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Benjamin Gold: My Favorite Longreads of 2010

benjamingold:

Hey it’s the end of 2010, publishers are still trying to figure out how to make money off their online content, and here are my favorite pieces of long form journalism that was published this year (plus one from the 90s)!


Richard Morgan, “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup,” (The Awl, August 2010)

As an struggling freelance writer, this article was, for me, especially meaningful. Morgan shows how success is totally ephemeral and relative (legions of freelancers would love for the career he describes), but also how the work can be its own reward.  


Keith Gessen, “Stuck,” (New Yorker, August 2010)

One way to tell if you really loved a story is when you bring it up all the time. Now, whenever I’m stuck in traffic with someone, I talk about what it’s like to drive in Moscow.


Michael Tedder, “Q&A: Ted Leo on Middle Class Indie-Rock Life, His Dissatisfaction With Your Karaoke Preparation, And Five-Dollar Words,” (Sound of The City, April 2010)

Thanks, in part, to this interview (and this one too) 2010 was the year I learned to love Ted Leo again. His great new album, The Brutalist Bricks, helped too.


Jason Aaron, “Where The Hell Am I?,” (Comic Book Resources, September 2010)

For his uncompromisingly close look at the life of a comic book creator, and the process it took him to get there, Jason Aaron’s series of columns is the best writing on comics I’ve read all year.


Mike McGonigal, “Temperature’s Rising: Galaxie 500,” (Pitchfork, May 2010)

I’m a big fan of Galaxie 500, and I knew the band members didn’t get along, but wow—they really don’t like each other! Beyond that, any band who manages to grab hold onto any semblance of success needs to reed this insider account of rock n’roll death.

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Patrick Doyle: Top 5 Longreads from 2010

Patrick Doyle is a senior editor for 5280 Magazine in Denver. 

patrickcdoyle:

The good folks at Longreads.com have been asking everyone for their five favorite pieces from 2010. Here are mine.  

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” by Chris Jones, Esquire
The best story of the year. Just give Jones his Ellie now.

The End of Men,” by Hanna Rosin, The Atlantic
A compelling case for why I and my male brethren are, umm, goners.

The Quaid Conspiracy,” by Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair
Reminiscent of VF’s Pat Dollard story from a few years back; Sales gets out of the way and watches—along with us—the Quaid trainwreck.

Village Voice,” by Peter Hessler, The New Yorker
Hessler follows Rajeev Goyal as he wades through D.C. and Nepalese politics and tries to make the Peace Corps relevant again. 

Believeland,” by Wright Thompson, ESPN.com
A heartbreaking, but hopeful piece about post-LeBron Cleveland. (Also: Who knew that Dennis Kucinich was such a hoops fan?) I still haven’t forgiven ESPN for “The Decision,” but this is a much-needed salve.

Goat Boy Rises (#HappyBirthdayBill)

Goat Boy Rises (#HappyBirthdayBill)

Rich Ziade: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Rich Ziade is partner and lead strategist at Arc90, notable for many things including creation of the wondrous Readability app.

(Ed. note: We know: One of the stories below is from 2009, and another is from 2007.)

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• Paul Graham ruminates over the deflationary value of stuff.

• Zak Smith debates which is more offensive: the porn industry or Tyra Banks exploiting the porn industry in Barely Legal Whores Get  Gang-F***ed.

• The New York Times (Wyatt Mason) deep dives into the mind of The Wired’s David Simon.

• The New Yorker (Nick Paumgarten) profiles John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.

• The CBC investigation (by Neil Macdonald) of the assassination of Lebanon’s prime minister Rafik Hariri plays like an international procedural thriller. Ben Affleck as the protagonist?

gq:

“I wouldn’t call it conversation,” Gelb said. “It’s this sort of breathless monologue that you can only engage by interrupting. Dick is an advocate. He almost always has a case to make.” Holbrooke’s forcefulness is tempered by an endearing vulnerability—the nakedness of his ambitions and pleasures and insecurities. He takes pains arranging the seating chart for official dinners. Between government jobs, he worked as an investment banker, and, according to USA Today, he’s worth at least seventeen million dollars, but he still looks as if he’d dressed in a hurry. He reads voraciously, writes quickly and well, and consumes large quantities of schlock entertainment. (Holbrooke is especially fond of “There’s Something About Mary.”) His great advantage over most colleagues and opponents is his analytic and synthetic prowess, which allows him, for example, to break down the reasons for the Taliban’s successful propaganda campaign in the tribal areas while connecting it to imperial British history in the region. As for his flaws, he seems remarkably unaware of them. Holbrooke cannot be kidded about the trait for which he’s best known: his ego.


—from
“The Last Mission,” George Packer’s Sept 2009 New Yorker profile of Richard Holbrooke. Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe.

Master of Play: Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's Man Behind Mario

Master of Play: Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s Man Behind Mario

Gillian Reagan: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Gillian Reagan is an editor at Capital New York. She does other stuff, too. 

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My rule was to steer clear of Capital articles (although you will recognize some bylines from contributors). These articles that weren’t necessarily the best writing of the year, but have frequently popped up and rolled around in my brain long after I read them for the first time. Sometimes it was because of the beautiful prose. But, mostly, the ideas are what stayed with me. 

