For those of you who keep track of this stuff, lots of people are freaking out about the future of long form journalism. Is this The End Of Print Forever, are newspapers DOOMED, does anyone read anything over 140 characters anymore, have we as a society lost our ability to foc—ooh, look, a butterfly!
No sense in pretending your charming HC writers don’t have a dog in that fight—what with, you know, wanting to be journalists upon graduation and all—but for whatever it’s worth, we’ve got a feeling this long form storytelling isn’t going anywhere. Hopefully you can see from this list (which features three stories that appear only online) that we’re not particularly concerned. Because, well, maybe print is going away. But back in the day, we used to read stories on scrolls. When Gutenburg busted out his printing press, people were probably in panic mode too: “What’s all this codex shit? We’re supposed to be reading on rolled-up papyrus!” Change isn’t blasphemy, kids. Change is a constant. (Sounds like something your stoner roommate might say, but there you go.) So maybe these stories are leaving the page and finding a place on a screen or a tablet or some megatron-flux-capacitor-projector of the future. The form is the thing that dies. But the substance, the story, the story is the thing that survives. We want to celebrate stories.
In no particular order, read on for Her Campus’s Favorite Long Form Journalism of 2010.
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Zadie Smith, NY Review of Books
A briefing: Zadie Smith (of White Teeth fame) reviews The Social Network , tries to understand our addiction to social networking by crawling inside our strange relationship with Facebook and attempting to find a way out.
A sample: “Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin wants your disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world.”
Why it’s on the list: Mark Zuckerberg might be an asshole, but that doesn’t mean his creation (that is, if it’s really his creation) hasn’t changed your life.
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Nancy Gibbs, Time
A briefing: In honor of the Pill’s 50th anniversary, a comprehensive history of the drug behind one of the biggest scientific and social innovations of the century.
A sample: “There’s no such thing as the Car or the Shoe or the Laundry Soap. But everyone knows the Pill, whose FDA approval 50 years ago rearranged the furniture of human relations in ways that we’ve argued about ever since.”
Why it’s on the list: If you are like over 16 million women in America, you pop one of these every single day. In the 1870s, Congress banned birth control information; they deemed the literature “obscene.” As recently as the 1960s, you often had to be married just to get a prescription for the Pill. Pretty lovely, isn’t it, to be in the generation that gets to take all that progress for granted.
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The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High
Jay Caspian King, The Morning News
A briefing: The life of a gambling addict as measured in dollars, chips and encounters with a fantastic stripper.
A sample: “I could tell you that during a 36-hour period in July of 2006, I lost $18,000 in Las Vegas. Or I could tell you I once picked through every corner of my car, including the grating underneath the spare tire, for five dollars of spare change so that I could make the minimum bet at a blackjack table (a bet I lost). And my interest in divulging these details would not be to instruct or to edify, or even to elicit empathy from fellow addicts. My interest would be to rip open my suffering heart and show you its beautiful beating, and in this way, I might think of myself as having been more alive than you, my hopefully horrified reader, were at a similar age and time.”
Why it’s on the list: King makes being inside the mind of a gambling addict feel like being inside a casino: disorienting, exciting, perpetually in motion. He makes you hopeful and nervous at the same time.
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Sean Flynn, GQ
A briefing: Flynn’s play-by-play of the events leading up to, during, and in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion lets you in on the lives of the rig workers and rescuers. You learn to care about them and then (you should see this coming, you know how the story ends, but still) you watch most of them die.
A sample: “Two weeks at sea, and he’s getting homesick. It’s a macho environment, too, and that gets to him after a while…On his hard hat, under the brim, Shane’s written two dates, his anniversary and Blaine’s birthday. Whenever I’m having one of THOSE days, he wrote on his MySpace page, where nothing is going right and I just want to choke slam someone, all I have to do is look at those two dates and remember that whatever I do out here impacts my two angels more than anyone and that I never want them to have to go without anything at all.…”
Why it’s on the list: Somehow when we were handing out roles for this disaster, we managed to skip these men. We made a BP executive the villain, an oil-slicked pelican the casualty, 210,000 gallons a day the headline. Might think there’s no good in all that bad, but here it is: husbands a day past a thirteenth wedding anniversary, fathers with sons who watch Elmo’s World, guys who work for a living. Or used to, anyway.
