I just read a brilliant long form investigative piece about Rupert Murdoch in Vanity Fair, which I’ll attach here: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/rupert-murdoch-cover-story
I’ve always admired this form of writing, from De Quincey to Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson and Norman Mailer.
Who are your favourite journalistic writers? Would you suggest some more contemporary ones?
I wonder if we might create a thread of our favourite long reads.
Please posts links below,
Hanif xx
Dear Readers, my dispatches will always be free and open to everyone. I am unable to use my hands and I’m writing, via dictation, with the help of my family. If you could become a paid subscriber and support me, it’d mean so much.
The music journalist, David Hepworth, turned me onto Joseph Mitchell – a man best known for his work for the New Yorker, which is collected in an anthology large enough to concuss a burglar, titled Up in the Old Hotel.
Mitchell, who was active during the early-mid 20th century, specialised in lengthy profiles of New Yorkers, mostly the working classes – men who laboured on the rivers, or in the scaffolds of the rising skyscrapers; the owners of well-established restaurants and bars that were in the process of becoming living antiques; police who specialised in cracking down on fortune tellers; the semi-itinerant families of gypsies who operated said fortune telling scams, and so on. He gravitated towards eccentrics and people who trod their own unique path – a bearded lady; the woman who worked the ticket booth at the Venice Theatre; the exuberant child prodigy, Philippa Schuyler, depicted brimming over with intelligence. She tragically drowned, the age of 35, following a helicopter crash, while working as war correspondent in Vietnam. Despite her many talents, she never learned how to swim.
In his reportage, Mitchell managed to capture a New York that was vanishing before his eyes – a world of formal beef steak dinners and oyster fleets, preserved in faded photographs. The title story is about a restaurant proprietor who has never visited the upper floors of his establishment, and who is filled with an almost existential dread when he contemplates what might be up there.
I have read that some of Mitchell's pieces parcel-up the conversations of several individuals into a more-manageable handful of composite characters. Some critics have questioned the veracity of his work. It is probably best to regard his writing as a semi-factual, anecdotal style of journalism, reminiscent of Truman Capote, that aims to present the reader with a deeper human truth.
A subject that Mitchell returned to was the eccentric Joe Gould, aka Professor Seagull on account of the raucous impression of a gull that he would sometimes perform upon request. Gould was a feral, off-kilter intelligence; an exasperating and overbearing braggart who may or not have possessed a violent streak. He claimed to be writing the World's longest book, titled 'An Oral History of Our Time' and would solicit donations that would allow him to continue this work. Mitchell, despite his best efforts, was never able to gain access to more than a few chapters, which Gould seemed to endlessly rewrite. He concluded that the book didn't exist and that Gould was trapped in a peculiar cycle of writer's block.
Mitchell suffered from mental health issues. My theory is that Gould broke him. From 1964, up until his death in 1996, he would turn up for work at the New Yorker. He was, to all appearances, a busy man. He went through the motions of reporting; he wrote occasionally; he began to set down his memoirs only to abandon them a few chapters after beginning the project. He never published anything again. William Shawn, who was editor of the New Yorker, and mindful of how influential Mitchell had been in establishing the magazine during its early days, put no pressure on him to submit anything.
What Mitchell did publish, however factual it might be, is nonetheless very good; unaffected and awash with the small daily details of life. He may have been dormant during his final 32 years at the New Yorker, but he left plenty behind - enough to keep you occupied for weeks if you were to read it all.
Snap. The Vanity Fair piece was superb I thought. Thorough. The fact that Mick Jagger sent his security in to de-bug her flat after moving out of Murdoch's got me. Seems to have had strong sources. I read so much these days on line. I follow and subscribe to the ' Byline Times' newspaper who exposed Crispin Odey's financial bung to Johnsons cabal to try to force a hard no-deal Brexit in October 2019 just so he could short the pound. That's why they tried to illegally prorogue parliament. Investigative journalism at its best.....Check them out, they hold a festival every summer too.....
This seems very long but I think it is correct. It’s a NYTimes article I’ve shared. “Two Kids. One Pony. Hundreds of Miles to Montreal’s Expo ‘67.” It is more of a video version than a traditional article and it is worth every second. I can’t wait to see everyone else’s favorites!
Also, her take on the journalist's role, while I don't wholly agree, makes some salient points. When she says, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” I would use an endnote -- usually those who do betray their sources seem to be the ones who benefit the most from readership. Just my observation and experience.
Both were written decades ago, but they've aged fairly well (except for the use of "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun), underlining the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabelle Wilkerson, was unbelievably good --- novelistic, deeply moving, incredibly well reported, and heartbreaking. And then she went on to write Caste.
Amitava Kumar writes wonderful non-fiction essays, the most recent of which explores his recent visit to his native India. It appeared in Granta, the link is free and open:
Robert Louis Stevensons' The Lantern Bearers, is my favorite essay, ever, of gorgeous prose but also the melding of memoir and narrative journalism. An exceptional piece of writing.
Reading all the comments it looks like everyone is so Anglo-Saxon minded… what about Emmanuel Carrere? Or decades ago Kapushinsky and his marvellous « Emperor »? Or closer to us the South African Harding? Or Andrei Kurkov? Or Mexican Juan Villoro? Etc…
My favorite long form journalism of late is coming out of Asheville, NC a town of about 90 thousand that was long on the hipster/tourism/hippie radar as an inexpensive place to live with walkable streets surrounded by a river and mountains. Those days are over. See: Down Town, Part 1: Merchants and workers say district is deteriorating, from The Asheville Watchdog. Not a flashy piece but well researched and in-depth: https://avlwatchdog.org/41929-2/. And this is just part one of four!
I have loved the television adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner's Fleischman is in Trouble — just as I loved the novel it sprang from. She's a wonderful writer, and her profiles are brilliant. If you haven't read "This Tom Hanks Story Will Help You Feel Less Bad", published in the New York Times in 2019, you must — and, wow, in 2019, we didn't even know how bad we were going to feel!
But I am a writer of non-fiction because of John McPhee. He is the person who taught me that *anything* is interesting if you really, really pay attention. It's so difficult to choose a single piece, but I often return to "Cooling the Lava", which appeared in the New Yorker in 1988 and is part of his collection The Control of Nature. It's about the 1973 eruption in Heimaey, Iceland, and how a community was saved.
Thanks for all the choices below: so much terrific work to read! And thank you so much for the prompt, Hanif.
I enjoyed that piece too, for the gossip, mostly. Emmanuelle Carrere’s essay on a couple of days in Davos has a similar feel, with sharp psychological insights from an observers position rather than so directly behind the scenes.
More generally, Angela Carter’s collection of journalism is something I can pick up again and again, her reports of working as a hostess in Japanese clubs are illuminating. I thought of Olivia Laing as writing that who I enjoy very much so perhaps there is a stylistic connection. Eve Babitz.
Kapuscinski’s reports of African independence, and Grosman’s war reporting is a harrowing read, where Norman Lewis’s style is more like a drily humorous policeman giving evidence.
I just read the George Trow profile of Ahmet Ertegun, which is good, but in general I find the peppy mid town Manhattan style of the New Yorker, irritating.
John Lanchester for explaining the ‘08 financial crisis and LRB business essays.
Finding it hard to spontaneously think of witty anti-establishment commentary currently in the US, it’s all so fucking earnest or showily intellectual. Ok, Tom Frank. Christian Lorentzen. Rachel Kushner. I’m sure there are more just can’t think right now. Cheers!
I’ve just discovered Jenny Diski - what a voice ! Her book of essays with the brilliant title ‘Why didn’t you just do as you were told’ for all brilliant sassy ‘difficult’ women everywhere who never did as they were told
"The Fierce Anthropologist" by Patrick Tierney in The New Yorker is a masterpiece. (Which cost him, of course, everything, as truly outstanding long form pieces often do.) I am surprised you found anything to admire in that dreary, hitting-every-predictable-snob-note Murdoch hit piece in VF.
Every single sentence pre-existed in the mind. "Now he will say this. Now he will say that." No surprise. No leaps, music, or rhythm. Not even any interesting quotes.
AI could have written it.
