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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Nancy Rommelmann, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation Magazine, Carl Zimmer, The New Yorker, plus a guest pick by Deadspin writer Drew Magary.

Brian Wolly: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Brian Wolly is an associate web editor at Smithsonian Magazine.

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1. Tom Bissell’s Breakdown of L.A. Noire on Grantland

When ESPN and Bill Simmons’ Grantland debuted in early June, the knives were out and its initial reaction was mixed at best. Like many, I approached the new project with simultaneous skepticism and optimism, but it wasn’t Simmons or Chuck Klosterman that sold me on the site’s potential. Bissell’s searingly accurate review and analysis of Rockstar’s supposedly groundbreaking video game L.A. Noire was the revelatory pice of writing that said, “Grantland will be around for a long time.” With his wit and contemplative style of placing L.A. Noire in the context of where the video game industry is headed, Bissell brought two much-vaunted products (Grantland and the game) down to Earth.

2. Sarah Stillman on the Invisible Army in Iraq

Perhaps no story from the New Yorker this year was more under-recognized than Stillman’s devastating expose on the third-country nationals working on U.S. military bases. The never-ending strata of deception piled upon political indifference was staggering. Her reportingwas a mash-up between the existential dread of The Wire with Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight and it deserves to be recognized for its brilliance.

3. The Film Nerd 2.0 Series on Star Wars: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

The six posts that encompass Drew McWeeny’s adventure in introducing his two sons to the six Star Wars films are a joyous series that reawakened the film nerd in me as well. McWeeny does the impossible: he makes me appreciate the Phantom Menace. For any parent (or eventual parent) who dreams of showing their own kids the two trilogies, McWeeny offers an endearing road map for how to do so. For those who want to just show the original trilogy, he’ll show you why you’re wrong.

4. Jonathan Bernhardt on Peter Angelos and the Orioles

In 2005, with the introduction of the Washington Nationals, I had to choose between my hometown’s new team and the team I had grown up rooting for, the Baltimore Orioles. I picked the Nats and have never looked back. Here are Bernhardt’s catalogues of Angelos’ transition from working class hero to the most despised owner in professional baseball. Taken in aggregate, the list of misdeeds gets to the heart of loving a team that will always disappoint.

5. James Fallows on Hacked!

In his Atlantic cover story, Fallows relates what everyone’s biggest nightmare, losing control of their gmail, happened to his wife. I sent the piece around to friends and family, insisting that they implement the steps Fallows recommended. Service journalism at its best.

And quickly, 3 great longreads from Smithsonian.com:

1. A Mega Dam Dilemma in the Amazon

Clay Risen weighs the positives and negatives with the Inambari Dam in Peru — the astounding photos by Ivan Kashinsky are also worth a look.

2. The Beer Archaeologist

Staff writer Abigail Tucker takes on the toughest assignment ever: reporting on Dogfish Head Brewery’s attempts to recreate ancient beer recipes.

3. Minter’s Ring: The Story of One World War II POW

Our new history blog is a great source for so many #longreads, but Gilbert King’s retelling of Minter Dial’s lost ring is a stirring tribute to the “Greatest Generation.”

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Molly Lambert: My Top 13 Longreads of 2011

Molly Lambert is a writer covering pop culture at Grantland. (She’s also featured in our Top 10 Longreads of 2011)

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These are some Longreads I enjoyed this year:

“The Bell Jar At 40”: Emily Gould on Sylvia Plath (Poetry Foundation)

• “The J in J. Crew”: Molly Young on Jenna Lyons (New York magazine)

“The Recessionary Charms Of American Horror Story”: Tess Lynch (Grantland)

• “The Movie Star”: Bill Simmons on Ryan Reynolds and Will Smith (Grantland)

“Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia”: Colson Whitehead at The World Series Of Poker (Grantland)

“Crass Warfare”: Emily Nussbaum on Whitney and 2 Broke Girls (The New Yorker)

“Frantically Impure”: Alex Carnevale on Susan Sontag (This Recording)

“Beauty”: Durga Chew-Bose on Barbara Loden (This Recording)

“God Knows Where I Am”: Rachel Aviv (The New Yorker, sub. required)

• “What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier Of Female Sexuality”: Amanda Hess on James Deen (GOOD)

“‘Make Me Proud’: Does Drake Actually Care About Women?”: Emma Carmichael (The Awl)

“Free The Network”: Allison Bland (The Awl)

“The Celebrity Rehab Of Dr. Drew”: by Natasha Vargas-Cooper (GQ)


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Evan Kindley: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Evan Kindley is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Ariel Levy, “Basta Bunga Bunga” (June 6, 2011) – The New Yorker

A great piece about what proved to be the Last Days of Berlusconi’s Italy, with all the virtues of the typical artfully triangulated New Yorker profile (as recently codified by John McPhee) plus a refreshing willingness to let Levy herself play a crucial role.  (Difficult to avoid, perhaps, when the people you interview say things like “I see you are a girl—I want to kiss you! … This is nature.”)

