Excerpt from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Pulphead,” on his brother’s electrocution, and what it did to his brain:
On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Ellsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having been ‘shocked to death,’ was electrocuted. He and his band, the Moviegoers, had stopped for a day to rehearse on their way from Chicago to a concert in Tennessee, where I was in school. Just a couple of days earlier, he had called to ask if there were any songs I wanted to hear at the show. I asked for something new, a song he’d written and played for me the last time I’d seen him, on Christmas Day. Our holidays always end the same way, with the two of us up late drinking and trying out our new ‘tunes’ on each other.
On Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir, The Last Holiday, and a family connection to the poet and musician:
Later, in 2005, when Scott-Heron was sent to prison upstate for violating parole, Fred mailed him a leather-bound book — a journal, I guess — with a picture of Scott-Heron from their high school days secreted in the spine. In the photo, Fred told me, Scott-Heron ‘looked like an angel. At this point, because he was doing crack, he resembled my grandfather. His hair was all white and wizened and his teeth were bad. I stuffed the picture in the binding of the book so they wouldn’t find it. And when he got out I saw him and he said, “Man, you really nailed my ass.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, it was late one night, and I couldn’t sleep, and I had this book and I started flipping through it. And all of a sudden this picture fell right on my chest. And it really hit me, all the places I’ve been, you know?”
On Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir, The Last Holiday, and a family connection to the poet and musician:
“Later, in 2005, when Scott-Heron was sent to prison upstate for violating parole, Fred mailed him a leather-bound book — a journal, I guess — with a picture of Scott-Heron from their high school days secreted in the spine. In the photo, Fred told me, Scott-Heron ‘looked like an angel. At this point, because he was doing crack, he resembled my grandfather. His hair was all white and wizened and his teeth were bad. I stuffed the picture in the binding of the book so they wouldn’t find it. And when he got out I saw him and he said, “Man, you really nailed my ass.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, it was late one night, and I couldn’t sleep, and I had this book and I started flipping through it. And all of a sudden this picture fell right on my chest. And it really hit me, all the places I’ve been, you know?” ‘ “
Ross Andersen is freelancer living in Washington, D.C. He has recently written about technology for The Atlantic, and is now working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He can also be found on Twitter at @andersen.
Procrastination being my favorite vice —and the impetus behind many a plunge into Longreads.com— it is perhaps not coincidental that this essay, an elegant defense of idleness, is my favorite of the year. Reading Birkerts may mean forgoing more pressing tasks, but he at least has the decency to make you feel like a visionary for doing so:
“Idleness … It is the soul’s first habitat, the original self ambushed—cross-sectioned—in its state of nature, before it has been stirred to make a plan, to direct itself toward something. We open our eyes in the morning and for an instant—more if we indulge ourselves—we are completely idle, ourselves. And then we launch toward purpose; and once we get under way, many of us have little truck with that first unmustered self, unless in occasional dreamy asides as we look away from our tasks, let the mind slip from its rails to indulge a reverie or a memory. All such thoughts to the past, to childhood, are a truancy from productivity. But there is an undeniable pull at times, as if to a truth neglected.”
Orion, billed as America’s finest environmental magazine, is a strange place to find a moving paean to technology, but that’s exactly what Shellenberger and Nordhaus have written here: a brief, albeit sweeping, history of the relationship between man the toolmaker and his environment.
“After the project was approved, the head of World Wildlife Fund Italy said, “Today the city’s destiny rests on a pretentious, costly, and environmentally harmful technological gamble.” In truth, the grandeur that is Venice has always rested—quite literally—on a series of pretentious, costly, and environmentally harmful technological gambles. Her buildings rest upon pylons made of ancient larch and oak trees ripped from inland forests a thousand years ago. Over time, the pylons were petrified by the saltwater, infill was added, and cathedrals were constructed. Little by little, technology helped transform a town of humble fisherfolk into the city we know today.”
Because what’s not to like about a close look at the understudied phenomenon of ghostwriting in Hip-Hop? I’d almost forgotten about this piece until this superb tweet by John Pavlus reminded me of it.
I badgered my Google Reader clique (R.I.P.) relentlessly with this essay, a sprawling take on science fiction, prediction and futurism—first by sharing it twice, and second by commenting on both shares with selected excerpts from the piece, so that it would show up at the top of Reader’s (since departed) Comment View. One such excerpt:
“And when read now, forty years from when I first began to write it, what is immediately evident about my future is that it could have been thought up at no time except the time in which I did think it up, and has gone away as that time has gone. No matter its contents, no matter how it is imagined, any future lies not ahead in the stream of time but at an angle to it, a right angle probably. When we have moved on down the stream, that future stays anchored to where it was produced, spinning out infinitely and perpendicularly from there.”
Sure, Christopher Hitchens’ takedown of the Royal Wedding was a more satisfyingly vicious read (“By some mystic alchemy, the breeding imperatives for a dynasty become the stuff of romance, even fairy tale.”) but it missed the complexity of Freedland’s piece, which opens with a withering run of digs at the crown, before finishing on a grace note about the Queen’s place in British culture.
