Search Results for: Wired

Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street

Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street

Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game

Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game

Amy K. Nelson's Top 6 Longreads of 2010: Murder mysteries, baseball, The Price Is Right

Amy K. Nelson is a writer for ESPN.com. (She and Elizabeth Merrill also wrote this great longread about sports and infidelity.)

***

Longreads asked me to compile my Top 5 of 2010. An impossible task, and I know a few of mine are on other people’s lists. Here’s what I drew up:

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
By Mark Bowden
Vanity Fair

Can’t get enough of murder-esque mysteries; this is one that stayed with me.

Dodgers Tap into ‘V energy’
By Bill Shaikin
Los Angeles Times

The most amazing baseball story of 2010. Hands down. One of those you wish you had written.

TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome
By Chris Jones
Esquire

I’m biased because this is my all-time favorite game show (Bob Barker only). Even without my bias, it’s just a kickass story.

Last Drop
By Brad Melekian
Outside

This was an amazing quick-turn of a difficult story with reluctant sources.

Art of the Steal
By Joshuah Bearman
Wired

Murder mysteries and thieving stories battle it out for closest to my heart.

*EXTRA CREDIT

The Shadow Scholar
By Ed Dante
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Rich Ziade: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Rich Ziade is partner and lead strategist at Arc90, notable for many things including creation of the wondrous Readability app.

(Ed. note: We know: One of the stories below is from 2009, and another is from 2007.)

***

• Paul Graham ruminates over the deflationary value of stuff.

• Zak Smith debates which is more offensive: the porn industry or Tyra Banks exploiting the porn industry in Barely Legal Whores Get  Gang-F***ed.

• The New York Times (Wyatt Mason) deep dives into the mind of The Wired’s David Simon.

• The New Yorker (Nick Paumgarten) profiles John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.

• The CBC investigation (by Neil Macdonald) of the assassination of Lebanon’s prime minister Rafik Hariri plays like an international procedural thriller. Ben Affleck as the protagonist?

The Desperate Battle Against Killer Bat Plague

The Desperate Battle Against Killer Bat Plague

Paul Ford: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Paul Ford was an editor at Harper’s Magazine; now he’s wandering around, looking at stuff and writing computer programs.

***

Tony Judt, “Night,” New York Review of Books (January 14)

This was the year of the dying critic. Most writers would do themselves, and their readers, a service by dying without all the self-elegies (“selfegies”?). We’ve read once too often, right, of the bark of the lonely fox out the bay window. But then you had Judt in his wheelchair, climbing Everest every night, putting out a series of reflections and continuing to publish great work even post-mortem. In a different city, and a different vein, there’s Roger Ebert’s Journal, the essay that never ends—starting as a kind of testament, it transformed over many months into a mass lecture from an old newspaper hand (a man of a literally dying breed), holding forth on absolutely everything.

Dan Koeppel, “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” (Popular Mechanics, January 29)

Stuff like this is why magazines persist. It’s fun to imagine the pitch. “I’d like to write about falling thirty thou—” “You had me at falling.”

Frédéric Filloux, “Aggregators: the good ones vs. the looters” (Monday Note, September 19)

Inside baseball for publishing nerds, but bangs out its point. It’s hard to find good wide-angle writing about tech. Related: “Why the OS Doesn’t Matter.” Also: Tom Bissell on cocaine and Grand Theft Auto; Fred Vogelstein on the iPhone/AT&T meltdown; and Nitsuh Abebe on the Internet Paradox.

Issendai, “How to Keep Someone With You Forever,” (Issendai’s Superhero Training Journal, June 9)

You read this, right? I’ve visited friends and read this aloud. Explains publishers, graduate school, bad jobs, and broken marriages. (Related in a way I can’t fully articulate: Given that 2010 was, in addition to being the year of the dying critic, the year of the supercilious journalist writing about the Insane Clown Posse, it’s worth going back to 2009’s “MC CHRIS IS AT THE GATHERING: A LOVE STORY,” for the nerd’s eye view—a far more subtle view than presented elsewhere—of the weirdness of Juggalism.)

Josh Allen, Chokeville. (Ongoing)

Most prose born on the Internet is highly defensive. Everyone is braced for audience attack and opens their posts with four paragraphs explaining why the remaining four paragraphs are worth reading. Chokeville is not that. It tries to explain itself, but it can’t. Sometimes I get started and then drift away to Zooborns, but I know that’s my problem, because I’ve forgotten how, and I also know that I’ll end up some weekend night in front of my monitor, zoomed in, drinking my way through every word.

P.S. We’re also several years into the flowering of history blogs. Here’s a good place to start.

Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics

Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics

Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010

aldridge:

My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic:

The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired
“Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”

The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”

The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”

Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy
Jon Ronson, The Guardian
“I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. Shaggy nods quietly. ‘I get anxiety and shit a lot,’ he says. ‘And reading that stuff people write about us… It hurts.’”

See my (much longer) list of the best long-form journalism of 2009.

Follow @longreads, or search for #longreads on Twitter. Or follow me, @mpaldridge.

The Savior of Conde Nast

Longreads Pick

Someday, when they tell the story of how digital magazines saved Conde Nast, it will begin in San Francisco’s Caffé Centro sometime in May 2009. It was there that Wired creative director Scott Dadich asked Wired editor Chris Anderson to meet him to discuss the creation of a prototype for a new digital tablet. Mr. Dadich knew the iPhone screen was far too small to re-create the magazine experience, but it got him thinking about a Minority Report-like touchscreen that could work. Mr. Dadich took out a cocktail napkin and drew an illustration of what Wired could look like on a 13-inch tablet screen.

Published: Aug 3, 2010
Length: 5 minutes (1,463 words)

Understanding the Anxious Mind

Longreads Pick

Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first embodied for him what it meant to be wired to worry.

Published: Sep 29, 2009
Length: 30 minutes (7,566 words)