Search Results for: Spin

Marty Peretz in Exile

Marty Peretz in Exile

Ben Cohen: These are a few of my favorite things

Ben Cohen: These are a few of my favorite things

Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Jay Caspian Kang is a fiction writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High, an essay on gambling addiction that appeared in the Morning News and has been named on several “Best of 2010” lists. 

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In no particular order.

THE LEGEND OF BLACK SUPERMAN — Rafe Bartholomew, Deadspin

I’m typing this in a Starbucks in the Robinson’s Place Mall in Manila. Everywhere I go in this city, I am reminded of Pacific Rims, Bartholomew’s chronicle of the place of basketball in the culture of the Philippines

The excerpt on Billy Ray Bates was my favorite sports read of the year. Any documentary filmmaker who wants a subject…

THE MURDERERS OF MEXICO — Alma Guillermoprieto, New York Review of Books

What else could you possibly ever want out of a journalist? Fearless, measured and whip-smart with an eye for narrative detail that should be the envy of every writer who has ever read her work.

Her reflections, observations and opinions on the war in Mexico should tower over every other work on the subject, the way Orwell towers over the Spanish Civil War. Hopefully, before it’s too late, someone in publishing will drive up to Guillermoprieto’s door with a suitcase filled with money, because if there is going to be another Homage to Catalonia, it will be Alma Guillermoprieto on the Narco Wars.  

INSANE CLOWN POSSE: AND GOD CREATED CONTROVERSYJon Ronson, The Guardian

The perfect companion for the world’s most baffling music video. I wish someone had done this for the Wu, circa 1994.

Ronson also broke open the seal for long-form articles written specifically to explain baffling youtube videos. Like somebody please write 3,000+ words on how they got that fucking bird to dance to that Willow Smith song. Choire Sicha, I’m looking you straight in the eyes and I am saying please. 

PELE AS A COMEDIAN — Brian Phillips, Run of Play

There are so many reasons why this essay should annoy me. It’s about a really kinda bad David Foster Wallace essay, it’s about soccer and it involves a lot of footnotes. And yet, it took me about a paragraph to discard all those hang-ups and just revel in the quality of writing, the intelligence of the mind at work.

RICHARD LAWSON’S AMERICAN IDOL COVERAGE — Richard Lawson, Gawker

The only reason I still watch the show. And, along with temperate weather and Mexican food, one of the three reasons why I love living on the West Coast. Because on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I can wake up and have Lawson’s mammoth recaps already posted on Gawker.

Sometimes, I find myself typing and deleting twitter messages to Richard Lawson. Mostly, they are about how my day is going. Sometimes, they are jokes about Crystal Bowersox. Once, it was a suggestion he get cloned so he could also write about the Biggest Loser

Matt O'Rourke: My Favorite Longreads from 2010

Matt O’Rourke is interactive group creative director for Crispin Porter+Bogusky in Boulder.

copymattt:

For those of you that like the internet for things other than cats and boobies, I give you 5 of my favorite Longreads from the past 12 months.

Hit-and-run vicitm was quiet, dependable, co-workers say

If you’re really lucky, Andrew Meacham will still be alive when you die.

The 2010 Rapha Gentleman’s Race Report

Heidi Swift on bikes, dirt, enduring love and lots of vomit. 

5 Year-Old Slugger

A simple story told beautifully by one of the best sports-writers on earth. 

Letter From Manhattan

Joan Didion’s original review of Woody Allen’s last great movie.

And God Created Controversy

On the surface this seems like one of the dumbest interviews ever documented. It is.

Me and Mrs. Palin

Longreads Pick

When his (pregnant) girlfriend’s mom ran for vice president and he was thrust into the national spotlight, Levi Johnston found his life spinning out of control. In an exclusive look back, the author tells editors at Vanity Fair about everyday life chez Palin—where the kids are in charge, Dad is threatening divorce, and Sarah the moose-hunting, stew-cooking hockey mom of legend is nowhere to be found. He also offers some eye-opening scenes from the campaign trail and the birth of his and Bristol’s baby.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 1, 2009
Length: 21 minutes (5,478 words)

Three Lives, Two Hits, One Happy Ending

Longreads Pick

Fate chose Marc Buoniconti to be the one left a quadriplegic, but he became the force behind a research center that has saved or improved the lives of other spinal-cord victims. He also brought peace of mind to Henry Mull and Herman Jacobs

Author: S.L. Price
Published: Aug 24, 2009
Length: 32 minutes (8,065 words)

More Songs About Feelings and Women

Longreads Pick

Stuart Murdoch recruited the other six members of Belle and Sebastian for their shared sensibility rather than their musical chops. The band provided the perfect accompaniment to Murdoch’s wistful, sometimes lisping voice. Swirling guitars and jaunty piano and horns sometimes created a deceptively upbeat counterpoint to his wry yet bleak wordplay but could also combine to create serotonin-lowering tunes reminiscent of the sadly beautiful songs of Morrissey and Nick Drake, two of Murdoch’s great influences.

Published: Jun 26, 2009
Length: 11 minutes (2,978 words)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Longreads Pick

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids–and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.

Published: Feb 1, 1997
Length: 29 minutes (7,379 words)