December 2011
124 posts
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Lidsky Lodge: My Top Longreads of 2011 →
davidlidsky:
Ah, procrastination! I knew I got into a deadline-driven business for a reason. Deadline pressure is the only antidote to procrastination, so here I am on December 31 organizing my Longreads thoughts.
I had trouble limiting myself to five stories so I did a bunch of sublists just for fun….
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Ross Andersen: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Ross Andersen is freelancer living in Washington, D.C. He has recently written about technology for The Atlantic, and is now working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He can also be found on Twitter at @andersen.
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“The Mother of Possibility,” by Sven Birkerts, Lapham’s Quarterly
Procrastination being my favorite vice —and the impetus behind many a plunge...
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Woodland Creature: My Top 15 Longreads of 2011 →
woodlandcreature:
Longreads.com has been doing a great series of roundups on its Tumblr, highlighting the best longreads of the year, chosen by well-known writers. I’m not well-known and not really a writer, but here are mine (I couldn’t narrow it down to five):
“Travis the Menace,” Dan P. Lee, New York Magazine
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Ben Cohen's Top Longreads of 2011
Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen.
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I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled me to re-read them, over and over, but I do know that you’ll find...
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Kevin Purdy: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Kevin Purdy is a freelance writer, and a frequent Longreader. Check out his site here.
Not all written in 2011, but brought to my attention and saved in 2011:
In Which There’s a Girl in New York City Who Calls Herself the Human Trampoline - This Recording Graceland is truly the one album I never get sick of. Great retrospective/place-setting piece.
New York is Killing Me - New...
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Stanford University School of Medicine’s Top Medical Longreads of 2011.
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Brian Wolly: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Brian Wolly is an associate web editor at Smithsonian Magazine.
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1. Tom Bissell’s Breakdown of L.A. Noire on Grantland
When ESPN and Bill Simmons’ Grantland debuted in early June, the knives were out and its initial reaction was mixed at best. Like many, I approached the new project with simultaneous skepticism and optimism, but it wasn’t Simmons or Chuck Klosterman that sold...
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Molly Lambert: My Top 13 Longreads of 2011
Molly Lambert is a writer covering pop culture at Grantland. (She’s also featured in our Top 10 Longreads of 2011)
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These are some Longreads I enjoyed this year:
• “The Bell Jar At 40”: Emily Gould on Sylvia Plath (Poetry Foundation)
• “The J in J. Crew”: Molly Young on Jenna Lyons (New York magazine)
• “The Recessionary Charms Of American Horror...
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Peter Smith's Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Peter Smith has written about food and science for GOOD, Wired, and Gastronomica. He’s based in Maine, and, in 2011, he covered pickle juice, patented sandwiches, and the last sardine cannery in North America. This is his first attempt at Top Five Longreads.
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Here are my (somewhat arbitrarily selected) #longreads that, er, explore unexpected, underexplored, and purposely obfuscated...
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Mark Lotto: The Best Things I Read This Year
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Evan Kindley: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Evan Kindley is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Ariel Levy, “Basta Bunga Bunga” (June 6, 2011) - The New Yorker
A great piece about what proved to be the Last Days of Berlusconi’s Italy, with all the virtues of the typical artfully triangulated New Yorker profile (as recently codified by John McPhee) plus a refreshing willingness to let Levy herself...
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Kevin Smokler's Top 5 Deep Interviews of 2011
Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books from High School (Prometheus Books, 2013) and curator of Deep Interviews here on Longreads.
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Here on Longreads, I’m curating Deep Interviews (#deepinterviews)—lengthy interviews with interesting people—a format I’ve grown to love. It’s not quite original...
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Matt Pearce: My Top 5 Longreads
Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch. He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square.
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1. Paul Ford - “The Epiphanator” - New York magazine
I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a critical mass people have finally accepted the deep role...
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Outside's Joe Spring: My Top 5 Longreads of the...
Joe Spring is the online editor for Outside Magazine.
This was a big year for longform journalism. Byliner came out with blockbuster stories, like Jon Krakuer’s Three Cups of Deceit. The Atavist put out consistently strong features with solid multimedia. At Outside, our editors and writers contributed excellent investigative online exclusives (“Blood in the Water,” “Crashing...
