Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Jan. 3, 2014

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.
This week’s picks from Emily and her friends include stories from MIT Technology Review, Creative Time Reports, The Los Angeles Times, and InFocus.

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
One of my favorite things about the Longreads community is the dialogue among readers. I know each of the readers below personally. They are all exquisitely well-read. They all have different interests; they all read different publications, and I get so, so excited whenever they email or tweet me a piece they love. This week, we present Joss Whedon and Wikipedia and David Byrne and a cross-dressing not-so-Everyman from Wyoming. (I told you these were good.)
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Recommended by Jordan. Can Wikipedia’s bureaucratic policies and shrinking volunteer team stay afloat?
Recommended by Elena. What makes a city inspiring? Byrne critiques New York’s increasingly exclusionary nature and longs for a future where aspiring artists can afford to express themselves.
Recommended by Hännah. Sissy Goodwin, a cross-dressing cowboy, reclaimed a derogatory epithet, stands up to bullies, and inspires his students and family daily.
Recommended by Elizabeth, who sends me biweekly reading recommendations and introduced me to Firefly and Lost. It’s no surprise she passed along this vintage Whedon interview.
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Photo of David Byrne: Wikimedia Commons
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J.B. MacKinnon | Orion | July 2013 | 12 minutes (2,875 words)
Our latest Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.
Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.
How did Johannes Vermeer manage to create such photo-realistic paintings in the 17th Century—and did he get help? A Texas tech company founder named Tim Jenison decided to try to find out if Vermeer could have used a camera-like contraption to create his art, by recreating one of the paintings himself:
Jenison decided to construct a version of a device that Vermeer himself could have built and used. And since he had no training or experience as an artist whatsoever, he figured he was the ideal beta user of whatever he rigged up.
He was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “Looking at their Vermeers,” he says, “I had an epiphany”—the first of several. “The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right,” meaning the color values. “Vermeer got it right in ways that the eye couldn’t see. It looked to me like Vermeer was painting in a way that was impossible. I jumped into studying art.”

– At Rookie, Tavi Gevinson describes what it’s like to be between the ages of 13 and 17.
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Photo: Petra
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Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a writer and an editor.
Taxes aren’t boring—they’re just supremely difficult to write about in a compelling way. These three stories stand out because they illustrate the far-reaching consequences of different countries’ tax policies through a few very influential people:
In his affectionate profile of tax expert Marty Sullivan, Steven Pearlstein breaks down everything that’s wrong about the US tax code in Sullivan’s nonpartisan, almost technocratic view—and goes on to explain why politics make it so hard to alter, let alone fix, the system. Not exactly action-movie material, but it’s handled so deftly that I couldn’t put it down.
In Vanity Fair, longtime tax writer Nicholas Shaxson shows how the City of London became a hub for tax-free global capital through the story of One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential building, its fabulously wealthy and faceless owners, and the offshore accounts they used to buy and register the properties anonymously.
Finally, Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker profiles Feargal O’Rourke, the man who helped transform Ireland into a “hub for tax avoidance” for multinationals like Apple and Facebook. Drucker withholds judgment (this is Bloomberg, headline and all) but O’Rourke’s mercenary wiles shine through a few well-chosen anecdotes. Choice quote, on Breaking Bad: “I don’t know what it says that we can be rooting for a guy on the dark side of the law.”
My favorite business stories are the ones that reveal how much time, energy and thought goes into seemingly mundane consumer goods. This Businessweek article about the ‘bakery bag closure and reclosure market’ is a great example of that. Did you know bag closures generate about $10 million in sales per year? That studies have failed to resolve whether consumers prefer clips or twist-ties? And that there are people whose job it is to sell commercial bakeries on the virtues of these objects? All of this makes perfect sense, of course (hi, capitalism!) but it takes a story like this one to get you thinking.
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–Douglas Starr, in The New Yorker, on how police have traditionally used The Reid Technique to get confessions—some of which have later turned out to be false.
Photo: boelaars, Flickr

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.
Happy holidays! Read more…

Above: Sebastian Thrun
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Teddy Worcester resides in San Francisco and helps to build products that support the free and open web.
Max Chafkin’s Fast Company story covering Sebastian Thrun’s change of course for Udacity is a must-read for anyone interested in online education. The brilliant Thrun admits that MOOCs are not necessarily the right course for Udacity, with staggeringly low class completion rates and weak test performance. Chafkin eloquently covers Udacity’s pivot toward offering a vehicle for “academic branding.” Highlighting Udacity’s recent deal powering Georgia Tech’s AT&T-sponsored academic program, Chafkin quotes Thrun lauding corporatized higher education, “If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it’s the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?”
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Photo via Wikimedia Commons
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