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Ted Cox, Stinque.com
A briefing: The gay “conversion” movement consists of organizations who assert they can “cure” gays of homosexuality. Cox, a straight atheist, spent a year undercover in the “ex-gay” movement and, under the guise of a Christian man “suffering from Same Sex Attraction,” spent a weekend at a Christian gay-to-straight conversion camp outside Phoenix.
A sample: “The Guide whispers in my ear how I used to be the Golden Child, how everything was wonderful before someone hurt me, how I put up walls to protect myself, and now it was time for those walls to come down. Like so many times that night, I’m trying not to crack up. To use another children’s tale, I feel like the little kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Except this time, instead of pointing out that the emperor is parading down the street in his birthday suit, I want to stand up and scream, “Are you fucking kidding?”
Why it’s on the list: Did you read that excerpt? That’s not even the weirdest thing that goes down over the weekend. But instead of dismissing the participants as religious extremist whackos, Cox gets at the real story: how sad it is that these men, some with wives and children who they probably love very much, never stop struggling to reconcile the faith they believe to be right and the emotions they’re told must be wrong.
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“The Last Nazi”
Scott Raab, Esquire
John Demjanjuk on trial.
A briefing: John Demjanjuk is eighty-nine years old. He is on trial as an accessory to almost 30,000 Nazi killings. He is not German, nor was he ever a Nazi. He is, however, in Germany, in prison, waiting to die. On convicting a criminal of a crime he maybe didn’t commit during a war that’s never really over.
A sample: “Unready to see humor in the ashpit of Europe’s Jewry? If so, I sympathize — I am a Jew, with family on both sides whose souls rose in that smoke — but I have little to say to those who can’t tell justice from vengeance, who believe that ends justify means, or who would mistake laughter at this farcical Nazi hunt for dishonoring the dead or making lies of history. But funny is funny, even when nourished in the soil of horror and delivered deadpan.”
Why it’s on the list: Usually when a writer uses the first person, you can practically see him leaning on a crutch shaped like the letter “I.” Here, though, Raab’s personal history is there when it’s relevant and absent when it would be distracting. He doesn’t play the victim card, doesn’t ask you to feel pity for the impact the Holocaust had on his family (tragic but true: somewhere between 11 and 17 million people died in the Holocaust, it’s not like being related to victims makes him unique). He demands only that you try, as he tries, to set aside personal prejudice and try to understand a man who, if nothing else, has spent the vast majority of life in hell.
Honorable mention: Chris Jones’s Roger Ebert: The Essential Man , a story which should only be read in private—unless, of course, you enjoy crying in public
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Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos
Marie “Riese” Lyn Bernard, Autostraddle
A briefing: Bernard breaks down exactly why she thinks Taylor Swift “is a feminist’s nightmare,” cataloguing just what bothers her about the long-legged, goldilocksed and perpetually surprised singer. Bonus points for the awesome graphic that tracks which motifs Swift most frequently employs in her songs: rain, stars, truck driving, crying and virginity.
A sample: “Swift’s insistence on casting herself as the outcast or the proverbial “girl in the bleachers” while prettier girls date her crush objects is really silly. Her standard-issue prettiness conforms to a hegemonic Caucasian beauty standard and she’s selling her fans short to claim otherwise; they’ll likely find that the doors that opened for Swift will never open for them, even if they relate to her lyrics. Perhaps the only legitimately irritating aspect of Taylor the Human is her continually presenting the experience of being teased in middle school for liking country music as a legit tragic impetus. Taylor F**king Swift! Put on a Rachel Berry smile and get yer sh*t together, we were all bullied in middle school!”
Why it’s on the list: There’s plenty to love about TSwift—her inescapably catchy songs, her unapologetic love of sparkly dresses, her poised and articulate manner that puts her pantsless and illiterate contemporaries to shame—but there’s a lot about her image and music that should, if not make you want to chuck all her albums in the trash, at least get you thinking about what it is we’re really celebrating in the women we promote to idol-worship status.
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Slate’s series on cyberbullying and coverage of the Pheobe Prince case
Emily Bazelon, Slate
A briefing: Phoebe Prince committed suicide at the age of fifteen in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Her death, which resulted in the criminal prosecution of six teenagers whose charges include rape and harassment, raises some questions that are a hell of a lot bigger than one teenage girl: Should you send kids to prison for making fun of each other? Can you really bully someone to death? When teenagers are cruel to each other in school, who is responsible—parents, teachers, the students themselves? The only possibility Bazelon dismisses is that the case is a simple one.
