#guest pick

[longreads]

A Longreads Guest Pick: E.A. Mann on Peter Hessler's "Dr. Don"

E.A. Mann is an engineer and freelance writer living in Warren, R.I.

I've read just about every issue of The New Yorker for the past seven years, and despite all of the big, important journalism I've read in those pages, this minor-key piece about a small town druggist has resonated deepest with me. As readers, we bring our pre-conceived ideas of what an article will be, and I assumed that this character study would pull back its camera and end as a commentary on the state of healthcare in America. But its author, entranced by his subject, instead burrows deeply into Dr. Don's outsized life in the lonely town of Nucla (population: 700 and falling), where the lonely landscape causes 'wives [to] leave the passenger's side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands.' What the author ends up with is a haunting study on community, regret, and the essential mystery of other people."

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[longreads]

A Longreads Guest Pick: Rebecca Hiscott on Mark Harris's Profile of Director Spike Jonze

Rebecca Hiscott is a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable.

I'm still marveling at 'Him and Her' by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix's stony-faced cameo on the cover — and an eye into the making of Her, the quasi-sci-fi movie that aspires to be 'a cautionary meditation on romance and technology' and 'a subtle exploration of the weirdness, delusiveness, and one-sidedness of love.' The narrative follows Jonze through the process of writing, shooting and editing the film, and his subsequent efforts to correct a cinematic gamble that hasn't paid off. Harris's lush prose mimics Jonze's aesthetic as a filmmaker, which the author describes as 'disarmingly sincere, and melancholy in surprising places"; the article also has an evocative opening scene that perfectly captures the spirit of the film and its enigmatic director.

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[longreads]

A Longreads Guest Pick: Andrew Pantazi on Michael Kruse's 'The Last Voyage of the Bounty'

Andrew Pantazi writes for his hometown newspaper, The Florida Times-Union.

From the gripping first paragraph in the first chapter of the first part of this longread, 'In the dark, in the wet, whirling roar of Hurricane Sandy, on a ship tipping so badly the deck felt like a steep, slick roof …,' Michael Kruse drew me into a tale of desperation and desire.

And that's just Part 1. I didn’t want to feature a story that wasn’t fully published, but The Tampa Bay Times' The Last Voyage of the Bounty was too good to pass up. The web design is beautiful and fairly non-distracting. Kruse churns out telling details. He slows the story when the crew has to make a decision, and then he moves the story along faster and faster and faster, as the storm gets closer and closer. Also check out the reporter’s notes where he annotates how he got all the details.

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[longreads]

A Longreads Guest Pick: Kate Cox on Jennifer Gonnerman's 'The Deliverymen's Uprising'

Kate Cox is a freelance writer and editor living in New York.

Nobody will say this, but the secret to New York City survival is a sturdy emotional filter. The flipside of said filter is that hundreds of our daily encounters fail to penetrate: the deli guy, the dry cleaner, fellow commuters—we so rarely engage in any authentic way. Jennifer Gonnerman's 2007 piece for New York magazine, 'The Deliverymen's Uprising,' did for bicycle deliverymen what the best writing always does; it burst that bubble. A successful longread can disrupt the practiced rhythm of our daily interactions. Gonnerman's account of the deliveryman revolt against a local noodle shop disrupted mine. I haven't undertipped since.

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[longreads]

A Longreads Guest Pick: Drew Grossman on 'Game of Tribes'

Drew Grossman is a writer living in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared on MensHealth.com, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, and his hometown paper, The Tallahassee Democrat.

My Longreads pick this week is Diane Roberts's 'Game of Tribes' for The Oxford American. The piece is an excerpt from a longer project, a book on the culture of college football and how it contributes to and reflects the extraordinary polarization of American life. Roberts—a native of Tallahassee, Fla. and professor in the English department at Florida State University—writes a beautiful and honest essay about the contradictory, but overwhelming love of college football in the American South. We know it’s not perfect, but we can’t help ourselves. Game of Tribes is part history, part ode, and part fight song. In preparation for week 7 of college football season, read Roberts’s Game of Tribes.

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[longreads]

A Longreads Guest Pick: Tim Cigelske on Clive Thompson's "Is Google Wrecking Our Memory?"

Tim is Director of Social Media at Marquette University and writes about beer and running for DRAFT Magazine.

"Whenever I hear people talking about how technology is ruining our attention spans and turning our collective brains to mush, I like to tell them about #longreads. This article is a perfect example. I saw a link on Twitter to an excerpt of Clive Thompson's book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. I immediately saved it to Pocket to read later. In this chapter, Thompson provides background on how we've always used outside resources to boost our 'transactive memory,' or ability to recall specific facts. The most powerful aid, it turns out, is pooling our brain power with other people. Today, technology is simply multiplying that ability. Now go share with someone else."

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Photo: Simon McConico

[longreads]

A Longreads Guest Pick: Sari Botton on 'Not Weird About Brooklyn'

Sari is a writer and editor living in Rosendale, N.Y. She writes the Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me column on The Rumpus. An anthology she edited for Seal Press, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, will be released Oct. 8.

"My favorite longread this week is 'Not Weird About Brooklyn' by Helen Rubinstein in the Paris Review Daily. Having left the East Village for upstate eight years ago with very mixed feelings on the matter, I tend to be very curious about other people's stories of quitting New York City. Love-hate relationships with the place are so common as to border on the cliche - ditto the city's tenacious gravitational pull despite the hate part of that equation, despite diminishing returns over time lived there. Rubinstein acknowledges the cliche, even the one inherent in writing about it, 'the trope of the single woman in New York,' while giving new, nuanced, if meta, voice to it. Her criteria for a potential mate made me laugh (and I cheered this one: 'Not anti-memoir.'). I was reminded of an essay by John Tierny in the New York Times Magazine in the mid nineties about how fundamentally picky single New Yorkers can be. (In that one, a criteria for potential mates was, '…has resolved her control drama.') Nine days before she leaves, as she packs up her apartment, Rubinstein seems at once melancholy and resigned to leaving, and as if she's trying to convince herself she's made the right choice. It's a familiar conversation, one I have with myself all the time."

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[longreads]

Longreads Guest Pick: Briana Bierschbach on 'Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing, and Death'

Girl reporter for Politics in Minnesota. Mother of Dragons.

It was a great week for longreads in America (see: Reuters' 'The Child Exchange' investigation and Rolling Stone's interactive story on hackers who will probably save the world), but one piece was passed around on my social media feeds more than any other: 'Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing and Death,' by Shane Morris. This piece doesn't exactly exemplify any traditional journalistic values, nor would mom approve of it (warning, this story contains swears), but it's also the most educational thing I've read all week. Did you know that the 'rise of Molly can be traced back to German Shepherds?' Did you know that cartel tactics are being used to traffic Molly? No, I bet you didn't. It's like 'Breaking Bad,' but real. Added bonus: Morris's writing style is amazingly accessible. It feels like you're listening to the confessions of a friend, that is, if you have friends that do/sell a lot of drugs.

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