"Within The Context of No Context" by George Trow is amazing. The New Yorker before it was propaganda, circa 1980.
You should write for VF, it would perhaps come alive again.
I thought Rachel Kushner’s recent collection of essays “The Hard Crowd” was superb. Other long-form essayists that I have loved reading over the years are Garry Wills (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/wills-garry/), Geoff Dyer, William Finnegan, Emmanuel Carrere, George Packer and Jenny Diski. This Laurie Penny essay on Trump and HRC was one of the few amusing and insightful essays I have read on this exhausted (and exhausting) topic over the last few years: https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/american-horror-story-ab4a4b389949
I love the longer form and I get my fix reading The Great Read section in the New York Times. Various journalists and various topics. They compile them on the weekend, so you get to pick and choose your weekend reads. There is always something there that catches my interest.
Also, great articles in The Atlantic. Vanity Fair was always my go to in my younger years! LOVED it.
I used to teach a literary journalism class. I swore by Gaye Talese's Frank Sinatra Has A Cold, obvs, Didion's The White Album, and I found Tom Wolfe did not age well.
These days I'm into that so-called world of auto-theory where Rachel Cusk has provided a million biographical possibilities, and Rob Doyle's Threshold, Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism (Semiotexte) - mind-blowing.
Like much of the industrial publishing complex filled with 'commercial' pulp, journalism is rarely much better - so I'm finding an increasing love for Substack to do the work that clickbait co-opted media platforms don't have space for. Sam Kriss is good here.
I always enjoy Casey Cep's thoughtful writing for The New Yorker. I liked her book, The Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.
Patrick Radden Keefe combines great investigative chops with graceful, compelling writing. Something a little different that you might like to try (it's got bad rock 'n' roll, a whacky concert promoter, American imperialism, Cold War disinformation, kooky real-life characters; what's not to like?) is his podcast Winds of Change. A good story well told.
Love investigative journalism- although I’m a mulitimedia person. I like a nice long form documentary or podcast, as well as written journalism. I enjoyed Ronan Farrow’s work in the last few years, plus there’s often things in the Atlantic or the New Yorker that I enjoy. I remember reading one article about what happens when your kid is a psychopath, one about fraud in relation to early fragments of bits of the bible and whether Jesus had a wife. Quite random stuff sometimes, as well as a steady diet of news and politics. I quite like investigative podcasts, which can sometimes be things about crime, but there’s a lot of non-journalistic unethical crap out there too.
What a wonderful idea for a post! So many journalists for me to read for the first time. Fintan o Tooles book Ship of Fools is worth a read. Gene Kerrigan is another guy that pulls no punches. Robert Fisk had a way with words bless him. His journalism was concise, his books expanded on the subjects in a most engaging way. His book The last Great War for Civilisation makes for quite a read.
It seems absurd to ask, “are you alright?” because I know your baseline is not “alright”. I just wanted to let you know how much I look forward to reading your dispatches.
Obviously she's best known for her fiction but I'm always happy and excited to stumble across essays on any topic at all by Zadie Smith. (A good collection of links at https://longform.org/archive/writers/zadie-smith )
Brooklyn Is… by James Agee plays on my hometown heart strings. With Joseph Mitchell that’s two pioneers, sorry I can’t come up with someone more recent.
I really enjoy Jon Lee Anderson and Patrick Raden Keefe, both in the New Yorker. Lilian Ross, not only for the book on Huston's film, but her writings about Hemingway. Jon Bradshaw still stands out, though.
The music journalist, David Hepworth, turned me onto Joseph Mitchell – a man best known for his work for the New Yorker, which is collected in an anthology large enough to concuss a burglar, titled Up in the Old Hotel.
Mitchell, who was active during the early-mid 20th century, specialised in lengthy profiles of New Yorkers, mostly the working classes – men who laboured on the rivers, or in the scaffolds of the rising skyscrapers; the owners of well-established restaurants and bars that were in the process of becoming living antiques; police who specialised in cracking down on fortune tellers; the semi-itinerant families of gypsies who operated said fortune telling scams, and so on. He gravitated towards eccentrics and people who trod their own unique path – a bearded lady; the woman who worked the ticket booth at the Venice Theatre; the exuberant child prodigy, Philippa Schuyler, depicted brimming over with intelligence. She tragically drowned, the age of 35, following a helicopter crash, while working as war correspondent in Vietnam. Despite her many talents, she never learned how to swim.
