215 Of The Best Longreads Of 2015
January 1, 2016 8:52 PM Subscribe
Holy crumbs, triggerfinger. This is tremendous.
posted by mochapickle at 9:20 PM on January 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by mochapickle at 9:20 PM on January 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is a great collection. I've read enough to know that the rest must be amazing.
I wouldn't call them "long reads" just "slightly longer than average."
posted by miyabo at 9:24 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
I wouldn't call them "long reads" just "slightly longer than average."
posted by miyabo at 9:24 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
OMG do we have to finish all of these before posting a snarky comment? The thread will be closed before even half way.
posted by sammyo at 9:39 PM on January 1, 2016
posted by sammyo at 9:39 PM on January 1, 2016
Who has it in them to digest even this tiny a slice of the whole of human misery across the whole planet.
posted by bleep at 10:44 PM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by bleep at 10:44 PM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
Mod note: I understand that intentions were innocent, but I've deleted the copied text which is basically the entirety of the Autostraddle piece except for the intro; it's fine to link to an excerpt to give some idea of the content, but not so much to reproduce an entire huge article, which functionally allows people to bypass the originating site/authors.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:20 PM on January 1, 2016
posted by taz (staff) at 11:20 PM on January 1, 2016
Sorry about that. I'll re-add this, which was also included: Longform Best of 2015.
posted by triggerfinger at 11:25 PM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by triggerfinger at 11:25 PM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
Of note: "What About Bob?" by Emily Nussbaum, about The Jinx, was written without the author having seen the finale.
I kind of feel like her editor should have backed up or at least sent her an email after the fact and said, "Uh, you should really watch that, okay?"
posted by St. Hubbins at 11:48 PM on January 1, 2016
I kind of feel like her editor should have backed up or at least sent her an email after the fact and said, "Uh, you should really watch that, okay?"
posted by St. Hubbins at 11:48 PM on January 1, 2016
Wow, these are great - and just from skimming them all enough to add to Instapaper I've realised that I should add a bunch of these sites to my regular reading as well.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:10 AM on January 2, 2016
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:10 AM on January 2, 2016
One of the things that really bums me out about the rebuttals to, and NYT Public Editor's response to, the "Unvarnished" story, is the unspoken subtext: Only powerful interest groups can expect fairness and accuracy in reporting. With any kind of bombshell expose like this, there will be an angle, a narrative, even an agenda. There's no way you can write (or a paper will publish) a dry, quantitative, 'objective' piece on an obscure industry. You have to generalize, summarize, condense, elide, and illustrate. In the mix, some details will come out wrong, and more importantly, you will have to make claims that are interpretive and heuristic. You will never prove, objectively, that something is "exploitative", "misleading", "unfair", etc. It's the only way to do an investigation like this and turn it into a meaningful piece of writing.
So, there will always be nits to pick, sometimes even big ones. But in this case it seems pretty clear that the substantial truth of the piece came out of the rebuttals and counter-investigations basically unblemished. Yet here we have the Public Editor saying the writers should "Giv[e] more acknowledgment to the salons that do it right, emphasizing the ways that these low-paid jobs can help new immigrants get a toehold in their new country ". So, the NYT's responsibility to protect industry is so fundamental that they have to ensure an investigative piece about problems within a specific industry makes a token defense of the machinations of global capitalism? She also suggests the writer should have given less credence to some of her evidence, while giving full credence to a rebuttal WRITTEN BY A NAIL SALON OWNER, with essentially his personal experience as his core evidence.
We only ever get this level of care and caution when there is someone with enough power to push back. Good for the editors for backing up Sarah Maslin Nir's great story. Boo on the Public Editor for the weak-kneed response.
posted by abrightersummerday at 12:32 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
So, there will always be nits to pick, sometimes even big ones. But in this case it seems pretty clear that the substantial truth of the piece came out of the rebuttals and counter-investigations basically unblemished. Yet here we have the Public Editor saying the writers should "Giv[e] more acknowledgment to the salons that do it right, emphasizing the ways that these low-paid jobs can help new immigrants get a toehold in their new country ". So, the NYT's responsibility to protect industry is so fundamental that they have to ensure an investigative piece about problems within a specific industry makes a token defense of the machinations of global capitalism? She also suggests the writer should have given less credence to some of her evidence, while giving full credence to a rebuttal WRITTEN BY A NAIL SALON OWNER, with essentially his personal experience as his core evidence.
