Search Results for: Rolling Stone

A family, convinced that homeownership was a requisite part of the American dream, ends up with a foreclosure:

We tried to short sale. A realtor named Sharon came by the condo to see the property and talk about our options. Normally a friendly and exuberant child, our two-year-old daughter Amelie was immediately suspicious of Sharon, who was actually quite kind and warm, and so naively optimistic about our short sale chances that we should have realized it wouldn’t work. When Sharon tried to sit on our sofa, Amelie pointed out that it was her sofa. Our daughter had never before looked at anyone with such contempt. We asked Amelie to be nice to our guest. Matt suggested that he and Amelie take a walk to leave me time alone to talk to Sharon and show her the condo. Instead, our daughter glared at Sharon, gripped her tiny hands on the sofa, and declared to all three of us: “This is MY HOME.”

“Housed.” — Aimee Phan, Guernica

See also: “Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners.” — Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, Nov. 10, 2010

Featured Longreader: Jan de la Rosa, YAlit enthusiast. See her story picks from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Guernica, plus more on her #longreads page.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

***

Read more…

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, a #fiction pick, plus a guest pick from @Kaisertalk.

Photo: shinya/Flickr

A Minnesota school district enacts a policy designed to stop teachers from discussing or acknowledging homosexuality. Gay students report bullying, but administrators do nothing. The result is a string of suicides that has shaken the community:

Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a ‘suicide cluster,’ adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. “Here you had a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one school district, in a small amount of time,” explains Reidenberg. “Kids started to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life.”

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied.

“One Town’s War on Gay Teens.” — Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

See also: “The Story of a Suicide.” — Ian Parker, The New Yorker

The Believer's Karolina Waclawiak: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Karolina Waclawiak is a novelist and screenwriter. She is also the deputy editor of The Believer. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, will be out July 2012 from Two Dollar Radio.

***

I’ve always been fascinated with religion, Russia, and missing persons stories so these five nonfiction pieces really captured my attention this year. The fallout from The New Yorker‘s Scientology piece turned out to be as compelling as the essay itself—and I had to put The New Yorker on here twice because the recent piece on Vladimir Putin is spectacular and continually evolving. Paul Collins’ piece on missing Barbara Follett was utterly haunting and Paul is a master of uncovering long-hidden mysteries. Everyone should check out all of his work, and I’m sure many have after reading that piece. And really, for the other two, who can turn away from secret cults and dead bodies found on beaches? Not me.

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

2. “The Apostate,” Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker

3. “The Body on Somerton Beach,” Mike Dash, Smithsonian

4. “Inside ‘The Order,’ One Mormon Cult’s Secret Empire,” Jesse Hyde, Rolling Stone

5. “Vanishing Act,” Paul Collins, Lapham’s Quarterly

BONUS

“Love in a Cold Climate,” Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair

Say what you will of Ms. Love, but she’ll always have a fan in me. 

“To Have and Have Not,” Matt Tyrnauer, Vanity Fair

I found myself endlessly quoting this piece on screen legend Lauren Bacall.

“Judy Lewis, Secret Daughter of Hollywood, Dies at 76,” Paul Vitello, The New York Times

NY Times’ fascinating obituary of Loretta Young’s illegitimate daughter with Clark Gable, Judy Lewis.

***

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 Andrew Rice: My Top Longreads of 2011

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. (See recent longreads by Rice.)

***

Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and listed in no particular order. Full disclosure: I’ve written for several of the publications cited on this list, but I’ve excluded from consideration any writer with whom I’m personally acquainted.

 ***

“The Romney Economy,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, 10/23/11

When it comes to degree of difficulty, delivering an interesting Mitt Romney profile is like nailing a reverse four-and-a-half somersault. But this story succeeded—not the least of which due to its brilliant packaging, which included a now-infamous cover photo of Romney with cash coming out of his suit pockets and the accompanying headline: “Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy.” Written without the (perhaps dubious) benefit of an interview with Romney, the story nonetheless managed to summon up the Republican candidate’s history of creative destruction, and tied that to the big story of the moment, the Occupy Wall Street protests. If Romney ends up becoming the Republican nominee, as still seems likely, the themes of Wallace-Wells’ profile will likely define the coming political year.