In his reportage, Mitchell managed to capture a New York that was vanishing before his eyes – a world of formal beef steak dinners and oyster fleets, preserved in faded photographs. The title story is about a restaurant proprietor who has never visited the upper floors of his establishment, and who is filled with an almost existential dread when he contemplates what might be up there.
I have read that some of Mitchell's pieces parcel-up the conversations of several individuals into a more-manageable handful of composite characters. Some critics have questioned the veracity of his work. It is probably best to regard his writing as a semi-factual, anecdotal style of journalism, reminiscent of Truman Capote, that aims to present the reader with a deeper human truth.
A subject that Mitchell returned to was the eccentric Joe Gould, aka Professor Seagull on account of the raucous impression of a gull that he would sometimes perform upon request. Gould was a feral, off-kilter intelligence; an exasperating and overbearing braggart who may or not have possessed a violent streak. He claimed to be writing the World's longest book, titled 'An Oral History of Our Time' and would solicit donations that would allow him to continue this work. Mitchell, despite his best efforts, was never able to gain access to more than a few chapters, which Gould seemed to endlessly rewrite. He concluded that the book didn't exist and that Gould was trapped in a peculiar cycle of writer's block.
Mitchell suffered from mental health issues. My theory is that Gould broke him. From 1964, up until his death in 1996, he would turn up for work at the New Yorker. He was, to all appearances, a busy man. He went through the motions of reporting; he wrote occasionally; he began to set down his memoirs only to abandon them a few chapters after beginning the project. He never published anything again. William Shawn, who was editor of the New Yorker, and mindful of how influential Mitchell had been in establishing the magazine during its early days, put no pressure on him to submit anything.
What Mitchell did publish, however factual it might be, is nonetheless very good; unaffected and awash with the small daily details of life. He may have been dormant during his final 32 years at the New Yorker, but he left plenty behind - enough to keep you occupied for weeks if you were to read it all.
I loved the journalism of Oriana Fallaci. A daring war journalist who at times turned to fiction to illustrate history. https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&ei=UTF-8&p=Oriana+Fallaci&type=E210US105G0#id=3&vid=4102de64691fc5a1aa91495736eebd39&action=click
Snap. The Vanity Fair piece was superb I thought. Thorough. The fact that Mick Jagger sent his security in to de-bug her flat after moving out of Murdoch's got me. Seems to have had strong sources. I read so much these days on line. I follow and subscribe to the ' Byline Times' newspaper who exposed Crispin Odey's financial bung to Johnsons cabal to try to force a hard no-deal Brexit in October 2019 just so he could short the pound. That's why they tried to illegally prorogue parliament. Investigative journalism at its best.....Check them out, they hold a festival every summer too.....
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/09/23/brexit-disaster-capitalism-are-boris-johnsons-hedge-fund-backers-driving-policy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/opinion/pony-boys-montreal-expo-67.html?unlocked_article_code=m4Bir1luo4RQlUGmcKdKfQJ6jxJGvoRojPieUQo5rNkZQ7QELFVYqB87ezWxkekG9cNdUZX40Mt4JP-qh9ro89fURCQF4kDlsYaKPE-QtfOtgs99pkdvfng7kjInsohvjTeloPxy4-Q-HJIm3MMU5_KI5qyQL633DU_IIDR9vcKCb7xf73UeQ8UTAU3SFbSwI1pyyYOatc9ZTSHE09H7B4hJ0wxwBGUQDuX9BD_VXTLeexYSwkgbCza10dCyfwymRqeFgYgslJWBqs_wP-LGBHKQ5nhwblQROVZteGcaHOn3XIiOnRCI51QaqE94FYGK9e89RsGYFzi0rckX-Vkrk6sk9fU&giftCopy=3_Independent&smid=url-share
This seems very long but I think it is correct. It’s a NYTimes article I’ve shared. “Two Kids. One Pony. Hundreds of Miles to Montreal’s Expo ‘67.” It is more of a video version than a traditional article and it is worth every second. I can’t wait to see everyone else’s favorites!
