Happy New Year! Here’s our Top 5 Longreads of the week, featuring Lapham’s Quarterly, The New York Times, Boston Review, Wired, and The Classical.
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A kung fu master looks for new disciples to pass on his wisdom: Dr. Yang had never had difficulty attracting students in the past—YMAA, the Boston-based organization he founded in 1982, operates more than 60 martial arts schools worldwide—but after more than 25 years, Dr. Yang was growing tired of doling out his ancient teachings […]
His best-known novel, Et Tu, Babe, was published 20 years ago, but now the writer has returned (with a new book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) to a world that matches the absurdity of his pre-Internet work: On Charlie Rose [in 1996], Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner sat together in the familiar round […]
How the introduction of stats into MMA (mixed martial arts) will change how the matches are fought: For all that enthusiasm, however, the sport has had a weak spot: It can be surprisingly difficult to say with any specificity what makes a mixed martial artist great, or what makes one fighter better than another. In […]
A writer digs into his grandfather’s past and discovers stories about life as a professional basketball player in the 1940s for the Chicago Stags, part of the BAA (Basketball Association of America), which later merged with another league to become the NBA: Detroit’s coach gave Schadler the score: ‘I have a wife and kids, and […]
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, The New Yorker, Inc. Magazine, The Classical, New York Magazine, #fiction from Guernica, plus a guest pick from Largehearted Boy’s David Gutowski.
A look back at James Watson’s book The Double Helix and the controversy it stirred in the science community. In telling the story, he produced a great work of literary nonfiction. Watson expanded the boundaries of science writing to include not only the formal, public face of Nobel-winning discoveries but also the day-to-day life of […]
A percussionist’s nerve-wracking audition for the Boston Symphony Orchestra: The classical audition ranks among the world’s toughest job interviews. Each applicant has 10 minutes at most to play in a way so memorable that he stands out among a lineup of other world-class musicians. Tetreault has prestigious degrees from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School […]
In the early 20th Century, six-day bike races were some of the biggest sporting events in the U.S.—not to mention grueling and dangerous: In the four corners of the old Chicago Stadium, faux-Greek sculptures depicted the premier indoor athletes of the day: a boxer, a track runner, a hockey player, and a bicyclist. Though outdoor […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week: SCOTUSblog, Esquire, New York Times Health, Outside magazine, The Classical, fiction from Nathan Englander, winner of the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, plus guest picks from Laura Nelson.