“How to be Good,” Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, 9/5/11 (sub. req.)

Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit argues, MacFarquhar writes, that “personal identity is not what matters.” But a profile is, by definition, an evocation of a person’s identity. How do you fulfill the requirements of the form on Parfit’s own, rather forbidding, terms? MacFarquhar didn’t make use of any scenes, or quotes of the traditional “he said” variety, conveying Parfit as a sort of disembodied intelligence. By all rights, this experiment should have been about as interesting to read as, well, a philosophy textbook. But the power of Parfit’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and ethics—and MacFarquhar’s skill at conveying them colloquially—made the piece sing to me.

“The God Clause,” Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek, 9/1/11

Are you interested in reading about a shadowy industry that attempts to predict and profit from gigantic, multibillion-dollar disasters? Great—me too. Now that I’ve got you interested, I will disclose that this article is actually about the reinsurance industry. This is the bait-and-switch trick that Greeley pulls off admirably in this piece. This was the cover story for Businessweek’s 9-11 anniversary issue, and aided by some very good cover art—something the magazine has been justly praised for lately—the piece managed to tell its readers a story that touched on the past while telling them something new.

“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 5/23/11 (sub. req.)

A detective story masquerading as a celebrity profile—or maybe it’s the other way around?—this was in an issue that kind of hung around on my endtable for a few months before I got around to sticking it into my bag for a long plane flight. Then it completely sucked me into its world. I won’t even pretend that I’m young enough to care about the rap collective Odd Future, or the fate of its missing member Earl Sweatshirt, but the outcome of this story, which I won’t spoil, offered an (ahem) oddly plaintive reminder that so many of our musical idols are, after all, just kids.

“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine, 6/2/11

This was my absolute favorite story of the year. Journalism from Africa often conveys the continent in broadly collective terms: tribes rival with one another, rebels fight the government, the downtrodden suffer or rise up. Bearak, who used to be stationed in the Times’ Johannesburg bureau, took one of those distressing mass phenomena that fill the inside pages of every day’s newspaper—an outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa’s township slums—and gave the story a terrible specificity. I particularly admired the way Bearak dissected the chance intersections and misunderstandings that led to a lynching, and dispassionately explained the cosmological worldview of the victim’s family about his death. In the end, Bearak resists the natural tendency to isolate a single villain and hold that person up to condemnation, despite the murky evidence, because that’s what the mob did, albeit in an incomparably more brutal fashion.

Bonus: Longreads Logrolling List

I’m lucky enough to be friends with a bunch of really talented writers, and it seems a shame to exclude them simply on the grounds of our acquaintance. So, here’s a list of really great articles written this year by people that I happen to know and like. You can take these endorsements with a grain of salt, of course, but I urge you to click and judge for yourself.

“Getting Bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, 8/8/11

The best account, so far, of the most stunning news event of this year.

“The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox,” Nathaniel Rich, Rolling Stone, 6/24/11

I was fascinated by this lurid miscarriage of justice. This story went way beyond the tabloid narrative of the persecuted innocent abroad.

“The Idealist,” Jason Zengerle, The New Republic, 1/13/11

A rising Democratic star finds his life derailed when he gets enmeshed in a bizarre political dirty tricks plot.

“Cheating, Incorporated,” Sheelah Kolhatkar, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2/10/11

The real, profitable and Canadian (!) company behind those lubricious Ashley Madison TV ads.

“The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 12/8/11; “The Casino Next Door”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 4/21/11

These two stories made me ache with jealousy.

“The Gulf War,” Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 3/14/11

The Gulf oil spill turned out to be less overwhelmingly catastrophic than some doomsayers predicted, but it still left behind some troubling lessons. This is the story of a disaster that happened beneath the surface, and in conveying that narrative with great depth and nuance, the story pulls off a truly difficult feat.

