Search Results for: dad

Man and Wife

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A wedding in an alternate universe:

“‘That’s the good news,’ Dad said. ‘He’s gone ahead and asked for your hand. And we’ve agreed to it.’

“My mother put down the knife and finished off her champagne. I wanted no more of mine.

“‘Well, don’t be so excited,’ said Dad. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? You’re going to be a wife. You’re going to live with Mr. Middleton, and he’s going to take care of you, for the rest of your life. And, one day, when we’re very old, he’ll help out your mother and me, too.'”

Source: Missouri Review
Published: Jun 1, 2007
Length: 34 minutes (8,596 words)

The emotional and financial challenges in providing assisted living for parents, who are now living longer: 

Since then, Daddy’s long goodbye has drained his retirement income and life savings of more than $300,000. Where’s that money gone? Assisted living, mostly. Of course, that amount doesn’t account for his medical bills, most of which have been paid by Medicare and insurance policies that were part of his retirement. Daddy’s income—Social Security, plus monthly checks from two pensions—pays for the facility where he lives, his taxes, his life insurance policy premiums, and such incidentals as a visiting podiatrist to clip his nails.

And he has been kicked out of two hospices for not dying.

“The Long Goodbye.” — Doug Monroe, Atlanta Magazine

See also: “When Are You Dead?” — John Sanford, Stanford Medicine Magazine, March 29, 2011

The Long Goodbye

Longreads Pick

The emotional and financial challenges in providing assisted living for parents, who are now living longer:

“Since then, Daddy’s long goodbye has drained his retirement income and life savings of more than $300,000. Where’s that money gone? Assisted living, mostly. Of course, that amount doesn’t account for his medical bills, most of which have been paid by Medicare and insurance policies that were part of his retirement. Daddy’s income—Social Security, plus monthly checks from two pensions—pays for the facility where he lives, his taxes, his life insurance policy premiums, and such incidentals as a visiting podiatrist to clip his nails.

“And he has been kicked out of two hospices for not dying.”

Published: Jan 24, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,886 words)

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone manufacturing work, and what it means for the future of job creation in the United States: 

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

“Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class.” — Charles Duhigg, Keith Bradsher, The New York Times

See also: “The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac.” — Aza Raskin, Fast Company Design, Feb. 14, 2011

[Fiction] A couple, and a writing workshop:

Her third story started out funny. It was about a woman who gave birth to a cat. The hero of the story was the husband, who suspected that the cat wasn’t his. A fat ginger tomcat that slept on the lid of the dumpster right below the window of the couple’s bedroom gave the husband a condescending look every time he went downstairs to throw out the garbage. In the end, there was a violent clash between the husband and the cat. The husband threw a stone at the cat, which countered with bites and scratches. The injured husband, his wife, and the kitten she was breastfeeding went to the clinic for him to get a rabies shot. He was humiliated and in pain but tried not to cry while they were waiting. The kitten, sensing his suffering, uncurled itself from its mother’s embrace, went over to him, and licked his face tenderly, offering a consoling ‘Meow.’ ‘Did you hear that?’ the mother asked emotionally. ‘He said “Daddy.”’

“Creative Writing.” — Etgar Keret, New Yorker

See more #fiction #longreads

Creative Writing

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A couple, and a writing workshop:

“Her third story started out funny. It was about a woman who gave birth to a cat. The hero of the story was the husband, who suspected that the cat wasn’t his. A fat ginger tomcat that slept on the lid of the dumpster right below the window of the couple’s bedroom gave the husband a condescending look every time he went downstairs to throw out the garbage. In the end, there was a violent clash between the husband and the cat. The husband threw a stone at the cat, which countered with bites and scratches. The injured husband, his wife, and the kitten she was breastfeeding went to the clinic for him to get a rabies shot. He was humiliated and in pain but tried not to cry while they were waiting. The kitten, sensing his suffering, uncurled itself from its mother’s embrace, went over to him, and licked his face tenderly, offering a consoling ‘Meow.’ ‘Did you hear that?’ the mother asked emotionally. ‘He said “Daddy.” ‘”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 2, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,687 words)

