Search Results for: This Magazine

Longreads Member Exclusive: Jason Zengerle’s First Assignment for Might Magazine

Longreads Pick

This week, we’re thrilled to feature Jason Zengerle, a contributing editor for New York magazine and GQ  who has been featured on Longreads  many times. Our Member Pick is Jason’s 1997 story on Michael Moore for Might magazine: “Is This Man the Last, Best Hope for Popular Liberalism in America? And, More Importantly, Does He Have a Sense of Humor?”

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Source: Might magazine
Published: Mar 15, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,685 words)

Finalists for the 2013 City & Regional Magazine Awards

Longreads Pick

Patrick Doyle of Boston Magazine has compiled a full list of the nominated stories for this year’s City & Regional Magazine Awards.

Published: Mar 4, 2013

Longreads Member Exclusive: Forever Young, by Jason Johnson & Kill Screen Magazine

Longreads Pick

This week’s Longreads Member Exclusive is “Forever Young,” a story by Jason Johnson for the literary video game magazine Kill Screen. Johnson tells us how he first discovered a group of Hungarian developers who have spent more than 20 years developing a game for the Commodore 64: 

“This wasn’t supposed to happen. As originally conceived, my account of Newcomer, a Commodore 64 game from Hungary, had no business in a publication that hangs its hat on lengthy works of journalism. My assignment was a paltry 1,500 words. The initial interview wasn’t fruitful. However, as is the case with many who’ve stumbled upon this fascinating lifework––now twenty-three years in the works, and counting––one thing led to another, and I was in it for the long haul.

“I was interested in profiling István Belánszky, Newcomer‘s torchbearer, but like so many merely adequate polyglots, István doesn’t speak English very well. He was hesitant to interview verbally. I wasn’t able to get to Budapest to meet him, so I interviewed extensively, both with and around István, relying on the convenience of email and instant messaging. The result was a scroll of text, some 27,918 words, the majority typed by István, with long intervals between our exchanges as he painstakingly hammered out, to the best of his ability, the ins and outs of writing software for a computer that, quite honestly, was outdated in 1992, when development on the game began. The longest of these sessions lasted for an insufferable seven hours. By the end, I was ready to cry. But every now and then, amidst the barrage of technical talk and ‘b0rked English,’ a morsel of information would appear in the text window so peculiar and surprising that it made everything worthwhile.”

Support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month

Source: Kill Screen
Published: Jan 18, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,679 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Inc. Magazine's Burt Helm

image

Burt Helm is Senior Writer for Inc. Magazine. His stories, “The Forgotten Founder,” “Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?” and “Hard Lessons in Modern Lending,” were featured on Longreads in 2012.

Best Takedown of an Old, Established Writer by a Young, Hungry Writer in an Awkward Press Junket Setting

Sarah Nicole Prickett, “How to Get Under Aaron Sorkin’s Skin (and also, how to high-five properly),” Toronto Globe and Mail

“Aaron Sorkin knows the weight of last words, and his last words to me, as we walk-and-talk out of the HBO press room, are: ‘Write something nice.’ He says this in the ‘Smile, honey’ tone of much less successful jerks.”

Those words launch Prickett into a funny, cutting attack on the pretentions and assumptions of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Through her eyes, the creator of A Few Good Men and The Social Network is guilty of an insufferable nostalgia for white male power, and she uses a press junket interview for Sorkin’s HBO show The Newsroom to diss the iconic writer in a way that’s both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Liveliest Profile of a Sprawling Corporation and its Straight-Laced Chief Executive

Jennifer Reingold, “Bob Iger: Disney’s Fun King,” Fortune

Big companies and their CEOs are tough to report on. Disney, led by the profoundly un-flamboyant Bob Iger and guarded by its disciplined phalanx of PR professionals, may be one of the toughest. That’s why Reingold’s story is so masterful—it explains Iger in way that’s vivid, thoughtful, and rigorous, giving us a sophisticated picture of him and his plans for the company. I wish Reingold would profile News Corp., Viacom, and every other American company, for that matter.

Investigative Story Responsible for Spurring Most Unintended “Holy Shit!” Uttterances

David Barstow, “Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle,” The New York Times

For me, this story’s surprises came in waves. First, there was the shock at how systematically and rampantly Wal-Mart bribed its way into Mexican retail. Next, there was awe at how Barstow nailed every crucial aspects of the ensuing cover-up. This is investigative reporting at its best—even-handed and rigorous, with no room for perpetrators’ excuses or squirming.

