December 2010
123 posts
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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 kind of India will they build?
By Anand Giridharadas, New York Times
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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 combination codes hidden throughout Erie. It contained drawings, threats, and detailed maps. If...
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Geoff Van Dyke: My Top 6 Longreads of 2010
Geoff Van Dyke is deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver.
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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 New Yorker
Deep, revealing profile of chef April Bloomfield.
The...
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Ginsberg Internets the Internet: The longest reads... →
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 and expansive observance of great and important writing flying…
Excellent list from Jordan Ginsberg, National Post.
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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 Atlanta. It is not a versatile or interesting voice — expunged of all traces of any but the most generic...
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'What It Takes': The Book that Defined Modern... →
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 it came out in the heat of the 1992 campaign, the tome dropped with a heavy...
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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 did suffer, going hungry, skipping months of school because there was no tuition, going without medicine. Most Haitians were even worse...
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Ten Mother Jones Longreads from 2010 →
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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 of a night out at Bennigan’s. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in...
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The Serpent King: The Capture of Wildlife Smuggler... →
“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 paying off government officials in the customs bureau and, importantly, in the wildlife department, the agency...
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Joe Pompeo: Everybody's doing this so I wanted to... →
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
“Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” Chris Jones, Esquire
Joe Pompeo is a media reporter at Yahoo! News
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Peter Smith: The Best Food Longreads of the Year →
Stories from Wired, Conservation Magazine, Edible Geography, Saveur, Slate, National Geographic, GQ and Prospect.
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Meet the Twiblings: How Four Women (and One Man)... →
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, sense — fruitful. But I knew Michael and I were a great couple — I had pined so long for the elusive feeling of rightness, and now that I finally had it, I was...
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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 and tweets, thinking about…
Excellent list of top #longreads from Jessanne Collins, who wrote this for The...
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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 psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the...
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Out of Lehman's Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of... →
“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 we basically dropped the world’s biggest economy because of an error in bank management.”
By Christine Harper,...
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Medieval Warfare: Just as Terrifying as You Might... →
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.
The Economist
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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 resonated as a morality tale in which Rizzo is cast as a greed-crazed,...
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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 turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the...
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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 playing on a different field, trying to exploit...
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Hatching Monsters: Lessons in Fame from P.T.... →
“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 greatest one ever seen.” Then, through repetition: if one asserts a claim often enough, the claim (true or untrue) achieves, as we say now,...
shield your eyes: Ok, since I'm shameless →
gillianmae:
Here are 15 favorite longreads from Capital in 2010:
License to trill: The reinvention of Robert Davi by Zachary Woolfe (piece of the year if you ask me!)
David Simon on the doomed relationship between cities and their newsrooms by Josh Benson
Citizen Mondo: ‘Project Runway,’ parable…
Re: that last item, Gillian Reagan gets even more #longreads-specific. Excellent!
A Capital send-off for 2010, and what you can... →
capitalnewyork:
We’ve been live for six months (yes, only six months)! Here’s a thank you note to all of you in the form of a review of what we’ve done so far and what we’re planning for 2011.
A handful of New York #longreads in this year-end recap from the Capital team.
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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 in the world. He could very well have the worst.
By...
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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 piece on tracking down those…
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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 are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they...
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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 divorced from nature, trapped in colorless boxes,” Le Corre...
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Pastry Chef Natalie Zarzour Doesn't Tolerate... →
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 a profession with little provocation, just ask her about the “Lobster Tail.”
By Kevin Pang, Chicago Tribune
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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 shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple,...
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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, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to...
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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 better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I...
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'Apple and Google have the most distinct... →
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 like a diplomat with the United Arab Emirates’ flag on his lapel. A gaggle of teenage boys from Brazil horsed around in Portuguese. A red-haired youngster put down...
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@EugenePhoto: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010 →
In case you missed it: Excellent collection from the curator of ReadingByEugene.com.
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Brendan Maher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
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 like choosing which child you love best!).
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Autism’s...
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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 pretty much everything about it; Deadspin, particularly…
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Paul Brady: My Top 5 Travel Longreads of 2010
Paul Brady is an editor at Condé Nast Traveler.
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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 (Steve Boggan, The Guardian, Dec. 11, 2010)
The story of following the same $10...
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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 was also *Diane Lane* to consider. (It turns out—and I never really knew...
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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 “six to eight,” which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get a decent count.
...
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Juli Weiner: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Juli Weiner blogs for Vanity Fair.
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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 Guardian, October 9, 2010
Hilarious discussion about theology with...
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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, sometimes we came in and found him resolutely gnawing the leg of the worktable with a fine sustained rage. Tonight, festively, the dog was locked...
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Foster Kamer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Foster Kamer (ex-BlackBook + Gawker + Village Voice) is online features and news editor at Esquire.
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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....
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Twin Freaks: On High-Altitude Skiers the Marolt... →
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) unremarkable, unstylish lines (“tourist routes,” as one put it), that they care less about summits than...
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MIRRORINGS: The late great Lucy Grealy on her...
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 just how omnipresent are our own images. I began by merely avoiding...
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'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 happening?’ I asked during an NSC meeting in late April. ‘Why isn’t anybody stopping these looters?’
‘By the...
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The Best Longreads of 2010: Science, Medicine &... →
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.
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Benjamin Gold: My Favorite Longreads of 2010
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 Awl, August 2010)
As an struggling freelance writer, this article...
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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, although Di Vita already knew.
“I am a surgeon and I am divorced,” Weinberger said.
He then took out...
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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 Putin and Medvedev have influence over the FSB, it is in many respects its own master. (US Secretary of Defense Robert...
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Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
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.
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In no particular order.
THE LEGEND OF BLACK SUPERMAN — Rafe Bartholomew, Deadspin
I’m typing this in a Starbucks in...
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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.
Q: In that case you can catch the next plane back to Sweden.
JA: No, I do things according to proper...