This is one of my favourites - beautiful, joyful, sharp and sad. Jill Lepore is a gorgeous writer.
The Lingering of Losshttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/the-lingering-of-loss
I've always adored this long piece about Fungi,a dolphin that lived in Kerry for 30 years before vanishing: https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oddball-dolphin-of-dingle/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Gay Talese (Frank Sinatra has a cold, the most famous but there are many more) and Gene Weingarten (Fatal Distraction), quite obvious maybe.
Lovely story on Alabama communists mutual aid auto repair shop.
I didn’t know the original meaning of “redneck” was from communist sympathizing coal miners!
https://lux-magazine.com/article/mutual-aid-cars-alabama/
Joseph Mitchell Up in the Old Hotel. I think he’s called the father of “ literary journalism “ Great book!
She's got quite the jaundiced eye, but Janet Malcolm's treatise on Sylvia Plath is a must-read.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/08/23/the-silent-woman-i-ii-iii?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
Also, her take on the journalist's role, while I don't wholly agree, makes some salient points. When she says, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” I would use an endnote -- usually those who do betray their sources seem to be the ones who benefit the most from readership. Just my observation and experience.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/03/13/the-journalist-and-the-murderer-i?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
Both were written decades ago, but they've aged fairly well (except for the use of "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun), underlining the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabelle Wilkerson, was unbelievably good --- novelistic, deeply moving, incredibly well reported, and heartbreaking. And then she went on to write Caste.
Janet Malcolm. “psychoanalysis, the impossible profession.”
She is a journalist and writes brilliantly on this
Amitava Kumar writes wonderful non-fiction essays, the most recent of which explores his recent visit to his native India. It appeared in Granta, the link is free and open:
https://granta.com/amitava-kumar-many-words/?fbclid=IwAR3Ww4uy4uCu6XE3sg_J6BUdTJkkeKU-WTDA8Xn7gcAadYu7TdG6g0i0G4A
Robert Louis Stevensons' The Lantern Bearers, is my favorite essay, ever, of gorgeous prose but also the melding of memoir and narrative journalism. An exceptional piece of writing.
Reading all the comments it looks like everyone is so Anglo-Saxon minded… what about Emmanuel Carrere? Or decades ago Kapushinsky and his marvellous « Emperor »? Or closer to us the South African Harding? Or Andrei Kurkov? Or Mexican Juan Villoro? Etc…
Andrew O’Hagan’s piece in the London Review of Books on the Grenfell Tower disaster. So long-form it’s really a book. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n11/andrew-o-hagan/the-tower
Ohhhhh yes: Love love love DIDION. H.S. Thompson. Mailer. My mind is thinking 1960s/70s.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
My favorite long form journalism of late is coming out of Asheville, NC a town of about 90 thousand that was long on the hipster/tourism/hippie radar as an inexpensive place to live with walkable streets surrounded by a river and mountains. Those days are over. See: Down Town, Part 1: Merchants and workers say district is deteriorating, from The Asheville Watchdog. Not a flashy piece but well researched and in-depth: https://avlwatchdog.org/41929-2/. And this is just part one of four!
I have loved the television adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner's Fleischman is in Trouble — just as I loved the novel it sprang from. She's a wonderful writer, and her profiles are brilliant. If you haven't read "This Tom Hanks Story Will Help You Feel Less Bad", published in the New York Times in 2019, you must — and, wow, in 2019, we didn't even know how bad we were going to feel!
But I am a writer of non-fiction because of John McPhee. He is the person who taught me that *anything* is interesting if you really, really pay attention. It's so difficult to choose a single piece, but I often return to "Cooling the Lava", which appeared in the New Yorker in 1988 and is part of his collection The Control of Nature. It's about the 1973 eruption in Heimaey, Iceland, and how a community was saved.
Thanks for all the choices below: so much terrific work to read! And thank you so much for the prompt, Hanif.
