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The Daily's Claire Howorth: My Top Longreads of 2011

Claire Howorth is the arts editor at The Daily (pictured with colleagues Rich Juzwiak, Zach Baron and David Walters).

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Picking five favorite longreads of the year is tough—an Oscar-esque problem of autumnal riches and a fussy year-long memory—so there are actually nine (or ten or eleven*) here. Maybe I’m just a long-lister, which seems appropriate for a Longreader. 

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THE LION

I sent in my choices last Thursday afternoon, unaware of impending coincidence, and this article was at the top of the list, where it remains. No need to contextualize it.

• “Trial of the Will” (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair)

THE BOOKENDS

Noreen Malone’s consideration of her millennial generation’s warped Weltanschauung partly blames the grownups. Lori Gottlieb’s piece in The Atlantic, published months earlier, serves as a perfect grownup riposte.

• “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” (Lori Gottlieb, The Atlantic)

• “The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright” (Noreen Malone, New York magazine)

(But when did that spelling of “alright” become all right?)

THE PALATE PLEASER 

Burkhard Bilger’s take on neo-old Southern cuisine, featuring wildman chef Sean Brock, is deeply satisfying food writing. Also: crazy, tiny, mohawked lowcountry boars!

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

THE WOMEN’S WOMAN

Throughout October and early November, I was deeply concerned that a majority of my home state would do something shamefully stupid and pass Initiative 26. Irin Carmon’s thorough reporting is basic, fundamental journalism—informing the people!—at its very best.

• “The Next Front in the Abortion Wars: Birth Control” (Irin Carmon, Salon)

THE BOYS OF SUMMER

My love for these pieces is still strong, after the season of their publication is gone. I’m cheaply lumping them under a gender rubric mainly because they’re by men, on men. And Don Henley was stuck in my head. Sean Fennessey on Michael Bay (explosions!), Bill Simmons on male movie stars (ephemera!), Jon Caramanica on Bon Iver (Emma! Eau Claire!), and Colson Whitehead on poker (everything else!). (*I’m prohibited by affiliation to mention one of this year’s most spectacular opuses, Zach Baron’s “Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas.”)

• “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia” (Colson Whitehead, Grantland)

• “Who, What and Where is Bon Iver?” (Jon Caramanica, New York Times Magazine)

• “Blow-Up: An Oral History of Michael Bay” (Sean Fennessey, GQ) 

“The Movie Star” (Bill Simmons, Grantland)

THE BONUS

Lisa Howorth—a.k.a. “Mom”—wrote a lovely, lyrical piece in the Oxford American’s music issue. She may squirm at this shameless shout-out, but that’s kind of how I felt reading the third graf.

• “The Neckbones” (Lisa Howorth, Oxford American)

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Writer Andrew Rice: My Top Longreads of 2011

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. (See recent longreads by Rice.)

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Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and listed in no particular order. Full disclosure: I’ve written for several of the publications cited on this list, but I’ve excluded from consideration any writer with whom I’m personally acquainted.

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“The Romney Economy,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, 10/23/11

When it comes to degree of difficulty, delivering an interesting Mitt Romney profile is like nailing a reverse four-and-a-half somersault. But this story succeeded—not the least of which due to its brilliant packaging, which included a now-infamous cover photo of Romney with cash coming out of his suit pockets and the accompanying headline: “Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy.” Written without the (perhaps dubious) benefit of an interview with Romney, the story nonetheless managed to summon up the Republican candidate’s history of creative destruction, and tied that to the big story of the moment, the Occupy Wall Street protests. If Romney ends up becoming the Republican nominee, as still seems likely, the themes of Wallace-Wells’ profile will likely define the coming political year.

“How to be Good,” Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, 9/5/11 (sub. req.)

Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit argues, MacFarquhar writes, that “personal identity is not what matters.” But a profile is, by definition, an evocation of a person’s identity. How do you fulfill the requirements of the form on Parfit’s own, rather forbidding, terms? MacFarquhar didn’t make use of any scenes, or quotes of the traditional “he said” variety, conveying Parfit as a sort of disembodied intelligence. By all rights, this experiment should have been about as interesting to read as, well, a philosophy textbook. But the power of Parfit’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and ethics—and MacFarquhar’s skill at conveying them colloquially—made the piece sing to me.

“The God Clause,” Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek, 9/1/11

Are you interested in reading about a shadowy industry that attempts to predict and profit from gigantic, multibillion-dollar disasters? Great—me too. Now that I’ve got you interested, I will disclose that this article is actually about the reinsurance industry. This is the bait-and-switch trick that Greeley pulls off admirably in this piece. This was the cover story for Businessweek’s 9-11 anniversary issue, and aided by some very good cover art—something the magazine has been justly praised for lately—the piece managed to tell its readers a story that touched on the past while telling them something new.

“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 5/23/11 (sub. req.)

A detective story masquerading as a celebrity profile—or maybe it’s the other way around?—this was in an issue that kind of hung around on my endtable for a few months before I got around to sticking it into my bag for a long plane flight. Then it completely sucked me into its world. I won’t even pretend that I’m young enough to care about the rap collective Odd Future, or the fate of its missing member Earl Sweatshirt, but the outcome of this story, which I won’t spoil, offered an (ahem) oddly plaintive reminder that so many of our musical idols are, after all, just kids.

“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine, 6/2/11

This was my absolute favorite story of the year. Journalism from Africa often conveys the continent in broadly collective terms: tribes rival with one another, rebels fight the government, the downtrodden suffer or rise up. Bearak, who used to be stationed in the Times’ Johannesburg bureau, took one of those distressing mass phenomena that fill the inside pages of every day’s newspaper—an outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa’s township slums—and gave the story a terrible specificity. I particularly admired the way Bearak dissected the chance intersections and misunderstandings that led to a lynching, and dispassionately explained the cosmological worldview of the victim’s family about his death. In the end, Bearak resists the natural tendency to isolate a single villain and hold that person up to condemnation, despite the murky evidence, because that’s what the mob did, albeit in an incomparably more brutal fashion.

Bonus: Longreads Logrolling List

I’m lucky enough to be friends with a bunch of really talented writers, and it seems a shame to exclude them simply on the grounds of our acquaintance. So, here’s a list of really great articles written this year by people that I happen to know and like. You can take these endorsements with a grain of salt, of course, but I urge you to click and judge for yourself.

“Getting Bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, 8/8/11

The best account, so far, of the most stunning news event of this year.

“The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox,” Nathaniel Rich, Rolling Stone, 6/24/11

I was fascinated by this lurid miscarriage of justice. This story went way beyond the tabloid narrative of the persecuted innocent abroad.

“The Idealist,” Jason Zengerle, The New Republic, 1/13/11

A rising Democratic star finds his life derailed when he gets enmeshed in a bizarre political dirty tricks plot.

“Cheating, Incorporated,” Sheelah Kolhatkar, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2/10/11

The real, profitable and Canadian (!) company behind those lubricious Ashley Madison TV ads.

“The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 12/8/11; “The Casino Next Door”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 4/21/11

These two stories made me ache with jealousy.

“The Gulf War,” Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 3/14/11

The Gulf oil spill turned out to be less overwhelmingly catastrophic than some doomsayers predicted, but it still left behind some troubling lessons. This is the story of a disaster that happened beneath the surface, and in conveying that narrative with great depth and nuance, the story pulls off a truly difficult feat.

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New York Times Writer Jenna Wortham: My Top Longreads of 2011

Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr.

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SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s everything, plus Doree flagged that amazing Kolker piece and Michelle laid claim to Paul Ford’s staggering essay on IVF. But these are the stories that I sent to my Kindle and the links that recurred with the most frequency in my drafts/Gchats folders on Gmail, so I think it’s safe to say that they are my top picks of 2011.

