Search Results for: Wall Street Journal

‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

First Chapters: ‘You Are One of Them,’ by Elliott Holt

Elliott Holt | The Penguin Press | 2013 | 12 minutes (2,854 words)

 

Our latest First Chapter is from Elliott Holt’s novel, You Are One of Them. Thanks to Holt and The Penguin Press for sharing it with the Longreads community.

* * *

Prologue

In Moscow I was always cold. I suppose that’s what Russia is known for. Winter. But it is winter to a degree I could not have imagined before I moved there. Winter not of the pristine, romantic Doctor Zhivago variety but a season so insistent and hateful that all hope freezes with your toes. The snow is cleared away tooquickly to soften the city, so the streets are slushy with resentment. And I felt like the other young women trudging through that slush: sullen and tired, with a bluish tint to the skin below the eyes that suggests insomnia or malnutrition or a hangover. Or all of the above. Every day brought news of a drunk who froze to death. I saw one: slumped over on a bench on Tverskoy Boulevard with a bottle between his legs and icicles decorating his fingers. Distilled into something so pure and solid that I didn’t recognize it as death until I got up close. The babushka next to me summoned the police.

I cracked under the weight of the cold. My only recourse was to eat. I inhaled entire packages of English tea biscuits in one sitting. They came stacked in a tube, and when I found myself halfway through one, I decided I might as well finish it. I polished off a whole tube every night after work and then pinched the extra flesh around my hips in the bathtub and thought, At least I’m warm.

It was 1996. At the English-language newspaper where I worked, the other expats were always joking. Russia, with all its quirks, was funny. There was a sign at Sheremetyevo Airport, perched at the entrance to the short-term-parking lot, which had been translated into English as acute care parking. It was a sign better suited to a hospital, where everything is dire. And at the smaller airports, the ones for regional flights, the Russian word for “exit,” vykhod, was translated into English as get out. A ticket to Sochi, for example, said you would be departing from Get Out #4. I laughed with them, but I knew that eventually these mistranslations would be corrected, that Russia would grow out of its awkward teenage capitalism and become smooth and nonchalant. You could see the growing pains in the pomaded hair of the nightclub bouncers, in the tinted windows of the Mercedes sedans on Tverskaya, in the garish sequins on the Versace mannequins posing in a shop around the corner from the Bolshoi Theater.

At the infamous Hungry Duck, I watched intoxicated Russian girls strip on top of the bar and then tumble into the greedy arms of American businessmen. American men still had cachet then; as an American woman, I hugged the sidelines. (“Sarah,” said the Russian men at my office, “why you don’t wear the skirts? Are you the feminist?” They always laughed, and it was a deep, carnivorous sound that made me feel daintier than I am.) Everyone in Moscow was ravenous, and the potential for anarchy—I could feel its kaleidoscope effect—made a lot of foreigners giddy. Most of the reporters at my paper spoke some Russian. But among the copy editors, many of whom were fresh out of Russian-studies programs and itching to put their years in the language lab to good use, the hierarchy was built on who spoke Russian best. They were not gunning for careers in journalism; they just wanted to be in the new post-Soviet Moscow—the wild, wild East—and this job paid the bills. The Americans with Russian girlfriends—”pillow dictionaries,” they called them, aware that these lanky, mysterious women were far better-looking than anyone they’d touched back home—began to sound like natives. They were peacocks, preening with slang. In the office each morning, they’d pull off their boots and slide their feet into their tapochki and head to the kitchen for instant coffee—Nescafe was our only option then—and they’d never mention their past lives in Wisconsin or Nevada or wherever they escaped from. “Oy,” they said, and “Bozhe moy,” which means “my God” but has anguish in Russian that just doesn’t translate. A little bravado goes a long way toward hiding the loneliness. You can reinvent yourself with a different alphabet.

On Saturdays at the giant Izmailovo Market, tourists haggled for Oriental rugs and matryoshka dolls painted to resemble Soviet leaders—Lenin fits into Stalin, who fits into Khrushchev, who fits into Brezhnev, who fits into Andropov, who fits into Gorbachev, who fits into Yeltsin. History reduced to kitsch. While shopping for Christmas gifts once, I stopped by a booth where a spindly drunk was selling old Soviet stamps. And there, pinned like a butterfly to a tattered red velvet display cushion, was Jenny. Her image barely warped by time. “Skolko?” I said. The man asked too much. He had the deadened eyes of a person who hasn’t been sober for years, and I didn’t feel like bargaining, so I handed him the money. He could smell my desperation. He put the stamp in a Ziploc bag, and on the way back home on the Metro I studied her through the plastic. My best friend, commemorated like a cosmonaut. Her name had been transliterated into Cyrillic: ДЖЕННИФЕР ДЖОНС, it said above the smiling photo of her freckled face. A five-kopeck stamp from the postal service of the USSR. I had just paid ten dollars for something that was originally worth next to nothing.

Conspiracy theorists will tell you that Jennifer Jones’s death was not an accident. They will tell you that her plane crashed not because of mechanical failure, not because the pilot was suffering from dizzy spells, but because the CIA shot it down. She had become a Soviet pawn they say, too sympathetic to the party. Others say that the KGB was responsible, that after the press took pictures of her smiling at the Kremlin and quoted her saying how nice the Russians were, they needed to quit while they were ahead. I’ve read the official reports. I heard the pundits spew their Sunday-morning-talk-show ire. But I don’t recognize the Jennifer Jones I knew in their versions of the story.

Some people will tell you that all of it was propaganda, that she was just a pawn in someone else’s game, but the letter—the original letter—was real. It came from a real place of fear. The threat used to be so tangible. I was prepared to lose the people I loved best. My mother, with her fuzzy hair and lemon-colored corduroys; our dog, Pip; and Jenny. Always Jenny, whose last act must have been storing her tray table in its upright and locked position. Yuri Andropov wished her the best in her young life. Maybe this blessing was a curse.

Or maybe her luck just ran out.

* * *

Chapter One

The first defector was my sister.

I don’t remember her, but I have watched the surviving Super 8 footage so many times that the scenes have seared themselves on my brain like memories. In the film, Isabel (Izzy, for short), four years old, dances on a beach. She is twirling, around and around and around again, until she falls in the sand. There is grace in her fall; she does not tumble in a heap but composes herself like a ballerina. She wears a bathing suit with the stars-and-stripes design that the U.S. swim team wore in the 1972 Summer Games in Munich. It is the same suit that Mark Spitz wore when he swam to gold seven times. On Izzy the Speedo bunches near her armpits but is taut across her stomach. Her body has already lost most of its toddler pudge. Her legs are long and lean and are beginning to show muscle definition. My parents were both athletes; Izzy’s coordination and flexibility suggest that she, too, will win many races. But her belly still protrudes slightly like a baby’s, and there are small pockets of fat on her upper thighs. Her hair is startlingly blond and tousled by the wind. Her eyes are green and transparent as sea glass. Behind her the ocean is calm. Her expression betrays—already!—a hint of skepticism. She is the sort of child who is universally declared beautiful. She looks directly at the camera, unafraid of meeting its gaze. My mother hovers at the right side of the frame in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. She wears a pink paisley bikini, and she holds me, a juicy nine-month-old with a half-gnawed banana in my right hand, on her lap. The camera rests for a moment on my face, but I am blurry, and before the focus can be adjusted, the lens turns abruptly back to Izzy, who is kneeling in the sand, strangely reverent and, judging from her moving lips and rhythmically tilting head, singing something. The camera pans to my mother once more. She is laughing, head thrown back.