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The New Yorker's Nicholas Thompson: My Top 5...
Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker and a frequent Longreader.
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I’m a sucker for stories about reinvention, disappearence, and people who pretend to be someone they aren’t. The genre has cliches, and can become trite. But it can also be wonderful. And this year, the category brought us some wonderful longreads.
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“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh,...
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: Thomas Mucha, GlobalPost: My top 5 longreads of... →
globalpost:
Thomas Mucha is the editor at GlobalPost
Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books
High on the Stones
Any writer who can connect Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin and Keith Richards in the same sentence is definitely worth reading.
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doddcasting: My Top Five #Greenreads of 2011 →
scottdodd:
This list is in no particular order. I also included a selection in OnEarth magazine’s best-of-the-year roundup, so technically, I’ve got six favorites. Find Top 5 Greenreads from other OnEarth contributors here, and share your own on Twitter and Tumblr with the hashtag #greenreads….
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Elmo Keep: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Elmo Keep is a writer who has written for The Hairpin, and other places.
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The Tetris Effect — Justin Wolfe, The Awl
There really isn’t a way to talk about this without spoiling the reveals. Just read it, whether you understand gaming or not, it doesn’t matter: If you don’t, you will come away curious, and if you do, you will have your mind blown it’s just so clever and...
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Dead Presidents: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 →
deadpresidents:
I’m a big fan of Longreads and I figured I’m important enough to share my Top 5 Longreads of 2011.
Now, as much as I would love to include my own work in the Top 5, I am not going to rank articles of mine such as “Crossover: The Unique Appeal of Jon Huntsman” or “Rick Perry’s ‘Oops’…
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Time's Radhika Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Radhika Jones is executive editor of Time.
I got to work on a number of great longreads at Time this year, among them Lev Grossman on fan fiction, Kate Pickert on the perils of cancer screening, and Kurt Andersen on the Year of the Protester. But these are a few of the pieces from other venues that have stuck with me.
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“And I Should Know,” by Roseanne Barr, New York
I didn’t follow...
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New York Magazine's Ben Williams: My Top Longreads...
Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine.
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1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, what’s great is the willingness of both subject and writer to play, and...
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Nature's Brendan Maher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Brendan Maher is biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal.
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My selection of the best science-themed longreads for 2011 suffers from two major limitations: 1.) I couldn’t read everything, so have probably missed some very worthy entries. 2.) I purposely did not include articles from Nature, where I am an editor. For some top stories from our pages see...
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Stiff Jab: Stiff Jab's Top Five Boxing Longreads... →
stiffjab:
by Gautham Nagesh
1. ”$50 UNDER 11.5 ROUNDS FLOYD MAYWEATHER, JR. VS. VICTOR ORTIZ.” by David Hill, McSweeney’s
A beautifully wrought essay that relates Mayweather’s controversial stoppage of Ortiz in September while pondering the nature of fear and the impact of fatherhood. Hill…
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Samuel Rubenfeld's Tumblr: My top-5 Long Reads of... →
rubenfeld:
Here are what I considered to be the top five long-form, investigative journalism pieces of 2011.
Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing — New York Times
With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim areas — Associated Press
The Afghan Bank Heist — The New Yorker
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A. N. Devers' Top 5 Bathtub Longreads of 2011
A. N. Devers’ work has appeared online in Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and in other publications. Her most recent essay, about poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in Carmel, California, is in the Winter 2011 issue of Tin House. She is the founder and editor of Writers’ Houses, a website dedicated to literary pilgrimage.
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Maghag (n.): 1. A compulsive reader and...
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Businessweek's Sheelah Kolhatkar: My Top 5...
Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.
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Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year:
“Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian
This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but you usually don’t hear...
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Instafiction's Jeremy Bushnell: My Top Fiction...
Jeremy P. Bushnell is the editor-in-chief of Instafiction.org, which links to a quality short story each weekday. He stockpiles many other links at his blog, Raccoon. He’s also on Twitter.
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“Backbone,” David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker)
During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace made massive contributions to the worlds of fiction and nonfiction alike, and I still miss...
