Woodland Creature: My 20 Favorite Longreads of 2012 woodlandcreature: Longreads sent out its list of the 10 best longreads of the year yesterday. Here’s my own personal list, except I could only narrow it down to 20: “A Family Learns the True Meaning of the Vow ‘In Sickness and in Health,’” Susan Baer, Washington Post […]
Tag: longreads
Jodi Ettenberg is the founder of Legal Nomads, a contributing editor to Longreads and Travelreads, and the author of The Food Traveler’s Handbook. It is always hard to narrow down my favourites from a full 12 months of longreading, so here are five—but certainly not all—of the standouts from the last year. They’re food-themed, mainly […]
Geoff Van Dyke is the editorial director of 5280 Magazine in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times. These are the stories that I emailed, posted, and tweeted the most this past year (and filed away in the digital filing cabinet for further reading). They are all […]
Emma Carmichael is the managing editor of Gawker. She lives in Brooklyn. The Best Thing I Read About A Woman Who Got Blamed For Everything The Woman Who Took the Fall for JPMorgan Chase, by Susan Dominus (New York Times Magazine) I tend to steer clear of stories about finance because I assume they’ll either […]
Lidsky Lodge: My Favorite Longreads of 2012 davidlidsky: The Frequent Fliers Who Flew Too Much In a year when Uber and the idea of having your own private driver entered popular culture, when Uber’s cofounder launched BlackJet, an Uber for private air travel, this is a fascinating look at their cultural predecessor—a time when American […]
David Roth is a co-founder of, writer for and editor at the sports website The Classical. He writes columns for Sports On Earth and Vice, co-writes The Daily Fix blog-column for the Wall Street Journal online, and writes for The Awl, GQ and other places when there’s time and when they’ll have him. He’s on […]
Michael Hobbes lives in Berlin. His essays from his blog, Rottin’ in Denmark, were featured on Longreads this year. I read news when I want to be entertained. I read features when I want to learn something. Here’s nine articles I read this year that changed the way I look at the world, and made […]
Nicholas Jackson is the digital editorial director for Outside magazine. A former associate editor at The Atlantic, he has also worked for Slate,Texas Monthly, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and other publications. Best Argument for the Magazine”The Innocent Man, Part One” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly)”The Innocent Man, Part Two” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly) I was going to give this two-parter from the always-great Pamela Colloff […]
Elliott Holt‘s first novel, You Are One of Them, will be published by The Penguin Press in June 2013 One of my two favorite short stories published in 2012 is “Member/Guest” by David Gilbert, which appeared in The New Yorker the week of November 12, but since that story is not available online without a subscription, […]
Jamie Mottram is the Director of Content Development for USA Today Sports Media Group and a proud supporter of Longreads. I work in sports media and read and think about sports A LOT. So the task of boiling the year in sportswriting down to some kind of best-of list is daunting indeed, and I won’t […]
Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Awl and Los Angeles Review of Books was featured on Longreads this year. In the essay “Freedom Is Overrated,” the theologian and scholar Sancrucensis contrasts the humanism of Jonathan Franzen with that of David Foster Wallace. A transcendentally beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on self and other. […]
This week we’re thrilled to feature Mike Albo’s “The Junket” as our Longreads Member pick. Albo is the author of The Underminer and Hornito, and “The Junket” was recommended by Longreads managing editor Mike Dang, who writes: “I’ve never read a piece by Mike Albo that I didn’t like. He’s written for lots of glossies and […]
Reyhan Harmanci is deputy editor of Modern Farmer, a not-yet-launched publication devoted to issues of farming and food (and animals!). Picking these stories activated an obsessive part of my brain and I’m already regretting throwing the “best” around without spending a few months reading all of the Longreads of 2012. But there’s always 2013! Best […]
Burt Helm is Senior Writer for Inc. Magazine. His stories, “The Forgotten Founder,” “Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?” and “Hard Lessons in Modern Lending,” were featured on Longreads in 2012. Best Takedown of an Old, Established Writer by a Young, Hungry Writer in an Awkward Press Junket Setting Sarah Nicole Prickett, “How to Get […]
Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Best Innocence Story “The Innocent Man” (Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly) What if you were convicted of murdering your wife, and you didn’t do it? What if, after decades in prison, you learned that the prosecution had held proof of […]
This week’s Longreads Member Exclusive comes from Margot Singer, whose essay “Call It Rape” was published in the Fall 2012 issue of The Normal School. Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review,Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is […]
Emily M. Keeler is a writer and the founding editor of Little Brother Magazine. Best Pair of Essays on Loneliness Emily Cooke, “The Lonely Ones” – The New Inquiry Susan Sontag is a force that continues to be reckoned with, and the publication of her second volume of journals this year occasioned this incredible piece. […]
Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire and ESPN and the winner of two National Magazine Awards. Favorite new writer discovery of 2012 I’m always scared of making lists like this, because a year is a long time, and I read a lot, and invariably I’ll forget writers and pieces that I liked very much. […]
Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September. This year I read a lot of great personal essays, but these were my favorites. Meaghan O’Connell, “Places I’ve Lived: A Nanny’s Room, the Perfect Sublet, and a Place You Can Instagram,” The […]
Paige Williams is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose stories have been anthologized in five Best American volumes. She teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and edits Nieman Storyboard. For elegance + acute observation in the service of theme Belle Boggs’ “The Art of Waiting,” on fertility (Orion) “The family as a […]
This week, we have a Longreads Member Exclusive recommended by one of our members, Boston Review Web Editor David V. Johnson. His pick is Richard White‘s ”Deconstructing Mare Island: Reconnaissance in the Ruins,” published in Boom: A Journal of California. Here’s an intro from David: Eureka! Boom: A Journal of California launched in the Spring of 2011. The quality of writing and […]
Edith Zimmerman is founding editor of The Hairpin and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. She’s also written for GQ, Elle, The Awl and This American Life. I’m not a doctor, but … (always a confidence-inspiring way to start a sentence!), these pieces on healthcare were two of the best articles I […]
Kiera Feldman is a reporter for The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. She wrote “Grace in Broken Arrow” for This Land Press, which was featured on Longreads in May. I’m of the belief that a good murder story should put you out of commission for a while. There is a storyworld to journey into, and it is a doozy. […]
Sam Mullet, an Amish sect leader from Bergholz, Ohio, was convicted of hate crimes for his role in an odd string of beard-cutting attacks last year, and was accused of sexually preying on women and tormenting men in his community. What led up to the attacks? According to Mullet, the violent beard-clipping spree against outsiders […]
David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. I am never sure how to choose the “best” story as there are too many. But here’s a list of some of the most notable and memorable stories I read in 2012. Pamela […]
On the 1962-1963 printers strike in New York that effectively shut down the seven biggest newspapers in the city, killed four of them, and made names for writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron: A city without The New York Times inspired rage and scorn, ambivalence and relief. A ‘Talk of the Town’ […]
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired’s Gadget Lab. Best story about a monkey that’s really about the role of government that’s really about nature’s place in the modern world that’s actually, maybe, really just about a monkey. “What’s a Monkey to Do in Tampa?” (Jon Mooallem, New York Times Magazine) This is the […]
A writer visits the home of Bryan Saunders, an artist known for his self-portraits created under the influence of a variety of drugs: We turn to the next one. ‘Whoa,’ I say. This one could not be less Xanax-like. The drawing is spindly and paranoid, and the page is patterned with real-life bullet holes. They […]
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