Search Results for: The Daily Beast

Featured Longreader: Iain Manley, travel writer at Old World Wandering. See his story picks from SF Weekly, Al Jazeera English, The Daily Beast, plus more on his longreads page.

Resuscitating a battered newsweekly in 2011 is a tough bit of business. Last year, The Daily Beast and Newsweek lost a combined $30 million. Ad page numbers tell how difficult it is, too: Newsweek’s ad page performance between April to September was down 18 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau quarterly report. This is easy to dismiss (what isn’t down these days!) — but Time is up 4 percent for the year, The Economist is flat and Newsweek is competing, year-over-year, against a version of itself that had an ownership change, a lame duck editor and a very uncertain future.

“Tough Times at Newsweek.” — John Koblin, WWD

See more #longreads from John Koblin

Tough Times at Newsweek

Longreads Pick

Resuscitating a battered newsweekly in 2011 is a tough bit of business. Last year, The Daily Beast and Newsweek lost a combined $30 million. Ad page numbers tell how difficult it is, too: Newsweek’s ad page performance between April to September was down 18 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau quarterly report. This is easy to dismiss (what isn’t down these days!) — but Time is up 4 percent for the year, The Economist is flat and Newsweek is competing, year-over-year, against a version of itself that had an ownership change, a lame duck editor and a very uncertain future.

Source: WWD
Published: Nov 18, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,094 words)

Blank Slate: Jacob Weisberg Doesn’t Much Care for What Works on the Internet. Can Slate recover?

Longreads Pick

The site’s internal numbers show that page views for October were up just 6 percent, to 83.6 million, and unique visitors were down 21 percent — growing pains as the site weans itself from longtime traffic teat MSN.com and develops its own, more clicky readers. Over the same time period, Gawker has more than doubled its audience, and the Huffington Post has a global readership roughly three times as large. Through October, the Daily Beast racked up publicity with long, will-they-or-won’t-they talks of a merger with Newsweek. When media people talk about the future of publishing online, in other words, they don’t talk about the site with the 12-year-old CMS.

Published: Nov 10, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,304 words)

Sarah Palin’s Lost Speeches

Longreads Pick

The Daily Beast has obtained the speeches Sarah Palin planned to deliver on Election Night 2008—win or lose. Read the words the McCain camp didn’t want her to say.

Source: The Daily Beast
Published: Nov 1, 2009
Length: 22 minutes (5,558 words)

The Mystery Man of the Edwards Affair

Longreads Pick

As Elizabeth Edwards talks (and talks) about her husband’s affair, The Daily Beast provides an exclusive look at one central character who remains a cipher: “Uncle Fred” Baron, the lawyer who paid for Edwards’ mistress to move across the country.

Source: Daily Beast
Published: May 20, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,360 words)

The Danger of Befriending Celebrities

Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2020 | 8 minutes (2,000 words)

Meryl Streep doesn’t call me every week to go bowling. In fact, she doesn’t call me at all. And that’s a good thing. I honestly can’t recommend becoming friends with celebrities, especially if you’re a long running journalist like I am. It simply will not lead to a Hollywood ending.

As appealing as they are, celebrities are used to being the center of attention, so you’d have to subvert your ego and go into full-blown ass-kiss mode in order to even be vaguely tolerable to them. Stars live for the spotlight, and in many cases, it’s all about them, even when they pretend it’s about you. (And I like things to be about me, thank you.) What’s more, as a journalist, I’d be blurring all sorts of lines and throwing away objectivity in order to snuggle up to my famous “friends.” And they’d only be nice in return because I’m press — and/or an ass kisser — so they’d have to feign some kind of kinship while pretending that all of my hideously annoying quirks are absolutely adorable. Yes, they’d be good at acting the part, but it’s so much better for both parties to just avoid this potential landmine and don’t go there. Don’t call me, Meryl! Don’t even text!
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“The Ugliness of Greatness”: A Kobe Bryant Reading List

OAKLAND, CA - JANUARY 14: Kobe Bryant #24 of the Los Angeles Lakers waves to the crowd after being taken out of the game in the fourth quarter against the Golden State Warriors at ORACLE Arena on January 14, 2016 in Oakland, California. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

On the final Sunday in January, Kobe Bryant — a legendary and complex figure within not only basketball and sports but culture writ large — was killed in a helicopter crash on the hills surrounding Calabasas, California. More than three years into his retirement, the ex-Los Angeles Laker was traveling to the Mamba rec center with his teenage daughter, Gianna, for a basketball tournament (seven other individuals were killed as well).

Much has been written about Bryant’s loss, comparing his death to those of Thurman Munson or Roberto Clemente, but with Bryant, the impact — like a fog— is omnipresent. He was drafted by the NBA out of high school, and for certain generational demographics, like millenials and Gen Z, it feels as if there was never a time in which Bryant wasn’t a part of our everyday discourse.