Three minutes of footage, shot in August of 1973, exactly one year before Nixon resigned. There are several notable things about this short film: (1) My mother looks relaxed and happy. Half of her face is obscured by the hat, yes, but the smile she wears is an irrepressible one. She is laughing at her older daughter, squeezing her younger one. She is all lightness and joy. (2) The camera lingers on her lovely legs for at least four seconds, which suggests that my father the auteur was, at this point, still very much in love with (or at least attracted to) my mother. (3) My sister is alive.

Just three months after this scene on the beach, Izzy died of meningitis. It was the sort of freak occurrence about which every parent has nightmares: a sudden fever that won’t go down, a frantic call to the pediatrician—supposedly one of the city’s best—and six hours later, despite said pediatrician’s reassurances that “it was nothing to worry about,” a visit to the emergency room at Georgetown University Hospital, where my sister’s meningitis was diagnosed too late to save her. It had already infected her spine and her brain.

This happened on November 7, 1973: my first birthday. Forever after that it was tainted. My parents could never bring themselves to celebrate it convincingly. During every subsequent birthday, they would excuse themselves at various points and disappear into their own private corners to grieve. At my fifth birthday party—the first one I remember—I could hear my mother’s wails from the laundry room in the basement. The sound was so alarming that the clown who had been hired to make balloon animals kept popping her creations. She seemed skittish. “Why is your mom crying?” the kids from my kindergarten class wanted to know. “I had a sister, and then she died,” I said. I used to deliver this information matter-of-factly. It was no more weighty than the fact that our house was stucco or that my father was British. I was three when my parents told me I’d had a sister, and it was a relief to know that there was an explanation for the absence I’d felt for so long in my limbic memory. I’d reach for a baby doll—a doll I later learned had belonged to her—and picture it cradled in another set of arms. Sitting beneath our dining-room table once when I was four—I liked to crawl into private spaces to play—I was overcome with déjà vu. I was sure I had sat in the same spot with Izzy. It must have been just before she died. I must have been eleven months old. I could almost hear a breathy, high-pitched voice urging me to “smile, little Sarah, smile!”

And soaking in the tub, even now as an adult, I sometimes sense the memory of bath time with my sister. My foot touching hers under the water as the tub filled, the sight of her leaning back to tip her blond head under the faucet. Letters of the alphabet in primary colors stuck on the porcelain sides of the tub, arranged in almost-words, and my mother crouched on the floor beside us, her sleeves rolled up so that her blouse didn’t get wet as she washed our hair. And after we were pulled from the water, did we wriggle free of our towel cocoons and chase each other around the house naked? Did I make her laugh? I have no proof that it didn’t happen. I feel certain it did.

Intuitively I knew that something was missing long before I knew how to articulate it. Long before I knew that most people’s parents slept in the same bedroom, that most people’s mothers weren’t afraid to leave the house, that some children had never seen their parents cry, I knew that something was off in my family. “Your poor parents,” people would say to me when I was older and I told them the story. But no one seemed to understand that I felt the loss, too. My sister was in heaven, my mother said, with my mother’s parents, who also died too young for me to meet them. I mourned the sister I didn’t get to know. I longed to share secrets and clothes. I wanted a co-conspirator. I was jealous of the kids with siblings, who rolled their eyes at each other behind their parents’ backs, who counted on the unconditional loyalty only a sister or a brother can provide.

I loved watching that film of my sister. My parents had bought the camera right before that beach trip, so there is no earlier footage of her. There are some photographs, of course, but it was a thrill for me to see her move. Her right hand ebbed and flowed through the air, replicating the motion of the waves behind her. Her body language was like a tide pulling me in; I recognized it somewhere deep inside myself. If she had lived, I know that we would be the kind of adult siblings about whom people say, “Their mannerisms are the same.”

My mother liked to watch our home movies every Saturday night, but screening them was a labor-intensive process. You had to set up the projector on the end table we used as a base, thread the reel through the machine—”Careful, careful!” my mother would say to my father—and sometimes, when the projector overheated, the film would burn and darkness would spread across the image on the living-room wall. It was terrifying to watch the dark blot fill the screen, as if our past were being annihilated right in front of us. It happened so quickly: one moment bright with life and then, suddenly, nothing but darkness. We lost many precious moments in this way—”Stop it, stop it, turn it off!” my mother would cry as my father fumbled with the projector, trying to save the rest of the reel from being fried—including the establishing shots of Izzy on the beach. A zoom into her cherubic face and then we watched that face melt. “My baby girl!” my mother whimpered while the loose strand of film flapped hysterically and my father struggled to turn off the machine. The manic whirring stopped, and then we were all quiet as my father put the reel away in its gray steel case.

“Sometimes I think we should just let it burn,” he said one evening.

“It’s the only one we have of her,” said my mother.

“But we’ve got to let go, Alice. We’ve got to look forward.”

She launched her iciest stare at him. “Is there something better on the horizon?”

I could tell he wanted to erupt. I don’t know if he locked up his rage because I was in the room or because he had already given up on my mom.

We didn’t watch the Izzy footage again after that—my mother was afraid the rest of the reel would be destroyed, so she hid it inside a hatbox in her closet. But when I was old enough to operate the projector, I sneaked late-night viewings of my sister. I would wait until I was sure my mother was asleep and then creep into her dressing room. She kept the hatbox on the top shelf, and as I reached for it, my hand would graze the silks of the dresses my mother had long ago stopped wearing. She retired her glamour when my sister died. (“You may not believe this,” my father said, “but at Radcliffe your mother was always the life of the party.”)

In the dark of the living room, where I set up the projector in the same place we always watched home movies, Izzy’s sequence of movements—turn, turn, fall, kneel—became a sort of meditation. I realize that I see all my memories this way. Everything I remember unspools in the flickering silence of Super 8 film. Each scene begins with the trembling red stripe of the Kodak logo and ends with the sound of the reel spinning, spinning, spinning until someone shuts it down.

From You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Elliott Holt, 2013.

Caught Up in the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher

Susan J. Palmer | University of Toronto Press | 2001 | 38 minutes (9,328 words)

The below article comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, and we’d like to thank the author, Susan J. Palmer, for allowing us to share it with the Longreads community.  Read more…

Longreads Member Pick: The Offline Wage Wars of Silicon Valley

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For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from Next City’s Forefront magazine, by journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz. Aronowitz looks at the story behind the minimum wage increase in San Jose, which jumped to $10 per hour from $8 per hour after the city’s residents voted for the increase last November—”the single largest minimum-wage jump in the nation’s history.” Aronowitz explains:

“A few months ago, I started to notice that journalists were totally obsessed with Silicon Valley’s income gap. In voyeuristic detail, they described oblivious 22-year-olds buying $5,000 bicycles and renting $3,000 studios and farming out the simplest tasks to worker bees with the click of an app. Meanwhile, the working class—the people on the other end of TaskRabbit and dry cleaning bills—were mostly painted in broad strokes as powerless casualties of this contemporary gold rush.