Most of the time we just hung out, in front of the newly opened Baskin-Robbins, on the corner of Montague and Henry Streets. This corner was the epicenter of Brooklyn Heights, a community unaccustomed to seeing its daughters straddling mailboxes and flicking cigarette butts into the street. Nor were we used to fielding the looks we began to get: wary, unhappy, every father coming home from Wall Street and every mother on her way to Key Food shooting us stern, silent reprimands. It made me squirm, but it also pissed me off: What was I doing that was so horrible? And if they had something to say, why didn’t they say it? While our little petri dish of a neighborhood evidently considered hanging out anathema, I was on the fence; my dad had grown up in Greenwich Village, an Italian kid playing stickball and rolling tires in the Hudson River. Isn’t this what teenagers did?

“The Queens of Montague Street.” — Nancy Rommelmann, nancyrommelmann.typepad.com

See more #longreads about Brooklyn, New York

The Queens of Montague Street

Longreads Pick

Memories of life as a truant teen in 1970s Brooklyn:

“Most of the time we just hung out, in front of the newly opened Baskin-Robbins, on the corner of Montague and Henry Streets. This corner was the epicenter of Brooklyn Heights, a community unaccustomed to seeing its daughters straddling mailboxes and flicking cigarette butts into the street. Nor were we used to fielding the looks we began to get: wary, unhappy, every father coming home from Wall Street and every mother on her way to Key Food shooting us stern, silent reprimands. It made me squirm, but it also pissed me off: What was I doing that was so horrible? And if they had something to say, why didn’t they say it? While our little petri dish of a neighborhood evidently considered hanging out anathema, I was on the fence; my dad had grown up in Greenwich Village, an Italian kid playing stickball and rolling tires in the Hudson River. Isn’t this what teenagers did?”

Published: Jan 1, 2012
Length: 41 minutes (10,299 words)

Gangrey: Our Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling. 

Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical combat is not rare. It’s in that spirit that you’ll find some cross pollination in the picks below. You’ll also see some good stuff that hasn’t shown up on the Top 5 lists so far. That’s on purpose. Hope you enjoy, and please know you’re welcome to come join us for last call over at gangrey.com. Drinks are on Wright.

***

Wright Thompson

Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, and he lives in Oxford, Mississippi.


“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times

“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine

“The View From Within,” Seth Wickersham, ESPN The Magazine

“Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?” Tom Junod, Esquire

“The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy,” David Von Drehle, Time

***

Justin Heckert

Heckert is a writer living in Atlanta. 

“The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker

 ”The Bomb That Didn’t Go Off,” Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

“Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?” Susan Dominus, New York Times Magazine

“A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left Home”, by Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times

“Staying the Course”, Wright Thompson, ESPN 

***

Thomas Lake

Lake is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated living in Atlanta.


 “A Brevard Woman Disappeared, But Never Left Home,” Michael Kruse, St. Petersburg Times

“True Grits,” Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker (sub. required)

“Diving Headlong Into A Sunny Paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times

“Could This Be Happening? A Man’s Nightmare Made Real,” Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times

“When A Diver Goes Missing, A Deep Cave Is Scene Of A Deeper Mystery,” Ben Montgomery, St. Petersburg Times

“The Beards Are A Joke,” Justin Heckert, Atlanta Magazine, April 2011

***

Mark Johnson

Johnson is a 2010 Pulitzer winner who covers health and science for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and once played guitar for a Rockford, Ill., grunge band called The Bloody Stumps.


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

“Punched Out,” John Branch, New York Times

“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” Rich Schapiro, Wired

“Imminent Danger,” Meg Kissinger, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Diving headlong into a sunny paradise,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times

***

Michael Kruse

Kruse, a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and contributing writer to ESPN’s Grantland, won this year’s ASNE award for distinguished non-deadline writing.


“The Lost Boys” Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly

The easiest-to-read hardest thing I read this year.

“The Lazarus File,” Matthew McGough, The Atlantic

Simple: suspense and surprise.

“You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” John Jeremiah Sullivan, The New York Times Magazine

My first reaction when I read this? Jealousy and awe. And when I read it a second time? And a third? Same.

