Search Results for: marriage

Cheating, Incorporated

Longreads Pick

Profile of Noel Biderman, founder of cheaters website Ashley Madison. “When I asked Biderman’s wife, Amanda, what it’s like being joined in holy matrimony with an anti-marriage entrepreneur, she let out a long sigh. ‘Really, the business itself doesn’t match who he is as a person—it’s not our lifestyle or value system or any of that,’ she said. ‘I mean, yeah, I’d love it if he were working on a cure for cancer. But it’s a business, and that’s how we look at it.'”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Feb 11, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,702 words)

The Last Temptation of Ted Haggard

The Last Temptation of Ted Haggard

Allen Iverson: Fallen Star

Longreads Pick

With his NBA career over, his marriage in trouble, and rumors swirling about drinking and money problems, the greatest Sixer of his era finds himself playing minor-league basketball in Turkey and spending his nights at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Istanbul. Isn’t it, weirdly, exactly how we always thought it would end for Allen Iverson?

Published: Jan 3, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,515 words)

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.

Housewives of God

Longreads Pick

Priscilla Shirer’s marriage appears to be just the sort of enlightened partnership that would make feminists cheer. Yet Shirer avoids using words like “feminist” or “career woman” to describe herself. She is an evangelical Bible teacher who makes her living by guiding thousands of women through the study of Scripture in her books, videos and weekend conferences — in which she stresses that in a biblical home and church, the man is the head and the woman must submit.

Published: Nov 12, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,893 words)

Fixed

Longreads Pick

The rise of marriage therapy, and other dreams of human betterment.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 29, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,802 words)

A Risky Proposal

Longreads Pick

Is it too soon to petition the Supreme Court on gay marriage?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 18, 2010
Length: 44 minutes (11,162 words)

Enemies of the Estate

Longreads Pick

The diminished but still fabulously wealthy and powerful British aristocracy has survived agricultural decline, estate taxes, and world war, often bolstered by strategic marriage. Will its ancient code and customs be finished off for good by divorce?

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jan 1, 2010
Length: 10 minutes (2,574 words)

Married (Happily) With Issues

Longreads Pick

I have a pretty good marriage. It could be better. There are things about my husband that drive me crazy. Last spring he cut apart a frozen pig’s head with his compound miter saw in our basement. He needed the head to fit into a pot so that he could make pork stock. I’m no saint of a spouse, either.

Published: Dec 1, 2009
Length: 9 minutes (2,436 words)

Please Be Seated. Guy Ritchie’s Life Will Begin Shortly.

Longreads Pick

His marriage to Madonna behind him, and the potential blockbuster Sherlock Holmes here, the director has a lot on his mind. But he can explain it all with three simple truths.

Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 1, 2009
Length: 25 minutes (6,409 words)