“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”
“If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.” —Michael Longley
Below are some of my favorite #longreads that fall under the umbrella of “the lives of the poets.” Each is paired with a favorite poem by the poet in question. Quite a few of these stories are personal, not just about the poet, but about the authors of the pieces themselves. Which is unsurprising, especially because, as Billy Collins put it in a 2001 Globe and Mail piece: “You don’t read poetry to find out about the poet, you read poetry to find out about yourself.”
David Berman is perhaps best known for his work with the indie-rock band Silver Jews, but his poetry is a thing to behold, as accessible as it is awesome (in the true sense of the word). Beller’s piece, a “tribute to the free-associating genius of the Silver Jews,” delves not just into the beauty of Berman’s free-association, but also his Judaism, his place in the New York literary scene of the 1990s, and his public pain.
The details of poet Frank Stanford’s life are as labyrinth-like as his most famous work, an epic poem titled, “The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You.” His life was in many ways a series of contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a backwoods outsider who maintained correspondence with poets ranging from Thomas Lux to Allen Ginsberg; and posthumously, he is both little-known and a cult figure in American letters. In seeking to unravel the man behind the myth, Ehrenreich heads deep into the lost roads of Arkansas: the result is a haunting and vivid portrait of both Stanford’s life and his own quest.
It is likely that if you have made it this far down the list you already know a fair amount about Sylvia Plath, but what makes this piece interesting is Elizabeth Hardwick’s take on her, and her lovely, clear-eyed prose. Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books, was herself no stranger to the lives of poets, having spent 23 years married to Robert Lowell. It is also—maybe—of interest that the same girls who fall mercilessly hard for Plath at 16 and 21 and often discover Hardwick with a similar fervor a few years down the road (myself included).
Widely considered one of the most important 20th century American poets, Lowell’s biographer called him “the poet-historian of our time.” Parker’s piece examines a much more personal history, that of Lowell’s relationship with her father, painter Frank Parker.
“He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: ‘Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.’ I have followed this rule myself. I find it remarkably effective for avoiding quarrels and making friends. A generous sharing of credit is the quickest way to build a healthy scientific community.”
Feynman on his work on the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb: “So I want you to just imagine this young graduate student that hasn’t got his degree yet but is working on his thesis, and I’ll start by saying how I got into the project, and then what happened to me.”
The founding editor of the New York Review of Books looks back on 50 years:
Danner: “I’m holding here the first issue, which declares, in a statement on the second page: ‘This issue … does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation, or to call attention to a fraud.’ This is the only editorial statement that you’ve ever made.”
Silvers: “That’s it! And that’s still what we try to do. We shouldn’t pretend to be comprehensive. There’s no point in reviewing a book if you can’t find someone whose mind you particularly respect. And even so, we have to turn down every month or so a piece we’d asked for. But I left one thing out of that editorial statement: the freedom of those people to reply at length, to make their case.”
I tend to steer clear of stories about finance because I assume they’ll either go over my head or bore me or maybe even disgust me. This one only disgusted me. I admire how patiently Susan Dominus reported and told Ina Drew’s saga. We never hear from Drew herself, and yet we’re still given as complete a portrait of her and her tenure at JP Morgan as was possible.
I’ve worked in environments with all men and found certain anecdotes that Dominus picked up to be incredibly relatable—even though the subject is one of the most powerful people in all of Wall Street. Consider:
One of the rare women to rise steadily into the management ranks on Wall Street, Drew stood out, sometimes awkwardly so, in a mostly male work environment. Havlicek recalls hearing her address a roomful of 200 male traders not long after Chemical merged with Manufacturers Hanover in 1991. “I didn’t plan any of this for my career,” she told the traders. “For God’s sake, I was captain of the twirling team in high school.” Her words were met with silence. “There were dozens of guys that were just cringing for her,” Havlicek says. “She didn’t fit their picture of what a senior trader should look like.” For Drew, there were a lot of moments like that: guys rolling their eyes, muttering under their breath about something she just said. “She never seemed to care,” Havlicek says. “She just kept doing what she was doing.”
