Part One of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.” But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the […]
Tag: longreads
After months of torment in Uganda and now Kenya, Alex and Michael’s journey toward a place where they can live freely under their real identities has just begun. The couple now faces a long and murky legal battle towards resettlement, entering a gray area of migration that has been hard to define — or prove. […]
This is an interview requested by Karadzic before I give official testimony the following day in open court. Ironically, when the witness unit’s call came out of the blue in August 2011, saying that “the defence” had requested an interview, I was driving through pluvial mist up a mountain track in Bosnia to attend the […]
Anna Clark is a journalist and the editor of the literary blog Isak. (See more stories on her Longreads page.) The infamous 3% statistic points to the percentage of publications each year in the U.S. that are translated into English. But even that number is inflated, as it includes technical material — manuals, guides, instructions — […]
“How open do you want your relationship with the adoptive parents to be?” I ask after some more small talk. She shrugs. “I’ll figure that out later,” she says. “I’m talking to two other families. One keeps drunk texting me that they want a girl. They want a white baby, which this is.” I expect […]
And with that little programming exercise, a second door cracked ajar. It was to swing wide open during the summer of 1969 when Thompson’s wife, Bonnie, spent a month visiting his parents to show off their newborn son. Thompson took advantage of his temporary bachelor existence to write a good chunk of what would become […]
(Left to right: Choire, Carrie, Alex) Because there are three of us, we trilaterally decided to go for 15. But it’s not really five each; that becomes complicated, too, but… well, anyway, no matter how you cut it, surely at least one of us hated some of these stories. Also to be fair, this list, […]
The first report of a zolpidem awakening came from South Africa, in 1999. A patient named Louis Viljoen, who, three years before, was declared vegetative after he was hit by a truck, had taken to clawing at his mattress during the night. Thinking he was suffering from insomnia, his family doctor suggested zolpidem to help […]
Halloran was no garden-variety pagan. He was the “First Atheling,” or prince, of his own Theodish tribe, called New Normandy. He had “thralls” who swore their allegiance to him. He didn’t just spend weekends reconstructing the religious activities of the pre-Christian Norse and Germanic gods—he led his flock, about 100 people at its height, in […]
In the years since his release from prison, Bashar had a difficult time finding work. Bally and Equinox wouldn’t hire him, but my smaller, independent gym did. “I started helping people,” he said, noting that he had been inspired to train by his grandmother’s struggle to touch her toes, a struggle I shared. So training […]
Sean Fennessey is the editor of GQ.com. (See more stories on his Longreads page.) I’ll try to follow a few guidelines for the sake of imagined objectivity, so, no friends; no GQ pieces; no pieces published before January 1, 2011; no stories pseudonymously submitted by my mom; no sandwiches. Here we go, with apologies, to, […]
Ruettimann had visited Hereaux at a time when he knew his friend would be alone. In the modest but cozy living room, Ruettimann handed Hereaux a heavy brown accordion file. He wrote a name down on a scrap of paper, the name of a local journalist. “If anything happens to me,” Ruettimann said, “give this […]
Announcing: Our first-ever e-book! Longreads: Best of 2011 includes seven of our favorite stories from the past year. The e-book is a unique partnership with the writers and publishers—we want to help celebrate outstanding storytelling, and this is just another way for us to do it. Additionally, money from the ebook sales will be shared with the […]
I should preface this by saying I didn’t plan to do a list, because all of your Top 5 Longreads of 2011 really represent what the Longreads community is all about. But, in true WWIC form, I couldn’t resist. Thank you for an incredible year. Special thanks to the entire Longreads team: Joyce King Thomas, Kjell Reigstad, Hakan Bakkalbasi and […]
Increasingly there exist two societies in America: a military class, strongly religious, politically conservative, drawn disproportionately from the South and from smaller towns and areas of limited economic opportunity, including the inner cities; and an untouched civilian class consisting of everyone else, who wouldn’t know a regiment from a firmament or an M16 from a […]
For all the old cards may have had in terms of sex appeal, they often lacked in tact. They were textually expansive; often, they said too much. In order to justify the need for oxygen masks, one safety card helpfully noted that modern aircraft fly at “very high altitudes.” A Canadair card from the early […]
So the Great Depression runs through Little House in the Big Woods like a big three-hearted river. Perhaps most striking, however, is that the book’s central theme is made most conspicuous not through the events and details described in its pages but by the things that aren’t there. There’s no Depression in the Big Woods. […]
Comedy is also an industry of paying dues: Many long-time performers regard their first ten years as a kind of clueless wandering, and veteran comics tend to treat newbies like replacement troops: They are young, dumb, and could be gone soon, so it’s best to wait till they survive a while before learning their names. […]
If you’ve been in Park Slope recently, you can probably guess how things turned out for the Lehane house. But you may not know why. How did the Brooklyn of the Lehanes and crack houses turn into what it is today—home to celebrities like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Adrian Grenier, to Michelin-starred chefs, and to more […]
The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma — investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort — and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up […]
Why is the protest happening now? Why not in 2008, when Wall Street nearly collapsed, or 2009, when unemployment and foreclosures soared? For Ben-Moshe, Obama’s election seemed like the end of the battle, not the beginning, and it took her three years to return to the field. Garofalo thought that his generation needed to be […]
It is not that Kagan is silent at oral argument. She is more talkative than her bow-tied predecessor, Justice John Paul Stevens, who tended to sit quietly through most of each session before gently asking, “May I ask a question?” Kagan asked ten questions on her very first day out last fall. But she actually […]
At 1:28, Sheehan, still on the way to the hotel, sent a text message to Yearwood. And then another text message to an unidentified recipient at 1:30. At 1:31—one hour after Diallo had first told a supervisor that she had been assaulted by the client in the presidential suite—Adrian Branch placed a 911 call to […]
1991 Jeffrey Katzenberg memo to Disney execs. As we begin the new year, I strongly believe we are entering a period of great danger and even greater uncertainty. Events are unfolding within and without the movie industry that are extremely threatening to our studio. Some of you might be surprised to read these words. After […]
Bitcoin was drawing the kind of attention normally reserved for overhyped Silicon Valley IPOs and Apple product launches. On his Internet talk show, journo-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis called it “a fundamental shift” and “one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in 20 years in the technology business.” Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson heralded “societal upheaval” […]
Kare’s first assignment was developing fonts for the Mac OS. At the time, digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that both a narrow I and a broad M were wedged into the same bitmapped real estate — a vestigial legacy of the way that a typewriter platen advances, one space at a time. Jobs was determined […]
Well into his forties he kept swinging between the poles of his double life as only a true Manichean can, a rock star buried in a pile of cocaine one minute and a sadhu renunciant fingering his beads the next. But by his fifties he had abandoned the pretensions of stardom altogether. He had married […]
Heyman found an apartment in Rio with a bunch of twentysomething international travelers and slipped easily into the singles beach and party scene. When we spoke by phone in mid-November, he confided that his old life at Infosurv seemed a distant memory. “Going back there is not Plan A,” he said. “It’s very possible that […]
Serpell told me that those handicaps can be easily masked by an outgoing, playful personality. “Bulldog breeders will insist that their dogs are happy and have a very good life,” Serpell said. “But a dog can love its owner and be happy at times, but that doesn’t mean his life isn’t needlessly compromised. In many […]
Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, […]
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