“When I heard that a few students at San Jose State, mostly working class women of color, had sparked a campaign to raise the minimum wage, I immediately realized that the $48 artisanal fried chicken of Silicon Valley had come home to roost. These kids were living in an exaggerated microcosm of what had pissed off Occupy Wall Street so much, and unlike that poor documentary filmmaker getting evicted in San Francisco, they weren’t impotent bystanders. They were fighting. This piece doesn’t tell a tale of a seamless victory; these activists were juggling kids, classes, campaigning, and their own minimum wage jobs, sometimes unsuccessfully. But their story is an important counterpoint to the implication that the widening of the wealth gap, happening everywhere, is simply inevitable.”

‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.

“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995. Read more…

Forever Young

Jason Johnson | Kill Screen | July 2012 | 23 minutes (5,679 words)

 

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.

“In hindsight, I suppose I should’ve reckoned István would have plenty to say about a project he had spent his entire adulthood completing. On his word, we printed in issue six of Kill Screen that Newcomer would be done and out the door by summer, though I had my suspicions. Almost a year after we wrapped up the interviews, the game is still missing. But, he’s making progress. Occasionally, I’ll get a message from my friend István, and sometimes it’ll just be a link to a crude joke on some Hungarian forum, but in others, he’ll detail an overhaul to the game’s combat system, or give me the lowdown on the progress of his interminable debug.”

For more stories like this, you can subscribe to Kill Screen magazine.

* * *

Hungary in the late ’80s was one of the most volatile places on Earth. The Soviet Union was on the verge of crumbling, and with it, the Eastern Bloc. The Iron Curtain did not fall without a fight. There were scenes of revolt. In 1989, more than 75,000 protestors flooded the streets of Budapest. A year later, the Hungarian republic was formed. With it came democracy and, as they say, freedom.

What does someone do with newfound freedom? Perhaps, swept up in the spirit of change, they go into politics. Welled over with nationalistic pride, they enlist in the armed services. They see the world. The way to the West, which had been cut off by 150 miles of barbed-wire fence along the Hungarian-Austrian border, was opened. The last thing you would expect someone to do is lock themselves indoors and develop a videogame. Yet that is exactly what a group of young Hungarian men did. They started working on a computer game called Newcomer, an adventure about a man in search of—what else—freedom.

While their choice was not the obvious one, it might have been the greatest pursuit of liberty of all. It was the pursuit of free enterprise. Under goulash communism, Hungarians were required by civil law to work—usually in a field other than videogames. It was nearly impossible to form a game development studio. That would require the blessing of the state, which, for common people, was very hard to get. Their only option would be to go underground; but distributing samizdat—self-published, uncensored media—was a criminal offense.

The story of Newcomer could likewise be described as a tragedy. The amount of man-hours spent on it will surely dwarf what little recognition it will receive when it is released later this year. During my interviews with István Belánszky, the project’s current lead, he told me several times how he was going into “crunch time,” the prolonged periods when he’d spend upwards of 90 hours a week readying the final build. He usually seemed exhausted, having had only a few hours of sleep from working on the game. Since 2008, Newcomer has been his full-time job. Before that, he averaged around 20-30 hours a week. And that is just the work of one team member. A game tester I spoke with told me that he had been playing the game for 14 years. Since then, he said, “there was barely a day I did not spend at least one or two hours playing.”

Since the decline of communism, Hungary has made a full transition to commercial capitalism. Yet Newcomer remains a relic of bygone days. It still runs on bulky, khaki-colored, plastic computers reminiscent of the Space Age. It looks like it was made in the Soviet era. Though the original creators set out in search of prosperity on the free market, the game has looped back to a socialist ideal. After decades of hard work, the game will be given away for free on the internet. While the times have changed, Newcomer never did.

* * *

Newcomer was born in 1990, the same year as the Persian Gulf War. It goes without saying, but the development cycle didn’t go exactly as planned. As proof, here I am, playing a pre-release version in 2012. The game’s history has been a perpetual series of setbacks, reboots, and delays. Newcomer was first released in 1994 for the Commodore 64 to miserable sales. The team, unhappy with the end results, reopened the game. Instead of making a sequel, they continued development until 2001, when they quietly released an expanded edition called Enhanced Newcomer.

By now, the original team members are pushing 50 years of age. All but one has abandoned the game. Belánszky, the youngest member of the old guard—the newcomer, so to speak—has taken the reins in the past 10 years. Though he started out as a beta tester for the 1994 edition, he has since become Newcomer‘s driving force. Unsatisfied with the game they made, he forged ahead, muscling through the forthcoming final edition without help from the original creators. Belánszky assures me that Ultimate Newcomer will be completed soon, but the first question that comes to mind is: “Why would anyone remain devoted to this?”

Although 22 years have passed in the interim, Newcomer is still very much a late-’80s-era computer game. Set in a penal colony gone rogue, it is a role-playing game with an emphasis on player choice. You could think of it as an 8-bit version of Mass Effect. The graphics are utilitarian, and the game takes place in what looks like a giant maze. Here’s my stab at describing it: It’s like walking through an elaborate series of office cubicles after quitting time. Newcomer‘s world is one of gray walls, perfectly square rooms, and boxy architecture built of ragged shapes.

Besides that, you don’t see things. To be precise, you don’t see the objects you interact with onscreen because of hardware limitations. In order to look at a picture hanging on the wall, you face the empty wall where the picture should be, press the Return key, and a description appears in purple text: “Very nice landscape drawing.” The game’s cast of characters—made up of militants, sleaze-balls, and jail-yard priests—are invisible also. When you move onto a square where someone is standing, their black-and-white mugshot—drawn in large pixels—appears in a window below.

The places you explore are perfectly motionless. Moving around feels like clicking through slides on an overhead projector, as opposed to the fluid motion of film or watching television. There is no sound, except for the plod of my own footsteps as I move forward, one frame at a time, by pressing the “I” key. Turn left or right, with “J” or “L,” and the screen jumps 90 degrees. Turn left four times and you pivot in a complete circle. The “K” key, the Enter key, and the Spacebar, given the specific situation, can all mean “Yes.” Though the interface is outdated, the creators aren’t twiddling their thumbs. It’s just that instead of smoothing out the rough edges, they are piling on lore.

Cases such as Newcomer‘s are uncommon in the game industry, but not unheard of. Publishers generally have the business sense to cancel projects before they slip into obsolescence. Embarrassments are mostly avoided, but sometimes, shit happens. The most widely publicized train wreck was the long, strange evolution of Duke Nukem Forever. After Duke‘s development team squandered 15 years playing catch-up with the latest tech, the publisher was forced to take legal action to get the game out the door. When it finally arrived in 2011, Duke was deemed a massive flop by critics and players alike. One publication called it “barely playable, not funny, [and] rampantly offensive.”

Newcomer is a different beast altogether. The first distinction is size. Newcomer is a big game. How big? Even Belánszky admits that he doesn’t know the game’s full extent. According to his lead tester, it “is almost beyond computability.” The game’s website says it takes 60 to 280 hours to play the first time through. To put this in perspective, Duke Nukem Forever takes approximately 10 hours to complete. The longest solo games, like Persona 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, can take over 100 hours.