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• Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble is Different.” (Businessweek, April 14, 2011)

A cutting, high-level look at the current boomlet in the tech biz—the kind that makes you kick yourself till the end for not being smart enough to have pitched it yourself. Ashlee takes a step back from the funding frenzy, sky-high valuations and feverish IPO rumors to examine the current ad-think consuming the tech world. He asks, what if instead of focusing on getting people to click on ads, buy group coupons and digital goods for their virtual farms, our engineers and entrepreneurs were trying to solve big problems in health and science?

• Lev Grossman, “The Boy Who Lived Forever.” (Time, July 7, 2011) 

I adored this piece because it shed light on a very particular corner of the Web—fanfic—without falling into the clichéd trap of portraying the more obscure recesses of the Internet as a place only inhabited by cr33p3rs and neckbeards. Instead, Lev lightly celebrates the creativity of the subculture and the communities and alternative realities people craft around their favorite characters and books.

• Jessica Pressler, “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age.” (New York Magazine, Sept 18, 2011)

I couldn’t get enough of the vivid, and at times lurid, details in this profile of Diane Passage, Ken Starr’s fourth wife. I mean, this phrase alone: “when she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily,” hooked me, line and sinker. Plus who doesn’t love a sordid glimpse into an underbelly, especially one in New York? The sharp observations and imagery from the first few grafs make you feel like a fly on the wall of a party you didn’t want to go to in the first place but can’t wait to see how it all shakes out.

• David Kushner, “Murder by Text.” (Vanity Fair, November 27, 2011)

A heartbreaking read about the gruesome murder of a 18-year-old girl named Kim Proctor and the two teenaged boys who killed her and then bragged about it on World of Warcraft, which ultimately led to their arrest. Kusher smartly weaves the role of technology and the concept of (im)permanence online into the piece for a compelling narrative.

• Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant.” (The New York Times, June 22, 2011)

I thought this was one of the most important pieces published this year, along with “The Life of Illegal Immigrant Farmers,” for giving the touchy subject of immigration a living, breathing human face. I read this stunning graf at least a half dozen times:

“And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.”

Honorable Mention:

While I was waiting for my copy of Sullivan’s Pulphead to be delivered, I stumbled across the work of Matt Bell, and immediately devoured two of his Kindle shorts—“A Tree or a Person or a Wall” and “A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way” and could not put them down. For such a stark, minimalist writer, his pieces are so evocative and rich with imagery that its hard not to be sucked into them almost immediately.

I also thought that this year brought out some hilarious and clever writing that touched on the way we consume and use technology and how it’s shaping our interactions, culture and lives.

Here’s a quick n’ dirty rundown of a few faves:

• Katie Heaney, “Reading Between the Texts” (The Hairpin, June 16, 2011)

• Leigh Alexander, “Five Emotions Invented By The Internet” (Thought

Catalog, January 12, 2011)

• Frank Smith, “Will the Real Frank Smith Please Stand Up” (The Morning

News, March 25, 2011)

Clive Thompson, “On Secret Messages in the Digital Age” (Wired

magazine, Jan 31, 2011)

Jonah Lehrer, “How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect.”

(Wired.com, October 2011)

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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. 

Heyman found an apartment in Rio with a bunch of twentysomething international travelers and slipped easily into the singles beach and party scene. When we spoke by phone in mid-November, he confided that his old life at Infosurv seemed a distant memory. “Going back there is not Plan A,” he said. “It’s very possible that that part of my life is behind me.” His biggest frustration: Because he was spending so much time with non-Brazilians, he wasn’t picking up Portuguese as quickly as he would have liked. So he moved after a month or so. By December, he was on the island of Florianópolis, in southern Brazil. His days consisted of riding a rented motorcycle to the beach, practicing his kite surfing, and then working out—mainly yoga and a regimen called P90X. His Portuguese was improving, thanks to a widening circle of Brazilian friends. “I have the vocabulary of a 5-year-old, but I can get my point across,” Heyman said. “The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that I have a gear I didn’t know existed. I look back on my life, and I’ve always been a very go-go person. I have been very achievement oriented all my life. And it is surprising to me that I can get into this gear where it is not about achievement. Maybe I was due for a break.”

