The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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–An oral history of Netscape on its 20th anniversary, from the perspective of its creators. Read more oral histories.

This week is all about ghosts: ghosts that haunt houses, girl ghosts in movies, ghostwriters and Ghostbusters.
Katie Heaney writes about the supernatural for Pacific Standard — everything from Bigfoot sightings to seances. In this installment, she visits the oldest home in New York in search of its rumored ghostly matriarch.
“You never expect that big a hit. But there was a great sense that we were doing something special right from the beginning.”
A sprawling, spectacular account of O’Hagan’s attempt to help the founder of Wikileaks write his memoir, and the total chaos that ensued.
A shorter piece about the role of malevolent women ghosts in cinema. (Hint: It’s their righteous fury that makes them so angry.)
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Photo: spectrefloat

In Polygon, 20 former Capcom employees and business partners look back on the arcade game that transformed the industry: Street Fighter II.

Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most oral histories are not particularly challenging or innovative – they are, after all, just stitched-together interviews. But this one required some deep reporting to identify, locate, and interview more than 40 sources, including Baltimore Stallions superfans and the team’s former marketing executive. The Capital News Service team went beyond simply interviews and created several interactive graphics to help tell their story in an organic way, not just a tacked-on-for-technology’s sake way. This is the kind of oral history worth repeating.
Capital News Service | January 24, 2014 | 49 minutes (12,268 words)
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The following reading list comes courtesy Michelle Legro, editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.
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No doubt you are on your way to one right now: an epic party, a night to end all nights. But will your epic party be as legendary as those thrown attended by Truman Capote, Cher Horowitz, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Belfort, Silvio Berlusconi, or the kids from Saturday Night Fever?
While Jay Gatsby may have spent lavishly, in the end he did it for love; in Martin Scorese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort does it all for the money.
Before we were rolling with the homies, director Amy Heckerling had to figure out if Cher Horowitz would totally gag if she had to go to a party in the Valley.
The hottest club in Las Vegas has Italian princes, ten-thousand dollar tables, a champagne fairy, air of pure oxygen, and you’re not invited.
The era of Berlusconi may be at an end, but the legend of this Italian version of Benny Hill will never be forgotten, nakedly chasing after topless nymphettes while running the country into the ground.
Truman Capote kept telling people that he was going to invite everybody to his party at the Plaza Hotel in November of 1966. Guests were required to wear only two colors, black and white, to mirror the ascot races in My Fair Lady. Masks were to be worn by all upon entry and removed only at midnight.
By day, Vincent sold paint in a Bay Ridge hardware store; by night he was the best disco dancer in all of New York City. And in 1977, he would be played on screen by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Cohn, meanwhile, later admitted to making most of the story up.

