Search Results for: writing

Longreads Best of 2016: Science Writing

Longreads Pick

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in science writing.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 20, 2016

Longreads Best of 2016: Science Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in science writing.

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Brendan Borrell
A freelance writer in Brooklyn.

The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort of) Rattled the Scientific Community (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine)

Whenever one of Mooallem’s stories come out, I pretty much drop what I’m working on, kick back on my couch, and read it with a big, stupid grin. This delightful piece about a self-professed “idler” who discovers a new type of cloud is the perfect match between writer and subject matter. I guarantee that the moment you start reading, you, too, will float away from whatever it is you probably should be doing.

The Billion Dollar Ultimatum (Chris Hamby, BuzzFeed)

I was blown away by this investigation into a global super court that allows businesses to strip countries of their ability to enforce environmental regulations. “Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, this legal system is written into a vast network of treaties that set the rules for international trade and investment,” Hamby writes. “Of all the ways in which ISDS is used, the most deeply hidden are the threats, uttered in private meetings or ominous letters, that invoke those courts.” This is the second part of Hamby’s series on the ISDS, and it focuses on an Australian company that was able to strip-mine inside a protected forest in Indonesia. Even though the company was complicit in the beating and, in one case, killing of protestors, the government was too cowed by the court to revoke the company’s permit. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Arts & Culture Writing

Longreads Pick

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in arts and culture writing.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 19, 2016

Longreads Best of 2016: Arts & Culture Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in arts and culture writing.

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Tobias Carroll
Freelance writer, managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn, and author of the books Reel and Transitory.

Michael Jackson: Dangerous (Jeff Weiss, Pitchfork)

Earlier this year, Pitchfork began publishing Sunday reviews that explore albums released in the time before said site debuted. This, in turn, has led to a whole lot of smart writers weighing in on the classics, the cult classics, the interesting failures, and the historically significant. Jeff Weiss’s epic take on “Jackson’s final classic album and the best full-length of the New Jack Swing era” is the sort of narrative music writing that’s catnip for me, the kind of work that sends me deeply into my own memories, and leaves me rethinking my own take on the album in question. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Food Writing

Longreads Pick

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in food writing.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 16, 2016

Longreads Best of 2016: Sports Writing

Longreads Pick

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 16, 2016

Longreads Best of 2016: Food Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in food writing.

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Rachel Khong
Former executive editor at Lucky Peach magazine; author of the novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, forthcoming in July 2017, and the cookbook, All About Eggs.

Citizen Khan (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker)

I would read anything by Kathryn Schulz, and this story makes a perfect case why. Ostensibly it’s the story of a man named Zarif Khan, who in 1909 found his way to Wyoming from the Khyber Pass, and made a name for himself selling tamales (the name: “Hot Tamale Louie”). Khan was a recognizably curmudgeonly chef (God forbid you put ketchup on his burgers!) of the sort writers reliably profile today. But “profile” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what this goosebump-inducing story is. Woven into this tale are captivating tangents—about Wyoming’s inclusive beginnings, the various histories of naturalization (and denaturalization), tamales, and Muslims in this country (a history that goes back so much further than Trump would have you believe)—that turn out not to be tangents at all: the heart of this story about tamales and burgers is a story about America, and the immigrants that make it. In Schulz’s hands it’s skilled and quietly hilarious. The story felt fitting when it was published in June; it feels even more essential now.

At Tampa Bay Farm-to-Table Restaurants, You’re Being Fed Fiction (Laura Reiley, Tampa Bay Times)

I read this story about food fraud slack-jawed. Laura Reiley’s basic premise is this: when you go to a restaurant advertising “local” or “farm to table,” it’s not only possible but highly likely(!) you’re being lied to. Years of working in restaurant criticism made Reiley rightly skeptical of menu claims, and suspicious that more was afoot than frozen cakes passed off as homemade. For her story she systematically investigates restaurants in the Tampa area that make declarations about their ingredients—sometimes embarrassingly high-mindedly—that they don’t exactly see through. A lot impresses me here, like Reiley’s persistence, guts, attentiveness, commitment, and spy moves (she kept ziptop baggies her purse to secrete away fish to lab-test later). The piece’s focus is on restaurants in Tampa, but it makes a broader statement about our convoluted food supply chains, and what it means to be an eater and consumer living in our increasingly weird world. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Sports Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

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Erik Malinowski
NBA/features writer at Bleacher Report.

The Art of Letting Go (Mina Kimes, ESPN The Magazine)

Whereas another writer might’ve taken this story’s central question—how (and why) Koreans have elevated bat flips in baseball to an art form that deserves celebration—and answered it with condescension or (at best) superficiality, Kimes goes above and beyond, taking readers on a swirling journey across South Korea, through stadium dugouts and Seoul’s inner-city neighborhoods, to produce a compelling narrative that is part sports, part travelogue, and as illuminating a culture piece as you’ve read all year. Between Kimes’ words (which are a masterclass in scene-setting) and the wondrous illustrations of Mickey Duzyj (who was along for the reporting), this was a story I kept seeing in my head all year long.

The Official Coming-Out Party (Kevin Arnovitz, ESPN The Magazine)

Bill Kennedy was living his childhood dream of being an NBA referee when his world was upended last December: A star player yelled two anti-gay slurs at him during a televised game. Kennedy’s open secret—that he was, in fact, gay—was now quite public and on its way to becoming a national story.
With empathy and a deft touch, Arnovitz details what happened that night, what preceded it, and (perhaps most importantly) what followed in the months ahead, as Kennedy’s coming out became a national story and sent the veteran referee on a personal journey that was decades in the making. (The kicker, which takes place at New York’s LGBT Pride March, is stirring and sensational.) When this new season tipped off, Kennedy became the first openly gay player or referee to appear in an NBA game. What Arnovitz so brilliantly conveys is the scope of all that had to happen for that moment to finally become real. Read more…

How Writing an Advice Column Changed Heather Havrilesky’s Life

Longreads Pick

Julie Beck talks to Heather Havrilesky about her new book How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly’s Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life, a collection of her “Ask Polly” advice columns on New York Magazine‘s The Cut blog (originally at The Awl) plus some that haven’t been published before.

Author: Julie Beck
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,723 words)

Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels

Longreads Pick

From Tana French and Natsuo Kirino to Gillian Flynn, women are writing crime novels that turn the old genre formula on its head, dispensing with heroes and more accurately reflecting our social media era, one where a murderer’s motives are no longer as clear as they were in Raymond Chandler’s day, and where emotional violence tastes precedence over gunplay.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 4, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,937 words)