As the author notes, Vegas, particularly Hunter S. Thompson’s Vegas, is without peer as clichéd essay subject. Nonetheless, Baron manages a dazzling walk along the meta-tightrope he has stretched between himself and the strip’s gaudy towers. He manages to generate fresh insights about the culture of the city, while serving up a penetrating, and at times unflattering, look at the impulse behind Thompson’s original project and his own. Oh and all this before Baron goes undercover at DEFCON, an annual hacker convention at which journalists are notoriously unwelcome.
I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled me to re-read them, over and over, but I do know that you’ll find yourself doing the same. In any case, you don’t need me to explain how to enjoy these stories, or why you should adore them. They speak for themselves. So, in the spirit of the season: gifts that keep on giving!
Here’s my favorite longish things I read this year so far as I can remember. A lot of these are unoriginal and you’ve probably already seen them in someone else’s best longreads of the year list but fuck it. It’s because it’s good reading.
I’m a thousand percent certain that I’ll wake up in a cold sweat tonight, having suddenly remembered a slew of tremendous stories that I really should have given some year-end love. With that important caveat, I do hope you’ll check out the five tales below; each one is guaranteed to occupy a hallowed place in your brain.
I was sorely tempted to fulfill my New Yorker quota by shouting out David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold,” about the assassination of a powerful Guatemalan attorney. As with all Grann stories, I literally cut that piece apart with a pair of scissors, then pinned the various sections to a cork board in an effort to better understand his mastery of structure. But Anderson’s account of the Tamil Tigers’ violent twilight gets the nod, primarily because it features the year’s most chilling scene: an alleged female spy is dragged in front of the author by a louche guerrilla commander, then carted away to be shot in the head. That brief passage may well be the most vivid description of casual brutality ever committed to the page.
The official story was that surfing superstar Andy Irons died of dengue fever, allegedly contracted during a competition in Bali. But the reality, carefully concealed by friends and family alike, was that Irons was an addict, one whose self-destructive habits had nearly killed him at least once before. Melekian’s heartbreaking story illustrates how the deeply troubled Irons was failed by those around him, who felt that no real harm could possibly come to such a prodigiously talented athlete.
When I first read this story, about the young activists who helped launch Egypt’s revolution, I was bowled over by the characters’ bravery and gumption—it’s no small thing to risk torture for the sake of righteous principles. But in light of how Egypt’s political situation has changed in recent weeks, the piece reads quite differently now—you can see the haziness of the activists’ idealism, and perhaps even a dash of arrogance in their tactics. The fact that “The Instigators” contains such varied narrative strands at its core is a testament to its expert craftsmanship and deep reporting. And the use of video in the iPad version is an object lesson in how storytelling can be enriched by digital technology—one brief glimpse of the central character in the thick of the protests adds volumes to the yarn.
Confessional writing seems so easy in theory, especially since there is seldom any original reporting involved. But, man, is it ever hard to pull off with any appreciable degree of success. The vast majority of such stories get bogged down in artificial sentiment or cheesy philosophizing. But that’s not the case with Baker’s glorious tale of adolescent mendacity, in which she recounts a minor scam she ran on an older guy—a scam that ended in hilariously embarrassing fashion. As The Great Gatsby showed, there are limits to America’s tolerance for personal reinvention, a lesson that Baker had to learn the hard way. But there is also solace to be had in the company of like-minded souls, a task now easier than ever thanks to the power of the Internet—a realm that, as Baker so eloquently puts it, provides “a clean, well-lighted place for your real self.”
The Homicide Report, an online project of The Los Angeles Times, tabulates and describes every single killing in my native city. When it first began, I focused on the brief accounts of each death—there’s no better way to be overwhelmed by the senselessness of daily violence. But I’ve since become a devotee of the project’s comments, which are frequently provided by acquaintances of the deceased—as well as blog regulars who possess, shall we say, hard hearts. When those two sides clash, the resulting mess makes for some epic reading. This year’s best example is the thread that follows the entry on Michael Nida, killed by the Downey police in bizarre circumstances. Was he involved in a bank robbery? Targeted because of his race? The victim of out-of-control cops? The commenters battle it out, and in doing so provide a snapshot of the fundamental beliefs that divide us. The comments admittedly contain large heapings of idiocy, insensitivity, and racism. But keep reading—the unabashed rawness of the views on display is what makes the “story” so compelling.
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 person.”
Wenner apparently felt one Hunter Thompson was all he needed, so George headed instead to the Boston Phoenix, that town’s version of the Village Voice. It was the ideal place for his freewheeling reviews of poetry, books, and music. His passion, however, was sports.
Part One of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.”
But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the N.H.L.’s most fearsome fighter, a caricature of a hockey goon rising nearly 7 feet in his skates.
Over six seasons in the N.H.L., Boogaard accrued three goals and 589 minutes in penalties and a contract paying him $1.6 million a year.
On May 13, his brothers found him dead of an accidental overdose in his Minneapolis apartment. Boogaard was 28. His ashes, taking up two boxes instead of the usual one, rest in a cabinet at his mother’s house in Regina. His brain, however, was removed before the cremation so that it could be examined by scientists.
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