Best Confirmation that Super PACS and Karl Rove are Just as Creepy as We Thought They Were

Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Inside Karl Rove’s Billionaire Fundraiser,” Bloomberg Businessweek

You probably remember the media firestorm that followed this story, which quoted Karl Rove joking about killing Todd Akin (“If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!”). The glimpse of the inner workings of Super PACs that follows in Kolhatkar’s fly-on-the-wall account is fascinating reading, even months after the election.

Best Confirmation of, Admit It, What We All Were Kind of Wondering While Watching the Olympic Opening Ceremony

Sam Alipour, “Will You Still Medal in the Morning?” ESPN Magazine

Those hot-bodied Olympians are having lots and lots of sex! Alipour illustrates hook-up culture in the Olympic Village with kickass reporting (big-name athletes go on the record, and are surprisingly candid) and just the right tone: The story is lighthearted and detailed without being prurient or icky, a tough order for a gossipy sex piece.

Clearest Portrait of a Misunderstood and Deadly American Subculture

Jeanne Marie Laskas, “Guns R’ Us,” GQ

Following the Tucson, Arizona shooting, Laskas set out to understand gun culture by working at a gun store in Yuma and profiling its clerks—the last line of defense between us and mass murderers. I love the way she leaves politics aside and zeroes in on her subjects’ humanity. The story appears in Laskas’s new book, Hidden America, a collection of her GQ stories about the many professional subcultures that make the U.S. work, from oil drillers to coal miners to migrant fruit pickers. Read it, read it, read it.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012

Longreads Best of 2012: Inc. Magazine’s Burt Helm

Longreads Pick

Burt Helm is Senior Writer for Inc. Magazine. His stories, “The Forgotten Founder,” “Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?” and “Hard Lessons in Modern Lending,” were featured on Longreads in 2012.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Author: Burt Helm
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 17, 2012

The 2012 National Magazine Award Finalists

Longreads Pick

See a collection of longreads from the 2012 Ellies, including stories from GQ, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, plus fiction from The Atlantic, VQR and more.

Published:

Reading List for 'Behind the Longreads' with New York Magazine

Reminder: This is next Wednesday! “Behind the Longreads” at Housing Works in NYC with New York magazine’s Dan P. Lee, Jessica Pressler, Wesley Yang and Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss. 

It’s a free event, and you can now RSVP on the Longreads Facebook page

Because this night is going to be about the stories themselves, we’ve prepared a reading list for the big event:

• “Travis the Menace,” by Dan P. Lee (also featured in our new Longreads: Best of 2011 ebook)

• “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age,” by Jessica Pressler 

• “Paper Tigers,” by Wesley Yang


New York Magazine's Ben Williams: My Top Longreads of 2011

Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine.

•••

1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, what’s great is the willingness of both subject and writer to play, and the dynamic between them—these pieces exploit the “profile as date” subtext really well. It’s fun to think about them as a sort of inverse to Jennifer Egan’s brilliant satire of the profile biz in A Visit From the Goon Squad.  In the Vick piece, what I like is the way that Leitch uses the PR apparatus around the process of profiling Michael Vick to reveal what’s at stake for him. He didn’t get much time with Vick, just a photo shoot and a phone call, but he used it to both explain and complicate the Michael Vick Story that the quarterback’s handlers want to tell. 

2. There are a bunch of New Yorker stories I could pick—Ryan Lizza’s “leading from behind” piece on Obama’s foreign policy was so influential; Jane Mayer on Thomas Drake and state secrets was fascinating and moving; Kelefah Sanneh not only wrote a great analysis of Odd Future, he tracked down their missing member; David Grann is David Grann—but my favorite was Jeffrey Toobin’s take on Clarence Thomas. There are so many things going on here: It’s a revisionist view that frames Thomas as very smart and canny; it shows how one justice can move the entire Supreme Court over decades through the way opinions are written; it sets the stage for next year’s healthcare ruling as a culmination of Thomas’s entire mission; and it makes clear once again just what a strange, extremist man he is.