Second is scope. The difference between Newcomer and a game like Duke Nukem Forever is that Newcomer has expanded laterally, not vertically. Whereas Duke‘s tragic flaw was a severe case of technological penis envy, Newcomer‘s fault was that, for four console generations, it ignored the changing times and focused strictly on content. The team kept adding more stuff: 150 additional characters weren’t enough. They wanted 180. A word count that matched that of Crime and Punishment seemed inadequate. They threw in another novella’s worth of reading. A good portion of the development time was spent adding what is appropriately called the “Long and Complex” mode. Whereas a branching game like Mass Effect has multiple endings, each of Newcomer‘s three modes has multiple endings.

The problem is that the game industry doesn’t wait around for designers to pen a work equivalent in length to In Search of Lost Time. If videogames are art, then they are the most fickle kind of art. In other media, a lengthy delay isn’t necessarily detrimental. After 44 years, Brian Wilson was able to piece together the Beach Boys’ lost album Smile. Spend too long making a game and the hardware won’t be around to play it. Case in point: Newcomer is a Commodore 64 game. But since the actual Commodore 64 has been out of production since the mid-’90s, it must be played on a C64 emulator that runs on modern computers. (Belánszky’s Ultimate edition will be getting a very limited release on 5 1/4” floppy disk, however.)

This means you are playing an authentic Commodore 64 game, complete with all the hang-ups. Belánszky counts it as a blessing that the pixel-art style of retro games has made a comeback. The writing is a disaster, dealing with characters with names like Dogcatcher and Axel and Jackal, second-in-command of a gang called the Marauders. It avoids direct comparison to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, the B-movie to end all B-movies, only because few games are regarded for their script. Worse, it is necessary to keep notes, jotting down hints that you are given during the game. This way, when you talk to someone like Ruth, a victim of sex trafficking you can sleep with for 500 bucks, you can choose “Tell me about…!” in the menu, then fill in the blank. Such aspects make playing Newcomer feel like running into a brick wall. In fact, I did run into the wall several times, fumbling with the controls, as the word “Ouch” scrolled repeatedly in the dialog box.

The game begins inside a compound that looks like a Syrian prison. I’m trapped in a maze of dilapidated sandstone patrolled by guards with uzis, punk rockers, and wild dogs. I get into a fight with the dogs, and it goes like this: I push “F” to fight, “A” to attack, and “Y” to confirm that I want to attack. Then, I shoot the dog for 1,200 damage points. I do this seven times in a row and the dog dies. As usual, there are no graphics to illustrate this violent conflict. It all occurs in a menu. I feel like a quality-control inspector on an assembly line, pressing the pass button each time a can of soup is slid in front of me.

Because of episodes like this, there is a disconnect between the game I see and the game described to me. Newcomer‘s original designer Zoltan Gonda told me that he is prouder of the game than anything he has ever done. Belánszky, his protégé, said what drives him is “the opportunity to take something that was promising, beyond what [he saw] in other games, and make it even better.” Once, he told me the inspirational story of a man who had played a previous edition of Newcomer in 2002. The man had lost his job and his wife, and was living alone in a flat. In his despondency, he started playing. After six months of not doing much else, he reached the end. The man then wrote the team a letter of gratitude. He said that Newcomer had helped him regain his self-confidence, and by playing it, he managed to pull his life together.

* * *

István Belánszky is tall and has a fairly slender physique. His head is shaved bald, and his features are pointy. He wears a bushy goatee, with no mustache. Shaven, his chin would be as prominent as Jay Leno’s. His goatee extends far in front of his face, as if you were viewing in profile the Man in the Moon. When I first contacted him over email, it took him a few days to respond. When he did, he explained that he had been checking me out—making sure that I was a writer, and not some Newcomer fan trying to glean unannounced information.

To put it bluntly, and it may be an understatement, Belánszky is obsessed with his game. When he sent me a copy to play, he encrypted the file and gave me the password over a secure chat client. This, he told me, would prevent the game from falling into the wrong hands, in case his network had been hacked. It felt like we were turning keys at the same time in order to arm a torpedo on a submarine.

Belánszky lives in old communist public housing in Budapest. His apartment is nestled in a wide, gray, boring building that was erected, along with many exactly like it, in the 1960s and ’70s to house the working class. He says its stairs are good for workouts. Belying his image as a programmer, Belánszky is also a bit of a health nut. Our conversations frequently began with small talk about hemp shakes, Omega fatty acids, cardiovascular training and stretching, and the benefits for lacto-vegetarians of building muscle mass with goat-milk whey protein.

He has not always been this health-conscious. However, as he spent the past decade primarily sitting in front of a computer, he developed a serious heart condition and Type 2 diabetes. To finance Newcomer, he began working for hire, doing odd jobs in the games industry: quality assurance, voiceovers, and localizations. He worked on Newcomer during his downtime. The result was a constant cycle of programming that eventually took a toll on his body. In 2008, he had to give up the side jobs because of his declining health. He weighed over 250 pounds. He was literally working himself to death.

Now Belánszky is healthy again. While Newcomer didn’t take his life, it did rob him of his youth. He turned 40 this May. Most of his adulthood has been spent living and breathing Newcomer. This fact is outlandish even before you consider that, strictly speaking, it isn’t his game. Belánszky joined up with the original team members in 1994, when the first edition of Newcomer had nearly been completed.

Taking over development on Newcomer may have been his destiny. Belánszky dropped out of high school in his senior year. He wanted to work in information technology, and the school he attended was ill-equipped to teach it. The best the Hungarian educational system had to offer were “horrible DOS PCs.” So he landed a job writing a monthly column on tabletop role-playing games for Guru Magazin, one of the first gaming magazines in Hungary. It was there that he discovered the game that would consume him.

In the spring of 1994, he had a long conversation in the editorial room with Zoltan Gonda, the creator and original designer of Newcomer, who occasionally wrote reviews for the magazine. Newcomer was in its final stage of development—or so they thought. Gonda was in need of another playtester who could give him feedback. According to Belánszky, “he pitched it to me as a computer role-playing game that was more like a tabletop role-playing game than anything else. Given my other main interest was computer geekery, I was sold on the idea.” He eagerly accepted the invitation, and with Belánszky’s assistance, the team wrapped up production on the first edition of Newcomer.

* * *

Gonda had assembled a team of three that included a coder, an artist, and himself as the game designer. Together, they envisioned a game in the same vein as Interplay’s popular titles, such as Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic fantasy that inspired Fallout; and Neuromancer, which was based on William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk novel. The plot, at least at the outset, is similar to the TV series Lost. A group of strangers with questionable pasts find themselves stranded on a mysterious island. Only these strangers are convicts, and the island is a prison. At the start of the game, your character wakes up on the island, confused from amnesia. His only memory is that he shot and killed his wife and the man she was sleeping with.

Like its main character, Newcomer‘s development started off on the wrong foot in 1990. Gonda had planned to complete the game in two years, but the team quickly ran into snags. No one had worked on a videogame before. Gonda likened the process to “walking in a 10-miles-long, pitch-dark tunnel with a tiny lighter in your hand.” The problem was that they didn’t have the hardware they needed to produce a game of the caliber of others on the market. They went from developing on MS-DOS, to two Commodore 64s linked together, to an Amiga 500, but Newcomer proved too much. It took too long for their underpowered computers to process information, so they purchased a compiling tool from the U.S. in order to speed things up. However, the code it produced didn’t work. They tried writing their own compiler, but it was too slow.