In general I would say that my favorite unofficial genre of Longreads is the kind that when I finish I think, “that woman is a badass.”
I read so many words about Lena Dunham’s HBO series this year that by the time I actually got to sit down and watch the series, I’d nearly lost track of how I would have watched it “on my own.” There was so much said about what Girls had gotten wrong that it became difficult, for me at least, to focus on what the show had gotten right. Then I read Elaine Blair’s breakdown of Dunham’s treatment of sex in the New York Review of Books and remembered: Oh, I can just watch Girls as a girl, and that is valuable, too. I appreciate criticism that puts you in your place.
I read Dan P. Lee on Fiona Apple three times before I’d even listened to Fiona Apple’s new album once. Even Fiona Apple, creative genius, can get stuck watching Mob Wives for four hours.
This was my favorite edition of Tell Me When It’s Over, a Deadspin series by Rob Trucks. It’s such a straightforward but brilliant idea: Trucks talks to former world-class athletes about “the moment they knew their playing days were over.” Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic gold medalist in swimming, talked a lot to Trucks about her career, but also about the sexual assault that defined the later half of her career, in plain language and detail that we don’t normally hear from rape victims. (Monika Korra deserves recognition for doing similarly this year.)
This is a very biased selection that I’m including anyway because I think everyone should read it. Kiese was my professor and friend at Vassar College. I’ve been reading his writing and learning from him for a while, and he is very much the reason that I pursued writing after college at all. His work gets at an honesty that I think all personal narrative should aspire to. In person and in his writing, he talks a lot about “reckoning”—facing ourselves fully and refusing to glance over our own weaknesses and fuck-ups. I admire that a lot.
I read this story on his blog, Cold Drank, and asked him if we could republish it on Gawker soon after. I think I’ve read it about once a month ever since. This piece hits you in the gut a few times and makes you want to be a better human being.
I read news when I want to be entertained. I read features when I want to learn something. Here’s nine articles I read this year that changed the way I look at the world, and made me wonder how I seem when it looks back.
It’s been a bad year for truth. From Mike Daisey and Jonah Lehrer to Rush Limbaugh and Mitt Romney, 2012 felt like a yearlong debate about the role of exaggeration, hyperbole, fact-checking and outright fabrication in the pursuit of an argument. Pogue’s piece, a kind of letter from the extreme-pedant end of the spectrum, illustrates how fidelity to facts can obscure the truth, and how embellishment can reveal it.
Maybe I only feel like I learned something from this essay because I’m in essentially the same position as Albo. I’ve been single for almost 10 years, and I’m realizing that if I had applied all the hours I’ve wasted on the promiscu-net to something useful, I could have knitted a quilt, learned French, mastered Othello and read all of Wikipedia by now.
If our society has learned anything from the first 20 years of internet access, it’s that looking for what you want isn’t always the best way to get it, and that getting it is a great way to stop wanting it. Albo’s essay couldn’t have been written by any gay man in America because they’re not as good at writing as he is, but I get the feeling it’s been lived by most of them.
OK, so it’s not exactly earth-shattering news that America’s prison system is problematic and that “Texas justice” is an oxymoron. But this year brought a new impetus for action, partly due to new numbers (the widely reported stat that 1% of America’s population is incarcerated), legislative action (Obama’s plan to combat prison rape, scorchingly reported in the New York Review of Books) and, qualitatively but no less essentially, longform pieces like Gopnik’s and Colloff’s.
People are always quoting the MLK-via-Obama line “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” and articles like these—one a macro view of the problem, one micro—is what that bend looks like.
It’s easy now to forget that this was an election year, and that we spent basically all of it squabbling, speculating and pontificating about its outcome, which we now say we knew all along.
