Search Results for: The Awl

Deepwater Horizon's Final Hours

Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours

Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours

Longreads Pick

The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern. Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck. It was no better there.

Published: Dec 26, 2010
Length: 34 minutes (8,590 words)

Paul Ford: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Paul Ford was an editor at Harper’s Magazine; now he’s wandering around, looking at stuff and writing computer programs.

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Tony Judt, “Night,” New York Review of Books (January 14)

This was the year of the dying critic. Most writers would do themselves, and their readers, a service by dying without all the self-elegies (“selfegies”?). We’ve read once too often, right, of the bark of the lonely fox out the bay window. But then you had Judt in his wheelchair, climbing Everest every night, putting out a series of reflections and continuing to publish great work even post-mortem. In a different city, and a different vein, there’s Roger Ebert’s Journal, the essay that never ends—starting as a kind of testament, it transformed over many months into a mass lecture from an old newspaper hand (a man of a literally dying breed), holding forth on absolutely everything.

Dan Koeppel, “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” (Popular Mechanics, January 29)

Stuff like this is why magazines persist. It’s fun to imagine the pitch. “I’d like to write about falling thirty thou—” “You had me at falling.”

Frédéric Filloux, “Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters” (Monday Note, September 19)

Inside baseball for publishing nerds, but bangs out its point. It’s hard to find good wide-angle writing about tech. Related: “Why the OS Doesn’t Matter.” Also: Tom Bissell on cocaine and Grand Theft Auto; Fred Vogelstein on the iPhone/AT&T meltdown; and Nitsuh Abebe on the Internet Paradox.

Issendai, “How to Keep Someone With You Forever,” (Issendai’s Superhero Training Journal, June 9)

You read this, right? I’ve visited friends and read this aloud. Explains publishers, graduate school, bad jobs, and broken marriages. (Related in a way I can’t fully articulate: Given that 2010 was, in addition to being the year of the dying critic, the year of the supercilious journalist writing about the Insane Clown Posse, it’s worth going back to 2009’s “MC CHRIS IS AT THE GATHERING: A LOVE STORY,” for the nerd’s eye view—a far more subtle view than presented elsewhere—of the weirdness of Juggalism.)

Josh Allen, Chokeville. (Ongoing)

Most prose born on the Internet is highly defensive. Everyone is braced for audience attack and opens their posts with four paragraphs explaining why the remaining four paragraphs are worth reading. Chokeville is not that. It tries to explain itself, but it can’t. Sometimes I get started and then drift away to Zooborns, but I know that’s my problem, because I’ve forgotten how, and I also know that I’ll end up some weekend night in front of my monitor, zoomed in, drinking my way through every word.

P.S. We’re also several years into the flowering of history blogs. Here’s a good place to start.

The House That Thurman Munson Built

Longreads Pick

Trust me, he said, and the last great brawling sports team in America did. Twenty years after Thurman Munson’s death, Reggie, Catfish, Goose, Gator, the Boss—and a nation of former boys—still aren’t over it. “I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he’s taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtling his head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 1, 1999
Length: 36 minutes (9,000 words)

A Love Too Big To Last

Longreads Pick

Theirs was the most epic love story in Hollywood history: a blaze of headlines, booze, jewels, brawls, and private jets. Marrying and divorcing twice, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton rocked the culture and each other’s lives.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jul 1, 2010
Length: 38 minutes (9,574 words)

Gareth Thomas … The Only Openly Gay Male Athlete

Longreads Pick

He’s 6’3″ and 225 pounds of muscle. He’s broken his nose five times, fractured both shoulders and lost eight teeth. He’s drunk his mates under the table and brawled by their side. He’s been named to the Welsh national rugby team more times than any other man. And, among active players in major professional team sports, he’s …”Wot, butt? You come to this tiny village in this tiny country and tell me that I’m the only gay man in a major team sport who’s out of the closet?” … “All the diversity in America, and no one there has done this?”

Author: Gary Smith
Published: May 3, 2010
Length: 21 minutes (5,468 words)

Bill Clinton, Then and Now: The Esquire Interview

Longreads Pick

In a sprawling discussion of his past and our common future, the former president compares his administration’s early years with Obama’s and talks about what he believes — in health care and next year’s midterms — is about to happen

Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 51 minutes (12,949 words)