Eventually, they found a powerful-enough computer. By then, the initial two years had passed, and they were just getting started. Regardless, they were determined to make Newcomer a reality. They believed it could become a commercial success. In fact, some of them still do. As recently as a few years ago, Gonda shopped Newcomer around for a high-definition update. But, even in 1994, success was not to be. Half a year before Newcomer was finished, Commodore went bankrupt, the Commodore 64 went out of production, and the market for its games collapsed. The original Newcomer sold an underwhelming 1,500 copies. It was considered a local success in Hungary.

* * *

Belánszky tells me his Ultimate Newcomer is the far superior edition, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. When you ask him why he does it—why he continues to dedicate his life to a game that was dated the first time it was released 18 years ago—he will say something like, “For the hell of it!” or, “Ask those guys who first made it up to Mount Everest.” But the truth is, he does it because he has faith in its system. By the system, I mean the massive body of code that connects the game in the same way that twisting, disorienting streets connect Istanbul.

Newcomer is designed so that it can be explored for a lifetime. Most of the active testers have completed it more than 50 times apiece, and they still have not seen every encounter with rabid dogs, nor discovered every plot twist within its crumbling walls. Their job is partly an archeological excavation. Recently, the lead tester discovered unknown content that had existed for over 15 years, and was buried deep within the game. This is all the more impressive considering that Newcomer is story-driven. Unlike a sandbox game, where the designers create a host of variables and let them run wild within a system, every choice in Newcomer was handwritten.

The great paradox of Newcomer is that, despite its severe technical limitations, it allows you to do so many different things. If you can think of something to do, there is a decent chance you can do it. Sure, it has all the normal conventions of role-playing games. There are turn-based battles to fight and experience points to gain and spend. There are bartenders to drink with and merchants who sell shotgun shells. You may form a team of the unlikeliest of heroes. But you can also cheat at gambling, pickpocket, blow things up with dynamite, rip off jukeboxes, have sex, learn the gift of guile, wash dishes, specialize in cryptology, wear makeup, work in a field, and look at a porno magazine.

According to Belánszky, Newcomer‘s distinguishing trait is “the way the narrative is triggered by the actions the player chooses.” Newcomer was designed to give the player an extraordinary amount of freedom—something Belánszky has not always had. As a child, he watched the “commie regime” use the threat of physical violence to suppress differences of opinion. As an adult working in a Second World republic, he has felt the sting of being on the wrong side of outsourcing. He was overworked and underpaid. He complains of unfair labor practices in his country. “We had to play by the Soviet rules back then. Now we are expected to play by neoliberal rules,” he said, referring to the limited opportunities he sees within Hungary.

As if to compensate, Newcomer is full of choices. “This level of flexibility and nonlinearity is still very, very rare in computer games,” Belánszky told me. The player’s actions make ripples through the game. If you get into an argument with a merchant, you can freely take his life—that is, if your stats are high enough—but the consequences are greater than missing out on the double-barreled shotgun for sale. You will also lose the chance to make friends with a creep named Sancho. And should you kill the Snake Charmer, you won’t be able to convince Anna Verkaik to seduce Wilder, in order to infect him with an STD. Yet this could allow you to seduce him yourself.

What you see of the prison camps and wilderness and space stations and virtual reality caves is largely determined by an incredibly long chain of events. To keep up with the massive amount of choices the player makes, there are more than 2,050 script packages that run in the background. These scripts evaluate situations. They calculate who is alive and who is dead, which characters have joined your party, and what skills they have gained. The scripts know how much time has passed, and what game-changing events have occurred. There is even one that keeps tabs on when the walls are sprayed with graffiti. These systems come together to create a world that not only evolves, but revolves around your every whim.

In addition to an unprecedented amount of agency, Belánszky and his teammates dreamt up a ludicrous amount of backstory for the game’s 180 key characters. Because many of the characters are inmates, he saw fit to give them psychological profiles. For instance, the android Percival (serial number: 143) is a male spy built in the year 2058. His cybernetic body is made of Steel-Titanium-Molybdenum. He has a sense of duty, he acts thoughtfully, he’s non-autodidact, and he has a built-in AI link.

Belánszky spent a solid three months at the library in Budapest, cooking up a reasonable pseudoscience. “I wanted the tech journals and descriptions to be solid,” he told me. He researched subjects such as criminology, behaviorism, and psychiatry, and then merged them with cyberpunk tropes and conspiracy theories. The result was details—lots and lots of them. Sometimes, during our many long conversations, Belánszky would give me lists of seemingly random prison records he had written:

William Blake—Emotion retarder v0.736.
Paul Van Kryg—Loyalty v0.9 (failed).
Fabricio Cerioni—Loyalty v0.9 (failed).
Peter Waarden—Emotion retarder v1.0b.
Seamus O’Connor—Emotion retarder v1.0z.
Louis Arbey—GEAS v0.8.

The team also hid daunting secrets deep within the game. For instance, David Peabody, a young British thug, is a secret character that you probably won’t run into. But let’s say you do. Whether he lives or dies; joins your crew, or gets a rival gang to kick your ass; knocks you out and steals your money, or helps you rob a vending machine; commits murder, or deals in kidnapped hostages; all depends on the way you treat him. Other secret characters include a former porn star, an alien, and a guy who, according to Belánszky, “likes to kill himself.” However, the domino effect isn’t limited to new recruits. It goes all the way down to the smallest detail, such as how long a used condom will remain on the ground.

According to Ben Samuel, a software engineer at UC Santa Cruz, this type of design is called scripted narrative, where “the player interacts with the story at points that are specifically authored by the designers. You have a space of play that is cleanly and clearly denoted.” Newcomer may be the most ambitious scripted narrative ever designed. Belánszky told me it was “an experiment to see how far the complexity could go.”When I asked him how many of these scenarios were in the game, he didn’t know. “Hundreds? Thousands?” he said.

* * *

The lion’s share of these extravagant scripts were added between 1997 and 2001, during the second phase of development, when the game was known as Enhanced Newcomer. It was during this time that Newcomer went from being a fairly straightforward role-playing game to a godlike attempt at granting free will. In 1996—two years after the original edition of Newcomer was released—Belánszky, Gonda, and the rest of the original team had reunited. Their hopes of breaking into the game industry renewed, they formed a small software company. Before long, however, they had revived Newcomer.

The plan had been to create new software and sell it to publishers, but that never happened. The only thing they sold was a game that was an advertisement for Electrolux, a company that makes designer household appliances, and 400 boxed copies of Enhanced Newcomer. Most of the team was still living with their parents, so they didn’t have to worry when a project fell through. As Belánszky put it, “when you don’t have to pay the bills, you can cut being pragmatic some slack.”

Belánszky’s generation was the first in Hungary to step outside the order of Living Socialism, where employment for everyone was a strict policy. It seems like the Newcomer team were relishing in the fact that they didn’t have to go to work. They were developers without a cause. And they weren’t alone. Thousands of other young Hungarian über-geeks, a term Belánszky uses to refer to himself during this time, had grown up using Commodore 64s, and they took a keen interest in creating computer graphics, pixel art, MIDI music, and even games for the defunct computer. They were part of the demoscene, a grassroots movement among hobbyist developers that centralized throughout Europe.

According to Poison, a well-known graphic artist within the Hungarian scene, people were drawn in for two reasons: One, because it is art. “You don’t explain why you do it. Doing it is the explanation,” he said. And two, because it is competitive. The reason demosceners restrict themselves to using outdated hardware is because it levels the playing field. Another reason is the wow factor. “If someone breaks the known limits, it makes for a really nice surprise,” he added.

With these tenets in mind, Belánszky and company started kicking around new ideas for Newcomer. This was followed by a period of unbridled ambition, in which they threw in everything but the kitchen sink. They added a plethora of letters and diaries, a pair of loaded dice, walkie-talkies, a high-tech cigarette lighter, monk robes, a useful tube of super glue, gang memorabilia, neural implants, intelligence modules from outer space, a mysterious super-weapon, and items that are too confidential to be revealed here. (Belánszky is a stickler about spoilers.)

* * *

If making Enhanced Newcomer was the afterparty, then what came next was the hangover. In 2001, at the end of the expansion, the team made around 1,200 euros in royalties and donations from the Enhanced edition. Newcomer inspires a cultish following among a very few. An anonymous post made on the game’s website in 2001 read as follows: “To this day, Newcomer is one of my favorite games. I bought it in late 1994 or early 1995. I was forced to discard my old C64 a few years ago, but the game still rests inside my desk drawer, and has been waiting for some time to appear on my monitor.”

By that point, the team members weren’t in it for the money. Yet a small loyal fan base wasn’t enough to keep them together. Reality was beginning to sink in. After four years of reckless abandon, Newcomer was still in a shoddy state, and so was the team’s so-called software business. It had been a hell of a ride, but the party was over. They couldn’t go on making a passion project forever. One by one, the members went their separate ways. Gonda left to work on other projects in the game industry. The original coder quit making games altogether. The original artist now works on high-budget first-person shooters.

Belánszky was the only man left standing. He considered it his civic duty to finish Newcomer the right way. He felt betrayed that the original members had abandoned the game. He wasn’t ready to give up. In 2003, he assembled a new team to undertake the Ultimate edition to be released this year. At first, they didn’t plan on expanding the game. Newcomer was already mammoth. They were just going to make it friendlier to play. (Up until then, it had to be booted from floppy disks.) They thought they would knock it out in no time. They were very, very wrong.

When the newly formed team began to update the game, they were horrified by what they found. It was infested with bugs. Nothing worked right. Characters that were crucial to the plot would suddenly forget what they were supposed to do. Characters that were dead would return to life. Belánszky found himself in the peculiar situation where a work of fiction will sometimes parallel its author’s life in ways that cannot easily be accounted for. It is fitting that Newcomer is set in a penal colony. For Belánszky, repairing Newcomer‘s many problems has been a 10-year sentence of manual labor. As he put it, “Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people,’ but to me, ‘Hell is other people’s code.'”

Belánszky, who had been a game designer on the Enhanced edition, found himself playing a new role: exterminator. What followed was the debug session to end all debug sessions. The more bugs Belánszky fixed, the more he found. By 2008, he had fixed 350 bugs. By 2010, the number had risen to 550. At last count, it had surpassed 700. The project nearly collapsed several times: once because of Belánszky’s failing health, and another from exhaustion. But he persevered. Giving up is not something that Belánszky does easily.

* * *

For Newcomer‘s fans, Belánszky’s tenacity has been the cause of what seems like an eternity of waiting. Guzslován Gábor, who first played Newcomer in 1995, told me that Belánszky is “lost in the details,” and that he should “forget the hunting of the bugs.” When I asked him whether Belánszky was a perfectionist, crazy, or simply obsessed, he agreed to all three. Near the end of the robust clean-up, Ultimate Newcomer received one last gasp of new material, delaying it by another 15 months. At one point, the release date was set for February of this year. It’s now May, and Belánszky tells me the weapon upgrade system needs to be revamped. (As of publication the game is still unreleased.)

Those who question whether it will ever be finished have a legitimate concern. However, Belánszky is confident it will be released soon. (Once, he told me that there were only four bugs left.) The reason is that after 18 years, he is tired of working on it. Newcomer has changed him. He finds himself drifting away from his preconceptions about games, gradually losing the naïve outlook that they are intrinsically good. “I have lost both my faith and interest in games,” he told me.

After Newcomer is done, Belánszky says he will take a few months off to recuperate. His health has begun to decline again during the final surge to complete the game. Then, he says he won’t continue with Newcomer, or any other project. The colossal amount of effort it took to build the game of his dreams, together with his frustrating experiences working in the game industry, has left him weary and fatalistic. He thinks that the majority of games make players worse human beings. He believes that the industry has been ruined by commercialization. He is convinced that games have psychologically conditioned their audiences into not thinking—into mindlessly craving more of the same thing. He says, “Gamers may be beyond saving.”

The people who play Newcomer will doubtlessly be few. Belánszky takes pride in that. He has taken the road less traveled. He went in the opposite direction of the draconic industry. He finds sanctity in Newcomer‘s lack of commercial appeal. “It would tear my heart out to gut Newcomer by lowering it to the lowest common denominator—just to add eye candy and turn it into a cash vehicle,” he said.

In his mind, Newcomer has remained pure, while the rest of the industry has fallen. Although he still believes in the potential for the good in games, and in the spirit that swept him up in software development almost 20 years ago, he admits that it might require too much effort to achieve it. “Pure potential is nothing,” he told me. “There would have to be some huge cataclysm on the market—one that changes everything—for that potential to return.”

Belánszky might say the same of his country. In the 22 years since Hungary became a republic, his ideology has shifted. Cynicism has replaced his youthful optimism, and his doubt has spread to his view of freedom in general. He questions if Western society is really free, or if freedom is undermined by capitalism. “The consumerist culture and condition that is supposedly about personal freedom in fact just turns people into zombies,” he said.

He wonders whether Hungary was better off before democracy. “It implies something very bad when I sound as if I preferred then to now. I totally hated it back then—but also now,” he said. “What has befallen this region is just suppression of a different kind, and is more subtle and harmful.” Though he has spent his life in pursuit of freedom, he finds it a troubling proposition. It is easy to visualize, but elusive, and hard to enact.

* * *

Originally published in Kill Screen, July 2012.

In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone: 

They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (‘Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?’). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a ‘secret kill site’ on 110th Street. There’s also—

‘Katie! Katie! Katie!’

Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then ­disappears inside the building.

“An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise.” — Benjamin Wallace, New York magazine

More Wallace

An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise

Longreads Pick

In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone:

“They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (‘Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?’). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a ‘secret kill site’ on 110th Street. There’s also—

“‘Katie! Katie! Katie!’

“Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then ­disappears inside the building.”

Published: Jul 22, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,242 words)

Writer Andrew Rice: My Top Longreads of 2011

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. (See recent longreads by Rice.)

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Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and listed in no particular order. Full disclosure: I’ve written for several of the publications cited on this list, but I’ve excluded from consideration any writer with whom I’m personally acquainted.

 ***

“The Romney Economy,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, 10/23/11

When it comes to degree of difficulty, delivering an interesting Mitt Romney profile is like nailing a reverse four-and-a-half somersault. But this story succeeded—not the least of which due to its brilliant packaging, which included a now-infamous cover photo of Romney with cash coming out of his suit pockets and the accompanying headline: “Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy.” Written without the (perhaps dubious) benefit of an interview with Romney, the story nonetheless managed to summon up the Republican candidate’s history of creative destruction, and tied that to the big story of the moment, the Occupy Wall Street protests. If Romney ends up becoming the Republican nominee, as still seems likely, the themes of Wallace-Wells’ profile will likely define the coming political year.

“How to be Good,” Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, 9/5/11 (sub. req.)

Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit argues, MacFarquhar writes, that “personal identity is not what matters.” But a profile is, by definition, an evocation of a person’s identity. How do you fulfill the requirements of the form on Parfit’s own, rather forbidding, terms? MacFarquhar didn’t make use of any scenes, or quotes of the traditional “he said” variety, conveying Parfit as a sort of disembodied intelligence. By all rights, this experiment should have been about as interesting to read as, well, a philosophy textbook. But the power of Parfit’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and ethics—and MacFarquhar’s skill at conveying them colloquially—made the piece sing to me.

“The God Clause,” Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek, 9/1/11

Are you interested in reading about a shadowy industry that attempts to predict and profit from gigantic, multibillion-dollar disasters? Great—me too. Now that I’ve got you interested, I will disclose that this article is actually about the reinsurance industry. This is the bait-and-switch trick that Greeley pulls off admirably in this piece. This was the cover story for Businessweek’s 9-11 anniversary issue, and aided by some very good cover art—something the magazine has been justly praised for lately—the piece managed to tell its readers a story that touched on the past while telling them something new.

“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 5/23/11 (sub. req.)

A detective story masquerading as a celebrity profile—or maybe it’s the other way around?—this was in an issue that kind of hung around on my endtable for a few months before I got around to sticking it into my bag for a long plane flight. Then it completely sucked me into its world. I won’t even pretend that I’m young enough to care about the rap collective Odd Future, or the fate of its missing member Earl Sweatshirt, but the outcome of this story, which I won’t spoil, offered an (ahem) oddly plaintive reminder that so many of our musical idols are, after all, just kids.

“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine, 6/2/11

This was my absolute favorite story of the year. Journalism from Africa often conveys the continent in broadly collective terms: tribes rival with one another, rebels fight the government, the downtrodden suffer or rise up. Bearak, who used to be stationed in the Times’ Johannesburg bureau, took one of those distressing mass phenomena that fill the inside pages of every day’s newspaper—an outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa’s township slums—and gave the story a terrible specificity. I particularly admired the way Bearak dissected the chance intersections and misunderstandings that led to a lynching, and dispassionately explained the cosmological worldview of the victim’s family about his death. In the end, Bearak resists the natural tendency to isolate a single villain and hold that person up to condemnation, despite the murky evidence, because that’s what the mob did, albeit in an incomparably more brutal fashion.

Bonus: Longreads Logrolling List

I’m lucky enough to be friends with a bunch of really talented writers, and it seems a shame to exclude them simply on the grounds of our acquaintance. So, here’s a list of really great articles written this year by people that I happen to know and like. You can take these endorsements with a grain of salt, of course, but I urge you to click and judge for yourself.

“Getting Bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, 8/8/11

The best account, so far, of the most stunning news event of this year.

“The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox,” Nathaniel Rich, Rolling Stone, 6/24/11

I was fascinated by this lurid miscarriage of justice. This story went way beyond the tabloid narrative of the persecuted innocent abroad.

“The Idealist,” Jason Zengerle, The New Republic, 1/13/11

A rising Democratic star finds his life derailed when he gets enmeshed in a bizarre political dirty tricks plot.

“Cheating, Incorporated,” Sheelah Kolhatkar, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2/10/11

The real, profitable and Canadian (!) company behind those lubricious Ashley Madison TV ads.

“The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 12/8/11; “The Casino Next Door”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 4/21/11

These two stories made me ache with jealousy.

“The Gulf War,” Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 3/14/11

The Gulf oil spill turned out to be less overwhelmingly catastrophic than some doomsayers predicted, but it still left behind some troubling lessons. This is the story of a disaster that happened beneath the surface, and in conveying that narrative with great depth and nuance, the story pulls off a truly difficult feat.

***

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. 

Sady Doyle: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown

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There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal is political.” This phrase was one of the most transformative ideas to emerge from second-wave feminism, or from the 20th century. It’s the underpinning assumption of all my own work. What it means is this: You take the most intimate, difficult, unseemly moments from your own life. You look to see if anyone else has experienced anything like them. You look for what you have in common with those people — your gender, your socioeconomic status, your career, your race. And then, you speak about what that means for the world. 

“The personal is political” is how the unspeakable, “private” issues of women—the men in the radical protest group who made rape jokes, the arrogant dismissals at the mostly-boy punk rock shows, the boss who made weird sexual comments, the date who raped you, the husband who beat you—became political concerns. It’s how “my problem” becomes “our problem.” It’s the catalyst for bringing marginalized experiences to light, and for finally understanding that it’s not happening because of who you are; it’s happening because of what you are, and that is something else entirely. Something which all of the people in your “what” have a vested interest in changing. 

“The personal is political” is also, I eventually came to realize, the essential factor in all of the essays I remembered from 2011. The pieces I’ve chosen are all about personal matters, in one way or another, and they all address huge social problems by focusing on one woman’s specific experience. They all raise questions without easy answers: About the identity of the reporter, and how that plays a role in what he or she reports; about whether personal responses to trauma can be evaluated in political terms; about how our identities come into conflict, and how to create a workable solidarity; about who we are, who we think we are, and who we would like others to think we are, and what the distance between those three things might be. In every case, I was struck by the author’s candor, bravery, and willingness to say some very uncomfortable things in public. And in every case, these pieces—and the reactions to them—taught me something new about how to see the world. 

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“Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone 

Kirsten Ostrenga was a lonely, home-schooled fourteen-year-old who started a MySpace page to connect with people. Four years later, she was receiving daily messages calling her things along the lines of “rape-enjoying pathetic bitch,” she was receiving other messages from middle-aged men who wanted to fuck her, she was being impersonated online by dozens of people, she had her house vandalized, she had her cat disappear shortly after someone threatened to kill it, she had been punched in the face by a “fan” posing for a picture with her, she had been raped, and she had been publicly called a “murderer” in connection with the death of her rapist, who tripped and fell while fleeing the police who were there to arrest him for raping Kirsten. That rapist also happened to be her first boyfriend. They’d met through MySpace. 

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece about all this is harrowing and astonishingly empathetic; the month it came out, I read it about ten or fifteen times. It’s not only about “Internet bullying,” or sexual violence, or even Kirsten Ostrenga; it’s also about the difficult-to-measure, often profound distance between Internet persona and person, and what we hope to find by making our lives public. Read it, and see if your voice doesn’t sound a little quieter the next time you go to write a snippy blog post about some public figure—if you don’t find yourself pulling certain punches, or asking whether you really know, or can ever know, what they’re actually going through at the moment. There are a lot of big magazine articles about Young People And The Internet. This year, no one did it better than Sabrina Rubin Erdely. 