Adam Plunkett, “King of the Ghosts” (October 7, 2011)  – n+1

Moving, passionate, yet determinedly unsentimental remembrance of David Foster Wallace by one of his students at Pomona that doubles as a review — the best I’ve seen — of his frustrating posthumous semi-opus The Pale King.  Whether or not you care a whit about Wallace, there’s a lot to be learned here about the anguish of mentorship: “He expressed some of the most meaningful things he said to me in some of his sentences most likely to seem meaningless. ‘It means a lot that it means a lot,’ ‘I feel for you.’”

Drake Bennett, “David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street” (October 26, 2011) – Bloomberg Businessweek

“David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.” I, too, have failed to learn to drive in 2011.

Rob Horning, “The Failure Addict” (November 18, 2011) – The New Inquiry

I’m not sure I buy Horning’s fundamental premise, that “Papa” John Phillips was “a harbinger of what microcelebrity may do to the rest of us,” but the two halves of this neatly turned essay — a knowledgeable account of Phillips’s sordid solo career and a lucid analysis of how an increasing amount of our (increasingly internet-dependent) sociality is getting redefined as “sharing” (“It’s sharing when we confess something; it’s sharing when we link to someone else’s work; it’s sharing when we simply express approval for something; it’s sharing when a social-media service automatically announces some action we took”) — are each worth the price of admission.

Sy Montgomery, “Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of an Octopus” (November/December 2011) – Orion Magazine

My nickname around the Los Angeles Review of Books office is “the Octopus.”  Read this and draw your own conclusions.

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Kevin Smokler's Top 5 Deep Interviews of 2011

Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books from High School (Prometheus Books, 2013) and curator of Deep Interviews here on Longreads. 

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Here on Longreads, I’m curating Deep Interviews (#deepinterviews)—lengthy interviews with interesting people—a format I’ve grown to love. It’s not quite original reporting but certainly more than transcription, a showcase for at least three of my favorite art forms—conversation, listening and set decoration. A great interview not only brings us inside the mind of an interesting person but inside the room where the conversation happened. And while many of the best presenters of interviews (The Paris Review, Playboy, Bomb) use an iterative process—the final interview emerging from several sessions like portrait painting—many others, equally loved, are on-the-spot reporting while all the action sits in hotel room club chairs. We the reader are invited in but are not the important person. We’re probably leaning uncomfortably against the bathroom door and trying to stay out everyone’s way. 

For this best-of list, I’ve chosen only interviews that you can read right now, no subscription required, from 5 different publications, at five different points in the trajectory of a culturally-known person. If the Deep Interview is a butterfly, below we’ve got pupae to pretty flying thing, though in no order biology would understand. 

2012 is looking to be a denser, dizzier time for the Deep Interview. More publications are opening their archives and the Charles Foster Kane basement of the genre (explained below). The hashtag #deepinterviews will keep you up to date on all these developments starting right now. 

I. William Gibson, The Paris Review Interview (Summer 2011 Issue)

Gibson knocks ‘em dead here—funny, smart, but plain and practical. A line like “We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination,” which left me thinking for a solid 40 minutes, is tossed off without pause. There’s also plenty for those of us who know science fiction much more as cultural phenomenon than by the particulars of the author’s worlds. I’m also guessing that even the diehards will be pleased by Gibson calling Neuromancer, his most famous novel, “a soap box derby car.” 

II. Scott Shepherd and Richard Maxwell: Bomb Magazine (Summer 2011 Issue)

BOMB has featured artist-on-artist interviews as its signature offering since 1981. About 90% of the time I have no idea who the subjects are and that’s just the way I like it. I read BOMB to unearth areas of creativity. Their interviews are my miner’s helmet. 

