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Longreads Best of 2015: Our 10 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year

This year marked Longreads’ first full year producing original stories with many of our favorite writers. We also published exclusives in partnership with other publishers—and all of these stories were funded by Longreads Members, with a match from WordPress.com

We are thankful for Members’ continued support, which makes these stories possible. Join today. If you contribute $50 a year or more we’ll send you a special Longreads tote bag. 

Below are the 10 most popular exclusives we published this year. You can see all of our stories here Read more…

We Are All Compromised: The Access Game Isn’t Dead Yet

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, via Wikimedia Commons

John Herrman’s excellent Awl series on the anxious state of the media business (featured in our latest Top 5) should be required reading for anyone who creates or consumes content on the internet. His conclusions—advertising models are sputtering, no one wants to pay for news, Facebook dictates the entire tenor of conversation and its subject matter—do so much to explain why we are inundated by media but largely unsatisfied with what floats to the surface. Come for Herrman’s dystopian vision—a future in which professional journalism is suffocated to death—and stay for the animated robot GIFs. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Jessica Rinaldi, Boston Globe

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Taylor Wilson, Nuclear Boy Genius

Longreads Pick

Taylor Wilson built a working nuclear fusion reactor in his parents’ garage when he was 14. Seven years and two TED talks later, Taylor is working on a hi-tech business empire and ways to intercept dirty bombs—all at the ripe old age of 21.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jun 20, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,147 words)

Claimed

Longreads Pick

After Fidel Castro took power in 1959 he nationalized the Cuban economy, seizing a wide variety of assets, including sugar mills, power plants, and hotels. Some of these assets belonged to American citizens doing business in Cuba. Seth Stevenson traces the strange history of these contested holdings, which have grown to a collective worth of roughly $8 billion, and questions how they will affect future relations between the two countries.

Source: Slate
Published: Nov 30, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,703 words)

The ’90s Soda that Nobody Cared About Until It Was Dead

In The Believer in February, 2014, Michael Schulman wrote about one of the most dramatic and memorable failures in American branding: Coca-Cola’s OK Soda. Marketed to Gen X’ers in 1994, the OK Soda brand died by 1995, though its artifacts live on in collector circles and advertising lore. As ’90s fashion and music cycle back through popular culture, this epic story of food, failure and the secret heart of youth culture highlights the arrogance of business people who think they know what you want and how to manipulate you into buying it.

When OK Soda was introduced, of course, Coke executives were certain they had it right. Drawing on a study from MIT, the company had pinpointed what Generation X was all about. “Economic prosperity is less available than it was for their parents,” Lanahan theorized. “Even traditional rites of passage, such as sex, are fraught with life-or-death consequences.” Tom Pirko, a Coke marketing consultant, told NPR, “People who are nineteen years old are very accustomed to having been manipulated and knowing that they’re manipulated.” He described the soda’s potential audience as “already truly wasted. I mean, their lethargy probably can’t be penetrated by any commercial message.”

How to sell soft drinks to such people? The answer was to embrace the angst. Coke turned to Wieden + Kennedy, the ultra-hip Portland, Oregon, ad firm that had devised Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. The agency’s pitch has become the stuff of soda lore: research had shown that Coca-Cola was the second most recognized term in the world. The first was OK, which, the firm pointed out, was also the two middle letters of Coke. So why not combine the two? The drink was christened OK Soda, and its semi-reassuring motto was “Things are going to be OK.”

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Are We Too Late to Save Antarctica?

World leaders have converged in Paris this week for COP21, the United Nations conference meant to foster a global consensus on climate change. As is often the case with these events, it feels incredibly late. Back in 2008, Julia Whitty wrote in Mother Jones about her trip to Antarctica. Her reflections on the fragility of the landscape — from fast-melting icebergs to dying penguin colonies — feel eerily prophetic, with a layer of nostalgic patina already forming in the edges.

There’s talk aboard the Endeavour of climate change, including from a vocal contingent of naysayers quoting mythical studies. One woman repeatedly cites a fictional cluster of 19,000 denialistas hunkered down in German institutes of higher learning, until someone asks her to prove it. There are also a surprising number of middle grounders leaking equal parts confusion and skepticism about “this global warming business.” The two groups manage to exhibit all five stages of climate-change denial: There’s nothing happening; we don’t know why it’s happening; climate change is natural; climate change is not bad; climate change can’t be stopped. The true believers discover each other mostly through shared incredulous silence.

Yet all come together when we happen upon an ancient ice floe topped with a single sleeping emperor penguin. It’s a juvenile that has just completed its inconceivable genesis in the dark of the Antarctic winter, perched atop its father’s webbed feet, tucked into the brood pouch, enduring 100-knot winds and subzero temperatures. The young bird utters three soft braying calls as we approach, then stands. The motor drives on a hundred cameras whine. Everyone whispers to no one in particular, as all are joined by an invisible thread of respect woven into the collective consciousness by March of the Penguins. You can almost hear the Morgan Freeman narration hang in the air.

Directly ahead lies heavy pack ice, the dividing line between ships and penguins. We turn back, leaving the young bird to its solitude.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Borders: A Reading List

When I think of borders, several things come to mind: covert darkness, hundreds or thousands of dollars handed to a coyote, desperation. In the news, Donald Trump vows to build some sort of ridiculous fence along the Mexican-American border to keep people out, and cowardly United States governors swear innocent Syrian refugees will not enter their states.

Borders are not only political. In reading for this list, I read about all sorts of boundaries—in jazz music, in science fiction and in desert landscapes. Borders are implicit in the designation of which bookshelves belong to me and which are my partner’s. In this list, I stuck to geography: islands bursting out of the sea, a property feud gone horribly wrong, the billions of dollars backing border control in the American South, and the American South itself. Read more…

Returning to a Simpler Cup of Coffee

In Serious Eats, Keith Pandolfi writes about how he turned away from fancy, upscale coffee and went back to drinking the old school, pre-ground, grocery store stuff in giant cans. While Pandolfi makes his case for what he calls bad coffee, Matt Buchanan at The Awl gives a breezy, biting recap of the rise of America’s venture capital-fueled third wave coffee business, where “every other Good Coffee company suddenly looked very small next to Blue Bottle’s big pile of money,” and “There are perhaps some people who will be upset that their favorite Good Coffee Company is now just another Good Coffee Brand, revealing once again the insignificance of their person and the futility of their Brand Devotion when it is set against forces vastly larger than themselves, like capitalism, but they should take solace in the fact that even if the Good Coffee Brand becomes less Good as it becomes ever larger—which, FWIW, Blue Bottle has only gotten better as it has gotten bigger—it was never even Great to begin with. It was just coffee.” In his essay, Pandolfi writes:

Maybe it all started a few months ago when I found myself paying $18 for a pound of what turned out to be so-so coffee beans from a new roaster in my neighborhood. It was one of those moments when I could actually imagine my cranky diner-coffee-swilling Irish grandfather rising from the grave and saying, “You know what, kid? You’re an idiot.”

It’s more than just money, though. I’m as tired of waiting 15 minutes for my morning caffeine fix as I am waiting the same amount of time for my whiskey, cardamom, and pimento bitters cocktail at my local bar. I am tired of pour-overs and French presses, Chemexes and Aeropresses. “How would you like that brewed?” is a question I never want to hear again.

Cheap coffee is one of America’s most unsung comfort foods.

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