Zachary Woolfe, “A Quiet Place of Dysfunction and Dystopia,” (The New York Times, October 21)

“As the motorcade carrying the body of Leonard Bernstein passed through Brooklyn on its way to Green-Wood Cemetery 20 years ago, construction workers removed their yellow hard hats and called out, ‘Goodbye, Lenny!’ It was a gesture of affection unthinkable for any other classical musician. In death, as in life, Bernstein was the exception: capable of anything and, almost, everything.”

Paul Ford, “Real Editors Ship,” (Ftrain.com, July 20)

“People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people ‘no.’ Saying ‘no’ is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued.”

Sady Doyle, “Sex Offender Week: Rivers Cuomo Messes You Up Forever,” (The Awl, April 27)

“We speak not of the Rivers Cuomo that was, nor of the Rivers Cuomo that is, nor yet of the Rivers that shall be. We speak, now, of the Platonic ideal of a Rivers Cuomo: The Rivers Cuomo you have never met, nor ever can meet, nor can ever be sued by (subsequent to writing a blog post that uses his name quite a lot), but who lives, nevertheless, within your brain. Specifically, if you happen to have grown up in the 1990s, and are heterosexual, and also a girl.”

Steven Hyden’s entire “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?” series, The Onion’s AV Club

“I remember the ’90s, but it’s like I wasn’t there. Like many people of my generation—including practically every band that was originally associated with the term—’grunge’ for me has become something to live down, like cuffed jeans or bad Luke Perry sideburns.”

Josh Allen, Chokeville.

I swear, I was going to put this in before Paul Ford did. “The goal is to tell every single story of this city…The site will be frequently updated with new material. Sometimes stories, sometimes a song, a photograph, a movie, illustration, radio show, encyclopedia entry, comic strip, field recording, whatever, etc…A good place to start is Welcome to Feddema Global. It features Allison Hull, who’s from out of town and also has no idea what’s going on, so maybe you can relate to her.”

Additional shout-outs: Peter J. Boyer, “The Covenant,”The New Yorker; Camille Dodero, “Live From Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos,” Village Voice; Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s entire “Live From Las Vegas election coverage” on The Awl; Timothy Garton Ash, 1989!, New York Review of Books; Zach Baron, “The End of the Story,” The Believer.

Chris Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Chris Jones is a writer at large for Esquire. (His stories are on many of your Top Fives.) He’s currently blogging at My Second Empire.


David Grann: The Mark of a Masterpiece, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010

Just a perfectly constructed, painful reveal of the sinister side of the art world, starting at its origins, with the artist’s fingerprints.

Michael Kruse: Stories of LeBron and sportswriter intertwined, tangled, The St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 21, 2010

Maybe the best way to approach an over-covered subject: write about him by writing about someone else. (See Breslin, Jimmy. Digging JFK Grave was His Honor.)

Eli Saslow: For a look outside the presidential bubble, Obama reads 10 personal letters a day, The Washington Post, March 31, 2010

For a look inside the presidential bubble, report the hell out of the story of a single letter.

CJ Chivers: A Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja, The New York Times, April 19, 2010

Every time CJ Chivers heads off to war and sends back a story, I feel like less of a man and less of a writer.

Tom Junod: Eating the Whole Animal, from the Inside-Out, Esquire, April 2010

Pure entertainment by one of the all-time great magazine writers. Also contains the sentence: “The veins are what freaked me out.” Impossible to resist. Reading, not eating, that is.

Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010

aldridge:

My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic:

The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired
“Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”

The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”

The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”

Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy
Jon Ronson, The Guardian
“I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. Shaggy nods quietly. ‘I get anxiety and shit a lot,’ he says. ‘And reading that stuff people write about us… It hurts.’”

See my (much longer) list of the best long-form journalism of 2009.

Follow @longreads, or search for #longreads on Twitter. Or follow me, @mpaldridge.

Aileen Gallagher: My 2010 Longreads

Aileen Gallagher is Assistant Professor of Multiplatform Journalism at Syracuse University.

agallagher:

Don Peck’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America (The Atlantic, March 2010)

Bleak, but I’ve never read a better numbers story.

Nick Blakeslee’s Alex Jones is About to Explode (Texas Monthly, March 2010)

Jones is sort of Glenn Beck meets Art Bell and Blakeslee nails the complex conflict of the man and the showman.

Tad Friend’s Sleeping With Weapons (New Yorker, August 16, 2010)

Profile of Lounge Lizard John Lurie starts off so well I use it in class: “From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face.” 

Luke Dittrich’s The Man Who Would Fall to Earth (Esquire, August 2010)

I did not expect to get through this story, let alone love it. (The story in the same issue about the perfect Price is Right bid is more my bag.) This is how you take a pontentially complicated story about an event (the freefall jump from space) and make it about people.

Dana Priest’s Top Secret America (Washington Post, July 2010)

Priest is such a meticulous, awesome reporter.  She’s sourced like Sy Hersch. This is not as readable as her Walter Reed series, but equally depressing and even more important to our country.