Scott Shepherd is an actor with the New York theater company Elevator Repair Service. ERS was profiled last year in the New Yorker as they were putting up GATZ, a six-hour word-for-word retelling of The Great Gatbsy. Richard Maxwell is an experimental theater director. Of them, I know The Great Gatsby, the New Yorker and that’s it. These guys don’t have a bunch of old war stories but rather experience collected as the raw material of the future, of projects yet conceived and horizons yet crossed. I don’t understand a fair amount of the theorizing about theater that they do. But the conversation is open enough for curiosity and learning and in that way, is the creative process itself in miniature. 

III. tUnE-yArDs: Pitchfork Interviews (April 25, 2011)

I loved Merrill Garbus (TY is her project) after reading this interview. She’s funny, self-aware, thoughtful. She’s also exactly the kind of musician you want big sloppy success for, which is what makes this piece such a great example of a type: The interview that catches a star on the rise. 

Pitchfork catches Garbus right before a tour, when she’s “doing a lot of boring and wonderfully domestic things.” Read the rest and you’ll think “I don’t think Merrill Garbus will be doing her own laundry much longer unless she wants to.” Also the interviewer both acknowledges that TY does not fit a current musical trend yet nonetheless insists on asking if Garbus went through a “punk phase” (nothing in her afro-pop-inspired-vocal-heavy songs would indicate this. The interviewer seems to think that any musician not wearing glitter must have had a punk phase) and rushing past Garbus’s narration of her musical salad days in the uncool 1980s to get to her time spent in the more culturally approved 1990s. 

Garbus is having none of it. She is straight with the journalist but firm that her story not fit any convention but her own. 

I wish only great things for Merrill Garbus after reading this. And I hope she also files it away as capturing a moment before all those big things happened. 

IV. Giancarlo Esposito: The Onion AV Club Interview (Oct. 7, 2011)

Read enough interviews and you thank 18 different gods when someone with a criminally underrated career is given room to talk about themselves. Such is the case with Giancarlo Esposito, a character actor who makes everything he appears in better just with his presence. 

Esposito has been acting since the 1980s and I became aware of him from starring roles in Spike Lee’s early films. If you’re around my age (38) you probably remember him as Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing or as Cab Driver YoYo in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. The AV Club’s got him here for his role as Gustavo Fring, the newest addition to the acclaimed series Breaking Bad, unseen by me. But I still say “thank god” and “about time.” Fifty more like this with Mr. Esposito please and at least that many actors like him. 

V. Martin Luther King Jr: The Playboy Interview (January, 1965, republished Oct. 21, 2011)

I’ve got this one here as a representation of where the availability of Deep Interviews is going. Playboy has taken to republishing from its 50-year archive of interviews via reader requests on the magazines Facebook page. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is here by reader demand, a rebuke to the idea that no one reads Playboy for the articles. 

Beyond that, Playboy’s efforts are an indicator of reader demand for this kind of journalism. And with any luck, more availability, more openness, at whatever rate, is where we’re headed. BOMB and The Paris Review already have their complete interview archives available on line and free. I’d love to see more publications head that way. 

An even bigger interview drop is coming in the next two years. The Library of Congress is in the process of digitizing the entire collection of interviews by Studs Turkel, perhaps America’s greatest interviewer. The first of those nearly 7,000 conversations is due to be made publicly available sometime next year. 

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Outside's Joe Spring: My Top 5 Longreads of the Year

Joe Spring is the online editor for Outside Magazine.

This was a big year for longform journalism. Byliner came out with blockbuster stories, like Jon Krakuer’s Three Cups of Deceit. The Atavist put out consistently strong features with solid multimedia. At Outside, our editors and writers contributed excellent investigative online exclusives (“Blood in the Water,” “Crashing Down”). Thanks to Longreads, Longform, Sportsfeat, The Browser, and other longform-loving sites, I found more great stories online then ever before. Every time I read something that made me think, I printed it out and taped it to the wall above my desk. Here are five of the articles published in 2011 that hang over my workspace.

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Dr. Don, By Peter Hessler, The New Yorker

A big look at the American West, told through the story of a small town pharmacist

Punched Out, By John Branch, The New York Times

How do you talk about the effects of concussions in sports in a new way? By profiling an individual’s life in exquisite detail, from start to after the finish. The multimedia is first rate as well. (This one took up the biggest chunk of wall space.)

Robert Krulwich, Commencement Speech at the University of Berkeley School of Journalism, Posted on Not Exactly Rocket Science

An argument for going after the things you want.

Frank’s Story, By John Brant, Runner’s World

Frank Shorter was the most famous marathoner of his day, yet few people knew about the disturbing behavior of his father—a supposedly perfect small town doctor.

