Search Results for: dad

Karen Wagner’s Life

Longreads Pick

She grew up listening to her dad talk about his days in the Army. She knew she wanted to be a soldier too. She spent nearly two decades serving her country with a quiet determination. On September 11, 2001, she went to her office at the Pentagon. “Major John Thurman, who had been sitting two desks down from Karen, lay on the floor and called out to see if anyone else was alive. Only Karen and Bill Ruth answered back. Thurman put his head as close to the floor as he could without burning his face, forced in a deep breath, and stood. He moved some file cabinets to make a path to Karen and then another to pull Ruth to them.” #Sept11

Author: John Spong
Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Aug 22, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,033 words)

Life on the Line Between El Paso and Juárez

Longreads Pick

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie together uncomfortably like an estranged couple, surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert. The cities are separated by the thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flows through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river’s natural habit of changing course and muddying boundaries. One side is Texas; the other, Mexico. The border’s way of life — its business, legitimate and otherwise — has always relied upon the circumvention of this dividing line.

Published: Jul 28, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,727 words)

The Life and Times of Harvey Updyke

Longreads Pick

“The weekend after the Iron Bowl, I went to Auburn, Ala., because I lived 30 miles away, and I poisoned the two Toomer’s trees. I put Spike 80DF in ’em.” … Harvey Updyke hung up the phone. He had just ruined his entire life in 62 words. Soon, the police would connect him with Al from Dadeville and nothing would ever be the same. “I’ll [be] honest with you,” he says. “I realized it was a bad idea when I was doing it. You know, I’m not stupid … “

Source: ESPN
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,021 words)

Becoming Katie (Part One)

Longreads Pick

The lone memento of Luke Hill’s unhappy existence hangs like a specter in his former bedroom, piercing blue eyes haunting from a 12-year-old portrait. It’s Luke at age 4, in a blue silk kimono, a glossy studio snapshot from when the family lived in Japan, during Dad’s service in the U.S. Marine Corps. This is Katie’s room now, and the picture of Luke hanging on her wall is the only one she’ll allow her mother to display in the house.

Source: Tulsa World
Published: May 7, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,876 words)

Cranking

Longreads Pick

Anyhow, this has been my on-and-off job for the past two years. I type. And, I try to type things that will help and comfort people, but mostly I try to type things that will please my editor. Who is awesome. Sometimes I do my job at 6:00 AM Pacific Time. Sometimes I do my job at 5:30 PM or 11:30 AM or really any time in between. Sometimes I do my job while my family goes to birthday parties and holiday dinners and a couple vacations and I don’t even know how many (non-Shakey’s) pizza nights–all without me. Without Dad.

Source: 43 Folders
Published: Apr 22, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,068 words)

Mister Lytle: An Essay

Longreads Pick

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” (National Magazine Award winner 2011)

Published: Oct 1, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,507 words)

Clayton Christensen: The Survivor

Clayton Christensen: The Survivor

On Homophobia and Recruiting in Women’s College Basketball

Longreads Pick

Emily Nkosi, who as Emily Niemann hit five three-pointers for Baylor in its 2005 title win against Michigan State, remembers that when recruiters came to her Houston home, as they did by the dozens in 2002, they had to pass a test. “On home visits,” Nkosi says, “my dad was assigned the question: ‘Do you have a bunch of lesbians on your team?'” Nkosi says her youth coaches abetted the process, vetting programs with their own inquiries about a “healthy climate” and the like. “You know,” Nkosi says, “the code words.” This line of questioning was especially fraught for Nkosi because, deep down, she knew she was a lesbian. But she was also a fundamentalist Christian who feared the religious repercussions of that reality.

Source: ESPN
Published: Jan 26, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,053 words)

I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait

I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait

Foster Kamer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Foster Kamer (ex-BlackBook + Gawker + Village Voice) is online features and news editor at Esquire


***

2010 was an incredible year for writing, bottom line. Despite the proliferation of things whose output is mostly antagonistic to great writing — like faceless “content farms” churning out hollow, Google-gaming information lacking anything of substance — great writing persisted. Twitter’s evolving as an aesthetic, yielding profundities from the most unlikely of sources, and a few performance artists, too. Blogging continued to evolve as a craft: some of its once loudest critics are now some of its most significant contributors. More and more people care about things being well written, and they remember them, even if they’re intended to be as disposable as a piece of produce. It’s an encouraging sign of what’s to come.

Putting together this list, I felt like I should make some omissions, like my (previous) employer, The Village Voice. There are too many great pieces I got to work with, but three worth noting were:

·  Steven Thrasher’s ranted-essay, White America Has Lost Its Mind, a pitch-perfect picture of America pre-2010 midterms.

·  All five installments of Graham Rayman’s The NYPD Tapes, undeniably some of the best investigative reporting in 2010. 

·  Live from Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos. Camille Dodero took an empathetic look at a part of America that’s almost unanimously discarded, viewed like a freak museum exhibit. It was feeling, it was fair, it was compelling in every way an assessment of a subculture should be.

