Search Results for: Spin

Scott Storch Raked in Hip-Hop Millions and Then Snorted His Way to Ruin

Longreads Pick

(AltWeekly Award Winner, 2011) When Scott Storch was 8 years old, he was dizzied by a soccer cleat to the head. His mom did not take such injuries in stride. She had been apoplectic when Scott lost his baby teeth in a living-room dive five years earlier, leaving him with a Leon Spinks grin. “I was an overly worrisome mother,” admits Joyce Yolanda Storch, who goes mainly by her middle name. “I was overbearing to a fault.”

Source: Miami New Times
Published: Apr 22, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,188 words)

How Carrots Became the New Junk Food

Longreads Pick

Crispin had done its own behavioral research, lurking in kitchens around the Boulder area. Staffers had watched suburban moms unpack their groceries and studied where kids looked for snacks when they got home from school. Kids seldom went to the refrigerator; instead, they went straight for the cupboards or the pantry. If they did go to the fridge, baby carrots were at least visible, out on a shelf. Full-size carrots, though, always went in the vegetable drawer. “The drawer of death,” one kid called it. Adults weren’t particularly fond of the vegetable drawer either. They tended to associate it with all the vegetables they buy and forget, and then discover weeks later, limp and leaking. A strategy began to emerge. Let regular carrots be the vegetable.

Source: Fast Company
Published: Mar 23, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,437 words)

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock '99

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock ’99

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: Woodstock ’99

Longreads Pick

Promoter John Scher insisted instead that the ugliness of Woodstock 99 reflected a larger moral chasm in the souls of the attendees. “I think, in some respects, the generation was irresponsible and they gave me and themselves the finger,” Scher told Spin. He wasn’t the only one who felt that Woodstock 99 amounted to a big “fuck you!” from legions of incorrigible kids. More than one writer likened Woodstock 99 to “The Day Of The Locust,” the 1939 Nathanael West novel about wanton sin and alienation in Los Angeles that ends with violent mob violence.

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Feb 22, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,866 words)

The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student

The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student

What Was He Thinking?

What Was He Thinking?

What Was He Thinking?

Longreads Pick

Jake Plummer never went to Tampa Bay, of course, just as he never offered his services to any other NFL team. Upon retiring in March 2007, he held a press conference at the Denver Athletic Club. Grasping a lectern, he told a crowd of reporters that he was “running away from the game” but not in “fear or fright.” He credited his teammates for his success, invoked his friend Pat Tillman and pointed to his chest and promised that “there will not be a jersey with an NFL patch here.” He said he was excited to move on and “take on new challenges,” because “life is grand, life is exciting.” Then, without taking questions, Plummer bid goodbye and walked down the hall to play a doubles handball match with his brother Eric.

Published: Feb 9, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,966 words)

I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait

I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait

The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots

Longreads Pick

With his leering coverage of Brett Favre’s penis (allegedly!), Rex Ryan’s foot fetish, and the surprising sex life of ESPN, A. J. Daulerio has turned Deadspin.com into the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web. But at what cost to his soul? And hell, to sports journalism itself?

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 19, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,417 words)

AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A Longreads List

Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland.

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Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals 

1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman. 

903 words / 3.5 minutes 

No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of a new disease in 1981. 

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AIDS in the heartland

1987. St Paul Pioneer Press. Jacqui Banaszynski. 

21,000 words (est) / 84 minutes (note: not Instapaper-friendly)

This Pulitzer-winning three-part series follows Dick Hanson — farmer, political activist, and gay man — from diagnosis to death. The writer describes the piece as such: “I wanted to be able not just to write about a disease, but THIS disease and all that went with it … the prejudice, the fear, the distance, the judging, the legal, financial and moral consequences, the lifestyle and the love …” Many people cite this article as the first time they were really drawn in to the AIDS crisis. 

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Fighting AIDS all the way

1989. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

3,695 words / 15 minutes

The harrowing plunge 

1990. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

5,905 words / 24 minutes 

Larry Josephs, 34, writer about AIDS, dies of the disease 

1991. New York Times. Alessandra Stanley 

360 words / 1.5 minutes 

In these two essays, Josephs writes first about his diagnoses and treatment and then about what happens when he gets very sick. Heart-wrenching personal voice coupled with details and research from someone who desperately wanted and needed to know everything about the disease. Honest, brave first-person journalism. 

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Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science 

2006. Harper’s. Celia Farber. 

12,163 words / 48 minutes 

From 1987 to 1995, Farber wrote a column in SPIN about AIDS called “Words from the front.” (Those articles can be found here.) She was one of the first and only journalists to cover scientists who questioned the link between AIDS and HIV and questioned the use of AZT to fight it. These scientists — including National Academy of Sciences member and Berkeley researcher Dr. Peter Duesberg — were labeled “AIDS denialists” by the scientific community, and Farber’s coverage of them put her in that pot, too. This article was published in 2006, but Farber had been writing about its topic for nearly 20 years. The piece provoked heated responses, including letters from the scientists who are credited with discovering  HIV. This response from the Columbia Journalism Review is in line with the criticism of the piece, the author, and its thesis.