The Fracturing of Pennsylvania, By Eliza Griswold, The New York Times Magazine

There were stories about hydrofracking with more statistical analysis and stories that explained the overall process and its effects in more detail, but no story was told better. Here’s how fracking in rural Pennsylvania affected the Haney family.

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Time's Radhika Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Radhika Jones is executive editor of Time.

I got to work on a number of great longreads at Time this year, among them Lev Grossman on fan fiction, Kate Pickert on the perils of cancer screening, and Kurt Andersen on the Year of the Protester. But these are a few of the pieces from other venues that have stuck with me.

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“And I Should Know,” by Roseanne Barr, New York

I didn’t follow the great Charlie Sheen meltdown of spring 2011. But I read every word of Roseanne Barr’s Sheen-inspired treatise on sitcom fame, in which she opens a window onto the warped and warping world of celebrity. It was a brilliant assignment, sharply executed and highly entertaining.

“It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!” by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

This is about the most exhilarating piece of business writing I have ever read, mostly thanks to Lewis’s summary of the trope of shit in German culture and its relation to the European financial crisis, which I found both hilarious and totally plausible. It was like stumbling into a graduate seminar on formalist readings of macroeconomics textbooks. I mean that in a really good way.

“Changing Times,” by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker

There’s nothing flashy or attention-seeking about Ken Auletta’s profile of Jill Abramson; it makes my top five because I found it fascinating to watch a picture of her emerge from the figure she cuts in the workplace. It emerges slowly—you have to wade through a lot of meetings—but Auletta was smart to go for inspirational at the outset: as a woman in publishing, I felt invested in Abramson’s rise and in the way she’s cultivated authority, intelligence and ambition.

“A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs,” by Mona Simpson, The New York Times

We all read a ton about Steve Jobs in the days after his death. Then Mona Simpson’s eulogy came along, reinvented the Jobs memoriam and blew the competition away. It was elegant, personal and lovingly attentive to detail—a tribute perfectly fitted to the man it honored. He was very lucky to have a writer for a sister.

“Cincinnati,” by James Pogue, n+1

I grew up in Cincinnati, back when WKRP was on the air and Jerry Springer was the mayor. It’s a city of in-betweens, and James Pogue’s rambling, evocative essay in n+1 captures its contradictions perfectly. I love the idea of a piece whose main goal is to take you somewhere else—in geography, in history and in memory.

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Nature's Brendan Maher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Brendan Maher is biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal.

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My selection of the best science-themed longreads for 2011 suffers from two major limitations: 1.) I couldn’t read everything, so have probably missed some very worthy entries. 2.) I purposely did not include articles from Nature, where I am an editor. For some top stories from our pages see our end-of-year special.

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1. “Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World,” Amy Harmon, New York Times

The science supporting new behavioural approaches to treating autism is slipped in subtly in this wonderful tale about a teenage boy with autism trying to engage with the world of “neurotypicals.” So is practically every other theme about the social and scientific difficulties that autism presents. The multimedia efforts are a treat, but Harmon’s writing is an absolute clinic in pacing.

2. “The Possibilian,” Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker

An obligatory nod to The New Yorker and to the ubiquitous David Eagleman, who has become something akin to the Oliver Sacks of our time (of course our time already has an Oliver Sacks). The details Bilger pulls into this profile are delicious. How could one not love a lab that studies the perception of time in which everyone seems to be wearing a broken wristwatch?

3. “The Behavioral Sink,” Will Wiles, Cabinet Magazine

This was a weird, wild and utterly immersive history of John B. Calhoun’s Universe 25, a mouse utopia of sorts where food was plentiful, but space was not. Once the population reached maximum density, behaviour turned pathological. The results of this experiment fit neatly’with apocalyptic fears prevalent during the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired in part by the book “The Population Bomb”. These themes are fun to reflect on, without alarm, in the year that the 7 billionth human was born

4. “False Positive,” Jon Cohen, Martin Enserink, Science

“Done. Case closed. Finito, lights off, The End,” is the ironic lede to this retelling of the story of Judy Mikovits, a passionate virologist hell-bent on proving that chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a retrovirus originally referred to as XMRV. The beginning is ironic because unbeknownst to anyone, the story would erupt again and again late in the fall, when Mikovits was sued by her former employer for allegedly stealing lab notebooks and then arrested as a fugitive from justice in a soap-opera-worthy postscript. I’ll note (in the gentle, ribbing way of a friendly competitor) that we called the death of this hypothesis several months prior in our pages, but Science’s take is as detailed as it is riveting.

