Tag: Best of 2011
Jared Keller: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 jaredbkeller: The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See (Mens Journal, March 2011) Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same […]
Karolina Waclawiak is a novelist and screenwriter. She is also the deputy editor of The Believer. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, will be out July 2012 from Two Dollar Radio. *** I’ve always been fascinated with religion, Russia, and missing persons stories so these five nonfiction pieces really captured my […]
clampants tumblepants: My Top Longreads of 2011 (Non-fiction) clampants: In this, my first full year with Instapaper, I found that…I still don’t have the time to read that much. That said, I did read a little bit here and there, so here are my top longreads I read in 2011 (in no order…and none are […]
Jay Caspian Kang (pictured above) is an editor at Grantland. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Morning News. His first novel, The Dead Do Not Improve, will be published by Hogarth/Random House in August 2012. *** David Hill: “$100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino” (McSweeney’s) This is the […]
Zach Crizer: My top longreads of 2011 zachcrizer: Among all the great longform journalism published in 2011, these were my favorites: 1. A Murder Foretold, by David Grann, The New Yorker: Could have been a fantastic detective book — if it weren’t all true. The package of amazing reporting and brilliant storytelling makes this the […]
Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago. *** It was another strong year for long-form content and journalism. There was no shortage of attention-grabbing longreads in traditional media, online-only outlets, alt-weeklies and literary journals—both in the U.S. and abroad, and written as profiles, personal essays, historical accounts and op-eds. And […]
The editors of mental_floss magazine: Mangesh Hattikudur, Ethan Trex, Stephanie Meyers, and Jessanne Collins. They’re also on Twitter and Tumblr. *** “Deep Intellect,” Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine) Is it weird to say we enjoyed this trek “inside the mind of an octopus” because it was so sensual? Who knew the octopus can taste with all of […]
David Hill writes Fading the Vig for McSweeney’s, writes about basketball for Negative Dunkalectics, writes sketch comedy for The Charlies, and starting next month will write a monthly column for Grantland. He is on Twitter at @davehill77. *** “Too Much Information,” John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote many notable things in 2011. I […]
David Dobbs writes articles on science, sports, music, writing, reading, and other culture at Neuron Culture and for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Atavist, Nature, National Geographic, and other publications. He’s working on a book about the genetics of human strength and frailty. He also twitters and tries to play the violin. *** Truly we live, as Steve Silberman said, in a […]
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a writer for Wired UK, Design Observer, and The Atlantic, among others, and an MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow, spending far, far too much time curating the web’s interestingness as @brainpicker. *** I’ve always found reading, writing, and thinking to be so tightly interwoven that, when […]
wikiweeks: Two Thousand Eleven Was A Year: #Longreads wikiweeks: Here’s my favorite longish things I read this year so far as I can remember. A lot of these are unoriginal and you’ve probably already seen them in someone else’s best longreads of the year list but fuck it. It’s because it’s good reading. The confessions […]
Dan-Hill.org: Top 5 Longreads of 2011 dan-hill: The Incredible True Story Of The Collar Bomb Heist A man walks into a bank with a bomb locked around his neck… An Abandoned Lifeboat At World’s End An unidentified lifeboat is found on Bouvet Island, one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The Stoner Arms […]
Claire Howorth is the arts editor at The Daily (pictured with colleagues Rich Juzwiak, Zach Baron and David Walters). *** 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 […]
Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. (See recent longreads by Rice.) *** Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and […]
Acquired Posting: Five-Or-So Longreads From 2011 That Are Just Splendid underscoredmatthews: These are, in no particular order, the five-or-so longreads that came to my mind when I decided to make a list of five-or-so longreads from 2011, so I guess it’s my List Of Longreads That I Guess Is A Top 5-Or-So List Since These […]
Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of Now the Hell Will Start and Piano Demon. He is currently working on a book about a spectacular 1970s heist and its decades-long aftermath, and he blogs daily at Microkhan. *** I’m a thousand percent certain that I’ll wake up in a […]
Jodi Ettenberg is a frequent Longreader, ex-lawyer and founder of Legal Nomads, which documents her travels (and food adventures) around the world. *** 2011 was a banner year for long-form journalism and storytelling on the web, and correlatively a time to appreciate people like Mark who have propelled the Longreads movement forward. I love how this […]
These were the results of a poll of all New York Times Magazine staff—edit, art, photo & production. We decided to do two lists: ‘Them’ and ‘Us,’ and hopefully that doesn’t get us in trouble with the Longreads governing body. THEM These were the consensus picks of the staff, with only a little executive tampering. […]
Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the founder of Nieman Storyboard. She is also writing what she hopes will be a very surprising book about Vladimir Nabokov. *** I’m contrary by nature. So when I sat down to pick my Longreads for 2011, I reviewed the lists that Mark had published to date and decided not to include a […]
Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown. *** There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal is political.” This phrase was one of the most transformative ideas to emerge from second-wave feminism, or from the 20th century. It’s the underpinning assumption of all my own work. […]
Logan Sachon writes for The Awl and other places also. She lives in Virginia. *** • “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” by Maria Bustillos (The Awl) This piece just blew me away, and I’m not even a DFW devotee (I’ve yet to tackle any of his books). To go to his library, to transcribe notes […]
Geoff Van Dyke is deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, and Men’s Journal. *** • “The Food at our Feet,” by Jane Kramer, The New Yorker Kramer can almost make you smell and taste the stuff she’s picking: mint, asparagus, fennel, mushrooms. Plus, maybe my favorite lead […]
Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages. See her stories on her Longreads page or find her on Twitter. *** The ones I couldn’t stop thinking about. *** • Jon Ronson , “Robots Say the Damndest Things,” GQ, March 2011 Besides the fact that Ronson is such a consistently fascinating writer, […]
Bethlehem Shoals is an editor at The Classical and the founder of FreeDarko.com. *** • “Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas,” Zach Baron, The Daily Hunter S. Thompson has a tendency to overshadow his subject matter, as if he invented the entire world in his own image, and this were a tenet of non-fiction. The dirty little […]
Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr. *** SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and […]
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 […]
Doree Shafrir is an editor at Rolling Stone, where she hangs out with the Misfits on a regular basis. She can also be found at doree.tumblr.com. *** When I went back into my Kindle and my Twitter and Tumblr and email and all the other places where I noted or saved especially noteworthy stories from […]
Lev Grossman writes about books and technology for Time magazine. He’s also the author of the bestselling novels The Magicians and The Magician King. *** • “One Man’s Quest to Outrace Wind,” by Adam Fisher, Wired Why do I never find stories like this? Probably because I’m not working as hard as Adam Fisher. Apparently there’s […]
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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