Longreads

Adam Pasick is managing editor of NYMag.com.

(These weren’t all technically published in 2010, but hey. No biggie.)

Read the list here.

“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 game against Oakland, when he commits and error that scores Don Baylor and then he subsequently strikes out at the plate, they heap all kinds of abuse on him, and, heading back to the dugout, he just ups and gives them the finger. Hoists the finger to everyone at Yankee Stadium. That’s not family entertainment! The next day when he comes to bat, when his name is announced and Thurman Munson steels himself for a rain of boos, the same fans begin to applaud, then give him a tremendous ovation.”

By Michael Paterniti, Esquire Magazine, 1999

“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 Times, written by Michael Pollan, which describes a meal element by element, including “a basket of morels and porcini gathered near Mount Shasta.” “Pollan,” writes Drewnowski, “is drawing a picture of class privilege that is as acute as anything written by Edith Wharton or Henry James.”

By Lisa Miller, Newsweek

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for New York Times Magazine. 

Click here for some of Andrew’s work featured on Longreads

“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 and a hotshot CEO, or otherwise attempt to leverage themselves into a “real” media company. They didn’t even rent an office. They continued to treat their site as a side project, even as it became a business with revenue comfortably in the seven figures. Basically, they declined to professionalize. You could say they refused to grow up.”

By Rob Walker, Fast Company

“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 had three goals for the better part of her adult life: to graduate from Cal, to cox the first boat and to win nationals. She saw no reason to change them.”

By Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated

“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 assistance, that meant that Righter had about $2,300 a month to clothe, feed, and lodge three children, along with herself—just about $500 above the state poverty line. She’d given up on making ends meet; she was broke. She’d been trying to teach Daniela to ask for help when she needed it, and now Righter was the one who needed help. On a particularly cold day in December, she did something she never thought she would have to do: She went to a food pantry.”

By Natasha Gardner, 5280 Magazine

“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 BBDO’s 2010 Webby award for best ad agency of the year, which was resting a few feet away from his electric guitar, tuned to imitate Keith Richards’ ringing sound.”Americans like a story of the big guys getting taken down,” says Lubars. “But that doesn’t mean that’s what is actually happening.”

By Felix Gillette, Businessweek

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 of these judicial overrides was ten to one.” In Delaware, where judges are not elected, such decisions favored defendants. The “tight connection between legal decision-making and local politics produces…an obvious risk of bias in capital cases.” Popular opinion has less effect on criminal justice in Europe. European judges and prosecutors are typically tenured civil servants. Popular opinion thus has less sway over individual trials. This difference provides a powerful argument for opponents of judicial elections.

By Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, New York Review of Books

“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, near a gnarled oak tree with steps winding up to the perch where Jackson wrote “Bad.” “You’ll feel something, which I think was what drove him. And I don’t mean that—I’m not coming from outer space—but you will actually feel it, I promise.”

By Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine

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 the damage, where she finds the pad has stuck to the seeping blood from her stitches. Either out of fear or instinct, she pulls the pad down, which inadvertently tears off the scabs, causing a surge of bleeding. For the second time in a few hours she’s covered in blood, her blood, but now she’s alone in the middle of the night and she doesn’t know what to do. She tries to stop the bleeding but can’t. She’s panicking. So she calls Andy.

By Jordan Ginsberg, This Magazine

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 still hung up on Yale?” the Woody Allen character asks the Diane Keaton character. “I think I’m still in love with Yale,” she confesses several scenes later. “You are?” he counters, “or you think you are?” All of the characters in Woody Allen pictures not only ask these questions but actually answer them, on camera, and then, usually in another restaurant, listen raptly to third-party analyses of their own questions and answers.

By Joan Didion, New York Review of Books (1979)

“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 come knocking.”

Selling on the Internet, Mr. Borker says, attracts a new horde of potential customers every day. For the most part, they don’t know anything about DecorMyEyes, and the ones who bother to research the company — well, he doesn’t want their money. If you’re the type of person who reads consumer reviews, Mr. Borker would rather you shop elsewhere.

“I’m not a salesgirl at Macy’s,” is the way he puts it, “following a customer around the store to make sure you’re happy.”

By David Segal, New York Times

“How old do you feel?” I asked her.

“Well, I still have the energy I had at 50,” she said. “More. Where is it coming from? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s a mystery even to me.”

…David Milch’s romantic and profane western series “Deadwood,” which I might not have watched past the third episode if Jen hadn’t watched the first season twice in the weeks following our son’s birth. She finished the first season finale in the wee hours one morning while nursing James. At breakfast that day she told me, “There are two important things that you need to know: ‘Deadwood’ might be the greatest dramatic series in the history of American television. And your son’s first word is going to be ‘cocksucker.’”

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 he wanted to eat and treated him to a bowl of his favorite cold noodles. But Chengjiang was wary and stood watching from outside the shop. When they boarded a bus, his older brother refused to go along. As the bus went past his stop, Zhou sensed something was wrong. “I remember thinking, ‘These people are so cold,’” Zhou says. They boarded a train, and there was nowhere to sit. So he lay down on the floor and cried. No one paid him any notice.

“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 other is irrational.” He’s just a boy, after all: Not a blank slate, but some of his ideas still bear the unmistakable trace of words he once read or overheard; a parent’s explanation.

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 that old.”

But I was like, “How can you say no to somebody if they really like something?” And I said that to the old lady, I asked her if she really liked it, and she was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” So, fuck you guys, you know? They tried to make me sound like the worst person ever.

Then the old lady pulled up her shirt, and there was this huge bruise, and I was like, “That’s not from the vacuum, right?” And she was like, “Kind of, yeah.” And then she was like, “No, I just fell down over there.” No wonder she felt horrible!