Listed and linked. I now have an incentive to waste even more time on the internet.
One of my all-time favorites is in the top 10, an article entitled "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" If you read it (and you should because it's amazing), you will be granted a lifetime of smug lectures to newlyweds who giddily show off their engagement rings. Really deflates everyone in the room. Makes boring parties or dinners a whole lot more fun.
6 comments:
This is a great article. Isobel has a CZ, but the argument really isn't worth having unless you want to lose friends. It is true though, it makes an otherwise boring dinner much more exciting.
Two that come to mind... Gay Talese's - Looking for Hemmingway
http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/paris/looking-for-hemingway.html
And The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt from the VQR.
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/fall/robertson-octopus-cathedral-salt/
A more recent favorite.
The article recounts Chiquita's hiring of paramilitary groups to kill labor leaders in Colombia. Interestingly Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, represented Chiquita in some stages of the trial (in which they were found guilty of aforementioned crimes).
It's interesting but, although I consider myself to have become quite the magazine groupie, I've read only a few of the listed articles (at least what I remember). I've read two of the Atul Gawande articles -- Letting Go (introduced by Pete) and The Itch. I've read King's famous "Letter From Birmingham Jail" but I never knew that it was originally an article somewhere. I also read Joshua Wolf Shenk's "What Makes Us Happy?"
Overall, I'm awed by how good a lot of magazine writing is -- and how superior it is to either television news or even newspapers. Just to pick one out of the hat, I recall enjoying Malcom Gladwell's How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules (which I mentioned in an earlier blog entry).
Arts and Letters Daily
@ aldaily.com
And LongForm
@ longform.org
are great sources of long-form journalism (worthy of their own blog posts). They are almost impossible to keep up with. And there is always something to read if you are bored.
The internet really is the end of boredom.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/boredom-is-extinct/8165/
Update: Isobel informs me she does not have a CZ, but rather a citrene. SORRY ISOBEL!
Does Harry Oppenheimer have any relation to J. Robert Oppenheimer? That would be quite the family.
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