Most election reporting is disposable, either gaffe play-by-plays (“Binders Full of Women: Interactive Timeline”), instantly obsolete hypotheticals (What if Romney picks Christie for VP?) or politically orchestrated profiles (“Obama’s audacious plan to save the middle class from Libyan airstrikes”). If you remember these articles past ctrl+w, it’s only until events catch up, and then they poof out of your consciousness forever.
Towers’s Romney profile is one of the few still worth reading after the election. Nominally a standard “let’s hang out in the campaign bus!” piece, it transcends its premise by capturing the conflicting forces tugging at the hem of the Republican party, and how Romney’s sheer empty-vesselness managed to please, and displease, everyone at once.
Maybe it’s just the ubiquity of its subject, now the most-viewed-ever video on YouTube, but no article stuck with me this year quite like Fisher’s. In a culture that strains to call itself postracial, sharing “Gangnam Style” on Twitter and Facebook was a safe, quiet way to shout ‘look how weird Koreans are!’ and invite your friends to gawk alongside you.
According to Fisher, “Gangnam” isn’t an expression of Korean culture, but a satire of it. Psy was saying the same thing we spectators were, only in a visual language (and, obviously, a verbal one) we couldn’t understand. He was laughing at his culture too, he just had no idea how easy it was to get the rest of the world to join him.
It’s all in the execution, they say, and nothing demonstrated that this year better than Veselka’s harrowing investigation into whether the guy who kidnapped and then released her on the side of the road in 1985 was a serial killer.
She never finds the answer to her question. But who cares! It’s a great piece, super interesting, suspenseful, creepy, introspective in all the right places. We all know that compelling stories don’t always need happy endings. In this case, it doesn’t need one at all.
I admit it: I have no idea how the international economy works. I used to feel about this the way I feel about not being able to describe asexual reproduction, or the Spanish Civil War, or how to grow tomatoes. I can see why somebody’s got to do it, I just can’t see why it’s got to be me.
Since the 2008 crash, though, knowledge of economics has gone from nice to have to can’t miss, and things like competitiveness, productivity and efficiency have taken a place in politics previously reserved for life-and-deathers like sports doping and the Ground Zero Mosque.
Patent trolling and outsourced manufacturing aren’t the only issues facing the US economy, of course, but both these articles demonstrate how businesses, governments and consumers have made the wrong thing too easy, and how the hard thing might not be the way back.
Born in Mexico City, Guillermoprieto has covered Latin America for NYRB since 1994, and she has also written for The New Yorker, The Guardian and the Washington Post. Today’s feature, “A Visit to Havana,” is about her return to Cuba for Pope John Paul II’s arrival in 1998.
Dozens of reporters have been killed in Mexico over the last 12 years by drug traffickers, and very little has been done to investigate their deaths and bring the murderers to justice:
Let us say that you are a Mexican reporter working for peanuts at a local television station somewhere in the provinces—the state of Durango, for example—and that one day you get a friendly invitation from a powerful drug-trafficking group. Imagine that it is the Zetas, and that thanks to their efforts in your city several dozen people have recently perished in various unspeakable ways, while justice turned a blind eye. Among the dead is one of your colleagues. Now consider the invitation, which is to a press conference to be held punctually on the following Friday, at a not particularly out of the way spot just outside of town. You were, perhaps, considering going instead to a movie? Keep in mind, the invitation notes, that attendance will be taken by the Zetas.
Imagine now that you arrive on the appointed day at the stated location, and that you are greeted by several expensively dressed, highly amiable men. Once the greetings are over, they have something to say, and the tone changes. We would like you, they say, to be considerate of us in your coverage. We have seen or heard certain articles or news reports that are unfair and, dare we say, displeasing to us. Displeasing. We have our eye on you. We would like you to consider the consequences of offending us further. We know you would not look forward to the result. We give warning, but we give no quarter. You are dismissed.
“I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Time cover story dismissed the gay world as a ‘pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.’ David Reuben’s 1969 best-seller, ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)’—a book I remember perusing shakily at the library—advised that ‘if a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.'”
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