5. “How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History,” Kim Zetter, Wired

This is one of the few things that keeps me up at night. We also did some coverage of this next evolution of computer viruses as weapons of war. Wired’s blow-by-blow account was, as you might expect, exceptional.

BONUS

“One in a Billion: A boy’s life, a medical mystery,” Mark Johnson Kathleen Gallagher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

I’m taking an extra turn because this three part series ran in late December after I had submitted my five best last year. Yes, it’s a bit obvious of me to pick a Pulitzer-Prize-winning package, but if you haven’t read this, you really should. The themes and challenges spelled out in this story of a sick child being helped by genomics will become a much larger part of the health-care discussion in the next few years.

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Samuel Rubenfeld's Tumblr: My top-5 Long Reads of 2011

Samuel Rubenfeld’s Tumblr: My top-5 Long Reads of 2011

A. N. Devers' Top 5 Bathtub Longreads of 2011

A. N. Devers‘ work has appeared online in Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and in other publications.  Her most recent essay, about poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in Carmel, California, is in the Winter 2011 issue of Tin House. She is the founder and editor of Writers’ Houses, a website dedicated to literary pilgrimage.

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Maghag (n.): 1. A compulsive reader and hoarder of periodicals and magazines to a magnitude that endangers the well-being of the hag’s housekeeping ability, family relationships, and punctuality. Identified by a pruney skin that develops from spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathtub 2. Writer and procrastinator known as A. N. Devers.

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1. I always go for Scientology exposes. I’m cheap that way. “The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker, with its heroic fact-checking effort, is so Xenu-shattering that it inspired a rebuttal from the Church of Scientology in the form of a poor-executed satire of The New Yorker.

2. My fandom of Paul Collins goes back a ways. His work exposes my periodical-weeding inability. If you came over to my apartment and demanded some Paul Collins, I’d be able to run to dusty stacks and the file cabinet and deliver a dozen essays of awesome. So I’m not surprised that his piece about the disappearance of child-writer Barbara Follett in the Lapham’s Quarterly Celebrity issue is perfectly constructed story of intrigue and wonderment, mystery and disturbia.

3. Anything I can say about Hungarian industrial designer and ceramicist Eva Zeisel’s Prison Memoir (A Public Space, issue 14) of being arrested in Stalinist Russia doesn’t do her charm and intellect justice. Just listen to this voice: “He put a number in front of my chest and I thought, This will make me look like those pictures of criminals one sees, Wanted for Murder. Then they took me to be fingerprinted, one finger rolled in the ink after the other, and again I thought, It’s like the movies. Again, we walked through many courtyards and the funny thing was that I did not see anybody. It was all empty. Finally, I was in my cell, and I still did not know what it was all about.”

4. Once upon a time, I was a professional archaeologist. Freelance survey and excavation work paid some of my bills my last year of college and my first couple of years out of school. I was waitlisted for a PhD to study caves with a famous spelunking archaeologist at Washington University and had determined if I didn’t get in I’d go a different route. By then I realized that archaeology and literature have more in common than people realize—and I love them for the same reasons. They are both, I believe, about our need to seek and excavate truth. But archaeologists, like many breeds of scientist, aren’t natural storytellers, and I am always glad when a writer happens upon archaeology and finds a way to explore the people and projects of a fascinating field. John Jeremiah Sullivan does this in his wonderful Paris Review essay, “Unnamed Caves” (purchase req.), and it’s now in his excellent collection, Pulphead. Go spelunking with him. Here’s a bonus: another favorite writer of mine, Elif Batuman, dug into Turkish archaeology in her essay, The Sanctuary” for The New Yorker (sub. required). She visits the world’s oldest temple and deftly unravels its history and mythology.

5. I would be lying by omission if I didn’t admit to reading a ton of celebrity dish in the tub. I think my favorite this year was “Lowe, Actually,” the excerpt in Vanity Fair of Rob Lowe’s memoir. I don’t really have a thing for Rob Lowe. Never have. (For instance, I loved West Wing but for the overuse of pancake makeup on Lowe’s face.) But I spent 6th grade idolizing S. E. Hinton for The Outsiders. And I was hooked again when I finally got to see the movie. So, yes, Rob Lowe had me at his mention of Ponyboy. Stay gold, y’all. 

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