3. Overall, my favorite thing in the new New York Times Magazine is probably the Riffs section—it identified a gap in the preview-and-review saturated culture journalism market, which is (relatively) long form argument/idea-driven pieces. To pick a few highlights: Dan Kois’s piece on avant-garde movies kicked off a fierce, endless, at times kind of ridiculous debate that just about every movie critic had to weigh in on; Adam Sternbergh’s piece on jokeless comedies defined an era; Sam Anderson on Derek Jeter both mocked empty sports hagiography and read like a hilarious version of Donald Barthelme. Alternate winner in this category is the New York Review of Books, which published some of the best cultural essays this year—Daniel Mendelsohn on Mad Men and Spiderman, Lorrie Moore on Friday Night Lights, and Dan Chiasson on Keith Richards were all delightful and provocative.

4. I just loved Paul Ford’s “The Web is a Customer Service Medium.” It’s the kind of piece that would be hard to get into a print magazine for various reasons, but it resonated instantly online. It’s a pretty abstract argument about a subject that’s not exactly under-analyzed—what is web content about, and how is it different from other forms of content?—but it opens by coining a phrase which instantly makes sense to anyone who works on the web: “Why wasn’t I consulted?” And then it goes on to make a very detailed, specific, convincing, and non-buzzword-filled argument that isn’t formulated expressly to piss off anyone who works in “old media,” which is refreshing.

5. Finally, some favorites in the emerging multimedia genre of longform tweeting. I probably read more words on Twitter than anywhere else this year, and I am grateful for the stamina of those who somehow manage to tweet and retweet extended thoughts all day, every day on specific themes. I learned as much about the Arab Spring by dipping into @acarvin’s feed as from any essays about it. @daveweigel is constantly insightful, and one of the few people capable of being funny about politics. Following @questlove’s stream is like listening to the world’s kindest, most passionate music geek.

***

See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

New York Times Magazine Staff: Our Top Longreads of 2011

These were the results of a poll of all New York Times Magazine staff—edit, art, photo & production. We decided to do two lists: ‘Them’ and ‘Us,’ and hopefully that doesn’t get us in trouble with the Longreads governing body. 

THEM 

These were the consensus picks of the staff, with only a little executive tampering. Such as: We decided at the last moment to semi-cheat and put Amy Harmon on the list. Though she is an “us” and not a “them,” we didn’t know a thing about her story until we read it in the newspaper, just like everybody else, and it was too good to leave off a year-end list. You will notice that Paul Ford’s essay fills the “our list is not the same as every other list” slot, but that is not, we swear, the reason it made the cut. It probably provoked as much conversation in our office as any single story this year. It is pure pleasure to read. By the way, we loved a lot from The New Yorker, and we could have justifiably filled all 5 slots with their stories. Though, of course, we would never do that. Also, there will be one staff member made very upset by the exclusion of “Travis the Menace,” by Dan P. Lee in New York magazine. Sorry, pal.

• “A Murder Foretold,” by David Grann, The New Yorker

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

• “The Glory of Oprah,” By Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic

• “The Man Who Sailed His House,” By Michael Paterniti, GQ

• “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Paul Ford, The Morning News

***

US

This is also the result of a poll of all magazine staff:

• “Qaddafi’s Never-Never Land,” by Robert Worth

• “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” by John Jeremiah Sullivan

• “Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?” by Susan Dominus

“Murder of an Innocent Man,” by Barry Bearak

• “What Happened to Air France Flight 447?” by Wil S. Hylton

***

See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

5280 Magazine's Geoff Van Dyke: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Geoff Van Dyke is deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, and Men’s Journal.

***

• “The Food at our Feet,” by Jane Kramer, The New Yorker

Kramer can almost make you smell and taste the stuff she’s picking: mint, asparagus, fennel, mushrooms. Plus, maybe my favorite lead sentence of the year: “I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes.”

• “The Kill Team,” by Mark Boal, Rolling Stone

The disturbing investigation into an Army unit in Afghanistan that was killing civilians for sport.

• “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” by Jonathan Franzen, New York Times

I kind of didn’t want to like this piece, but Franzen’s assessment of “consumer technology products,” and our fraught relationships with them, feels right on.

• “The Day that Damned the Dodgers,” by Lee Jenkins, Sports Illustrated

As a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan, it was heartbreaking to read this chronicle of how the Giants’ greatest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, have gone from one of the most respected organizations in sports to one of the most dysfunctional.

“What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?” by Edward Jay Epstein, The New York Review of Books

A fascinating investigation that suggests Dominique Strauss-Kahn was set up, perhaps even by people associated with French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

BONUS

Pretty much anything by Charles P. Pierce at Grantland, but especially his piece on the beginning of the end of NCAA sports and his unflinching essay on Jerry Sandusky and Penn State.

***

See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook.