The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Search Results for: Rolling-Stone
America’s Journalism Scandals Can Be Divided Into Three General Categories
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Julia Wick
Julia Wick Photo by Bob Mical
Now that the facts have been laid bare, “A Rape on Campus,” published in November, joins America’s rogues’ gallery of journalism scandals. For ease of reference, the scandals can be divided into three general categories (excluding the recent phenomenon of television figures telling tall-tale war stories).
The first two are straightforward. There is pure fabrication, for which high-profile culprits include Jayson Blair (The New York Times), Stephen Glass (The New Republic) and, going back a little further, Janet Cooke (The Washington Post). And there is the act of plagiarism (culprits too numerous to list).
“A Rape on Campus” falls into a third category: lack of skepticism.
It is the most complicated of the three, and in many ways the most insidious. It is a crime no single journalist — reporter or editor — can be completely inoculated against committing.
—Jonathan Mahler, writing in The New York Times about the newly released report dissecting Rolling Stone’s story about campus rape, which the magazine has now retracted. The 12,600-word report was commissioned by Rolling Stone and authored by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
The Genius and Mystery of Willie Nelson
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Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He’s an uncanny vocal phraser: “The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson,” said the late producer Jerry Wexler. “The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they’re going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It’s some kind of musical miracle.”
In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. “The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers,” says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, “Oh, why does a guy write? I don’t know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it.” Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, “a bit of a mystery.” “He’s really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you’re talking about,” says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. “You’re like, ‘Fuck, Willie, answer the question!’ There’s a lot of exterior there. That’s why you’ll never quite fully get that picture.”
“You never get to know him like you should, but you know there’s more there than what you’re seeing,” says Loretta Lynn. “I know there’s more there because of how he writes. He can’t fool me!”
“He’s a hard man to know,” Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. “He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn’t talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him.”
–Patrick Doyle, in Rolling Stone, on the story of a music legend.
Photo: thomashawk, Flickr
Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: 'The Poorest Rich Kids in the World'
Posted by Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong Above: Doris Duke
The Poorest Rich Kids in the World
Sabrina Rubin Erdely | Rolling Stone | August 2013 | 38 minutes (9,653 words)
Sabrina Rubin Erdely (@sabrinarerdely) is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.
I often deal with interview subjects who tell variations of the truth. People don’t usually out-and-out lie, although that happens from time to time. But memory is a flimsy thing. Even a clear-eyed subject gets details wrong: The sequence of events is off, a sweater was blue and not green, that sort of thing. And then there are those people whose emotions or perspectives have put a filter on their recollections, skewing it this way or that.
The teenage twins Georgia and Patterson Inman, heirs to the Duke fortune, were like an exponential version of that latter category. Their memories had been so warped by trauma that they actually couldn’t separate fact from fiction. I’d never encountered anything like it: Two people with shared memories of events which, to them, felt authentic—and much of which did check out as true—but some of which was implausible, and a few which turned out to be false. It was as though their minds were designed less for record-keeping, and more for coping with their tremendous pain—flexible tools which were bending in all directions in an effort to make sense of their pasts.
When I realized the way the twins were interweaving fact and fiction, with no clue they were doing so, I panicked. Double-sourcing wasn’t going to be enough to report this story; I needed to rethink my reporting methods, as well as the way I approached the writing, relying heavily on documents and secondary sources, and opting to include bits of questionable material as evidence of the kids’ shaky states of mind. After the article was published, the twins were worried I’d portrayed them as “liars,” which couldn’t have been farther from my intention. I know they had told me nothing but the truth, as best they could.
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Photo: Duke University Library
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New York Times Writer Jenna Wortham: My Top Longreads of 2011
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Longreads
Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr.
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SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s everything, plus Doree flagged that amazing Kolker piece and Michelle laid claim to Paul Ford’s staggering essay on IVF. But these are the stories that I sent to my Kindle and the links that recurred with the most frequency in my drafts/Gchats folders on Gmail, so I think it’s safe to say that they are my top picks of 2011.
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• Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble is Different.” (Businessweek, April 14, 2011)
A cutting, high-level look at the current boomlet in the tech biz—the kind that makes you kick yourself till the end for not being smart enough to have pitched it yourself. Ashlee takes a step back from the funding frenzy, sky-high valuations and feverish IPO rumors to examine the current ad-think consuming the tech world. He asks, what if instead of focusing on getting people to click on ads, buy group coupons and digital goods for their virtual farms, our engineers and entrepreneurs were trying to solve big problems in health and science?
