I always love Kate Silver‘s #longreads picks. Here’s her Top 5. frontofbook: Longreads asked for a top five. Here are a few that stand out: Christopher Hitchens, “Martin, Maggie, and Me” (Vanity Fair) The Hitchens-Amis bromance is the ultimate had-to-be-there of Thatcher-era intelligentsia. Bottoms up. Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17 Dots) Pop fans […]
Tag: longreads
aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic: The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired “Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger […]
The House That Thurman Munson Built “They call Thurman Munson grouchy, brutish, stupid, petty, greedy, oversensitive. It becomes a soap opera: Thurman Munson pours a plate of spaghetti on one reporter’s head and nearly kicks another’s ass. But the fans—all they see is this walrus-looking guy who plays like he’s a possessed walrus. During a […]
Aileen Gallagher is Assistant Professor of Multiplatform Journalism at Syracuse University. agallagher: Don Peck’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America (The Atlantic, March 2010) Bleak, but I’ve never read a better numbers story. Nick Blakeslee’s Alex Jones is About to Explode (Texas Monthly, March 2010) Jones is sort of Glenn Beck meets Art […]
Divided We Eat “In America,” epidemiologist Adam Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.” He points to an article in The New York […]
Jared Keller, in addition to being in charge of the whole internet, is also social media editor for The Atlantic. michellelegro: Trust in what Jared says. He’s in charge of, like, the whole internet. Or at least the portion of it housed in the Watergate building. jbkeller: Dan Baum, “Happiness Is A Worn Gun” (Harpers, […]
Inside the Wild, Wacky, Profitable World of Boing Boing “We know what happens next: This hobby morphs into a successful business. But Boing Boing’s version of that tale is a little different. Mark Frauenfelder and his partners — Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz — didn’t rake in investment capital, recruit a big staff […]
The Courage of Jill Costello “When she asked her doctors about rejoining the team, they looked at her as if she were crazy. Crew? She’d need all her strength just to make it through each day. Jill didn’t care. She told her mom she saw cancer as ‘just another thing on my plate.’ Besides, she’d […]
Unwanted: Inside Colorado’s Dysfunctional Foster Care System “Foster care parents have long battled the stigma that they profit from the kids who come into their homes, that foster care is a booming business. Righter was paid $23 a day for the baby, $32.28 for Daniela, and $23.38 for Josefina. Without a job, and without daycare […]
verygoodyear: The Empty Chamber – The New Yorker The Hamster Wheel – Columbia Journalism Review The Raging Septuagenarian – New York MagazineNo Secrets Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency. –> The Great CyberHeist – The New York Times George Lucas Stole Chewbacca – But It’s OK – Binary Bonsai
Michelle Legro is an editor for Lapham’s Quarterly (who you should be following on Tumblr!) michellelegro: If you aren’t one of the more than 10,000 people who follow @longreads on Twitter, or get the Longreads Instapaper feed on your iPhone or iPad, then do so immediately. Every day there are perfectly curated features of long-form journalism, […]
Don Draper’s Revenge “All these little companies with fun names,” says David Lubars, “we’ve kicked their butts.” Lubars is chairman and chief creative officer of Omnicom’s BBDO North America, an 82-year-old Madison Avenue agency with more than 17,000 employees. On a recent Friday afternoon, Lubars was sitting in his Midtown Manhattan office. He gestured at […]
On the Death Sentence Similarly, local elections affect decisions of state prosecutors to seek the death penalty and of state judges to impose it. “In states where judges were until recently empowered to override jury sentences,” Garland explains, “elected judges typically used this power to impose death rather than life. In Alabama the death-to-life ratio […]
Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown “You’ll see why Michael called this place Neverland,” says Tom Barrack, the newest owner of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch. Barrack is a 63-year-old billionaire with a gleaming shaved head, summer-in-Sardinia tan, personally trained muscles, and sockless tasseled loafers. He is sitting on the lawn beside the Tudor-style, panic-room-equipped main house, […]
Inside the Bloody World of Illegal Plastic Surgery When she wakes up at 3 a.m., the anaesthetic is long gone. Her body is screaming, racked with pain, and if a doctor were there, he’d probably tell her she was going into shock. She shakes violently but manages to toss herself into the bathroom to inspect […]
Letter from ‘Manhattan’ The characters in these pictures are, at best, trying. They are morose. They have bad manners. They seem to take long walks and go to smart restaurants only to ask one another hard questions. “Are you serious about Tracy?” the Michael Murphy character asks the Woody Allen character in Manhattan. “Are you […]
A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web “When I fly to Las Vegas I look down and see all these houses,” he starts. “If someone in one of those houses buys from DecorMyEyes and ends up hating the company, it doesn’t matter. All those other houses are filled with people, too, and they will […]
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband and her daughter’s sudden sickness, Didion describes being paralyzed by memories of her family triggered during mundane circumstances. She calls this experience “the vortex effect.” Matt Zoller Seitz’s Salon essay, “All The Things That Remind Me Of Her,” shows the […]
The Searchers Zhou’s nightmare began when he was 6. He and his older brother — Zhou thinks his name was Chengjiang — were leaving school when they met a couple who claimed to be friends of their parents. The man and the woman said they were there to take them home. They asked Zhou what […]
The Justin Bieber of Bullfighting “The bull is my best friend,” Michelito said the night before. “He’s the one I’m always thinking about, always focusing on.” But it’s hard to square that with what he said next. “There is no real relationship between a bullfighter and a bull, because one is a rational animal while […]
The Awl: A Q&A with a Vacuum Cleaner Salesman They’re like, “You sold to an old woman.” And, I mean, she was 90. She was. But I definitely try and make sure that old people want it. “You want this right?” I say that. But the neighbors were like, “I would never sell to somebody […]
Anyone who has lived through the global bubble and bust of the last few years may wonder what’s so great about a consumer society. In the United States, the idea that we have reoriented our economy toward consumption and don’t make things anymore has become a standard lament, not a sign of progress. But China […]
Emerging from his haze, Sean O’Keefe felt a bizarre sensation in his mouth. Like chewing on gravel without taking a bite. He explored that mystery with his tongue until it registered: His mouth was awash with his own broken teeth. The Waiting: Survivors of the Ted Stevens plane crash in Alaska wondered if help would reach […]
A song called “A Freak Like Me Needs Company,” for the eight-stilettoed Arachne and her Furies to sing near the end of the show, was apparently less right. “I thought, and still do, that it would be a hit,” says Bono. “A percussive eighties Paradise Garage dance piece with a fantastic hook. Julie was like, […]
The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a […]
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