly | Dec. 17, 2010 | 15 minutes (3,837 words) A child-prodigy author mysteriously disappears. Barbara Follett was 13 when her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in 1927:
This was from December 2010, but it came out after last year’s best-of list was published. It’s also on The Awl editors’ best-of-2011 list. I still think about this story constantly. More Collins: “The Molecatcher’s Daughter” (The Believer, 2006)
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3. In Which We Teach You How to Be a Woman in Any Boy’s ClubMolly Lambert | This Recording | Feb. 22, 2011 | 11 minutes (2,825 words) A manifesto for the modern woman:
I can think of at least ten other personal essays that blew me away this year, but Lambert’s seemed to completely take over our conversations, online and off. More from This Recording in 2011: “Where We All Will Be Received” (Nell Boeschenstein)
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4. A Murder ForetoldDavid Grann | The New Yorker | March 28, 2011 | 57 minutes (14,318 words) A political conspiracy in Guatemala and the murder of lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, who created a video predicting his own killing in 2009:
Obviously, with David Grann, it’s never so straightforward.
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5. A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left HomeMichael Kruse | St. Petersburg Times | July 22, 2011 | 10 minutes (2,735 words) A reporter retraces the last years of a woman who slipped away from society:
Once you finish this piece, read the annotated version of this story, in which Kruse breaks down exactly how he reported each fact from Kathryn Norris’s life. Incredible.
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6. What Really Happened Aboard Air France Flight 447Jeff Wise | Popular Mechanics | Dec. 6, 2011 | 17 minutes (4,253 words) A fatal human error, repeated over and over again, as the reader observes helplessly. Writer Jeff Wise uses pilot transcripts to deconstruct, conversation by conversation, wrong move by wrong move, how bad weather and miscommunication between the pilots in the cockpit doomed this Airbus 330, which plunged into the Atlantic in 2009, killing 228 people:
This, along with “Travis the Menace” and Wired’s “The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” was one of the most heart-stopping of the year. See also: “The Unlikely Event” (Avi Steinberg, Paris Review)
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7. Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult WorldAmy Harmon | The New York Times | Sept. 18, 2011 | 30 minutes (7,524 words) A year in the life of an autistic teen moving into adulthood—a time when support systems can begin to fall away:
Harmon’s was one of several outstanding pieces this year on the subject of autism. Also see Steve Silberman on John Elder Robison, an author with Asperger syndrome. More from Amy Harmon: “A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over Shrimping Life”
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8. The Girl from Trails EndKathy Dobie | GQ Magazine | Sept. 6, 2011 | 26 minutes (6,657 words) Revisiting the Texas gang-rape story, and a reminder about protecting our youngest victims. Dobie spends time with the girl’s family and attempts to understand how some members of the community could jump to the defense of the 19 men and boys accused:
Just one of many outstanding pieces from GQ this year, including “The Movie Set that Ate Itself,” essays from John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph High School Basketball Scandal,” and a fun collection of oral histories. More Dobie: “The Long Shadow of War” (Dec. 2007)
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9. A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve JobsMona Simpson | The New York Times | Oct. 30, 2011 | 9 minutes (2,383 words) The final moments, and unforgettable last words, of a technology visionary’s life:
Steve Jobs tributes poured in during October and November, including a touching tribute from veteran tech journalist Steven Levy. Some of the best reading came from Steve himself, with his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. See also: The Steve Jobs archive on Longreads
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10. Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help LibraryMaria Bustillos | The Awl | April 5, 2011 | 38 minutes (9,439 words) The ultimate DFW fan goes on a road trip to see what was on his bookshelves and pore over the marginalia for clues about his life:
After this was published, Bustillos kept going. In 2011 she also dissected the work of the late Christopher Hitchens, as well as Wikipedia and Aaron Swartz, among other topics. |
In his personal writings, Gray comes across in a more extreme way than in his theatrical persona, his anguish and need not tempered by his perceptive charm. He writes searchingly about his sexuality. He chronicles his relationships with the three major women in his life — first LeCompte, then Renée Shafransky and later Kathleen Russo — each one overlapping with the last, each becoming involved in his work. And it is evident that even as a young man, Gray was battling the demons that would eventually lead him to end his life in 2004 by throwing himself from the Staten Island Ferry into the water.
“Spalding Gray’s Tortured Soul.” — Nell Casey, New York Times Magazine
See more #longreads from The New York Times
(Photo Credit: Ken Regan/Camera5 for The New York Times)
The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson
Kiki, who is 34, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.”
On a brutally cold morning in mid-December, Rahm Emanuel, hatless and wearing a glove on only his left hand, stood for an hour in front of the turnstiles at the Paulina el station, which sits in his old Congressional district on Chicago’s North Side. As the trains slammed and screeched overhead, he offered his hand to the mostly young and professional commuters heading downtown. Emanuel’s manner seemed more studied than spontaneous. He employed standard lines — “nice hat,” “good book” — and relied on the logos on riders’ head wear and jackets for conversation starters. He addressed both sexes as “man,” and when a woman asked about his plans for the Chicago Transit Authority, he was characteristically a trifle abrupt — “Here’s the deal,” he said to start — and egocentric.
By Scott Turow, New York Times Magazine
How Egypt’s Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for the Internet
Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.
By James Glanz, John Markoff, New York Times
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