January 2011
87 posts
1 tag
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 7:... →
Search for Bradley Nowell videos on YouTube and you’ll find a smattering of interview clips recorded a year or so before he died. Here he is backstage on the Warped Tour looking like one of the many shirtless, deeply tanned, and blond bros lurking in the audience. He’s wearing gold Elvis sunglasses and talking about partying with the other bands on tour and hanging with champion skateboarder...
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Separation Anxiety: How Always-On Digital Culture... →
The e-personality is more impulse-driven and more narcissistic; it gives itself permission to explore or seek out more morbid subjects; it regresses to earlier developmental stages that are more about action without heed to consequences; and it has a more grandiose view of itself.
By Joan O’C. Hamilton, Stanford Magazine
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'I Will Never Know Why': Susan Klebold on Her... →
Those of us who cared for Dylan felt responsible for his death. We thought, “If I had been a better (mother, father, brother, friend, aunt, uncle, cousin), I would have known this was coming.” We perceived his actions to be our failure. I tried to identify a pivotal event in his upbringing that could account for his anger. Had I been too strict? Not strict enough? Had I pushed too...
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Upon This Rock →
Remember those perfume dispensers they used to have in pharmacies—”If you like Drakkar Noir, you’ll love Sexy Musk”? Well, Christian rock works like that. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian off-brand, and that’s proper, because culturally speaking, it’s supposed to serve as a stand-in for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very...
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No Objections: What History Tells Us About Gay... →
Although gender parity between spouses would have been unthinkable at the founding of the United States, marriage laws have moved over time in this direction. In Anglo-American common law, marriage was based on the legal fiction that the married couple was a single entity, with the husband serving as its sole legal, economic, and political representative. Under this doctrine, known as coverture,...
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Kate Silver: Bringing Up Kennedy: A Longreads List →
frontofbook:
The February Vanity Fair is out, and in the feature well is a look at the JFK inaugural, 50 years later. (Justin Bieber’s youthful mug adorns the cover, not Jack’s.) It seems like, oh, just last month, the mag excerpted Greg Lawrence’s Jackie as Editor. Because VF and the Kennedys go…
Excellent #Longreads #List from Kate Silver!
(Here’s instructions on how to make...
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The Man Who Saw Too Much →
Fellow Aspen first responders were momentarily shocked by Ferrara’s news. PTSD was supposed to happen to soldiers, a malady incurred on jittery battlefields far from home, not in a Xanadu dedicated to strenuous good fun. But Ferrara had long suspected he had PTSD and wasn’t surprised. “Of course he got PTSD,” says Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy Alex Burchetta....
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Ballad for a Plain Man: Singer Jeff Finlin Thought... →
I loaded his songs into my iPod and while living on the road, while sitting on planes and trains, while lying in strange motel rooms, I closed my eyes and focused on his lyrics and thought: This guy’s channeling the angels. This guy’s got the gift. This guy can conjure a heartbreak, a hangover, moonlight, the Deep South, with a few words. I wondered: Who is this guy? Who the hell is...
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Game of Her Life: On 14-Year-Old Ugandan Chess... →
News eventually spread around Katwe that Katende was part of an organization run by white people, known in Uganda as mzungu, and Harriet began hearing disturbing rumors. “My neighbors told me that chess was a white man’s game and that if I let Phiona keep going there to play, that mzungu would take her away,” she says. “But I could not afford to feed her. What choice did...
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Program Note: Welcoming Rolling Stone to the... →
Taibbi, Bob Marley, Captain Beefheart and Obama: All of our previous Rolling Stone story picks are on their Longreads page.
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The Constitution and Its Worshippers →
Crying constitution is a minor American art form. “This is my copy of the Constitution,” John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. “And I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,...
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Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a... →
I asked a ton of people, and while there were a few in favor of singular “they,” this exchange with my old friend Michael, a San Francisco musician, composer and poet (and executive, by day) is representative:
Me: Do you write “she” for indeterminate pronoun? What do you do at work?
Michael: At work we make ugly constructions to avoid “he.” Every once in a...
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The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers →
“Some man, 60 years old, that couldn’t take the business and went and killed himself. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with that when you’ve got a 16-year-old daughter who gets the call? Huh? And I’ll tell you how you deal with that. You go through it, and you make jokes about it, and you continue with it, and you move forward. That’s how you do it, or...
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Jim Joyce Still Haunted By Blown Perfect-Game Call →
gq:
“I think about it still, almost every day,” Joyce says. “I don’t want to be known as Jim Joyce, the guy that blew the perfect game. But I think that’s inevitable.”
Why?
“Because I’m Jim Joyce,” he says, “the umpire who blew the perfect game.”
From Amy K. Nelson’s wrenching new ESPN profile.
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A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over the Shrimping Life →
A few months later, Buddy traded $800 and bartered time and equipment for a 51-foot boat that needed, among other things, a new layer of fiberglass. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 41 miles offshore last April, they were almost done with the seemingly endless repairs. Their goal had been to finish before the young brown shrimp, at their sweetest and most succulent, began to move in...
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The Boy Who Died of Football →
Three days after he collapsed from heatstroke at practice in 2008, 15-year-old Max Gilpin became one of at least 665 boys since 1931 to die as a result of high school football. Here’s what made his case different: The Commonwealth of Kentucky tried to prove Max’s coach had a hand in killing him.
By Thomas Lake, Sports Illustrated
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Afghanistan: Land of War and Opportunity →
In Herat, Kabul, and cities large and small, Paul Brinkley serves as tour guide, ambassador, fixer, motivational speaker, and leader of the unofficial Afghanistan chamber of commerce. With all of his titles and duties, he prefers to think of himself primarily as a matchmaker, negotiating high-stakes unions between multinational companies like IBM and JPMorgan Chase and Afghan officials and...
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The Web Is a Customer Service Medium →
The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book...
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kimaskew: My Favorite #Longreads This Week
kimaskew:
In Search of Spiraling Time (Bookslut)
The Man Who Spilled the Secrets (Vanity Fair)
Michael Chabon: How to Salvage a “Wrecked” Novel (The Atlantic)
David Mitchell: Earth calling Taylor (FT.com)
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Capital New York: 7 great longreads by Tom Robbins... →
capitalnewyork:
I was introduced to Tom Robbins while I was in college. My mentor at the time was the editor of the Industrial Workers of the World’s newspaper and he printed packets of reporting for me. I gobbled it up, especially Mr. Robbins’ muckraking at the Village Voice.
By Gillian Reagan
