Rolling Long Form Article Thread

There have been a couple of threads about this in the distant past, and maybe my search skills are not terribly good in finding more recent ones, but I thought it might be a good idea to have a thread for long form articles you've read that you thought others might enjoy.

No subject matter boundaries, but let's say 5,000 words or more?

Here's one I read this morning, and I can't remember if I picked it from an ilx link or what. Doesn't matter.

Pepino, the Gentleman Art Thief of Venice

there's a 77 thread and a noise thread for this as well but they're both dormant
this was pretty intense. i avoid vice generally but damn
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/my-gandma-the-poisoner-0000474-v21n10

:

New piece about sumo from Grantland

My evil dad: Life as a serial killer’s daughter

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/03/24/rwandan-genocide/

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/dolphin-intelligence/foer-text

fascinating article, mordy - thanks for posting

The dawn of online piracy:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-man-who-broke-the-music-business

Glover had been thinking about retiring from the Scene. He started leaking when he was in his mid-twenties. He was now thirty-two. He had worn the same haircut for ten years, and dressed in the same screen-print T-shirts and bluejeans, but his perception of himself was changing. He didn’t remember why he had been so attracted to street bikes, or why he’d felt it necessary to own a handgun. He found his Grim Reaper tattoo impossibly stupid.

He started leaking when he was in his mid-twenties

same

Glover had been thinking about retiring from the Scene.

He was getting too old for this shit.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/an-artist-with-amnesia

Gold Artifacts Tell Tale of Drug-Fueled Rituals and "Bastard Wars"
Vessels discovered in a Scythian grave mound contained traces of opium and marijuana, confirming the claim of an ancient historian.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150522-scythians-marijuana-bastard-wars-kurgan-archaeology/

this is not longform at all but it is good

cool, wkiw the scythians

cf related article

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141029-amazons-scythians-hunger-games-herodotus-ice-princess-tattoo-cannabis/

Amazons smoked pot and drank a powerful concoction of fermented mare's milk called kumis, which they used in rituals. Put us around a campfire in ancient Scythia.

In that picture of the ancient Amazons sitting around their campfire we also have to include men. We don't have any evidence that there were whole societies with nothing but women. When we say Amazons, we mean Scythian women. In this case Scythian warrior women.

Herodotus gives us a very good picture. He says that they gathered a flower or leaves or seeds—he wasn't absolutely sure—and sat around a campfire and threw these plants onto the fire. They became intoxicated from the smoke and then would get up and dance and shout and yell with joy. It's pretty certain he was talking about hemp, because he actually does call it cannabis. He just wasn't certain whether it was the leaves or the flower or the bud. But we know they used intoxicants. Archaeologists are finding proof of this in the graves. Every Scythian man and woman was buried with a hemp-smoking kit, including a little charcoal brazier.

Herodotus also described a technique in which they would build a sauna-type arrangement of felt tents, probably in wintertime on the steppes. He describes it as like a tepee with a felt or leather canopy. They would take the hemp-smoking equipment inside the tent and get high. They've found the makings of those tents in many Scythian graves. They've also found the remains of kumis, the fermented mare's milk. I give a recipe in the book for a freezing technique they used to raise its potency. [Laughs.] Do not try this at home.

http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/the-root-of-all-things/

http://publicdomainreview.org/2015/06/03/the-nightwalker-and-the-nocturnal-picaresque/

I guess it was published a while ago, but just read this and thought it was fantastic: https://read.atavist.com/the-fort-of-young-saplings

Building the Clinton Foundation

https://medium.com/@aarongell/friend-of-the-devil-3726bd1ddc1c#.unf9gm7o3

Ten years ago, an acquaintance committed one of the most nefarious crimes in New York history. Then he helped me try to understand why.

anyone read this? thought it was p fascinating, despite feeling like the writer probably veers into unethical places on several occasions. nonetheless it's still a pretty wild story.

i would say DEFINITELY veers into unethical and often skeevy places and takes a lot of time to explain how he has a good reason why

Yeah, I think it was so long as to almost wind its way away from some pretty base behaviour.

The writer came across quite weak, sort of dominated by the power of the story.

