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”?). […]
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Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Jay Caspian Kang is a fiction writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High, an essay on gambling addiction that appeared in the Morning News and has been named on several “Best of 2010” lists. *** In no particular order. […]
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The Gleeful Contrarian
The Gleeful Contrarian “The site is intended to expand the reader’s sphere of interest. It’s a grave mistake in publishing, whether you’re talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago Bill Gates was boasting that we’ll soon have sensors which will […]
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The Web Is a Customer Service Medium
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a […]
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Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,” the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) […]
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Kare’s first assignment was developing fonts for the Mac OS. At the time, digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that both a narrow I and a broad M were wedged into the same bitmapped real estate — a vestigial legacy of the way that a typewriter platen advances, one space at a time. Jobs was determined […]
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Anna Clark: My Top 5 World Lit Longreads of 2011
Anna Clark is a journalist and the editor of the literary blog Isak. (See more stories on her Longreads page.) The infamous 3% statistic points to the percentage of publications each year in the U.S. that are translated into English. But even that number is inflated, as it includes technical material — manuals, guides, instructions — […]
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Writer Emily Gould: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever and the co-owner of Emily Books, and also she can’t stop blogging for some reason. *** 1. “Letter from Astana,” by Keith Gessen (New Yorker, sub. required) The New Yorker‘s “Letter From” essays, though they’re always entertaining and executed with finesse, can leave the […]
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Writer Maria Bustillos: My Top Longreads of 2011
Maria Bustillos is a journalist who writes frequently for The Awl. *** The power of Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” (The Awl) derives from the purity of its point of view, which is that of one person’s lived experience, minutely and honestly detailed. Benedikt swings gracefully between humor and searing candor in this […]
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Alexander Chee's Top 5 Longreads of 2011: #Fiction and #Nonfiction
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. (See more on his Longreads page.) *** My Top Fiction Longreads for 2011: • Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2011: Beautiful, seemingly casual, smart and terrifying, it is the story of a man worried […]