We only ever get this level of care and caution when there is someone with enough power to push back. Good for the editors for backing up Sarah Maslin Nir's great story. Boo on the Public Editor for the weak-kneed response.
posted by abrightersummerday at 12:32 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
I did a little text parsing and it looks like these are the places that featured the most items:
4 Broadly
4 Medium
4 The Atlantic
5 Racked
5 The New Yorker
6 Buzzfeed
6 Guernica
7 Autostraddle
7 The New York Times
There were also 11 places that had three entries on the list, and 23 with two entries. And it's possible I missed some entries, but this is pretty close :)
posted by the agents of KAOS at 2:04 AM on January 2, 2016
4 Broadly
4 Medium
4 The Atlantic
5 Racked
5 The New Yorker
6 Buzzfeed
6 Guernica
7 Autostraddle
7 The New York Times
There were also 11 places that had three entries on the list, and 23 with two entries. And it's possible I missed some entries, but this is pretty close :)
posted by the agents of KAOS at 2:04 AM on January 2, 2016
Okay, if we also add all the selections from the Longreads Best of 2015, as far as I can tell the only stories that appeared across all three sites were:
Boston Globe: The life and times of Strider Wolf
NYT: The Price of Nice Nails
If we look at the articles on Longform and Longreads that couldn't be included in the Autostraddle list because they were written by men, the ones picked as top stories on both sites were:
The Atavist: Whatsoever Things Are True
The New Yorker: Unfollow
HuffPo: The Lost Girls
HuffPo: The Myth of the Ethical Shopper
Eater: Ina Garten Does It Herself
NYT: The Agency
Bloomberg Businessweek: What Is Code?
posted by triggerfinger at 3:36 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
Boston Globe: The life and times of Strider Wolf
NYT: The Price of Nice Nails
If we look at the articles on Longform and Longreads that couldn't be included in the Autostraddle list because they were written by men, the ones picked as top stories on both sites were:
The Atavist: Whatsoever Things Are True
The New Yorker: Unfollow
HuffPo: The Lost Girls
HuffPo: The Myth of the Ethical Shopper
Eater: Ina Garten Does It Herself
NYT: The Agency
Bloomberg Businessweek: What Is Code?
posted by triggerfinger at 3:36 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
Almost all the ones on the list that I have read were good, and I have about half of the unread ones opened as tabs right now. There is some good reading here. A lot of the year end stuff isn't very interesting, but I always appreciate these best-of lists of articles and books since it is so easy to miss great writing.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:12 AM on January 2, 2016
posted by Dip Flash at 6:12 AM on January 2, 2016
The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogotá is fantastic - reading it gave me chills.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 7:56 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 7:56 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
I couldn't help noticing this similar characterization of two different people in two different articles.
J.G. is a lawyer in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences.
Greene, 57, has curly brown hair, glasses, and the habit of speaking in complete paragraphs, as though he's lecturing a psychology class instead of having a conversation.posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 10:09 AM on January 2, 2016
Holy crap, that National Association of Professional Women is a scam article.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 12:53 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 12:53 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
The Earthquake article had me refreshing the smithsonian seismic tracker a few times this morning. Same thing happened after I read about the Yellowstone caldera in Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything.
I've read a couple of the others and I'm going back for more. Thank you!!
posted by brain.eat.brain at 3:23 PM on January 2, 2016
I've read a couple of the others and I'm going back for more. Thank you!!
posted by brain.eat.brain at 3:23 PM on January 2, 2016
I know about Instapaper but it would be great to have a tool that would automatically pull the text from each link into chapters, like a book. Does such a thing exist?
posted by desjardins at 3:38 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by desjardins at 3:38 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
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posted by T.D. Strange at 8:55 PM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]