The thing about the 16-year-old girl is crazy too.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

I really liked this:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper

that is great

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/

http://www.golf.com/tour-and-news/what-happened-tiger-woods-it-remains-most-vexing-question-sports

^^ feels like the outline for a potentially great novel.

many links

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/04/queens-of-nonfiction-56-women-writers-everyone-should-read.html

ta

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-battle-over-the-sea-monkey-fortune.html?_r=0

richard pevear and larissa volokhonsky on translating, from russian in particular:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6385/the-art-of-translation-no-4-richard-pevear-and-larissa-volokhonsky

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra

Thanks. Christ.

The translation one was superb.

really interesting follow up to that translation article - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/

just realised also discussed here Anna Karenina

http://jezebel.com/interview-with-a-woman-who-recently-had-an-abortion-at-1781972395

damn

This old trifle is a pleasure http://www.gq.com/story/fashion-generation-tips-national-magazine-award

I feel like this is really worthwhile

https://medium.com/deep-code/situational-assessment-2017-trump-edition-d189d24fc046#.q6do7zry6

(thanks, Google, for finding this thread)

can we stop using war as a metaphor for everything we think is fucking important

I'm ready for a war on war

fucking singularity fetishists

personally I find it hard to disagree with "make more friends" as one of the central conclusions of a "world is changing rapidly" analysis

https://redux.slate.com/cover-stories/2017/05/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html

that's an attention-grabbing headline

Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection

By day, New York’s residential garbage is picked up by municipal workers. But come nightfall, private haulers collect the commercial trash, often working at breakneck speeds with few protections for workers.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly-world-of-private-garbage-collection

man i cannot recommend that story enough
the stuff those guys go through, it’s harrowing shit

yeah somebody posted that on FB and it is very good

The Week JFK Airport Stood Still

Everything that went wrong as the bomb cyclone hit America’s largest port of entry.

https://slate.com/business/2018/01/when-the-bomb-cyclone-shut-down-jfk-airport.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru

I enjoyed this

https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21734379-no-guts-no-glory-fundamental-physics-frustrating-physicists

This piece is so full of astounding and memorable sentences

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/24/how-the-sandwich-consumed-britain

really no love for the gigantic British sandwich industry

Oh hell's bells yes! Matter of fact I'm only halfway through, saved the rest for later, but it's so great.

Boltman has been round the block a few times. He had a McDonald’s franchise for a while. He observed that, even as sandwiches function as an accelerant of our harried, grinding lives, they also offer a moment of precious, private escape. “People want to eat,” he said, leaning close. “They want comfort. They want solace. I’ve had a shit morning. I’ve fallen out with my boss. I’ve had a fucking horrible journey in. A poxy lettuce-and-whatever concoction in a plastic bowl is not going to do it for me. I want a cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit and I actually want to cry. I am going out for a fucking sandwich.”

👌

And Alan Sugar’s bloviating. You can just see it.

Anyway this was entertaining for slightly different reasons: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/how-to-harden-a-country-that-sits-on-a-fault-line/

I read half of the sandwich article when it came out, they missed the paragraph about people coming to hassle me when I'm obviously trying to eat my lunch and read about Wolves for 15 minutes.

I started to read the sandwich article but the idea of all those cold, pre-packaged British sandwiches depressed me. I couldn't get past "salmon & tomato".

My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror

In another recent incident that gave me chilling insight into the power of government surveillance, I met with a sensitive and well-placed source through an intermediary. After the meeting, which occurred a few years ago in Europe, I began to do research on the source. About an hour later, I got a call from the intermediary, who said, “Stop Googling his name.”

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/03/my-life-as-a-new-york-times-reporter-in-the-shadow-of-the-war-on-terror/

finally read the sandwich story and it is indeed great, but

Louis Eustache Ude, the chef d’hotel to the Earl of Sefton . . . did his best to refine the craze, suggesting bechamel as a barrier and urging “extraordinary care” in the trimming of salad, but you can sense in his words the frustration that he has been reduced to this. “Of all things in the world, sandwiches have least need of explanation,” he wrote. “Everyone knows how to make them, more or less.”

the lex to thread

quincy jones knows every motherfucker in the world

https://www.gq.com/story/quincy-jones-has-a-story

http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/quincy-jones-in-conversation.html

You sure seem to know a lot.
I know too much, man.