A sample: “At home in her bedroom, Phoebe plugged in her cell phone to recharge it, perhaps because she hadn’t entirely absorbed what she was about to do. Soon after, she hung herself in the stairwell with a black scarf woven with multicolor thread. Her sister had given it to her. After Phoebe’s death, the police found several of her drawings. One of them shows a human figure with a noose around the neck. In a note drawn as if it was pinned to the body, Phoebe asked for forgiveness.” (from Part One of “What Really Happened to Pheobe Prince?”)
Why it’s on the list: Bazelon went to South Hadley back in February and has been reporting from the front lines ever since. Her series demonstrates by its very breadth and depth that there’s more to Phoebe’s suicide than “high school sucks, kids made fun of her, she killed herself.” Cyberbullying takes the problem to a much more threatening place. What do you do with a bully who can terrorize you, literally, at every hour of the day and night? If we want to live some of our lives online—and judging by how many of us have email addresses, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts, it’s safe to say we do—then we have a responsibility to grapple with this, to try to understand it. It’s an issue with a body count.
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“The Runaway General”
Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone
A briefing: Unless you live under a rock the size of the Middle East, you probably already know that almost immediately following the publication of this kinda-too-candid interview with General Stanley McChrystal, President Obama removed McChrystal from his post. (Although, as Seth Meyers put it on Twitter: “As punishments go, you could do worse than ‘you’re no longer in charge of winning the war in Afghanistan.’”)
A sample: “McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond “I never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there, that’s the problem,” he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner. “Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?” “Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”
Why it’s on the list: Remember that time people were worried journalism was obsolete? Whoa. If you aren’t sure this story is important, just click on the link; RS has since re-headlined the piece with the not at all hyperbolic title “The Stanley McChrystal Scoop That Changed History.”
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Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works
Brendan I. Koerner, Wired
A briefing: Alcoholics Anonymous was conceived in December 1934 by an atheist who hit rock bottom and, while in a hospital bed pumped up on hallucinogens (then thought to be a cure for alcoholism), demanded to see God, was granted his request, and never drank again. His twelve steps, the first and second of which echo the founder’s religious awakening—admit powerlessness over alcohol and believe a higher power can restore you—have never been altered. But how do you figure out if AA really works when all the members are anonymous, all the meetings are free and open to the public, and more than 90% of recovering alcoholics will relapse at least once?
A Sample: “At a time when fraternal orders and churches with strict hierarchies dominated American social life, Wilson opted for something revolutionary: deliberate organizational chaos. He permitted each group to set its own rules, as long as they didn’t conflict with the traditions or the steps. Charging a fee was forbidden, as was the use of the AA brand to endorse anything that might generate revenue. “If you look at this on paper, it seems like it could never work,” White says. “It’s basically anarchy.” But this loose structure actually helped AA flourish. Not only could anyone start an AA group at any time, but they could tailor each meeting to suit regional or local tastes. And by condemning itself to poverty, AA maintained a posture of moral legitimacy.”
Why it’s on the list: I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that there’s not a ton of overlap between HC readership and Wired readership. If you don’t read Wired because you know so little about technology that you just bang on the top of your TV when it doesn’t work or are always at the mercy of the Apple Geniuses to breathe life into your mysteriously dead iPhones, you are missing out. Wired is “about technology” the way that Friday Night Lights is “about football”: it is, except it really isn’t. Case in point: this excellent feature.
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Mark Harris, New York
A briefing: A behind-the-scenes look at how your Academy Awards sausage gets made. Harris gets inside the political maneuvering slash celebrity prostitution that is the race to the Oscars.
Best line: “Even 30 seconds at a microphone becomes overburdened with portent. From the back of the vast room, a publicist watches The Hurt Locker’s “Breakthrough Actor” winner Jeremy Renner, a soft-spoken guy who gives the intriguing impression that at any moment he could ricochet in an unexpected direction, accept his prize and remark with a wry smile, “It feels cool to still be breaking out at 39 … I’m okay with that.” “Ugh!” the publicist says, as adrenalized as someone in a presidential-debate spin room. “Did you see him up there? He was comatose! We’re going to have to wake him up or he’s not going to win anything.”
Why it’s on the list: Who doesn’t like to see that beneath a carefully constructed veneer of beauty lies an ugly and entirely unglamorous process?