Search Results for: Russia

Bloodlust: Why We Should Fear Our Neighbors More than Strangers

Longreads Pick

Civil wars are generally more savage, and bear more lasting consequences, than wars between countries. Many more people died in the American Civil War—at a time when the population was a tenth of what it is today—than in any other American conflict, and its long-term effects probably surpass those of the others. Major bloodlettings of the 20th century—hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths—occurred in civil wars such as the Russian Civil War, the Chinese Civil Wars of 1927-37 and 1945-49, and the Spanish Civil War. More Russian lives were lost in the Russian Civil War that followed World War I than in the Great War itself, for instance.

Published: Mar 27, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,974 words)

Dancing the Body Electric: A Look Back at New York’s 1970s Dance Boom

Longreads Pick

The body was what the decade was about, beginning with where a body was. The Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1970. Also in 1970, the American ballerina Suzanne Farrell defected from choreographer George Balanchine and his New York City Ballet (NYCB) and joined Maurice Béjart and his Ballet of the Twentieth Century in Brussels. Four years later, in 1974, Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union to Canada, then made his way to New York and the American Ballet Theatre (ABT). The same year, the young star Gelsey Kirkland defected from NYCB to ABT in order to begin a partnership with Baryshnikov.

Source: City Journal
Published: Mar 14, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,660 words)

Rad Storm Rising (1990)

Rad Storm Rising (1990)

Rad Storm Rising

Longreads Pick

A hundred and fifty years ago the Russian philosopher Petr Chaadayev wrote that “we are one of those nations that somehow are not part of mankind but exist only for the sake of teaching the world some kind of terrible lesson.” In the area of nuclear affairs the steady emission of environmental horror stories from the USSR confirms that the Soviet Union is in the process of teaching the world another in its series of terrible lessons.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 1, 1990
Length: 17 minutes (4,460 words)

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden

Longreads Pick

Once you enter the zone, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see it’s a town. They’ve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale.

Source: Outside
Published: Feb 22, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,800 words)

Byron Reese & Demand Media’s Planet of the Algorithms

Longreads Pick

Every week, Reese would come up with an idea for something new to peddle. They would draft a business plan, launch a website, and measure consumers’ subsequent interest in a product. Efforts to sell coins and watches failed. At one point, Reese tried manufacturing family portraiture using inexpensive subcontractor artists in places such as Russia. The concept wasn’t easy to expand. “A lot of people have ideas,” says Handsman. “Byron has the discipline to actually measure them. He was willing to come up with a ridiculous number of ideas, but he was also willing to abandon them if they were proven not to work.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jan 28, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,606 words)

Mallary Tenore: My Top 5 Media Longreads of 2010

Mallary Tenore covers media news for the Poynter Institute’s Poynter.org.

***

Timothy Lavin: The Listener, The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2010 

Refreshing to see well-written stories about lesser-known media phenomena like Coast to Coast AM.

James Verini: Lost Exile, Vanity Fair, Feb. 23, 2010 

Verini does a great job describing what the death of the paper (in this case, Russia’s English-language paper The Exile) means to the two men who started it and how this ties into the experience of loss. 

Richard Morgan: Seven Years as a Freelancer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup, The AwlAug. 2, 2010

Using humor and honesty to show how unglamorous the life of a freelancer can be.

Laurie Hertzel: News Reporting in Duluth: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, MinnPost, Aug. 26, 2010 

I’ve always loved stories about female journalists who aren’t afraid to advocate for gender equality in the newsroom, and I think this one is particularly good. I like the memories that Hertzel shares about working with Jacqui Banaszynski — arguably one of the most influential editors and coaches in the business. 

Frank Bruni: The Age of Laura Linney, The New York Times, July 28, 2010 

This story isn’t about the media, but I’m including it because it reminds me of the importance of being versatile as a journalist. Bruni has written about a wide variety of topics — Hollywood, politics, his struggles with weight,  etc. — and always does so in a way that makes me think he has studied that particular subject or source for years. 

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

Deadly Medicine

Longreads Pick

Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 2, 2010
Length: 24 minutes (6,019 words)

The Perfect Stride: Can Alberto Salazar straighten out American distance running?

Longreads Pick

At first, Salazar’s scheme was bizarrely complex. Among other things, he arranged for the design of a sealed house near the Nike campus in which athletes would sleep in rooms with varied amounts of oxygen. He also used an obscure computer program from Russia that claimed to measure an athlete’s fatigue level using electrodes that tracked variations in heart rate and in a runner’s “omega brain waves.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 1, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,123 words)