I enjoyed that piece too, for the gossip, mostly. Emmanuelle Carrere’s essay on a couple of days in Davos has a similar feel, with sharp psychological insights from an observers position rather than so directly behind the scenes.
More generally, Angela Carter’s collection of journalism is something I can pick up again and again, her reports of working as a hostess in Japanese clubs are illuminating. I thought of Olivia Laing as writing that who I enjoy very much so perhaps there is a stylistic connection. Eve Babitz.
Kapuscinski’s reports of African independence, and Grosman’s war reporting is a harrowing read, where Norman Lewis’s style is more like a drily humorous policeman giving evidence.
I just read the George Trow profile of Ahmet Ertegun, which is good, but in general I find the peppy mid town Manhattan style of the New Yorker, irritating.
John Lanchester for explaining the ‘08 financial crisis and LRB business essays.
Finding it hard to spontaneously think of witty anti-establishment commentary currently in the US, it’s all so fucking earnest or showily intellectual. Ok, Tom Frank. Christian Lorentzen. Rachel Kushner. I’m sure there are more just can’t think right now. Cheers!
I’ve just discovered Jenny Diski - what a voice ! Her book of essays with the brilliant title ‘Why didn’t you just do as you were told’ for all brilliant sassy ‘difficult’ women everywhere who never did as they were told
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/why-didn-t-you-just-do-what-you-were-told-essays-jenny-diski
"The Fierce Anthropologist" by Patrick Tierney in The New Yorker is a masterpiece. (Which cost him, of course, everything, as truly outstanding long form pieces often do.) I am surprised you found anything to admire in that dreary, hitting-every-predictable-snob-note Murdoch hit piece in VF.
Every single sentence pre-existed in the mind. "Now he will say this. Now he will say that." No surprise. No leaps, music, or rhythm. Not even any interesting quotes.
AI could have written it.
"Within The Context of No Context" by George Trow is amazing. The New Yorker before it was propaganda, circa 1980.
You should write for VF, it would perhaps come alive again.
I thought Rachel Kushner’s recent collection of essays “The Hard Crowd” was superb. Other long-form essayists that I have loved reading over the years are Garry Wills (http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/wills-garry/), Geoff Dyer, William Finnegan, Emmanuel Carrere, George Packer and Jenny Diski. This Laurie Penny essay on Trump and HRC was one of the few amusing and insightful essays I have read on this exhausted (and exhausting) topic over the last few years: https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/american-horror-story-ab4a4b389949
https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571376827-dispatches-from-the-diaspora/
I love the longer form and I get my fix reading The Great Read section in the New York Times. Various journalists and various topics. They compile them on the weekend, so you get to pick and choose your weekend reads. There is always something there that catches my interest.
Also, great articles in The Atlantic. Vanity Fair was always my go to in my younger years! LOVED it.
I used to teach a literary journalism class. I swore by Gaye Talese's Frank Sinatra Has A Cold, obvs, Didion's The White Album, and I found Tom Wolfe did not age well.
These days I'm into that so-called world of auto-theory where Rachel Cusk has provided a million biographical possibilities, and Rob Doyle's Threshold, Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism (Semiotexte) - mind-blowing.
Like much of the industrial publishing complex filled with 'commercial' pulp, journalism is rarely much better - so I'm finding an increasing love for Substack to do the work that clickbait co-opted media platforms don't have space for. Sam Kriss is good here.
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah deserved all the awards and accolades she won for "A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof":
https://www.gq.com/story/dylann-roof-making-of-an-american-terrorist
I always enjoy Casey Cep's thoughtful writing for The New Yorker. I liked her book, The Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.
Patrick Radden Keefe combines great investigative chops with graceful, compelling writing. Something a little different that you might like to try (it's got bad rock 'n' roll, a whacky concert promoter, American imperialism, Cold War disinformation, kooky real-life characters; what's not to like?) is his podcast Winds of Change. A good story well told.
