The Toppling of Saddam’s Statue: How the Media Inflated a Minor Moment in a Long War “I realized this was a big deal,” McCoy told me. “You’ve got all the press out there and everybody is liquored up on the moment. You have this Paris, 1944, feel. I remember thinking, The media is watching the […]
Tag: longreads
Sober Traveling: AA Roadside Assistance for a Recovering Alcoholic My goal for this trip in the winter of 2008 is to drive from California to a conference in Florida and back, attend AA meetings in seven states and see how they differ — and how they don’t. I have two fears: that a low-budget camping […]
The Squid Hunter Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist from New Zealand, is one of the hunters—but his approach is radically different. He is not trying to find a mature giant squid; rather, he is scouring the ocean for a baby, called a paralarva, which he can grow in captivity. This year, he told me, he […]
India’s New Generation of Caste Busters Misal embodies the type of person who will truly transform India: not an engineer or a financier, but an average person who refuses to be satisfied with the status he was born to. Umred rioted because its people had somehow acquired the courage of their own dissatisfaction. But what […]
The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist The most perplexing and intriguing pieces of evidence, though, were the handwritten notes that investigators found inside Wells’ car. Addressed to the “Bomb Hostage,” the notes instructed Wells to rob the bank of $250,000, then follow a set of complex instructions to find various keys and […]
Geoff Van Dyke is deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver. *** The Future of Advertising, by Danielle Sacks, Fast Company A must-read for anyone in the media business. Innocence Lost, by Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly Instrumental in getting a Texas man off death row and out of prison. Burger Queen, by Lauren Collins, The […]
Ginsberg Internets the Internet: The longest reads in the world jordanginsberg: I’m trying out a new “blog character” who only posts quotes and makes lists. It is going to be a big hit on the Internet, I reckon. Also, it is pretty amazing that the Longreads phenomenon has taken off, that there is a determined […]
Ryan Seacrest: ‘Dark Lord of Hosts’ Napping is for mortals. The Angel of the Bottomless Pit has souls to harvest, a mission demanding as much science as art. Seacrest’s voice — full of wiseass pep — has worked on radio for more than half his present incarnation, dating to his high school days in suburban […]
‘What It Takes’: The Book that Defined Modern Campaign Reporting Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes” is now widely considered the greatest modern presidential campaign book. But the judgments of Washington’s elite come late to Maryland’s remote Eastern Shore, and the book’s place in political writing has dawned only very late on its author. When […]
In Haiti, a Relationship Built on Adversity He asked me whether I would be his daughter’s godfather and I said no, foreseeing how that would be used to wheedle more money out of me. Joe, you can’t let your goddaughter suffer. I know he was hurt by that. The disturbing part was that his family […]
Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die. Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack […]
The Serpent King: The Capture of Wildlife Smuggler Anson Wong “I can get anything here from anywhere,” he boasted to an American undercover agent in March 1997. “Nothing can be done to me. I could sell a panda — and, nothing. As long as I’m here [in Malaysia], I’m safe.” The key, he explained, was […]
Joe Pompeo: Everybody’s doing this so I wanted to join in the fun joepompeo: My 2010 #longreads list, off the top of my head and kind of random, probably excluding lots of great pieces that I loved but cannot think of at the moment: “Lounge Lizard John Lurie’s disappearing act,” Tad Friend, The New Yorker […]
Meet the Twiblings: How Four Women (and One Man) Conspired to Make Two Babies For many couples, the most crushing aspect of fertility treatment is not all the early morning blood-draws but the haunting feeling that the universe is telling them that their union is not — in a spiritual, as well as a biological, […]
infinite jess: State of the Industry infinitejess: Thanks to the Bastard Blizzard of 2010, I had plenty of unexpected time this week to get nostalgic, which is by all accounts the best thing to do at this time of year. (Except, oh, drink glühwein in Heidelberg, but whatever.) So I started paging through my bookmarks […]
The Decline Effect But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from […]
Out of Lehman’s Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants “We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem,” said John Reed, 71, a former co-chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc., who estimated only 25 percent of needed changes have been enacted. “I’m astounded because […]
Medieval Warfare: Just as Terrifying as You Might Imagine The soldier now known as Towton 25 had survived battle before. A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough—somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died—to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out. […]
How Bell Hit Bottom Rizzo and seven other Bell leaders past and present are charged with looting more than $5.5 million from one of the county’s poorest municipalities. It is a hydra-headed scandal that has spawned seven federal, state and county investigations and transformed a forgotten suburb into a synonym for rogue governance. It has […]
The Gleeful Contrarian “The site is intended to expand the reader’s sphere of interest. It’s a grave mistake in publishing, whether you’re talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago Bill Gates was boasting that we’ll soon have sensors which will […]
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street “The kind of trading strategies our system uses are not the kind of strategies that humans use,” Kharitonov continues. “We’re not competing with humans, because when you’re trading thousands of stocks simultaneously, trying to capture very, very small changes, the human brain is just not good at that. We’re […]
From Lapham’s Quarterly, lessons on fame and advertising from The Life of P. T. Barnum, which was published in 1855. “Put on the appearance of business, and generally the reality will follow.” And what follows then? Profit. How is this miracle achieved? First, through false superlatives and inflated rhetoric, e.g., “The world-famous _______ is the […]
Remember This There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as “AJ,” who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called “EP,” who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory […]
reubeningber: My Top Long Reads of 2010 reubeningber: I’ve read a lot over the past year, below are my Top Long Reads of 2010. (Thinking about posting a couple of other Top ____ of 2010 lists in the near future Books and Apps Maybe). CBC Investigation: Who killed Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri (CBC News) A great […]
Marty Peretz in Exile In September, writing on his New Republic blog The Spine, Peretz homed in on a familiar villain: Islamic terrorists who target other Muslims. “Frankly,” he wrote, “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” He got himself wound up: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they […]
Paleo Fitness: The Workout that Time Forgot “We live like zoo animals!” It’s an idea Erwan Le Corre borrowed from the British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the 1967 classic “The Naked Ape,” and it’s central to his worldview: that we are essentially wild creatures ill-suited to desk jobs and processed foods. “We have become […]
Pastry Chef Natalie Zarzour Doesn’t Tolerate People Who Cheapen Her Craft To understand why customers disappeared, why she entered a self-described period of rage, why the cannoli now costs $9, why the Zarzours will close the shop when their lease runs out in September and how Natalie Zarzour became Chicago’s most provocative pastry chef in […]
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist After Goering matter-of-factly recounted the murder of a close associate that he had once set into motion, Kelley asked how he could bring himself to demand his old friend be killed. “Goering stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright,” Kelley recalled. “Then he […]
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