A thread to share pieces of longform journalism or writing you are currently digging. I have trouble finishing books sometimes, but with my long commute, articles that last me anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes are perfect. For those that don't use it, I strongly recommend downloading Pocket on your phone and adding the Pocket button to your browser. Can save articles to your phone and access them offline whenever you'd like. I'll get it started with a few recent ones I've liked: The Voyeur's Motel (The New Yorker / Gay Talese) Gerald Foos bought a motel in order to watch his guests having sex. He saw a lot more than that. In The Land of Missing Persons: The Mystery of Why People Go Missing in Alaska (Alex Tizon / The Atlantic) Two families, two bodies, and a wilderness of secrets. Who Killed the Sheridans? (The New York Times / Michael Sokolove) The police say a prominent New Jersey lawyer killed himself and his wife of 47 years. Their sons refuse to believe it. The Sex Machine (Boston Magazine / Michael Damiano) Jon Gross is having more sex than you. Way, waaaaay more sex, and with way more people’s spouses. So how exactly did this middle-aged New England plumbing-supplies salesman find the secret to free love, make friends with porn stars and multimillionaires, and become America’s king of swingers?
This is a list of most suggest and recommended magazine articles. Length varies, but the subject matters are super interesting. Also, there's Longform itself.
This piece from Huffington Post Highline was posted in the old Sexism/Feminism thread on AP and I thought it was really good, very eye-opening. Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream: The dangerous culture of male entitlement and sexual hostility hiding within America's national parks and forests. TW: sexual assault/harassment/hostility Also be conscious of sound or use headphones because the piece does include ambient noise in the background.
Longform is good, as is the Longreads weekly newsletter. I also recommend signing up to Digg's daily digest of longreads. Those three and Twitter is where I get most of my material.
The Arctic Suicides: It's Not The Dark That Kills You For more than 30 years, the suicide rate in Greenland has been among the highest in the world. Madness The Ballad of Fred and Yoko In Florida prisons, mentally ill inmates have been tortured, driven to suicide, and killed by guards. How one of the world’s foremost Beatles collectors died homeless on the streets of Little Rock.
Giving this another try. The True Story of Nintendo's Most Wanted Game How did a boring Nintendo game from 1987 become the most coveted cartridge ever? It's a bit of a mystery. Loved to Death: How Instagram Is Destroying Our Natural Wonders Geotagging technology shows us where we are, no matter the destination. But the more we discover (and the more photos we take), the more we ruin. The Rise of Dating App Fatigue Services like Tinder and Hinge are no longer shiny new toys, and some users are starting to find them more frustrating than fun.
There are old but some of my favorites... You Just Got Out of Prison. Now What? - Carlos and Roby are two ex-convicts with a simple mission: picking up inmates on the day they’re released from prison and guiding them through a changed world. My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard - Private prisons are shrouded in secrecy. I took a job as a guard to get inside—then things got crazy The Minecraft Generation - How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching millions of children to master the digital world.
Gridiron Gangster: How a Vigilante Gambler Took Down an Alleged Crime Boss Inside the story of Owen Hanson, former USC athlete suspected of heading an international gambling and drug syndicate. Jeff Rosenstock Wants You To Fight Like Hell The guy behind this year's best punk record gets real about post-election anxiety. Truther Love Uncovering the dating habits of conspiracy theorists and the challenges they face. Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump To understand what to expect from the Trump administration means in part to fathom the driven, contradictory character of Mr. Bannon, whom the president-elect has named senior counselor and chief White House strategist. Rarely has there been so incendiary a figure at the side of a president-elect, thrilling Mr. Trump’s more extreme supporters while unnerving ethnic and religious minorities and many other Americans.
"In conventional Marxist analyses, labor-power is simply presumed to be present – a given factor of capitalist production. At best, it is understood as the product of natural, biologically determined, regenerative processes. In socializing labor-power – in unearthing its insertion in history, society, and culture – social reproduction feminism reveals, in the first instance, that labor-power cannot simply be presumed to exist, but is made available to capital only because of its reproduction in and through a particular set of gendered and sexualized social relations that exist beyond the direct labor/capital relation, in the so-called private sphere." Social Reproduction Beyond Intersectionality: An Interview
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil - He was the head football coach at an elite prep school. He was also a serial pedophile who openly terrorized students for twenty-five years. So why did nobody stop him?
Bumping this for two phenomenal pieces of journalism that dropped today: Death at a Penn State Fraternity (The Atlantic) Tim Piazza fought for his life for 12 hours before his Beta Theta Pi brothers called 911. By then, it was too late. -- Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream (BuzzFeed) A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right “killing machine.”
This came out in 2015, but I just read it today and it is easily one of the most interesting and terrifying things I’ve ever read. Thought this was the best place to put it. The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest