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Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Tampa Bay Times, Wired, The New Yorker, Splitsider, The Verge, fiction from The Atlantic and a guest pick by Preeti Desai.
What happened when the author re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushi:
“Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: ‘Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,’ Franken told me. ‘He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.'”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Tampa Bay Times, Wired, The New Yorker, Splitsider, The Verge, fiction from The Atlantic and a guest pick by Preeti Desai.
Wired’s Occupy Wall Street correspondent reflects on her year of covering the movement:
“Standing next to an older officer after one eviction, telling him what I’d seen and listening to him worry about how he was going to send his kids to college, I overheard the police talk to each other. Of the protestors they kept saying the same thing, the same three words to each other and walked away: ‘They’ll be back.’ Some said it with scorn, lips curled. Some said it with fear, some excited for the action. Some said it with the watery voices of drowning hope: ‘They’ll be back.’
“Please, let something matter again, let something change.
“The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. ‘You may go through your constitutional ritual,’ they intoned, ‘but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.’ We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.”

Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire and ESPN and the winner of two National Magazine Awards.
Favorite new writer discovery of 2012
I’m always scared of making lists like this, because a year is a long time, and I read a lot, and invariably I’ll forget writers and pieces that I liked very much. But this category is easy for me: Michael J. Mooney. He wrote back-to-back stories for D Magazine this summer that are so different but the same in that they both knocked me on my ass. First he wrote about a brutal rape in “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back.” (It is a difficult read, but the ending is more than worth it.) And then he wrote the most amazing bowling story ever in “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever.” Plus, he’s a straight-up good dude. Love this guy so much.
Best election story
I’m going to seem like a homer here, but I don’t care: Charlie Pierce did journalism on Esquire.com during this entire election cycle that bordered on heroic—and I don’t use that word lightly. In its ideas, in its language, in its sheer volume, his account of this election, taken as a whole, is humbling and inspiring at the same time. Start with the end, “The Greatness of Barack Obama is Our Great Project” and go back from there.
Best personal blog post/essay
I’m going to pick two stories here, both sports stories. Writers hate hearing athletes say, “You never played the game,” but it’s hard to deny that former athletes understand the games they played better than most of us do. Just the other day, The Classical posted a meditation by former basketball player Flinder Boyd about Ricky Rubio, “The Ricky Rubio Experience.” I’m not sure I can say why, exactly, but I was really moved by this story. Some of The Classical guys can be snide little shits, far too Internet cool, but Boyd wrote with real heart here. I love this story.
The second is by one of my most favorite friends, Kevin Van Valkenburg of ESPN. He wrote about the death of a semi-pro football player in a story called “Games of chance.” Kevin played college football at the University of Montana, and he writes beautifully about the pull of the game as well as the charge that comes from hitting and with being hit. Sometimes the first person interrupts; here it informs.
Best crime story
I see the great David Grann has already picked this one, but I’ll echo his pick, because it was that good: Pamela Colloff’s “The Innocent Man” for Texas Monthly is an epic, immersive, amazing story. And full credit to the gang down in Austin for committing so completely to longform journalism. That this story even exists makes me hopeful about so many things.
The story that made me feel the most awesome about just about everything
I’ve always been an optimist about writing, or at least I’ve always tried to be an optimist about writing, and 2012, for me, has been filled with reasons for optimism (like Pamela Colloff’s story above, which is really a multi-layered testament to the power of belief). Yes, this business remains in flux, and yes, many good writers continue to put more love into their writing than their writing returns to them. But I still feel like we live in a golden age, filled with possibility. One of the stories that most made me feel that way—both because of the story itself, and because of its subject—was “How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big-Budget Flick” by Jason Fagone in Wired. The title describes the tale exactly, and it’s just as improbable and fun and crazy as it sounds. I feel like this story sums up the modern writing business as well as any: There’s still plenty of lightning out there, and there are still lots of bottles, and every now and then, someone still catches one with the other.

This week we’re excited to feature a Longreads Exclusive from David Kushner, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse” is Kushner’s 2007 Rolling Stone profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Road,” “No Country for Old Men” and “All the Pretty Horses.” See an excerpt here.
p.s. You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member.
(Illustration by Katie Kosma)
This week, we're excited to feature a Longreads Exclusive from David Kushner (@DavidKushner), a contributing editor to Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired. He's been featured many times on Longreads, and he's the author of Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto.
“Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse” is Kushner's 2007 Rolling Stone profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road, No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses. Kushner explains how he first met the reclusive writer:
"I owe my Cormac McCarthy story to two people: Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, and my dad. My dad urged me to read Cormac's books when I began writing for my college newspaper. The sentences are amazing, he said. He was right, and I read every one of them. Years later, I was interviewing Randall for Rolling Stone when she told me that Cormac had done an edit of her most recent book on theoretical physics. Come again? I said. Cormac hangs out at the Sante Fe Institute, she explained, a science research center in the foothills of New Mexico. After meeting him there, he offered to read her book—and surprised her by sending back an edited copy of the manuscript. Hmm, I said. Can I interview him about you for the story?
"Randall laughed, and I knew why. Cormac had a reputation for being reclusive, and had only done a couple interviews over his career. It's a long shot, she said, but she'd give it a try. A few minutes later my phone rang. You're not going to believe this, she said, but he'll talk with you.”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Mother Jones, SB Nation, Wired, Dissent Magazine, Playboy, fiction from The American Reader, and Mike Spry’s guest pick from GQ.
A writer goes to New Zealand to visit Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, who is fighting criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice for committing copyright infringement, among other allegations:
Police led Kim to the lawn, where most of the household was gathered. ‘I was so worried about Mona—she was pregnant with the twins. I kept asking where she was, where the kids were.’ Kim couldn’t see the kids, but he saw Ortmann. He and Batato had flown in for the birthday Kim shared with his son, Kimmo. It promised to be an epic event, complete with A-list entertainers from the US. The bouncy castle hadn’t even been blown up yet.
The police found Batato by the back of the house with his laptop; he was still in his robe. Ortmann was in bed when the tactical team burst in. He looked freaked out and shattered. He wasn’t the sort who pretended at the gangsta stuff. He didn’t even play shooter videogames.
Kim asked a police officer, ‘What are the charges?’ He imagined that, with more than 50 staff members from around the world, maybe one of them was mixed up in something.
The answer surprised him: ‘Copyright infringement.’
As the cops led him to a police van, Kim passed Mona. She seemed frightened. ‘All this for copyright?’ he said to her. ‘Bullshit.’
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Vanity Fair, The Billfold, The New Yorker, Wired and New York magazine, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick by Brittany Shoot.
“Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth.” — Mat Honan, Wired
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