“Inside the Mind of a Runaway CEO.” — Amy Barrett, Inc. Magazine

See more #longreads from Inc. Magazine

Inside the Mind of a Runaway CEO

Longreads Pick

Heyman found an apartment in Rio with a bunch of twentysomething international travelers and slipped easily into the singles beach and party scene. When we spoke by phone in mid-November, he confided that his old life at Infosurv seemed a distant memory. “Going back there is not Plan A,” he said. “It’s very possible that that part of my life is behind me.” His biggest frustration: Because he was spending so much time with non-Brazilians, he wasn’t picking up Portuguese as quickly as he would have liked. So he moved after a month or so. By December, he was on the island of Florianópolis, in southern Brazil. His days consisted of riding a rented motorcycle to the beach, practicing his kite surfing, and then working out—mainly yoga and a regimen called P90X. His Portuguese was improving, thanks to a widening circle of Brazilian friends. “I have the vocabulary of a 5-year-old, but I can get my point across,” Heyman said. “The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that I have a gear I didn’t know existed. I look back on my life, and I’ve always been a very go-go person. I have been very achievement oriented all my life. And it is surprising to me that I can get into this gear where it is not about achievement. Maybe I was due for a break.”

Source: Inc.
Published: Nov 1, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,361 words)

As I read, something quite unexpected occurred, an “aha” moment in the quiet of my kitchen, with the dog asleep on the floor and coffee cooling in a cup. I leaned against the cooktop. I realized I was writing the wrong story.

Forty-one years ago, while an exchange student living at a convent school in Belgium, I was sexually assaulted by a teacher, a married woman with an 8-month-old son. This is not a newly recovered memory. This is a story I have told repeatedly, though not publicly, for years. I needed to tell it to convince myself it was true.

I choose to tell it here, not because I wish to detract in any way from the severity of the alleged abuse that took place at Penn State but because it illustrates the power of the mind, as psychologist Richard Gartner, author of the definitive book on the subject, Betrayed As Boys, told me, “to put experience in a kind of box so that it doesn’t disturb the rest of you.” Because, while I am a reluctant citizen of the confessional states of America, my experience, which pales in comparison to the trauma described by the grand jury, illustrates the banal ubiquity of sexual abuse and its insidious aftermath.

“Grown-ups Must Act Like Grown-ups.” — Jane Leavy, Grantland

See more #longreads from Grantland

Grown-ups Must Act Like Grown-ups

Longreads Pick

As I read, something quite unexpected occurred, an “aha” moment in the quiet of my kitchen, with the dog asleep on the floor and coffee cooling in a cup. I leaned against the cooktop. I realized I was writing the wrong story.

Forty-one years ago, while an exchange student living at a convent school in Belgium, I was sexually assaulted by a teacher, a married woman with an 8-month-old son. This is not a newly recovered memory. This is a story I have told repeatedly, though not publicly, for years. I needed to tell it to convince myself it was true.

I choose to tell it here, not because I wish to detract in any way from the severity of the alleged abuse that took place at Penn State but because it illustrates the power of the mind, as psychologist Richard Gartner, author of the definitive book on the subject, Betrayed As Boys, told me, “to put experience in a kind of box so that it doesn’t disturb the rest of you.” Because, while I am a reluctant citizen of the confessional states of America, my experience, which pales in comparison to the trauma described by the grand jury, illustrates the banal ubiquity of sexual abuse and its insidious aftermath.

Author: Jane Leavy
Source: Grantland
Published: Nov 11, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,421 words)

At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.

“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

“How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

See more #longreads from The Washington Post

At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.

“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

“How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

See more #longreads from The Washington Post

How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA

Longreads Pick

At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.

“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Oct 31, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,636 words)