I’ve admired the work of William Langeweische ever since I read his first contribution to The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/11/the-world-in-its-extreme/667826/
Love investigative journalism- although I’m a mulitimedia person. I like a nice long form documentary or podcast, as well as written journalism. I enjoyed Ronan Farrow’s work in the last few years, plus there’s often things in the Atlantic or the New Yorker that I enjoy. I remember reading one article about what happens when your kid is a psychopath, one about fraud in relation to early fragments of bits of the bible and whether Jesus had a wife. Quite random stuff sometimes, as well as a steady diet of news and politics. I quite like investigative podcasts, which can sometimes be things about crime, but there’s a lot of non-journalistic unethical crap out there too.
https://newrepublic.com/article/118748/william-t-vollmanns-dangerously-uncorrupted-literary-mind I loved this profile by my friend Tom Bissell. I had a temp corporate editing job in DC when I read it on the Metro in one big gulp. Made me feel less alienated. Also a fan of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s profile on Axl Rose — how he describes his scream.
What a wonderful idea for a post! So many journalists for me to read for the first time. Fintan o Tooles book Ship of Fools is worth a read. Gene Kerrigan is another guy that pulls no punches. Robert Fisk had a way with words bless him. His journalism was concise, his books expanded on the subjects in a most engaging way. His book The last Great War for Civilisation makes for quite a read.
Hanif- I miss hearing from you.
It seems absurd to ask, “are you alright?” because I know your baseline is not “alright”. I just wanted to let you know how much I look forward to reading your dispatches.
David Sedaris ,Me Talk Pretty One Day.
They Saw the Horrific Aftermath of a Mass Shooting. Should We?
This piece, by Jay Kirk, in the New York Times of 20 April, is one of the most powerful pieces of contextual journalism I have ever read.
I can't provide a link.
Some favorites
Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry
Susan Orlean esp The Orchid Thief, and The Library
John Vaillant's “Golden Spruce” and “The Tiger”
American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee
The Vanity Fair piece was brilliant. Thank you for sharing it!
It is said that Murdoch and Maxwell are the models for Logan. What a pair!
Hi everyone, I was blown away by this piece.
FEBRUARY 27, 2023 ISSUE
LETTER FROM ISRAEL
ITAMAR BEN-GVIR, ISRAEL’S MINISTER OF CHAOS
As unrest roils the country, a controversial figure from the far right helps Benjamin Netanyahu hold on to power.
By Ruth Margalit
February 20, 2023
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volumes 1-4.
The Jaguar Smile - Salman Rushdie
Substack - How America Took Out The Nordstream Pipeline, Seymour Hersh
Plus stuff from...
+ Pilger
+ Assange
+ Roger Waters
Not long-form, but gosh I love Patrick Freyne’s writing: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2023/04/14/the-main-thing-im-learning-is-that-having-an-affair-is-way-easier-than-i-thought/
For art pieces John Richardson for vanity fair are wonderful. My favorite is a piece he did on Gala Dali.
and now, how to manage this list ?
not sure if my comment went thru... i have many favorites... one of them is Adam Schatz, love his piece on the great jazz artist Don Cherry in NYRB.... don't know if it's readable beyond the pay wall. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/06/don-cherry-apostle-now-ness/
Obviously she's best known for her fiction but I'm always happy and excited to stumble across essays on any topic at all by Zadie Smith. (A good collection of links at https://longform.org/archive/writers/zadie-smith )
Brooklyn Is… by James Agee plays on my hometown heart strings. With Joseph Mitchell that’s two pioneers, sorry I can’t come up with someone more recent.
James Meek, e.g. 'Where will we live?'; 'It's already happened'. Wide ranging.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/search-results?search=james+meek#
I really enjoy Jon Lee Anderson and Patrick Raden Keefe, both in the New Yorker. Lilian Ross, not only for the book on Huston's film, but her writings about Hemingway. Jon Bradshaw still stands out, though.
Johny Pitts „Afropean. Notes from Black Europe“
This was one of the most heartbreaking tales on greed and poverty and when the two collide. https://www.propublica.org/article/milwaukee-fire-brunner-belen-landlord-tenant
I keep going back to this.
https://granta.com/touch/
I am big fan of "Rest of the World" that usually looks at overlooked tech stories from a wider perspective. Example: https://restofworld.org/2021/the-facebook-outage-crippled-businesses-and-communication-around-the-world/