Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern. Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, […]
Tag: longreads
Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower Hannah: The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work. The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think […]
‘Apple and Google have the most distinct propositions for your exobrain’ With any faith, it is fun to focus on the fanatics, but not very illuminating. On a recent trip to the Fifth Avenue store, not many faces fitted the stereotype of Apple partisans as hip, rich, Western youth. There was a man who looked […]
I’m the biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal. Longreads kindly asked me to offer up my five favourite couldn’t-put-down features for the year, and I was happy to comply. The focus on biology wasn’t intentional, but I did purposely keep features from Nature out of the running (it’s […]
Ben Cohen: These are a few of my favorite things Thank you Ben. Amazing list. bzcohen: I started using Instapaper on a plain ol’ iPod—I know, right?—around June, and I’ve since starred about 180 items, a number that, for the most part, doesn’t include the people and places I can’t not read: The Awl, and […]
Paul Brady is an editor at Condé Nast Traveler. *** This isn’t a list of the best travel writing of the year, but if this is what travel writing could be every time, the genre wouldn’t have such a shaky reputation. I didn’t pick anything from Traveler because that would be lame. Pass the Bucks […]
Grandpa Joe & Secretariat: A Christmas Story In mid-October, he’d seen his beloved Charlie Rose interview Diane Lane and John Malkovich. Ever since that interview, he’d been carrying with him the notion that he would see this movie at his earliest opportunity. Never mind his preceding fondness for the racehorse and its moment in history—there […]
Dutch Santa and ‘Six to Eight Black Men’ The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.” I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always […]
Juli Weiner blogs for Vanity Fair. *** These are the pieces I sent out to friends with the all-caps subject line, “THIS.” These are the pieces I come back to when I’m looking to improve my own writing. These are the pieces I’ll be re-reading well into 2011. Jon Ronson: And God Created Controversy, The […]
Personal History: Chicago Christmas, 1984 Then it was the Christmas party. The way we knew it was festive was the garage had been cleared of dog shit. It had also been cleared of the dog, a constantly barking mutt who even bit Warner. He bit Warner, he bit the shovel head Warner thrust at him, […]
Foster Kamer (ex-BlackBook + Gawker + Village Voice) is online features and news editor at Esquire. *** 2010 was an incredible year for writing, bottom line. Despite the proliferation of things whose output is mostly antagonistic to great writing — like faceless “content farms” churning out hollow, Google-gaming information lacking anything of substance — great writing persisted. Twitter’s evolving […]
Twin Freaks: On High-Altitude Skiers the Marolt Brothers A number of renowned ski mountaineers told me, without wanting their names to be used, that they resented the attention the Marolts had received for their exploits—or, more to the point, the attention the Marolts had sought out. The criticism is that the Marolts ski (and climb) […]
Thanks to Julia Arthur for two #longreads on Lucy Grealy. Below, from Grealy herself in Harper’s (1993), and here from her friend Ann Patchett in New York Magazine, 2003. lostangelesca: There was a long period of time, almost a year, during which I never looked in a mirror. It wasn’t easy, for I’d never suspected […]
‘Damn Right,’ I Said. Bush is the lone hero of every page of Decision Points. Very few spoken words are assigned to him, outside of the public records of speeches and press conferences, and in nearly all of them he is forceful, in command, and peeved at the inadequacies of his subordinates: ‘What the hell is […]
The Best Longreads of 2010: Science, Medicine & Technology Third and final round in our “Best #longreads of 2010” collaboration with BrainPickings.org. Today: Science, Medicine & Tech—with stories from Amy Harmon, Andrew Rice, Jerome Groopman, Logan Ward, The Oil Drum, Lawrence Lessig, and more.
benjamingold: Hey it’s the end of 2010, publishers are still trying to figure out how to make money off their online content, and here are my favorite pieces of long form journalism that was published this year (plus one from the 90s)! Richard Morgan, “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup,” (The […]
The Runaway Doctor At the barracks, Weinberger sat at a long table with the officers and wolfed down a bowl of pasta before anyone else was finished. He posed amiably for a picture. Lieutenant Colonel Guido Di Vita, of the Carabinieri, in charge of the region that includes Courmayeur, asked him again who he was, […]
The Concealed Battle to Run Russia The Federal Security Service (FSB) is in several ways more powerful and more of a threat to individual rights than the KGB was during the Soviet era. The KGB took its orders from the Communist Party, which always kept a close watch on its operations. In contrast, although both […]
Jay Caspian Kang is a fiction writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High, an essay on gambling addiction that appeared in the Morning News and has been named on several “Best of 2010” lists. *** In no particular order. […]
Transcript: The Julian Assange Interview Q: Here you are facing, possibly facing, very, very serious charges indeed, double rape even, is a possibility—and you are saying: “I will not go back to the country where those offenses are alleged to have been carried out to face the music.” JA: No, I have never said that. […]
Out on the Ice Brian Burke isn’t just a legend of the NHL. He’s a fists-up, knock-your-teeth-out gladiator. But when his hockey-loving son came out of the closet and died soon after, he was thrust into a strange new role: advocate for gays in a macho sports culture. He’s no cheerleader—he looks like he hates […]
Patrick Doyle is a senior editor for 5280 Magazine in Denver. patrickcdoyle: The good folks at Longreads.com have been asking everyone for their five favorite pieces from 2010. Here are mine. “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” by Chris Jones, EsquireThe best story of the year. Just give Jones his Ellie now. “The End of Men,” […]
laphamsquarterly: Barbara Newhall Follett, the child prodigy who began her first book The House Without Windows at the age of 8, and the subject of Paul Collins’ essay “Vanishing Act.” “My dreams are going through their death flurries. I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings […]
Group Home’s Unorthodox Sex Policy Disquiets Mother Kevin Rouse’s story reveals the difficulties of dealing with a population of men with adult sexual urges and often childlike thinking. The staff of the Human Development Center enacted a bold and unorthodox policy permitting sex between residents, but experts who deal with the developmentally disabled question whether […]
Mallary Tenore covers media news for the Poynter Institute’s Poynter.org. *** Timothy Lavin: The Listener, The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2010 Refreshing to see well-written stories about lesser-known media phenomena like Coast to Coast AM. James Verini: Lost Exile, Vanity Fair, Feb. 23, 2010 Verini does a great job describing what the death of the paper (in this case, Russia’s English-language […]
Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game “These wack-jobs who spend 20 hours a week stacking coupons? That stuff drives us batty,” says John Morgan, executive director of the Association of Coupon Professionals. “They dance all over the rules. These zealots may be following the letter of the law, but I don’t think […]
The Social Network Jose Canseco says he has regrets. The man is reportedly broke. The man is a pariah — he has been excommunicated by the high priests of baseball. He seems to believe this is because he told the truth about some things, because he admitted using steroids and named a few other players […]
Oprah’s Network Is Her Highest Hurdle The Oprah Winfrey Network’s three-year gestation has been unusually arduous. Early on, Ms. Winfrey’s partner in the joint venture, Discovery Communications, grew frustrated, and as boardroom tensions boiled over early last year she considered backing out altogether. The relationship has improved markedly since then. But as recently as late […]
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