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Edith Zimmerman: My Top 6 Longreads of 2011
Edith Zimmerman is a writer and co-editor of The Hairpin.
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“All the Single Ladies,” Kate Bolick, The Atlantic
Kate’s story on the current state of marriage, and men, and women, is sad and happy and fascinating, and just generally makes me want to give her a high-five and roll cigarettes with her, even though neither of us smoke.
“Ask an Abortion Provider,” Dolores...
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Gangrey: Our Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling.
Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical combat is not rare. It’s in that spirit that you’ll find some cross...
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Mike Dang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Mike Dang is editor of Bundle and managing editor for Longreads. See his longreads page here.
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I’ve read a lot of great longreads this year, but I know that a longread is truly special when I become its biggest cheerleader. I’ll casually slip the story into conversations, teasing out some of its best bits to wheedle the person into reading it later on his or her own. Here are five...
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Science writer Ed Yong's Top 12 Longreads of 2011 →
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Jared Keller: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 →
jaredbkeller:
The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See (Mens Journal, March 2011)
Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.
Bats,…
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The Believer's Karolina Waclawiak: My Top 5...
Karolina Waclawiak is a novelist and screenwriter. She is also the deputy editor of The Believer. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, will be out July 2012 from Two Dollar Radio.
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I’ve always been fascinated with religion, Russia, and missing persons stories so these five nonfiction pieces really captured my attention this year. The fallout from The New Yorker’s...
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clampants tumblepants: My Top Longreads of 2011... →
clampants:
In this, my first full year with Instapaper, I found that…I still don’t have the time to read that much. That said, I did read a little bit here and there, so here are my top longreads I read in 2011 (in no order…and none are particularly long):
When I Was a Very Small Boy
by Ettore…
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Grantland's Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads...
Jay Caspian Kang (pictured above) is an editor at Grantland. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Morning News. His first novel, The Dead Do Not Improve, will be published by Hogarth/Random House in August 2012.
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David Hill: “$100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino” (McSweeney’s)
This is the sort of piece you want to compare to other writers like...
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Zach Crizer: My top longreads of 2011 →
zachcrizer:
Among all the great longform journalism published in 2011, these were my favorites:
1. A Murder Foretold, by David Grann, The New Yorker: Could have been a fantastic detective book — if it weren’t all true. The package of amazing reporting and brilliant storytelling makes this the best for me.
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Howard Riefs: My Top Longreads of 2011
Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago.
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It was another strong year for long-form content and journalism. There was no shortage of attention-grabbing longreads in traditional media, online-only outlets, alt-weeklies and literary journals—both in the U.S. and abroad, and written as profiles, personal essays, historical accounts and op-eds. And many...
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Mental Floss Editors: Our Top Longreads of 2011
The editors of mental_floss magazine: Mangesh Hattikudur, Ethan Trex, Stephanie Meyers, and Jessanne Collins. They’re also on Twitter and Tumblr.
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“Deep Intellect,” Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine)
Is it weird to say we enjoyed this trek “inside the mind of an octopus” because it was so sensual? Who knew the octopus can taste with all of its skin, run amok out of...
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Writer David Hill: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
David Hill writes Fading the Vig for McSweeney’s, writes about basketball for Negative Dunkalectics, writes sketch comedy for The Charlies, and starting next month will write a monthly column for Grantland. He is on Twitter at @davehill77.
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“Too Much Information,” John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote many notable things in 2011. I chose to highlight this...
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Writer David Dobbs: My Top Longreads of 2011
David Dobbs writes articles on science, sports, music, writing, reading, and other culture at Neuron Culture and for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Atavist, Nature, National Geographic, and other publications. He’s working on a book about the genetics of human strength and frailty. He also twitters and tries to play the violin.
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Truly we live, as Steve Silberman said, in...
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Brain Pickings' Maria Popova: My Top 5 Longreads...
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a writer for Wired UK, Design Observer, and The Atlantic, among others, and an MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow, spending far, far too much time curating the web’s interestingness as @brainpicker.
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I’ve always found reading, writing, and thinking to be so tightly interwoven that, when done correctly, they become...
