Longform Best of 2013

An incredible collection. Major kudos to the Longform team. (Also, yeah, Pittsburgh!)

I converted this Best of 2013 list into a Readlist for my Kindle, just as an experiment. But oh, wow, was the content amazing. The essays, selected by the Longform people, were indeed the best essays from last year - I can imagine no better. They were timely, powerful, moving and deeply intelligent. “Jahar's World” (Rolling Stone), about the younger Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was haunting. I was in Boston in April 2013, and knew most of what the article covered - but I still found it striking and insightful. “Into the Lonely Quiet” (Washington Post), about parents who lost their children at Sandy Hook, was painfully upsetting, both the micro of these people's terrible loss, and the macro of America's awful gun policies. (Seriously, “the right to bear arms” has so much costs, and zero, ZERO benefits.)

Some of the articles were simply amazing in their investigative skill: I was stunned by the journalist taking one of the illegal migrant boats to Australia in “The Impossible Refugee Boat Lift to Christmas Island” (GQ). I also found “Invisible Child” (NYT) fascinating in its granular portrayal of a young homeless girl in Brooklyn.

CAN'T RECOMMEND IT ENOUGH. Onto 2012, 2011, 2010...

Edited to add: And did I mention Venkatesh Rao's brilliant “The American Cloud” (Aeaon), about the “Hamiltonian cathedrals” - the backend of American consumerist capitalism - and the “Jeffersonian bazaars” - the front-end of human-scale “theater, as told through the prism of Whole Foods and its BLAZING FALSENESS (and yet attractiveness)? Can that article be more genius? No, it cannot. This has seriously bumped his blog up on my reading list.