Comments on: I Like To Read Things

Question: I Like To Read Things

turgid dahlia — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:21:50 -0800

What are some of your absolute favourite online essays, articles and other pieces of non-fiction writing?

Pursuant to this post and the excellent linked essay, I have found my appetite whetted for some more fine pieces of journalism, reportage, history, criticism, review, everything and anything. I have trawled the online archives of The Atlantic and The New Yorker because I love to have something fresh and interesting to print out and read on my lunch break.

Basically I'm after singular examples of quality online writing (no fiction, thanks, I have more than enough of that), not necessarily for the beauty of the prose or even for the content of the story - I just want one of those (preferably big) articles you can't stop reading, and at the end you want to show it to everybody you know because it's just so amazing, and you wish you had read it sooner.

For reference, one of my favourites is the wonderful B.R. Myer's piece A Reader's Manifesto, from The Atlantic Monthly.

First AskMe, please be gentle.

By: Sassyfras

Sassyfras — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:30:50 -0800

I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War.

By: Airhen

Airhen — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:38:33 -0800

Jonathan Lebed's Extracurricular Activities by Michael Lewis.

By: fire&wings

fire&wings — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:43:06 -0800

How America lost the war on Drugs.
The Secret to raising smart kids.
In the Garden of Earthly delights: Irreversible. (helps if you've seen it)
The largest stones of all time.
Where Hip Hop Lives

And because someone has to, and it's fucking great, this.

By: AceRock

AceRock — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:49:38 -0800

Check out the MIT's open courses on essays and their reading lists/materials for some good leads:

Writing and Reading the Essay (Fall 2005)
Advanced Essay Workshop (Spring 2005)
The Science Essay (Spring 2004)

Also, yeah, Michael Lewis is great. The Ballad of Big Mike is excellent, and basically a condensed version of his book The Blind Side.

By: Rock Steady

Rock Steady — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:50:15 -0800

It is from 1960, and about baseball, but if that doesn't stop you, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" by John Updike is considered by many to be the finest piece of sports journalism ever.

By: bmalicoat

bmalicoat — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:21:42 -0800

Classic: There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

More recently: High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas

By: Zonker

Zonker — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:35:53 -0800

George Orwell's Politics and the English Language

By: rooftop secrets

rooftop secrets — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:46:21 -0800

When Pigs Fly: The Death of OiNK, The Birth Of Dissent, and a Brief History of the Record Industry Suicide
okay, not the best essay I've ever read but it summed up the topic of the time pretty darn well when OiNK went down.

The Problem With Music - Steve Albini
a little outdated, but still oh so relevant

By: ldenneau

ldenneau — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:56:40 -0800

Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line."

By: iamisaid

iamisaid — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:58:14 -0800

I know you're asking about material available online, but I must recommend the compilation The New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass. Some of the stories may be familiar to you, but many of them were new to me and fulfill exactly the criteria you're describing. Most of them are probably available online if you do some digging. A list of the included pieces is here. I would make a list of my favorites, but I think I would have to list almost every one of them. I bought the book in hopes that it would be creatively inspirational and get me excited about nonfiction writing again, and it served that purpose quite well.

By: sneakin

sneakin — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:01:05 -0800

I really like Shalom Auslander's essays, many of which are available at his website. I particularly enjoyed this article he wrote for Nerve, "Where's the Sin?: An Anti-Sermon." He was raised strictly Orthodox (Jewish) and is now a very edgy, secular (from what I understand) guy. I find him interesting and incisive. His observations about religion and Judaism are fascinating to me.

By: farmdoggie

farmdoggie — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:05:53 -0800

Martin Amis on porn: A Rough Trade

By: Eudaimonia

Eudaimonia — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:16:12 -0800

Michael Pollan is one of my non-fiction gods and wrote this article , which seems to be the basis for his new book "In Defense of Food" (this book as well as "Omnivore's Dilemna" are fan.tastic. But they aren't online.) - 12 pages

If you have children, or actually, even if you don't, this article brings together lots of interesting psychology and sociology to look at the the culture of praise and entitlement that surrounds the youth of America. - 5 pages

Hope you find these interesting enough.

....Oh and thank you for asking this question!

By: Zed_Lopez

Zed_Lopez — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:21:05 -0800

Most of Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker Archive, like Blowing Up.

Can you say hero? (Tom Junod's Esquire profile on Fred Rogers)

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:23:32 -0800

These are fantastic, guys. Some, like the Orwell and the Weingarten piece from The Washington Post, I am already familiar with (and they are precisely the sort of thing I'm after), but I've printed out a dozen others so far and am looking forward to a very illuminating 45 minutes in the lovely Botanical Gardens, just down the road from the office. Please keep them coming!