***

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. 

Sady Doyle: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown

***

There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal is political.” This phrase was one of the most transformative ideas to emerge from second-wave feminism, or from the 20th century. It’s the underpinning assumption of all my own work. What it means is this: You take the most intimate, difficult, unseemly moments from your own life. You look to see if anyone else has experienced anything like them. You look for what you have in common with those people — your gender, your socioeconomic status, your career, your race. And then, you speak about what that means for the world. 

“The personal is political” is how the unspeakable, “private” issues of women—the men in the radical protest group who made rape jokes, the arrogant dismissals at the mostly-boy punk rock shows, the boss who made weird sexual comments, the date who raped you, the husband who beat you—became political concerns. It’s how “my problem” becomes “our problem.” It’s the catalyst for bringing marginalized experiences to light, and for finally understanding that it’s not happening because of who you are; it’s happening because of what you are, and that is something else entirely. Something which all of the people in your “what” have a vested interest in changing. 

“The personal is political” is also, I eventually came to realize, the essential factor in all of the essays I remembered from 2011. The pieces I’ve chosen are all about personal matters, in one way or another, and they all address huge social problems by focusing on one woman’s specific experience. They all raise questions without easy answers: About the identity of the reporter, and how that plays a role in what he or she reports; about whether personal responses to trauma can be evaluated in political terms; about how our identities come into conflict, and how to create a workable solidarity; about who we are, who we think we are, and who we would like others to think we are, and what the distance between those three things might be. In every case, I was struck by the author’s candor, bravery, and willingness to say some very uncomfortable things in public. And in every case, these pieces—and the reactions to them—taught me something new about how to see the world. 

***

“Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone 

Kirsten Ostrenga was a lonely, home-schooled fourteen-year-old who started a MySpace page to connect with people. Four years later, she was receiving daily messages calling her things along the lines of “rape-enjoying pathetic bitch,” she was receiving other messages from middle-aged men who wanted to fuck her, she was being impersonated online by dozens of people, she had her house vandalized, she had her cat disappear shortly after someone threatened to kill it, she had been punched in the face by a “fan” posing for a picture with her, she had been raped, and she had been publicly called a “murderer” in connection with the death of her rapist, who tripped and fell while fleeing the police who were there to arrest him for raping Kirsten. That rapist also happened to be her first boyfriend. They’d met through MySpace. 

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece about all this is harrowing and astonishingly empathetic; the month it came out, I read it about ten or fifteen times. It’s not only about “Internet bullying,” or sexual violence, or even Kirsten Ostrenga; it’s also about the difficult-to-measure, often profound distance between Internet persona and person, and what we hope to find by making our lives public. Read it, and see if your voice doesn’t sound a little quieter the next time you go to write a snippy blog post about some public figure—if you don’t find yourself pulling certain punches, or asking whether you really know, or can ever know, what they’re actually going through at the moment. There are a lot of big magazine articles about Young People And The Internet. This year, no one did it better than Sabrina Rubin Erdely. 

“‘I Can Handle It:’ On Relationship Violence, Independence, and Capability,” Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, Feministe 

and

“I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD,” Mac McClelland, GOOD 

I always think of these two pieces as connected to each other, so that’s how I recommend you read them. They’re both about violence, and the ways that violence can change you. They’re both painful to read. And they’re both notable for being comprised of about ten separate things that female journalists, or feminists, are never supposed to say in public. Whitefield-Madrano writes about visiting the emergency room, after her boyfriend beat her up, with blood streaming down her face. “The only words that make sense are the ones that spill out of my mouth over and over again,” she says, “the only words that will let the receptionist and the nurses and my friends and my parents know that this isn’t what it looks like, that I’m not one of those women, those women in abusive relationships, those women who can’t help themselves enough to get out: I went to college, I went to college, I went to college.” Meanwhile, McClelland leads with “It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint,” and goes on from there.

