Search Results for: Rolling Stone

‘He’s Our Baby’: What Happens When a Child Is Placed in Foster Care

Cris Beam | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | August 2013 | 23 minutes (5,787 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, by Cris Beam, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick. Thanks to Cris and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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Longreads Guest Pick: Briana Bierschbach on 'Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing, and Death'

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Girl reporter for Politics in Minnesota. Mother of Dragons.

It was a great week for longreads in America (see: Reuters’ ‘The Child Exchange’ investigation and Rolling Stone’s interactive story on hackers who will probably save the world), but one piece was passed around on my social media feeds more than any other: ‘Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing and Death,’ by Shane Morris. This piece doesn’t exactly exemplify any traditional journalistic values, nor would mom approve of it (warning, this story contains swears), but it’s also the most educational thing I’ve read all week. Did you know that the ‘rise of Molly can be traced back to German Shepherds?’ Did you know that cartel tactics are being used to traffic Molly? No, I bet you didn’t. It’s like ‘Breaking Bad,’ but real. Added bonus: Morris’s writing style is amazingly accessible. It feels like you’re listening to the confessions of a friend, that is, if you have friends that do/sell a lot of drugs.

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Michael Hastings’ Dangerous Mind

Longreads Pick

On the life and death of a haunted journalist. The tragic death of Michael Hastings also gave birth to a number of conspiracy theories:

“Hastings never identified himself in his writing as someone suffering from PTSD. The closest he came to such an admission was in May, when he retweeted an article about using pot to treat PTSD. In fact, according to the coroner’s report, that is exactly what he was doing.

“Still, PTSD was not something he discussed even with his close friends. Matt Farwell, a freelance writer and Army veteran, worked with Hastings on two stories for Rolling Stone. The second involved a CIA station chief with PTSD, but even then Hastings did not open up on the subject, Farwell says.

“The death of Hastings’ fiancée clearly had a traumatic effect on him. When asked a few years later on C-SPAN what it was like writing the memoir, he answered, ‘I wrote it in — I was so screwed up when I wrote that book.'”

Source: LA Weekly
Published: Aug 22, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,974 words)

Longreads Guest Pick: Win Bassett on 'The Poorest Rich Kids in the World'

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Win Bassett is a writer, lawyer, and seminarian at Yale.

My treasured longread of the week is Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “The Poorest Rich Kids in the World” in Rolling Stone. I lived down the road from Duke University for ten years, but one doesn’t need any familiarity with the Blue Devils to become enthralled with the tale of a family haunted by real demons. Erdely writes near the beginning of her story, “When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion.” But by the end of the heroin-filled, heart-wrenching saga that involves blood, guns, torture, and even lions, one learns all the money in the world can’t save the heirs of the Duke family.

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Longreads Member Pick: 'Quebrado,' by Jeff Sharlet

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This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth and bestselling author of The FamilyC Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. “Quebrado” is a chapter from Sweet Heaven, first published in Rolling Stone in 2008, about Brad Will, a young American journalist and activist.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive this week’s pick.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Longreads Member Pick: ‘Quebrado,’ by Jeff Sharlet

Longreads Pick

This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth and bestselling author of The Family, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. “Quebrado” is a chapter from Sweet Heaven, first published in Rolling Stone in 2008, about Brad Will, a young American journalist and activist.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive this week’s pick.

Published: Aug 1, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,133 words)

Video Pick: The Journey of Transgender Rocker Laura Jane Grace

If you’ve been following Longreads for a while, you may have seen this excellent Rolling Stone story from last year by Josh Eells, “The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel”, about Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace’s transition.

This MTV House of Style short reveals more about her life, and the small things she’s discovered with regard to clothing, makeup and style. And as Grace notes at the end of the clip, “A lot of tips I picked up were from other trans women on the Internet… When I was 14 years old if I was watching House of Style watching a transsexual being interviewed and talking about that, it would have completely changed my life. I would have felt saved.”

Read more from the Longreads archive: Stories by Josh Eells

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Video Pick: The Journey of Transgender Rocker Laura Jane Grace

Longreads Pick

If you’ve been following Longreads for a while, you may have seen this excellent Rolling Stone story from last year by Josh Eells, “The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel”, about Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace’s transition.

This MTV House of Style short reveals more about her life, and the small things she’s discovered with regard to clothing, makeup and style. And as Grace notes at the end of the clip, “A lot of tips I picked up were from other trans women on the Internet… When I was 14 years old if I was watching House of Style watching a transsexual being interviewed and talking about that, it would have completely changed my life. I would have felt saved.”

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 20, 2013

The Letter

Longreads Pick

S.I. Newhouse’s contentious appointment of Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, and what Gottlieb did to bring the magazine into a new era:

“Orlean was an early Gottlieb-era hire. ‘She came in off the street,’ said McGrath, her Talk of the Town editor (though, she noted, Gottlieb was often her second reader). ‘She came into my office and, in the space of a twenty-minute conversation, she had about a hundred ideas for stories, and about eighty of them were good.’

“Orlean laughed about this. ‘By the standards of The New Yorker I was being brought in off the street. I had a book contract; I was writing for Rolling Stone and The Boston Globe, so that’s hilarious. That’s so classic of The New Yorker to feel that if you weren’t at The New Yorker you were essentially homeless and living hand-to-mouth on crap.’

“‘When I got there the mood was not very nice,’ she said. Orlean was unusual among New Yorker writers, most of whom, she said, had spent their careers at the magazine and hadn’t written for other publications. ‘It’s a little bit like, I wasn’t a virgin, and more typically people came to The New Yorker as virgins. They came into their adulthood there.’ The place was cliquey, she said, but that has since dissipated, in no small part because Gottlieb brought in so many writers who ‘weren’t born in the manger.’ At this point, ‘that aristocratic, inbred feel—that if you weren’t there from birth you didn’t deserve to be there—has really dissolved.'”

Author: Elon Green
Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 3, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,379 words)

“Tribute to Phil Ramone.” Billy Joel, Rolling Stone.