Putting this list together is a little torturous. That aside, these are my five favorite — and most personally important — things I read this year. I think you’ll like them. I’m very, very conscious about the omission of women — or anything really other than White Dudes — on this list, and I apologize for my narrow, singular selection. 

5. Profiling bands sucks. No matter how provocative the subject, writing about and interviewing “famous people” — but especially musicians — is a sharp, royal pain in the balls. Getting them to elaborate on their art? Inherently awkward. Both parties know exactly how fruitless and overreaching these things are. Nicholas Dawidoff’s April profile of The NationalforThe New York Times Magazineshould have been one of those things. [New York Times writer interviews five white dudes from Brooklyn making Pitchfork-approved music.] Face value: “Groan.” But Dawidoff managed to get as close to understanding this band’s creative process — really, not that complicated of one, either — as anybody in it, and we’re right there with him as it happens. It helps if you’re a fan or a young Almost Famous aspirant, but the story of just some guys becoming one of the most famous rock acts in America over a decade, and doing it without becoming celebrities or selling out fans? And writing the story well? It’s an anomaly. Some people left the piece the way a great band leaves you after a concert: wanting more, but satisfied no less. I did.

4. Michael Chabon’s introduction toFountain Cityis the most motivational thing I’ve read all year. It’s a four-chapter booklet packaged with the latest issue of McSweeney’s. It’s the epic Chabon started that he never finished, a novel “wrecked” by the author …until he decided to annotate what was written. In the introduction, Chabon — yeah, the same guy who wrote Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — writes about the terrible, beautiful way the 20-something iteration of himself that went on to write those books failed at this book. As it turns out, it’s the same panicked, procrastinating, and eventually depressing way so many of us fail, too. It’s sad, sure. But: Chabon admits he even fell short annotating Fountain City, as he only revisited the first four chapters before watching it “sink” again. Yet that failure yielded the most successful and brutally honest meditation on failing as I’ve ever read. It’s barely ten pages, if that. Hopefully, McSweeney’s or Chabon will put it online. It’s too good to sit trapped in this $24 box, lest McSweeney’s fail something they don’t have to.

3. Technically released late last year, but I read it this year while writing about job changes at the New York Observer, a 23 year-old pink, weekly paper, that’s (mostly) historically striven to be classically New York in every way a contemporary publication born here should be: brilliant, but accessible; hysterical, yet never a joke; above all, true to its citizenry – Manhattanites – for better or worse. There wouldn’t be a Gawker without the Observer. Vanity Fair wouldn’t be the same, because the Observer was the last job Graydon Carter had before he was beckoned there. It was the birthplace of Sex and the City, some of the best writers and editors in New York City, and also, too many trend pieces that took hold nationally to count. And it was the place where Peter Kaplan (the longtime, former editor of the New York Observer) was given rise. You’ll understand why after reading Peter Kaplan’s introduction forThe Kingdom of New York, the Observer ”clippings” book, which tells the entire history of a publication — and the modern era of this city — in 11-ish pages. It’s hysterical and perfect and a little heartbreaking in the way great sentimentalizing and romanticizing — the kind that will make you nostalgic for things you’ve never experienced — often is. But also, endlessly inspiring: as a writer, as a New Yorker, as a reader, and as someone who tries to recognize a good moment when it’s in front of them. And thanks to the magic of Google, you don’t even have to buy the book to read it. Whattatown.

2. Every time you hear about those people who have risen from the most adverse and traumatic conditions a kid could be presented with, into prominence, they’re celebrities or writing a memoir (or both). A blogger is, in so many ways, the furthest thing from that. Some bloggers know this guy’s name, his longtime readers from when he used to blog for The Consumerist know who he is. But none of those people likely know anybody else in the same way they now irreversibly know him after Joel Johnson’s February 2010 post entitled Why I’m Funny. Some people spend years on their memoirs, hundreds of pages of public therapy, a backwards, sick competition where brand-name writers compare how fucked up their childhood was to the next person’s. I don’t know how long Joel spent on this, which begins with the sentence “The first time I ever came in anyone’s mouth, it was into the mouth of my stepfather.” But 6,215 words later, they should all be ashamed, because I know exactly how long it’s going to stay with me: forever, or at least until I write for the last time.

1. Like The Village Voice, I should probably also omit my top Longread of the Year, because it comes from the new job I started at on Monday. But I can’t, because Chris Jones’ profile of Roger Ebert in the March 2010 issue of Esquire was undisputably the best and most memorable thing I – and plenty of others – read this year. It introduced him to a new generation of people unfamiliar with the man and his impact. It made people who couldn’t give a shit about magazine profiles or Roger Ebert sob. [I’ll admit it, I got weepy.] But maybe most significantly, it redefined Roger Ebert to America. This wasn’t investigative journalism or the most hard-hitting interview ever conducted. It was quite simply — and incredibly — the product of great magazine writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald, you want a second act? Well, here’s a third. “Old Media” publications, like Roger Ebert, are supposedly dying. Yet, neither have seemed more alive than this in the last ten years.