What’s something you wish you didn’t know?
Who killed Kennedy.

Who did it?
[Chicago mobster Sam] GiancanaChicago gangster Sam Giancana is a well-known name among Kennedy conspiracists, both for his alleged help in delivering Illinois votes for Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election and the 1963 assassination of the president. The latter theory largely stems from Giancana’s murder in 1975, not long before he was supposed to testify before a Senate committee investigating collusion between the mob and the CIA. . The connection was there between Sinatra and the Mafia and Kennedy. Joe Kennedy — he was a bad man — he came to Frank to have him talk to Giancana about getting votes.

I’ve heard this theory before, that the mob helped win Illinois for Kennedy in 1960.
We shouldn’t talk about this publicly. Where you from?

Toronto.
I was at the Massey Hall show.

Really? The Charlie Parker concert with Mingus and those guys?
Yeah, man. I saw the contract after. The whole band made $1,100. I’ll never forget that.

Love this. Amazing read, thanks for sharing.

This was unexpectedly engrossing:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/10/the-invisible-power-of-big-glasses-eyewear-industry-essilor-luxottica

An American family’s struggle for student loan redemption

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/looks-like-debt-to-me-miller

Charles W. Howard is the porta-potty king of New York City. The seat of his vast empire is Broad Channel, Queens; from this windswept rock in Jamaica Bay, you can see the lights of Manhattan twinkling across the water. Early every morning, while the city sleeps, dozens of trucks — tagged with WE’RE #1 AT PICKING UP #2 decals — snake through the five boroughs to clean his 18,000 toilets. The company boasts more than $35 million in annual revenue, thanks in part to “salesgirls” who head out each day in the company’s signature Volkswagen Beetles to poach contracts from competitors who are too shy to sell with sex. Charlie himself arrives at work only around midday in a black Cadillac Escalade. Young female dispatchers and clerks cry “Charlie! Charlie!” while men in orange slickers hose down toilets in the yard.

On a recent Thursday, the gleaming Escalade stops at a pizzeria, and Charlie, 53, steps out, a bit heavy and wearing a rumpled purple dress shirt. He’s brought along Kimberly, the star of his company’s YouTube channel. She’s beautiful, blonde, and his wife. Charlie favors superlatives, like another Queens businessman, and speaks with the accent you’d expect from a man so old-school New York there’s a neighborhood named after his family. And now, not far from Howard Beach, he explains why he’s the greatest toilet man in America. “I had different theories about business,” he says, “and they all turned out to be correct.”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/charles-howard-porta-potty-king-of-nyc.html

https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/bruce-hay-paternity-trap-maria-pia-shuman-mischa-haider.html

^^^ oh yeah this thing was insane.

maybe dude would have gotten hoodwinked either way bc he's such a sap but it certainly didn't help matters that he and his ex-wife had such a nebulous arrangement and had apparently failed to communicate any parameters or boundaries. I guess I can understand wanting to still co-habitate while raising young children (though it definitely seems like a highly fraught proposition) but then to have some kind of perceived understanding that you can't pursue a serious relationship but you CAN pursue casual hook-ups, and then apparently to be completely wrong about that, at least from the ex-wife's perspective...jesus, what a clusterfuck.

This Simon Reynolds article got quite a lot of traction at the time it was published, I seem to recall:

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/

The legacy of violence surrounding James Brown, up to and including questions surrounding his own death. Compelling reading, but it’s...a lot:

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/02/us/james-brown-death-questions/index.html

christ

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

jo ann beard is one of the greatest to ever do it, buy the boys of my youth mookie

Seconding that, that book is so good.

interview with ellen burstyn

https://www.vulture.com/2019/12/interview-ellen-burstyn-on-inside-the-actors-studio.html

https://www.limestonepostmagazine.com/bloomington-2019-year-of-farmers-market-controversy

If someone asked you for your favorite longform pieces, what would you list? Interpret that however you want

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) May 28, 2021

want to know lots and lots about man-made freshwater lakes?

https://limestonepostmagazine.com/deep-dive-how-healthy-is-lake-monroe/

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/o-uommibatto-how-the-pre-raphaelites-became-obsessed-with-the-wombat/