Whitefield-Madrano was a feminist who organized Take Back the Night marches, published op-eds criticizing “the notion that a woman’s greatest personal threat lay outside the home,” and stayed in her relationship after her boyfriend started to hit her. McClelland was a human rights journalist whose job was to faithfully witness the pain of others; after being threatened with rape in Haiti, and witnessing the aftermath of severe sexual violence, she contracted post-traumatic stress disorder and needed her ex-boyfriend to simulate a rape with her as part of her recovery. Both women focus, to a large degree, on the internal aftereffects of the trauma. McClelland gagged and vomited, cried constantly, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop drinking. Whitefield-Madrano missed work, forgot her own phone number, moved in a permanent daze: “I’d been depressed before, and this was different. This was a fog of having no idea who I was, where I’d gone, or if I might return.” 

And they both produced astonishingly skilled, un-self-indulgent pieces of writing out of those experiences. (This was particularly easy to miss in the backlash to McClelland’s piece, which ranged from legitimate concerns—her representation of Haiti, her treatment of sources—to publishing her ex-boyfriend’s full name and place of employment, calling her a “geisha,” and claiming that she was somehow faking her PTSD to get attention and/or a book deal.) The experiences of trauma, abuse and post-traumatic stress are often literally impossible to describe. The very nature of what they call an “acute stress response”—“a feeling of detachment, disorientation, inability to concentrate or respond sensibly;” “the mind ‘going blank’;” “the person appears to be out of contact with others but is not unconscious;” these are symptoms, which sound fairly mild until you realize (as I once did, in my own experience of traumatic shock) that the strange hollow object by the metal basin is a cup, and is intended to hold water, which is why it is by the sink, and that you have been figuring this out for twenty minutes, ever since you set the cup down there—induces a fundamental disconnect from language. McClelland and Whitefield-Madrano plunge us into that experience with their nightmarish descriptions, but they also analyze it in lucid detail. It’s a remarkable achievement: Two clear, rational, coherent accounts of what it’s like to lose coherence, clarity, and reason.  

“SO REAL IT HURTS: Notes on Occupy Wall Street,” Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Facebook (republished at Racialicious)

For about a month this fall, every single professional journalist who cared about social justice or protest in any way whatsoever was busy writing or filing their Pieces On Occupy Wall Street. None of us wrote a better piece than Manissa McCleave Maharawal, who initially posted this on her personal, semi-private Facebook page. 

Covering protests is tricky. You don’t want to undermine or demonize them by reporting the wrong scenes or speaking to the wrong people. You don’t want to gloss over their problems by ignoring the less flattering facts on the ground. You don’t always know, frankly, whether you are there to report or support, and depending on what happens to you—as in the case of the writers who went to Occupy Wall Street to protest, and wound up filing pieces about getting arrested; or, the other writers who went to report, and wound up being victimized by the police like any other protester—that role can change within the space of an hour. 

And I will be even more frank with you: In the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street, I sometimes felt that I was seeing a lot of supporting, and not always enough reporting. It was communal, it was wonderful, it was revolutionary, absolutely no-one was smoking any pot whatsoever because that was a right-wing lie, everyone was so equal, etc. It was usually only on the smaller blogs that you could find stories like McCleave Maharawal’s: Men “dancing up on” women at drum circles without consent, radical activists responding to education about gender pronouns with outright bafflement, people of color being told to direct their concerns to someone’s email inbox rather than bringing them up at General Assembly, a man including a line about there being “one race, the human race, formerly divided by race, class,” etc., in the promotional materials, and responding to objections (namely that we were hardly “formerly” divided on those fronts) with “[it’s] scientifically true.” McCleave Maharawal was not “just” writing a personal essay; she was performing a public service, by giving people a genuinely nuanced view of the occupation. But this is not an anti-Occupy piece. It is not an attack piece. And it is not an example of undermining. Precisely because she was willing to cover the gritty and sometimes unflattering details of how solidarity was actually being worked out among “the 99%” at Occupy Wall Street, McCleave Maharawal actually wrote a far more convincing and meaningful argument for it than I had yet read. It’s a model for anyone who wants to advocate—for a cause, for a community, for a protest, for an idea—without slipping into boosterism; for anyone who wants to speak about the facts on the ground, without losing sight of what those facts really mean. 

