Lidsky Lodge: My Top Longreads of 2011 davidlidsky: Ah, procrastination! I knew I got into a deadline-driven business for a reason. Deadline pressure is the only antidote to procrastination, so here I am on December 31 organizing my Longreads thoughts. I had trouble limiting myself to five stories so I did a bunch of sublists […]
Ross Andersen is freelancer living in Washington, D.C. He has recently written about technology for The Atlantic, and is now working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He can also be found on Twitter at @andersen. *** “The Mother of Possibility,” by Sven Birkerts, Lapham’s Quarterly Procrastination being my favorite vice […]
Woodland Creature: My Top 15 Longreads of 2011 woodlandcreature: Longreads.com has been doing a great series of roundups on its Tumblr, highlighting the best longreads of the year, chosen by well-known writers. I’m not well-known and not really a writer, but here are mine (I couldn’t narrow it down to five): “Travis the Menace,” Dan […]
Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen. *** I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled […]
Kevin Purdy is a freelance writer, and a frequent Longreader. Check out his site here. Not all written in 2011, but brought to my attention and saved in 2011: In Which There’s a Girl in New York City Who Calls Herself the Human Trampoline – This Recording Graceland is truly the one album I never […]
Brian Wolly is an associate web editor at Smithsonian Magazine. ••• 1. Tom Bissell’s Breakdown of L.A. Noire on Grantland When ESPN and Bill Simmons’ Grantland debuted in early June, the knives were out and its initial reaction was mixed at best. Like many, I approached the new project with simultaneous skepticism and optimism, but it […]
Molly Lambert is a writer covering pop culture at Grantland. (She’s also featured in our Top 10 Longreads of 2011) *** These are some Longreads I enjoyed this year: • “The Bell Jar At 40”: Emily Gould on Sylvia Plath (Poetry Foundation) • “The J in J. Crew”: Molly Young on Jenna Lyons (New York magazine) • […]
Peter Smith has written about food and science for GOOD, Wired, and Gastronomica. He’s based in Maine, and, in 2011, he covered pickle juice, patented sandwiches, and the last sardine cannery in North America. This is his first attempt at Top Five Longreads. *** Here are my (somewhat arbitrarily selected) #longreads that, er, explore unexpected, […]
Evan Kindley is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. ••• Ariel Levy, “Basta Bunga Bunga” (June 6, 2011) – The New Yorker A great piece about what proved to be the Last Days of Berlusconi’s Italy, with all the virtues of the typical artfully triangulated New Yorker profile (as recently codified by […]
Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books from High School (Prometheus Books, 2013) and curator of Deep Interviews here on Longreads. *** Here on Longreads, I’m curating Deep Interviews (#deepinterviews)—lengthy interviews with interesting people—a format I’ve grown to love. It’s not quite original reporting but certainly […]
Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch. He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square. ••• 1. Paul Ford – “The Epiphanator” – New York magazine I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a […]
Joe Spring is the online editor for Outside Magazine. This was a big year for longform journalism. Byliner came out with blockbuster stories, like Jon Krakuer’s Three Cups of Deceit. The Atavist put out consistently strong features with solid multimedia. At Outside, our editors and writers contributed excellent investigative online exclusives (“Blood in the Water,” “Crashing Down”). Thanks […]
Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker and a frequent Longreader. ** I’m a sucker for stories about reinvention, disappearence, and people who pretend to be someone they aren’t. The genre has cliches, and can become trite. But it can also be wonderful. And this year, the category brought us some wonderful […]
: Thomas Mucha, GlobalPost: My top 5 longreads of 2011 globalpost: Thomas Mucha is the editor at GlobalPost Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books High on the Stones Any writer who can connect Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin and Keith Richards in the same sentence is definitely worth reading.
doddcasting: My Top Five #Greenreads of 2011 scottdodd: This list is in no particular order. I also included a selection in OnEarth magazine’s best-of-the-year roundup, so technically, I’ve got six favorites. Find Top 5 Greenreads from other OnEarth contributors here, and share your own on Twitter and Tumblr with the hashtag #greenreads….
Elmo Keep is a writer who has written for The Hairpin, and other places. ••• The Tetris Effect — Justin Wolfe, The Awl There really isn’t a way to talk about this without spoiling the reveals. Just read it, whether you understand gaming or not, it doesn’t matter: If you don’t, you will come away […]
Dead Presidents: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 deadpresidents: I’m a big fan of Longreads and I figured I’m important enough to share my Top 5 Longreads of 2011. Now, as much as I would love to include my own work in the Top 5, I am not going to rank articles of mine such […]
Radhika Jones is executive editor of Time. I got to work on a number of great longreads at Time this year, among them Lev Grossman on fan fiction, Kate Pickert on the perils of cancer screening, and Kurt Andersen on the Year of the Protester. But these are a few of the pieces from other […]
Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine. ••• 1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, […]
Brendan Maher is biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal. *** My selection of the best science-themed longreads for 2011 suffers from two major limitations: 1.) I couldn’t read everything, so have probably missed some very worthy entries. 2.) I purposely did not include articles from Nature, where I […]
Stiff Jab: Stiff Jab’s Top Five Boxing Longreads of 2011 stiffjab: by Gautham Nagesh 1. ”$50 UNDER 11.5 ROUNDS FLOYD MAYWEATHER, JR. VS. VICTOR ORTIZ.” by David Hill, McSweeney’s A beautifully wrought essay that relates Mayweather’s controversial stoppage of Ortiz in September while pondering the nature of fear and the impact of fatherhood. Hill…
Samuel Rubenfeld’s Tumblr: My top-5 Long Reads of 2011 rubenfeld: Here are what I considered to be the top five long-form, investigative journalism pieces of 2011. Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing — New York Times With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas — Associated Press The Afghan Bank Heist […]
A. N. Devers‘ work has appeared online in Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and in other publications. Her most recent essay, about poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in Carmel, California, is in the Winter 2011 issue of Tin House. She is the founder and editor of Writers’ Houses, a website dedicated to literary pilgrimage. *** Maghag […]
Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. *** Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year: “Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but […]
Jeremy P. Bushnell is the editor-in-chief of Instafiction.org, which links to a quality short story each weekday. He stockpiles many other links at his blog, Raccoon. He’s also on Twitter. *** “Backbone,” David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker) During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace made massive contributions to the worlds of fiction and nonfiction alike, […]
Edith Zimmerman is a writer and co-editor of The Hairpin. *** “All the Single Ladies,” Kate Bolick, The Atlantic Kate’s story on the current state of marriage, and men, and women, is sad and happy and fascinating, and just generally makes me want to give her a high-five and roll cigarettes with her, even though […]
Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling. Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical […]
Mike Dang is editor of Bundle and managing editor for Longreads. See his longreads page here. *** I’ve read a lot of great longreads this year, but I know that a longread is truly special when I become its biggest cheerleader. I’ll casually slip the story into conversations, teasing out some of its best bits […]
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