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
When a bridezilla demanded that Grad find a date to her wedding, she made the best of the situation—she took to Craigslist.
Traditional interviewing with a twist: Luna interviews T.J. Kincaid, better known as YouTube’s The Amazing Atheist. (Full disclosure: I am the editor-at-large for The Annual, a monthly humor magazine founded by my childhood friend and comedy connoisseur, Kevin Cole.)
To everyone who didn’t understand the dirty jokes their friends told in middle school: Hudgins understands you. And he may have had it a bit worse.
Their former venues include a bloody delicatessen basement and a low-fi burlesque club frequented by Hasidic Jews. Upright Citizens Brigade has produced some of the wildest and funniest folks in comedy today. Here, Raftery compiles the experiences of the early days of Amy Poehler, Ed Helms, Bobby Moynihan, Horatio Sanz, Janeane Garofalo and many more.
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Photo: Marcin Wichary
Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics:
Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him and Mrs. Krabappel to engage in Bull Durham-inspired extramarital shenanigans. Canseco’s wife rejected the scene, and the staff had to do a last-minute Saturday afternoon rewrite when Oakland came south on a mid-August road trip.
Instead of Lothario, Canseco got to play hero, rushing into a woman’s burning house to rescue her baby, then cat, followed by a player piano, washer, dryer, couch and recliner combo, high chair, TV, rug, kitchen table and chairs, lamp, and grandfather clock. Requesting the new sequence turned out to be the wiser move. Canseco and his wife had nearly divorced earlier that year before reconciling, and a week before “Homer at the Bat” aired, Canseco was arrested by Miami police for chasing down and ramming his wife’s BMW twice with his red Porsche at 4:30 a.m. After the chase ended, he allegedly got out of his car, came over to his wife’s driver-side window, and spit on it.
“The Making of ‘Homer at the Bat’.” — Erik Malinowski, Deadspin
See also: See also: The Making of ‘Nevermind’ (Excerpt from ‘Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge’) — Mark Yarm, MTV Hive, Sept. 19, 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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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.
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I should preface this by saying I didn’t plan to do a list, because all of your Top 5 Longreads of 2011 really represent what the Longreads community is all about. But, in true WWIC form, I couldn’t resist. Thank you for an incredible year. Special thanks to the entire Longreads team: Joyce King Thomas, Kjell Reigstad, Hakan Bakkalbasi and Mike Dang. -Mark Armstrong, founder, Longreads Support Longreads by supporting our partners: Read It Later: Save your favorite stories for reading on the iPhone/iPad, Android or Kindle Fire. You can also support Longreads by becoming an Official Member for just $3 per month, or $30 per year. 1. Travis the MenaceDan P. Lee | New York Magazine | Jan. 24, 2011 | 24 minutes (6,096 words) The heartbreaking, horrifying story of a chimp named Travis and the Connecticut couple that raised him like a son. Lee followed Travis’s path from local celebrity to fully grown (and violent) adult:
“Travis” was the first in a “tabloid-with-empathy” trilogy from Lee: He also brought humanity to the story of Anna Nicole Smith (“Paw Paw & Lady Love”) and wrote about Harold Camping, the elderly doomsayer who never quite got his apocalypse calendar right (“After the Rapture”). More Lee: “Body Snatchers” (Philadelphia Magazine, 2008)
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2. Vanishing ActPaul Collins | Lapham’s Quarterly | Dec. 17, 2010 | 15 minutes (3,837 words) A child-prodigy author mysteriously disappears. Barbara Follett was 13 when her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in 1927:
This was from December 2010, but it came out after last year’s best-of list was published. It’s also on The Awl editors’ best-of-2011 list. I still think about this story constantly. More Collins: “The Molecatcher’s Daughter” (The Believer, 2006)
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3. In Which We Teach You How to Be a Woman in Any Boy’s ClubMolly Lambert | This Recording | Feb. 22, 2011 | 11 minutes (2,825 words) A manifesto for the modern woman:
I can think of at least ten other personal essays that blew me away this year, but Lambert’s seemed to completely take over our conversations, online and off. More from This Recording in 2011: “Where We All Will Be Received” (Nell Boeschenstein)
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4. A Murder ForetoldDavid Grann | The New Yorker | March 28, 2011 | 57 minutes (14,318 words) A political conspiracy in Guatemala and the murder of lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, who created a video predicting his own killing in 2009:
Obviously, with David Grann, it’s never so straightforward.
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5. A Brevard Woman Disappeared, but Never Left HomeMichael Kruse | St. Petersburg Times | July 22, 2011 | 10 minutes (2,735 words) A reporter retraces the last years of a woman who slipped away from society:
Once you finish this piece, read the annotated version of this story, in which Kruse breaks down exactly how he reported each fact from Kathryn Norris’s life. Incredible.
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6. What Really Happened Aboard Air France Flight 447Jeff Wise | Popular Mechanics | Dec. 6, 2011 | 17 minutes (4,253 words) A fatal human error, repeated over and over again, as the reader observes helplessly. Writer Jeff Wise uses pilot transcripts to deconstruct, conversation by conversation, wrong move by wrong move, how bad weather and miscommunication between the pilots in the cockpit doomed this Airbus 330, which plunged into the Atlantic in 2009, killing 228 people:
This, along with “Travis the Menace” and Wired’s “The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” was one of the most heart-stopping of the year. See also: “The Unlikely Event” (Avi Steinberg, Paris Review)
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7. Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult WorldAmy Harmon | The New York Times | Sept. 18, 2011 | 30 minutes (7,524 words) A year in the life of an autistic teen moving into adulthood—a time when support systems can begin to fall away:
Harmon’s was one of several outstanding pieces this year on the subject of autism. Also see Steve Silberman on John Elder Robison, an author with Asperger syndrome. More from Amy Harmon: “A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over Shrimping Life”
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8. The Girl from Trails EndKathy Dobie | GQ Magazine | Sept. 6, 2011 | 26 minutes (6,657 words) Revisiting the Texas gang-rape story, and a reminder about protecting our youngest victims. Dobie spends time with the girl’s family and attempts to understand how some members of the community could jump to the defense of the 19 men and boys accused:
Just one of many outstanding pieces from GQ this year, including “The Movie Set that Ate Itself,” essays from John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph High School Basketball Scandal,” and a fun collection of oral histories. More Dobie: “The Long Shadow of War” (Dec. 2007)
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9. A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve JobsMona Simpson | The New York Times | Oct. 30, 2011 | 9 minutes (2,383 words) The final moments, and unforgettable last words, of a technology visionary’s life:
Steve Jobs tributes poured in during October and November, including a touching tribute from veteran tech journalist Steven Levy. Some of the best reading came from Steve himself, with his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. See also: The Steve Jobs archive on Longreads
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10. Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help LibraryMaria Bustillos | The Awl | April 5, 2011 | 38 minutes (9,439 words) The ultimate DFW fan goes on a road trip to see what was on his bookshelves and pore over the marginalia for clues about his life:
After this was published, Bustillos kept going. In 2011 she also dissected the work of the late Christopher Hitchens, as well as Wikipedia and Aaron Swartz, among other topics. |
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