Search Results for: basketball

The Cold Rim of the World

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2015 | 13 minutes (3,199 words)

 

We docked just past midnight, the sun to the south shining through a thin layer of clouds. It was late June, and the sun hadn’t set for months in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard; it wouldn’t set again until the end of September. For the previous two weeks I’d been on board a ship sailing the perimeter of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, as part of the artist residency The Arctic Circle, and we’d reached one of our final stops. The dock we tied the boat to was a decayed mass of wood, warped and chewed to the appearance of shredded wheat. To our left, a massive structure for loading coal onto ships. To the right, blocks of buildings without form or purpose or inhabitants. This was Pyramiden, a Soviet-era mining town that’s been abandoned for over 15 years. Read more…

What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Cinderella Story’?

To try to figure out what exactly that story is and why we still have it, we have to separate out the folk tale that is Cinderella, though, from the turn of phrase that is “Cinderella story.” Americans will call almost anything a Cinderella story that involves a good thing happening to someone nice. We slap that title on movies and books, but also on basketball games won by tiny schools full of scrawny nerds, small businesses that thrive and even political ascendancies that upend established powers.

The actual Cinderella tale, while a nebulous thing that can be hard to pin down with precision, is more than that. There’s very little that’s common to every variant of the story, but in general, you have a mistreated young woman, forced to do menial work, either cast out or unloved by her family. She has an opportunity to marry well and escape her situation, but she gets that chance only after being mistaken for a higher-status person, so she has to get the man who may marry her to recognize her in her low-status form, which often happens either via a shoe that fits or some kind of food that she prepares.

Linda Holmes, writing for NPR about the “endlessly evolving” story of Cinderella.

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Longreads Best of 2014: Sports Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

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Eva Holland
Freelance writer based in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Together We Make Football (Louisa Thomas, Grantland)

It’s been a bad year for football: Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, the lingering Jameis Winston saga. And a bad year for football means a big year for think pieces about violence and football—I couldn’t tell you how many of those I read this year. But one of them stood out. In “Together We Make Football,” Louisa Thomas reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between the NFL, masculinity, violence, and women. She takes her time, building a case slowly and methodically, before driving home her point: that violence is inherent to, and integral to, the NFL. That although the vast majority of football players don’t beat their wives, there may be no way to separate the bad violence—the off-field violence—from the on-field violence that we love. Here’s Thomas: Read more…

Larry Bird’s Greatest Shot Was the One He Didn’t Take

Longreads Pick

How basketball great Larry Bird almost walked away from the game.

Published: Dec 7, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,545 words)

Keep Moving

Longreads Pick

On the nomadic life of an assistant college basketball coach.

Source: SB Nation
Published: Nov 12, 2014
Length: 33 minutes (8,308 words)

The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty

Photo by mulmatsherm

Kiera Feldman | This Land Press | September 2014 | 34 minutes (8,559 words)

This Land PressWe’re proud to present a new Longreads Exclusive from Kiera Feldman and This Land Press: How Richard Roberts went from heir to his father’s empire to ostracized from the kingdom. Feldman and This Land Press have both been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and her This Land story “Grace in Broken Arrow” was named the Best of Longreads in 2012.
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David Foster Wallace on the Costs of Becoming a Professional Tennis Player

It’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life – outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small.

-From David Foster Wallace’s “The String Theory,” published in Esquire in July 1996.

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Photo: jpellgen, Flickr

The Believer Interview: Ice Cube

Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words)

 

The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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‘Music Is a Mirror of What We’re Going Through, Not the Cause of What We’re Going Through. It’s a Reaction, It’s Our Only Weapon, It’s Our Only Way to Protect Ourselves, It’s Our Only Way to Fit, It’s Our Only Way to Get There.’

Before rap music, New York might as well have been:

Paris


Africa


Australia


A thousand miles away from a thirteen-year-old Ice Cube

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Once upon a time, the name Ice Cube was analogous to explicit lyrics, guns, women as “bitches,” South Central, and attitude. Bad attitude. Not to mention mind-blowing rap music wrapped in raw emotions. But those were Ice Cube’s teen years, before he married Kimberly Jackson, became father to four kids, and turned into a true Hollywood player. A legend long before he turned thirty, Ice Cube, together with his fellow N.W.A. members, revolutionized not only the rap/ hiphop genre, but all music, by making it OK for musicians to speak their minds and then some.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Run and Gun

Longreads Pick

How a promising basketball star ended up facing drug and murder charges.

Source: Fox Sports
Published: Jun 30, 2014
Length: 30 minutes (7,537 words)