By: Cucurbit

Cucurbit — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:51:10 -0800

Classic: Notes on "Camp"

More recent: In the Sonora

By: grumblebee

grumblebee — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:55:21 -0800

open letters

By: Jaltcoh

Jaltcoh — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:57:43 -0800

Stolen from my blogroll of individual articles/essays:

WaPo - A Body and Spirit Broken by the Taliban. Falsely Charged as a Christian, Afghan Suffered Ruthless Torture.

NYT - A Woman's Work - about the woman who ordered mass rapes in the Rwandan genocide

Slate - Blogging the Bible

Peter Beinart - Fault Lines - essay from a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks

Jon Chait - Maverick vs. Iceman - a history of McCain's reinvention of himself

Mrs. X - One Woman's Abortion (anonymous article from before Roe v. Wade was decided)

Mark Schmitt - The "Theory of Change" Primary. ("Hope and bipartisanship are not things that Obama naively believes are present and possible -- they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure.")

Robert Kagan - Power and Weakness. Why the United States and Europe see the world differently.

Eric Schlosser - The Chain Never Stops. ("American slaughterhouses are grinding out meat faster than ever -- and the production line keeps moving, even when the workers are maimed by the machinery.")

Jonah Goldberg - The tyranny of cliches. ("I think some people assume clichés are akin to mathematical proofs; some Pythagoras did all of the heavy lifting ages ago, proving that this or that cliché is true and therefore nobody needs to re-check his math.")

Jon Cohn - The best case against universal health care

interview with the philosopher John Searle (video and transcript)

Ebert's Movie Glossary

John McWhorter - Dying Languages

Edge - What questions have disappeared?

By: bah213

bah213 — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:24:20 -0800

I second Malcolm Gladwell's entire New Yorker output, but these two are some of my favorite articles ever:
The Trouble With Fries: Fast food is killing us. Can it be fixed?
Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety.

I also loved this 2003 NY Times feature on Jon Brion (record producer/composer of the scores for Punchdrunk Love, I Heart Huckabees, etc....)

By: Cucurbit

Cucurbit — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:43:50 -0800

Classic: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

More recent: It's Britney Bitch (a virtuosic reading of Britney Spears's "Piece of Me")

By: allkindsoftime

allkindsoftime — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:57:56 -0800

A lot of these come up on the blue, you just have to be patient and wait for them - many I see above I first found on the blue myself.

One that I don't see above, which I think the one that you were inspired by, OP, is quite similar to, is a piece that ran in the Rocky Mountain News a couple of years back - forget the name, and its late here, but it was a pulitzer winning piece and was all about the soldiers who have to deliver the toughest news there is. Its late and I can't find the link but you should be able to find it with a little more googling than I just did.

By: Gerard Sorme

Gerard Sorme — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:13:28 -0800

Brand new - from Vanity Fair - you'll love it:
The Last Campaign: Bobby Kennedy...The Hope The Tragedy And Why He Still Matters.

Vanity Fair often has excellent articles and many are online.

By: rtha

rtha — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:13:55 -0800

allkindsoftime, I was trying to remember that piece earlier today - I couldn't even remember the newspaper that did it.

I think it's this: Final Salute

The photographer for the article won a Pulitzer for it.

By: KokuRyu

KokuRyu — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:35:58 -0800

A Reporter at Large: The Megacity: The New Yorker

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:36:18 -0800

Well, while we're all here, I thought I'd throw in another that I quite enjoyed: John Taylor Gatto's Against School, from Harper's. I take no responsibility whatsoever for the unutterably awful formatting.

By: MadamM

MadamM — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:50:05 -0800

Anything by Atul Gawande gives me that "Wow I want to tell everyone about this!!!" feeling. Too bad I suck at retelling them. I would suggest a subscription to the New Yorker, if you don't already have one; long form non-fiction is kinda their thing. Others to check out (although I have no personal history with them) would be the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.

By: any major dude

any major dude — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:08:37 -0800

Bagdad year zero is probably the most prescient deconstruction of the motives behind the war in Iraq. Naomi Klein absolutely nails it back in 2004 when most were still scratching their heads.

By: odragul

odragul — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:15:51 -0800

Matthew Crawford: Shop Class and Soulcraft

By: exphysicist345

exphysicist345 — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:21:01 -0800

Seconding the New Yorker. Until your subscription kicks in, their recent nonfiction articles are online here.

By: Brian James

Brian James — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:42:26 -0800

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. by Gay Talese.

By: Skot

Skot — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:13:56 -0800

A Rape In Cyberspace. It's sort of pathologically overwritten, but it's always stuck with me.