• Lev Grossman, “The Boy Who Lived Forever.” (Time, July 7, 2011)
I adored this piece because it shed light on a very particular corner of the Web—fanfic—without falling into the clichéd trap of portraying the more obscure recesses of the Internet as a place only inhabited by cr33p3rs and neckbeards. Instead, Lev lightly celebrates the creativity of the subculture and the communities and alternative realities people craft around their favorite characters and books.
I couldn’t get enough of the vivid, and at times lurid, details in this profile of Diane Passage, Ken Starr’s fourth wife. I mean, this phrase alone: “when she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily,” hooked me, line and sinker. Plus who doesn’t love a sordid glimpse into an underbelly, especially one in New York? The sharp observations and imagery from the first few grafs make you feel like a fly on the wall of a party you didn’t want to go to in the first place but can’t wait to see how it all shakes out.
• David Kushner, “Murder by Text.” (Vanity Fair, November 27, 2011)
A heartbreaking read about the gruesome murder of a 18-year-old girl named Kim Proctor and the two teenaged boys who killed her and then bragged about it on World of Warcraft, which ultimately led to their arrest. Kusher smartly weaves the role of technology and the concept of (im)permanence online into the piece for a compelling narrative.
• Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant.” (The New York Times, June 22, 2011)
I thought this was one of the most important pieces published this year, along with “The Life of Illegal Immigrant Farmers,” for giving the touchy subject of immigration a living, breathing human face. I read this stunning graf at least a half dozen times:
“And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.”
Honorable Mention:
While I was waiting for my copy of Sullivan’s Pulphead to be delivered, I stumbled across the work of Matt Bell, and immediately devoured two of his Kindle shorts—“A Tree or a Person or a Wall” and “A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way” and could not put them down. For such a stark, minimalist writer, his pieces are so evocative and rich with imagery that its hard not to be sucked into them almost immediately.
I also thought that this year brought out some hilarious and clever writing that touched on the way we consume and use technology and how it’s shaping our interactions, culture and lives.
Here’s a quick n’ dirty rundown of a few faves:
• Katie Heaney, “Reading Between the Texts” (The Hairpin, June 16, 2011)
• Leigh Alexander, “Five Emotions Invented By The Internet” (Thought
• Frank Smith, “Will the Real Frank Smith Please Stand Up” (The Morning
• Clive Thompson, “On Secret Messages in the Digital Age” (Wired
• Jonah Lehrer, “How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect.”
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Longreads If you’re in NYC, please come to our Night of Long-Form Journalism panel Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Housing Works, which we’re presenting in conjunction with Longreads.
To get you ready for the panel, we’ve collected a couple great stories from each of the three panelists: Jeff Goodell, Brian Hiatt and Rob Sheffield.
Jeff Goodell:
The Dark Lord of Coal Country, Nov. 29, 2010: The Rolling Stone investigation that forced the resignation of Don Blankenship, the coal industry’s dirtiest CEO
As the World Burns, Jan. 6, 2010: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming
Brian Hiatt:
Billy Corgan, Rock God Interrupted, Jan. 3, 2011: The infinite sadness and unlikely redemption of the last Pumpkin standing
Lady Gaga, New York Doll, June 11, 2009: Gaga worships Warhol. Kisses girls (for real). And she’s the biggest new pop star of 2009
Rob Sheffield:
Rocklahoma: Still Hair Metal After All These Years, Dec. 27, 2007: Welcome to the festival where Eighties hair bands and those who love them gather to headbang and ponder the passage of time
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Posted by Longreads
Longreads Coming April 13th!
Rolling Stone and Longreads present: A night of long-form journalism.
Join us at Housing Works in NYC for a special panel with Rob Sheffield, Jeff Goodell, and more. Moderated by Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana.
The Stoner Arms Dealers
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Longreads David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business. To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America’s military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After Bush took office, private military contracts soared from $145 billion in 2001 to $390 billion in 2008. Federal contracting rules were routinely ignored or skirted, and military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin cashed in as war profiteering went from war crime to business model. Why shouldn’t a couple of inexperienced newcomers like Packouz and Diveroli get in on the action? After all, the two friends were after the same thing as everyone else in the arms business — lots and lots and lots of money.
By Guy Lawson, Rolling Stone
Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail?
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Longreads Why Isn’t Wall Street In Jail?
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
I put down my notebook. “Just that?”
“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
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