While I was raging through the Miami airport, Tim Chapman, a husky twenty-eight-year-old photographer for the Miami Herald, was doing some of the best work of his life. In Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, he had talked his way onto a flight to Jonestown, where the bodies still lay, three days after the massacre that […]
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The Awl's Choire Sicha, Carrie Frye, Alex Balk: Our Top Longreads of 2011
(Left to right: Choire, Carrie, Alex) Because there are three of us, we trilaterally decided to go for 15. But it’s not really five each; that becomes complicated, too, but… well, anyway, no matter how you cut it, surely at least one of us hated some of these stories. Also to be fair, this list, […]
Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable […]
Rolling Stone's Doree Shafrir: My Top Longreads of 2011
Doree Shafrir is an editor at Rolling Stone, where she hangs out with the Misfits on a regular basis. She can also be found at doree.tumblr.com. *** When I went back into my Kindle and my Twitter and Tumblr and email and all the other places where I noted or saved especially noteworthy stories from […]
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, […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