“A man’s nightmare made real,” Chris Goffard, the Los Angeles Times

Riveting. The work of a master.

“God’s Away on Business,” Spencer Hall, Every Day Should Be Saturday

George Teague, college football and big thoughts.

***


Ben Montgomery

Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, and he lives in Tampa.


“If I Die Young,” Lane DeGregory, St. Petersburg Times

“The Guiltless Pleasure,” Rick Bragg, Gourmet

“A Lot To Lose,” Tony Rehagen, Indianapolis Monthly

“The Shepard’s Lamb,” Danielle Paquette, Indiana University Daily Student

“Voice of America,” by Coozledad, rurritable

***

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. 

Writer David Dobbs: My Top Longreads of 2011

David Dobbs writes articles on science, sports, music, writing, reading, and other culture at Neuron Culture and for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Atavist, Nature, National Geographic, and other publications. He’s working on a book about the genetics of human strength and frailty. He also twitters and tries to play the violin.

***

Truly we live, as Steve Silberman said, in a time of longform renaissance.  The reading year was notable not just for the rise of many long reads and Longreads, but for the debut of The Atavist and Byliner, two new venues for publishing pieces too long for magazines but too short for books. Both, like Longreads, brought me lots of good reading. And The Atavist, which was first off the blocks, let me publish a story, My Mother’s Lover, for which I had tried but failed to find the right length and form for almost a decade. Cheers to Longreads for helping spearhead this renaissance—and to you, Constant Reader, for doing the reading that in all but the most immediate sense makes the writing possible.

Here are my top 5 longreads of 2011, plus some extras. My filter: a combination of what I thought best and what continued to resonate with me. Writing is hard. I’m moved by the dedication to craft in these pieces.

***

“Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World,” by Amy Harmon, New York Times
Harmon pulls off something extraordinarily difficult here: she draws on little more than straight reportorial observation to show a young autistic man moving out into a world that struggles to accommodate him. Neither is quite ready for the other; yet they engage, as they must. Gorgeously structured and an immense reward. (Bonus: She later tells how she put it together.)

Janet Malcolm’s “Art of Nonfiction” interview in Paris Review
Malcolm has written several of the best books I’ve ever read; The Silent Woman haunts me more on every reading. Here she reveals how she did it: a rigorous method wielded by a powerful mind and rarefied sensibility. Equally moving and informative were the Paris Review interview with John McPhee and a Chris Jones conversation with Gay Talese. I am now in love with Talese, though he never calls.

“Study of a lifetime,” by Helen Pearson, Nature
Pearson, Nature’s features editor, shows how fine science writing is done, following a set of researchers researching a set of people and they’re all trying to figure out the same thing: How to make sense of their lives. Lovely stuff, true to complex, incredibly valuable science about complex, richly textured lives.

“Climbers: A team of young cyclists tries to outrun the past,” by Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker
Young Rwandan cyclists try to ride into the future. Some rough road, some fine riding (and writing).

“California and Bust,” by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
California as a formerly developed country. Includes deftly rendered bicycle ride with former governor Schwarzenegger. Lewis is writing some of the best stuff out there right now.

***

Okay that was 5 and then some. But these I couldn’t’ leave out:

“The Apostate,” Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
The Church of Scientology versus Wright and the New Yorker fact-checking department. Former is overmatched.

“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” by Rich Shapiro, Wired
Riveting and bizarre.

“The Promise,” by Joe Posnanski, at Joe Blogs
Promises made, broken, and kept, variously, by Bruce Springsteen, the United States of America, and Posnanski’s dad. 4 stars easy, 5 if you love Bruce. And who doesn’t?

“What Made This University Researcher Snap?” by Amy Wallace, Wired
How and why a scientist went postal. Amy Wallace gets inside a scary head.

too many Daves, by David Quigg
Blatant cheating, as this is a blog, and Quigg almost always writes very short posts But he’s reading long stuff, all good, and responding to it beautifully as writer and reader; almost no one gets so much done in so little space. If you harbor even a spark of literary love, he’ll fan it.

Disclosures: The Atavist and Nature published stories of mine this year, and Wired.com (actually a separate outfit from Wired the magazine) hosts my blog.


***

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.