“‘I Can Handle It:’ On Relationship Violence, Independence, and Capability,” Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, Feministe 

and

“I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD,” Mac McClelland, GOOD 

I always think of these two pieces as connected to each other, so that’s how I recommend you read them. They’re both about violence, and the ways that violence can change you. They’re both painful to read. And they’re both notable for being comprised of about ten separate things that female journalists, or feminists, are never supposed to say in public. Whitefield-Madrano writes about visiting the emergency room, after her boyfriend beat her up, with blood streaming down her face. “The only words that make sense are the ones that spill out of my mouth over and over again,” she says, “the only words that will let the receptionist and the nurses and my friends and my parents know that this isn’t what it looks like, that I’m not one of those women, those women in abusive relationships, those women who can’t help themselves enough to get out: I went to college, I went to college, I went to college.” Meanwhile, McClelland leads with “It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint,” and goes on from there.

Whitefield-Madrano was a feminist who organized Take Back the Night marches, published op-eds criticizing “the notion that a woman’s greatest personal threat lay outside the home,” and stayed in her relationship after her boyfriend started to hit her. McClelland was a human rights journalist whose job was to faithfully witness the pain of others; after being threatened with rape in Haiti, and witnessing the aftermath of severe sexual violence, she contracted post-traumatic stress disorder and needed her ex-boyfriend to simulate a rape with her as part of her recovery. Both women focus, to a large degree, on the internal aftereffects of the trauma. McClelland gagged and vomited, cried constantly, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop drinking. Whitefield-Madrano missed work, forgot her own phone number, moved in a permanent daze: “I’d been depressed before, and this was different. This was a fog of having no idea who I was, where I’d gone, or if I might return.” 

And they both produced astonishingly skilled, un-self-indulgent pieces of writing out of those experiences. (This was particularly easy to miss in the backlash to McClelland’s piece, which ranged from legitimate concerns—her representation of Haiti, her treatment of sources—to publishing her ex-boyfriend’s full name and place of employment, calling her a “geisha,” and claiming that she was somehow faking her PTSD to get attention and/or a book deal.) The experiences of trauma, abuse and post-traumatic stress are often literally impossible to describe. The very nature of what they call an “acute stress response”—“a feeling of detachment, disorientation, inability to concentrate or respond sensibly;” “the mind ‘going blank’;” “the person appears to be out of contact with others but is not unconscious;” these are symptoms, which sound fairly mild until you realize (as I once did, in my own experience of traumatic shock) that the strange hollow object by the metal basin is a cup, and is intended to hold water, which is why it is by the sink, and that you have been figuring this out for twenty minutes, ever since you set the cup down there—induces a fundamental disconnect from language. McClelland and Whitefield-Madrano plunge us into that experience with their nightmarish descriptions, but they also analyze it in lucid detail. It’s a remarkable achievement: Two clear, rational, coherent accounts of what it’s like to lose coherence, clarity, and reason.  

“SO REAL IT HURTS: Notes on Occupy Wall Street,” Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Facebook (republished at Racialicious)

For about a month this fall, every single professional journalist who cared about social justice or protest in any way whatsoever was busy writing or filing their Pieces On Occupy Wall Street. None of us wrote a better piece than Manissa McCleave Maharawal, who initially posted this on her personal, semi-private Facebook page. 

Covering protests is tricky. You don’t want to undermine or demonize them by reporting the wrong scenes or speaking to the wrong people. You don’t want to gloss over their problems by ignoring the less flattering facts on the ground. You don’t always know, frankly, whether you are there to report or support, and depending on what happens to you—as in the case of the writers who went to Occupy Wall Street to protest, and wound up filing pieces about getting arrested; or, the other writers who went to report, and wound up being victimized by the police like any other protester—that role can change within the space of an hour. 

And I will be even more frank with you: In the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street, I sometimes felt that I was seeing a lot of supporting, and not always enough reporting. It was communal, it was wonderful, it was revolutionary, absolutely no-one was smoking any pot whatsoever because that was a right-wing lie, everyone was so equal, etc. It was usually only on the smaller blogs that you could find stories like McCleave Maharawal’s: Men “dancing up on” women at drum circles without consent, radical activists responding to education about gender pronouns with outright bafflement, people of color being told to direct their concerns to someone’s email inbox rather than bringing them up at General Assembly, a man including a line about there being “one race, the human race, formerly divided by race, class,” etc., in the promotional materials, and responding to objections (namely that we were hardly “formerly” divided on those fronts) with “[it’s] scientifically true.” McCleave Maharawal was not “just” writing a personal essay; she was performing a public service, by giving people a genuinely nuanced view of the occupation. But this is not an anti-Occupy piece. It is not an attack piece. And it is not an example of undermining. Precisely because she was willing to cover the gritty and sometimes unflattering details of how solidarity was actually being worked out among “the 99%” at Occupy Wall Street, McCleave Maharawal actually wrote a far more convincing and meaningful argument for it than I had yet read. It’s a model for anyone who wants to advocate—for a cause, for a community, for a protest, for an idea—without slipping into boosterism; for anyone who wants to speak about the facts on the ground, without losing sight of what those facts really mean. 

“With The Ladies In The Back At An Odd Future Show,” Emma Carmichael, The Awl

2011 was, in many ways, the Year Of Unpleasant Conversations About Odd Future. The group just brings up a lot of sticky subjects: The relationship between art and artist, the relationship between creation and social responsibility for what one has created, the white fear of black masculinity, men’s disregard for violence against women. And, you know what? Those conversations were just as unpleasant for me as they were for you. I don’t exactly look forward to having any of them again. 

But, if I ever teach that long-imagined seminar on Journalism, Pop Culture, and Gender, I think our final assignment is going to consist of a 10-page paper on the difference between two short passages in two reviews of the exact same show: Amos Barshad’s “Odd Future Live Show Surpasses the Hype,” for Rolling Stone, and Emma Carmichael’s “With the Ladies In The Back at an Odd Future Show,” for The Awl. In fact, let’s just do that now. Better one? 

At one point, a fresh-faced blond girl roughly the same age as Tyler landed on the stage and accosted him for a kiss; he complied, wondered aloud if he might now have herpes and then tossed her off, too.

Or better two? 

[Just] after two in the morning, a blonde girl surfed her way onstage and kissed Tyler, who announced, “I might legit have herpes.” The crowd laughed and started a “show your titties” chant, and she refused, looking bashful. “Then get the fuck off the stage!” Tyler yelled. 

Class: Which of these passages was written by a man? How can you tell? Which writer made note of whether the girl in question was attractive (“fresh-faced”), and how do you think cultural norms around gender, presentation and gaze affected this choice? What is the difference between “accosted [Tyler]” and “kissed Tyler;” who is portrayed as an aggressor in each of these passages, how does it differ between passages, and what does that mean? Why did both writers choose to describe the girl as “blonde,” and which cultural narratives are supported by that choice? Would your answer be different if the writers substituted “white” for “blonde?” How? Do you think Amos Barshad joined in the “show us your titties” chant? If not, why didn’t he tell us that it happened? Are you really angry right now? At whom, and why, and what does that tell you? Please remember to demonstrate in your response that the personal is political. Papers due whenever you think you know what all of this means, and can say it. I might never turn mine in. 

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