Search Results for: Slate

Nanolaw with Daughter

Longreads Pick

Why privacy mattered. “On a Sunday morning before her soccer practice, not long after my daughter’s tenth birthday, she and I sat down on the couch with our tablets and I taught her to respond to lawsuits on her own. I told her to read the first message. ‘It says it’s in French,’ she said. ‘Do I translate?’ ‘Does it have a purple flag on it?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t actually have to worry about it unless it has a purple flag.'”

Author: Paul Ford
Source: Ftrain
Published: May 16, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,031 words)

motherjones:

Inside the “lavish,” “debauched” lifestyle of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Beyond the oil money, all-night parties, Playboy bunnies, and 15,000-square-foot Malibu mansion, there’s the larger question of whether Teodoro has used shell companies to funnel $100 million into the United States. Click here for deets and this week’s 4 other Longread story picks.

Programming note! Every week we team with the excellent Mother Jones to feature our Top 5 Longreads email. This week’s picks are from This Recording, Slate, Sports Illustrated, Foreign Policy and Minneapolis City Pages. Sign up to get the email every Friday.

The Stutterer: How He Makes His Voice Heard

The Stutterer: How He Makes His Voice Heard

The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly

The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly

The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly

Longreads Pick

(City Magazine (CRMA) Award nominee.) “He was part of [Blagojevich’s] inner, inner circle, about as close to the sun as you can get.” Those days were gone. Now Kelly was holing up on and off in this trailer near 173rd and Cicero. His marriage was on the rocks—he was shacking up in a downtown condo with his girlfriend, Clarissa Flores-Buhelos, a married woman two decades his junior. The feds had indicted him three times in two years; he had pleaded guilty twice, and he was slated to go on trial with his old pal Blagojevich on the third set of charges. A decade or more of prison loomed. In fact, Kelly was expected to turn himself in within a few days. “My life is over,” he had admitted to reporters four days earlier, in a rare unguarded moment before the press.

Published: May 1, 2010
Length: 27 minutes (6,925 words)

Peter Smith: The Best Food Longreads of the Year

Peter Smith: The Best Food Longreads of the Year

Juli Weiner: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Juli Weiner blogs for Vanity Fair.

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These are the pieces I sent out to friends with the all-caps subject line, “THIS.” These are the pieces I come back to when I’m looking to improve my own writing. These are the pieces I’ll be re-reading well into 2011.

Jon Ronson: And God Created Controversy, The Guardian, October 9, 2010

Hilarious discussion about theology with members of Insane Clown Posse.

Nathan Heller: Trench Coat, Unlit Cigar, Slate, July 13, 2010

The beautifully written deconstruction of the Wise and Cranky Kaplan Twitter feeds.

Nancy Jo Sales: The Suspects Wore Louboutins, Vanity Fair, March 2010

Dishy account of the celebrity-worship and avarice that fueled a spate of burglaries in Los Angeles.

David Grann: The Mark of a Masterpiece, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010

The history of American connoisseurship takes the form of an impossible-to-stop-reading crime drama.

David Segal: A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web, The New York Times, November 26, 2010

A gripping and legitimately terrifying account of an online conman and the insidious side-effects of poor customer reviews.

Joe Spring & Chris Keyes: Our Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Joe Spring and Chris Keyes are editors for Outside Magazine.

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The Most Isolated Man on the Planet, Slate, Monte Reel (Aug. 20, 2010)

He’s alone in the Brazilian Amazon, but for how long?

The Last Patrol, The Atlantic, Brian Mockenhaupt (November 2010)

A veteran unit patrolling the Devil’s Playground hands off its territory to a new patrol.

An Army of One, GQ, Chris Heath (September 2010)

Who would be crazy enough to hunt Osama bin Laden alone…11 times?

The Ballad of Colton Harris-Moore, Outside, Bob Friel (January 2010)

One the trail of a teenage fugitive.

Last Drop, Outside, Brad Melekian (December 2010)

An inside look at the last days of surfing’s most troubled star.

Can CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV?

Can CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV?

Can CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV?

Longreads Pick

Van Veen’s question for his deputies: “How do we translate network effects to original programming?” Reich thinks for a moment, then says, “What if we did a show called ‘Ransom,’ where each week you hold the next episode for ransom until the previous episode hits a certain number of viewers?” Van Veen likes this. “It’s not crazy. That could be the basis for something that really works.”

Published: Dec 13, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,297 words)