Below is a reading list of articles published in the week-and-a-half since Bryant’s death that address both his sui generis athletic skillset, but also how to talk about a celebrity whose death is more than several paragraphs of any obituary:

1. It Is a Terrible Irony That Kobe Bryant Should Fall From the Sky (Charles P. Pierce, Esquire)

Kobe was the bridge from Michael Jordan to the present generation of NBA superstars, and Pierce explains the brilliance of the Lakers guard, who continually evolved on and off the court.

2. This Is Why Mothers Don’t Sleep (Henry Abbott, True Hoop)

Abbott’s True Hoop was essentially the first true NBA blog, a site you visited at least once a day (and — at maximum — kept open in a tab to continuously refresh), and he ruminates on the toll of Kobe’s death as a father, but also the emotional weight that his wife, Vanessa, must now carry.

3. Two Things Can Be True, But One Is Always Mentioned First (Jeremy Gordon, The Outline)

In 2003, Kobe was accused of raping a 19-year old employee of the Colorado hotel where he was staying. “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me,” she told police. The case was litigated in public for the next year-and-a-half, a period in which the victim’s name was leaked, and ultimately, she chose not to testify at trial. (The Laker settled with his accuser out of court.) Gordon deep-dives into the case, and why it remains relevant — not only in the era of #MeToo, but also in Kobe’s death.

4. How To Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy (Ashley Reese, Jezebel)

More than a decade after the settlement, the accusations became a blip in the life of Kobe Bryant, but the decisions made that night in 2003 need to be remembered, which is why the Washington Post‘s suspension of journalist Felicia Sonmez was so troubling. All Sonmez did was tweet a link to a comprehensive longread about the rape accusation and subsequent media and legal circus, and for that, she was dragged not only on social media but by WaPo’s editorial masthead. Reese manages to weave separate threads — on Kobe, his death, his legacy, and why it’s important to discuss troubling truths — in this compendium on the Lakers star.

5. Kobe Bryant Was Basketball’s Great Storyteller (Louisa Thomas, the New Yorker)

“The ugliness of greatness.” Kobe once mentioned that phrase to Ben McGrath in a 2014 profile for the magazine, and Thomas evaluates Kobe’s life within that context — how the basketball player evolved into the Black Mamba, and how that shift continued into his retirement and, for a moment, looked to alter the rest of his life.

6. What Made Kobe Different (Jonathan Abrams, B/R Mag)

Abrams, who has written extensively about the NBA (and covered Kobe as a cub reporter at the Los Angeles Times), reflects on what the star meant to a generation of not only admirers but also sports writers.

7. More than a number: College players tell their stories about Kobe Bryant inspiring them to wear No. 24 (Matt Norlander, CBS Sports)

During the 2019-2020 men’s college basketball season, there are 181 players who wear a No. 24 jersey. Norlander spoke with dozens of those players to ask how Kobe influenced not only their jersey number and playing styles, but also their lives. According to Vanderbilt’s Aaron Nesmith, a highly-recruited freshman who has worn No. 24 ever since he was in grade school, “One thing I read after Kobe’s passing was that he read the entire NBA rulebook. All of it, like he knew where the refs had to stand and look, so if he needed to get away with a cheap foul, he’d know how to do it. That stuff is admirable. He lived the game because he knew it.”

Longreads Best of 2019: Science and Nature

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in science and nature.

Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and publisher of Undark magazine.

‘We Have Fire Everywhere’ (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine)

Our Secret Delta (Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith, The Post and Courier)

One of the most interesting trends in climate change reporting is the way writers now quietly and deftly weave its effects into the background of natural disaster stories, from the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic to the increasingly explosive wildfires in the west. I’d like to pay tribute to two outstanding examples of this in the past year.

One is environmental writer Jon Mooallem’s stunning narrative portrait of last year’s devastating Camp Fire in northern California, which killed at least 85 people, burned through nearly 240 square miles, and destroyed almost 20,000 buildings including almost all of the small, wooded town of Paradise. Mooallem’s story “We Have Fire Everywhere” is a vivid, terrifying, edge-of-your seat reconstruction of desperate attempts to escape a literal inferno. It moves so beautifully and is so well-paced that you almost don’t realize that he’s also slipping in a lot of very smart fire science, exploring the ways in which climate change is making wildfires exponentially more dangerous. Describing one harrowing moment in a line of burning cars, he writes, “Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a car; she was trapped in the 21st century.”

The other is “Our Secret Delta,” a haunting exploration of South Carolina’s threatened Santee River delta, published this September in the Charleston paper, The Post and Courier. It’s a real pleasure in these days when we worry so much about the fate of local journalism to see this paper shine in so many important ways. This project, led by Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith, is visually gorgeous and told with the grace of an old-time Southern story, allowing the delta, its history and culture, its fragile waters, to gradually unspool like the winding path of a river itself. The writers create a memorable portrait of an old and essential ecosystem under new threats. Perhaps the most ominous threat is the rise of coastal waters as they reshape the state, yet another reminder that climate change stalks our present as well as our future.

Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and instructor of creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Climate Signs (Emily Raboteau, The New York Review of Books)

When Emily Raboteau’s son becomes obsessed with extreme weather events after a family outing to the “Nature’s Fury” exhibition at the natural history museum in New York, she wonders how much she should shield her five-year-old from conversations around climate change. It is a query she carries with her as she embarks on a city-wide pilgrimage to visit each installation of a public art project called “Climate Signals” wherein the artist hijacks highway traffic signs, rewriting their commonplace warnings with uncanny proclamations of new hazards ahead. In Saint Nicolas Park in Harlem, the sign reads: CLIMATE CHANGE AT WORK. At Hudson River Yards, the yellow lettering spells out an even more dire threat: CLIMATE DENIAL KILLS. In this expertly rendered essay –– gracefully weaving between the personal and critical, the scientific and political –– Raboteau attempts to make sense of what it means to raise a child in a world that is coming apart. It is a question many have but that is all too often addressed in reductive, late capitalist logic in which our human hearts are not taken into consideration.

Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau is a professor of creative writing at the City College of New York, and the author of several nontraditional longform essays, including a year-long Twitter thread on climate change, @emilyraboteau.

After the Storm (Mary Annaïse Heglar, Guernica)

Mary Annaïse Heglar’s “After the Storm” stood out to me as a knockout personal essay on climate this year. Heglar is building a body of important work marrying climate awareness with social, environmental, and racial justice. In this piece, which ran in Guernica in October, she frames her harrowing experience of Hurricane Katrina, along with her family in the Mississippi River region, as the lens through which she now sees the climate movement as an activist and director of publications at the National Resources Defense Council. She weaves together the overtly racist news coverage of that storm, the fact that it made landfall the day after the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder, and the inequitable suffering of New Orleans’ Black population to illuminate the layers of historical injustice magnified by the climate crisis, “covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It’s what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically ‘left out,’ but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers.” This should be required reading for those interested in how equity and equality are pivotal to successful climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Mary Annaïse Heglar
Mary Annaïse Heglar is a climate justice writer and communications professional based in New York City.

The End Times Are Here, and I Am at Target (Hayes Brown, The Outline)

Perhaps the most perplexing paradox of climate change is its ability to be both overwhelmingly terrifying and mind-numbingly ordinary. Especially in the past few years, as denial has become less of a viable option and even delusion has slipped from our fingers, the climate crisis with its alarming headlines and horror stories has become… normal. The steady drumbeat to the banality of our lives. Hayes Brown manages to capture that drumbeat in this masterful essay, isolating its sound out of the symphony with surgical precision. As he runs regular errands in a regular Target on a regular, if unusually hot, summer day in Brooklyn, the climate crisis reverberates in the back of his mind, filtering into every choice of every item, if he allows himself to think of it. As someone who exists as a bonafide “climate person,” I love the fresh eye that Hayes brings to the subject. He gives voice to the haunting bewilderment, the guilt of surrender, and the uncertainty that lies within the cracks of the certainty. His essay reminds us of the dullness of our collective heartbreak as we stare into our manmade abyss.

Mikael Awake
Mikael Awake‘s work has appeared in GQ, Bookforum, ArtNews, The Common, and most recently McSweeney’s 58: 2040 A.D. He teaches at Lafayette College.

Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries (Malcolm Harris, Pacific Standard)

This piece by Malcolm Harris has stuck with me for a few reasons. It came out in Pacific Standard, which was an important outlet for environmental writing before it was shut down this past August. (How the crisis in media has interacted with the climate crisis is a subject for another day.) The essay is an elegant synthesis of entomology, economics, and colonial history that places indigenous knowledge at the foundation of the climate conversation — not as ornament, but as central anti-capitalist critique, as timeless technology. Such a piece could inspire the allotment of more time and money — in academic, political, media, and cultural spaces — for deeper dives into indigenous environmentalism and systems of knowledge. It made me dream of a 1619 Project-style series devoted to un-suppressing those narratives, and made me think about Standing Rock and Mauna Kea and how the violent suppression of indigenous activism works hand-on-musket with the suppression of indigenous thought. Harris is a sharp and funny writer, which is why this story seemed something of a departure in approach and tone, and I appreciated it. I wasn’t familiar with the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who posits the crucial idea that what we call climate change is not a new challenge, but one as old as the New World, “part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based society.” The piece resonated with my feeling that imagination is a function of collective human memory, or as Harris says, paraphrasing sociologist Nikitah Okembe-RA Imani, “[t]hose who study what has been suppressed can see the future.”

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

I Never Wanted my Hemangioma to Define Me

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Emily Weitz | Longreads | October 2019 | 13 minutes (3,434 words)

 

Some kids spent a week of their summers at the Jersey Shore. Others went camping in the Adirondacks. I spent a week every summer of my childhood in the Children’s Ward of NYU Hospital. Muppet movie nights and a play room where children in wheelchairs piece puzzles together. The click click of high heels hurrying down hallways, the smell of cleaning supplies and anesthesia in the air.

I never wanted my hemangioma to define me. Even if it took up half my face, like a suffocating, throbbing purple blanket over the real me. I knew that it was the first thing people noticed when they looked at me. Who’s going to notice big brown eyes when they’re sitting next to a volcano that exploded on a little girl’s cheek?
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