“With The Ladies In The Back At An Odd Future Show,” Emma Carmichael, The Awl

2011 was, in many ways, the Year Of Unpleasant Conversations About Odd Future. The group just brings up a lot of sticky subjects: The relationship between art and artist, the relationship between creation and social responsibility for what one has created, the white fear of black masculinity, men’s disregard for violence against women. And, you know what? Those conversations were just as unpleasant for me as they were for you. I don’t exactly look forward to having any of them again. 

But, if I ever teach that long-imagined seminar on Journalism, Pop Culture, and Gender, I think our final assignment is going to consist of a 10-page paper on the difference between two short passages in two reviews of the exact same show: Amos Barshad’s “Odd Future Live Show Surpasses the Hype,” for Rolling Stone, and Emma Carmichael’s “With the Ladies In The Back at an Odd Future Show,” for The Awl. In fact, let’s just do that now. Better one? 

At one point, a fresh-faced blond girl roughly the same age as Tyler landed on the stage and accosted him for a kiss; he complied, wondered aloud if he might now have herpes and then tossed her off, too.

Or better two? 

[Just] after two in the morning, a blonde girl surfed her way onstage and kissed Tyler, who announced, “I might legit have herpes.” The crowd laughed and started a “show your titties” chant, and she refused, looking bashful. “Then get the fuck off the stage!” Tyler yelled. 

Class: Which of these passages was written by a man? How can you tell? Which writer made note of whether the girl in question was attractive (“fresh-faced”), and how do you think cultural norms around gender, presentation and gaze affected this choice? What is the difference between “accosted [Tyler]” and “kissed Tyler;” who is portrayed as an aggressor in each of these passages, how does it differ between passages, and what does that mean? Why did both writers choose to describe the girl as “blonde,” and which cultural narratives are supported by that choice? Would your answer be different if the writers substituted “white” for “blonde?” How? Do you think Amos Barshad joined in the “show us your titties” chant? If not, why didn’t he tell us that it happened? Are you really angry right now? At whom, and why, and what does that tell you? Please remember to demonstrate in your response that the personal is political. Papers due whenever you think you know what all of this means, and can say it. I might never turn mine in. 

***

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. 

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.

***

• “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.

***

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 Jessica Lussenhop: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages. See her stories on her Longreads page or find her on Twitter. 

***

The ones I couldn’t stop thinking about.

***

• Jon Ronson , “Robots Say the Damndest Things,” GQ, March 2011

Besides the fact that Ronson is such a consistently fascinating writer, now when people ask me what kind of journalist I’d like to be, ultimately, I can now say, “You know that piece where Jon Ronson gets to fly all over the world and meet all the robots? That kind.”

• Joe Eskenazi, “The Art of the Steal,” San Francisco Weekly, March 2011

 A fascinating portrait of a very uncool and very successful art thief. Also, orchid club crasher. Definitely one of the most memorable characters of 2011.

• Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “My Ex-Gay Friend,” New York Times Magazine, June 2011

Really haunting, and in large part because of this turn: “I told Michael about a recent conversation I had with our former boss … who surprised me by wondering aloud if Michael was ever truly gay.”

• Tim Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory,” Rolling Stone, May 2011

Masterful storytelling and as someone who never really knew a world without Fox News, this one just really took me to school.

• Jeanne Marie Laskas, “The People V. Football,” GQ, March 2011

MVP Longread: This year was the year of chronic traumatic encephalopathy stories (rounded out by the amazing New York Times series on hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard), but Laskas’s skill elevates former Viking Fred McNeill and his struggle with early onset Alzheimer’s far beyond poster-child-dom. I ran around recommending this to just about everyone I know after reading it.

***

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.