By: PueExMachina

PueExMachina — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:34:22 -0800

The People Own Ideas!

By: Sonny Jim

Sonny Jim — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:41:51 -0800

The collected film criticism of Chris Fujiwara. The selected reviews, columns, and essays of Scott McLemee.

By: claudius

claudius — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:35:55 -0800

Almost anything from the London Review of Books, in particular essays by John Lanchester, Anatol Lieven and Jenny Diski.

By: Tamanna

Tamanna — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:44:20 -0800

A Person Paper on Purity in Language by Douglas Hofstadter. Probably one of the most eye-opening things you'll read all year, if not ever.

By: awenner

awenner — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:45:07 -0800

Crowding People's Market for Cabbage: The Price Is Right. One of the best slice-of-life pieces I've ever read.

By: dawson

dawson — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:19:07 -0800

Henry Mitchell, pretty much anything.
Sedaris on smoking.
Arts and Letters Daily will yield you at least 1 or 2 excellent essays a week.
And while I don't care for the man, and loathe the beer, Jonah Goldberg's Buds for Life strikes me as a nearly perfect piece of writing.
There are so many, but one more, Douglas Hofstadter on Purity in Language.

By: peacheater

peacheater — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:18:16 -0800

What if it's all been a big fat lie? by Gary Taubes in the NY Times.

By: triggerfinger

triggerfinger — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:51:17 -0800

I know you're looking for things you can print out at work but if you're ever looking for a book full of great magazine articles, you may like the Best American Magazine Writing books that come out every year.

By: of strange foe

of strange foe — Fri, 02 May 2008 21:19:01 -0800

Elaine Scarry's 'On Beauty and Being Just' lecture is linked from here.

By: jblu

jblu — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:23:44 -0800

check out the doors of perception, aldous huxley's awesome recounting of his experience with mescaline.

By: lukemeister

lukemeister — Sat, 03 May 2008 09:32:32 -0800

William Langewiesche at Atlantic, Vanity Fair. Seconding London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. Virginia Quarterly Review on Pat Robertson.

By: Mapes

Mapes — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:05:59 -0800

The Median Isn't the Message by Stephen Jay Gould.
The Accidental Entrepreneur by Gordon Moore. One of many great Nobel Prize essays.
Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine by Danny Hillis.
Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson.

By: gstone

gstone — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:42:34 -0800

Gregg Easterbrook is an excellent author of many magazine articles. A classic example is this prescient piece, written in 1980, about NASA's space shuttle programme. Easterbrook writes also about environmental issues, but is perhaps mostly widely known for his extended musings on the NFL.

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:11:12 -0800

Thank you, Metafilter!

By: gen

gen — Sat, 10 May 2008 08:43:15 -0800

Let me second Mapes' link to Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board." Phenomenal non-fiction.

By: NolanRyanHatesMatches

NolanRyanHatesMatches — Sun, 11 May 2008 10:13:59 -0800

I'll add Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, by David Foster Wallace, from Harper's, 2001. The hypertexted footnotes might be ideal for those who usually loathe DFW's style.

By: mosessis

mosessis — Sat, 17 May 2008 12:39:37 -0800

Book Forum is another good place to find interesting articles online (same idea as aldaily)

By: hippugeek

hippugeek — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:17:01 -0800

No-Man's-Land: Fear, Racism, and the Historically Troubling Attitude of American Pioneers, by Eula Biss.

Self-description
DISCUSSED: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Kansas, Bonnets, "A Great Many Colored People," Copper Gutters, Martin Luther King Jr., People Who Know Nothing about Gangs, Scalping, South Africa, Unprovoked Stabbing Sprees, Alarming Mass Pathologies, Chicago, Haunted Hot Dog Factories, Gangrene, Creatures from the Black Lagoon, Tree Saws, Headless Torsos, Quilts, Cheerleaders, Pet Grooming Stores, God

By: storybored

storybored — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:17:08 -0800

An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish. Bertrand Russell's essay still stands up after all these years. It's a pointed yet humorous look at human folly.

By: storybored

storybored — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:22:12 -0800

Richard Feynman's lucid explanation of pseudoscience vs the scientific method. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. " Cargo Cult Science.

By: keep it under cover

keep it under cover — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:20:54 -0800

I really enjoyed reading this article about air traffic controllers:

Something's Got To Give

These are such extraordinary people with so much weight on their shoulders. It's fascinating to see what a day in their lives is like.

By: fantabulous timewaster

fantabulous timewaster — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:01:06 -0800

Metamagical Themas contains most or all of Douglas Hofstadter's columns from Scientific American, including the Person Paper linked upthread.

By: songfromme

songfromme — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:27:57 -0800

Soon to be published in book form as This is water, David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address.

Stunning.