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To recap: Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it’s betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.
Another month, another terrifying expose of Goldman Sachs from Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who chronicles how Goldman Sachs spent the better part of a decade selling off bad investments, betting that they would fail, and then taking your tax money to pay off the loans. And now I now exactly where SEAL Team Six ought to strike next. I’m told Goldman’s compound is somewhere in lower Manhattan.
-DM
[LongReads, Rolling Stone] (via the20s) -
If you’re in NYC, please come to our Night of Long-Form Journalism panel Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Housing Works, which we’re presenting in conjunction with Longreads.
To get you ready for the panel, we’ve collected a couple great stories from each of the three panelists: Jeff Goodell, Brian Hiatt and Rob Sheffield.
Jeff Goodell:
The Dark Lord of Coal Country, Nov. 29, 2010: The Rolling Stone investigation that forced the resignation of Don Blankenship, the coal industry’s dirtiest CEO
As the World Burns, Jan. 6, 2010: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming
Brian Hiatt:
Billy Corgan, Rock God Interrupted, Jan. 3, 2011: The infinite sadness and unlikely redemption of the last Pumpkin standing
Lady Gaga, New York Doll, June 11, 2009: Gaga worships Warhol. Kisses girls (for real). And she’s the biggest new pop star of 2009
Rob Sheffield:
Rocklahoma: Still Hair Metal After All These Years, Dec. 27, 2007: Welcome to the festival where Eighties hair bands and those who love them gather to headbang and ponder the passage of time
(via neighborhoodr-soho)
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Another tab belongs to the Tumblr Dashboard, which stays open for a good portion of the day, and is usually good for news updates from Soup and Paula Deen riding things. Another favorite is the Front Pages Tumblr—I’ll go there to scan the print editions of all the major papers. In fact, this is how I usually interact with the Los Angeles Times. Nothing personal: I just know that if the Times is going to do an epic story (like, say, something by Joe Mozingo), it’s going to appear in Column One, which is usually in the same spot on the front page. Print products still have excellent visual cues like this that have yet to be replicated online.
Mark Armstrong, founder of Longreads, dishes on his media diet.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire
(via theatlantic)
Thanks Mark, you’re pretty much my main source for Instapaper material.
(via theatlantic)
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The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist
Back in my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania (and while I was living there), the very strange and sad story of Brian Wells went down. He will forever be known as the “Collar Bomber” or the “Pizza Bomber.” He was part of an attempted bank robbery that involved him having a live bomb locked around his neck that unfortunately ended his life. This Wired article does an excellent job recounting all of the bizarre circumstances around Wells and the people who planned this robbery.
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Long Reads | Tumblr
This is absolutely wonderful.
Curated, tag-centric filtering of stream-based content changes the “search” paradigm.
The information search process is driven by relational discovery rather than free-form text-entry.
This allows for a more memorable and valuable mind-map to form around and between disparate pieces of information.
The more memorable the content relationship, the more valuable and relevant the content becomes.
Agreed.
Co-incidentally, this is the same model as Neighborhoodr.
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Five Longreads from 2010
With a bit more time on my hands commuting a few stops on the subway, I need some reading material to Instapaper to my iPad. Longreads has been invaluable in providing me with a great selection of really interesting articles. Along the way, there were five particular stories this year that really caught my attention. Without further ado, here are my five favorite longreads of 2010:
1) Is James Franco For Real by Sam Anderson - New York Mag
I’m generally uninterested in celebrity culture but this was a really fun, creative article that is a sort of modern day “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” The author has some interactions with Franco but for the most part Sam Anderson creates a mythology around the actor and his career schizophrenia.
2) The Wrong Man by David Freed - The Atlantic
Amongst all the anti-terror hysteria of 2010 was this story of Dr. Steven Hatfill who was wrongfully accused of being responsible for a series of anthrax attacks in 2001. David Freed recounts in a breezy but detailed story of the entire ordeal.
3) Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup by Richard Morgan - The Awl
Richard Morgan bears his soul about his struggle to make a living as a freelance writer.
4) The New Gawker Media by Felix Salmon - Reuters
There have been so many articles written about Gawker and so few tell us anything we haven’t already read before. Felix puts together perhaps the most comprehensive piece on where Gawker’s been and where it appears to be headed, revealing some odd financial handling using offshore accounts.
5) Probably going to piss off a lot of white people with this one by Matt Langer - Matt Langer’s Tumblr
Tumblr may be better known as a micro-blogging platform but there’s plenty of longform content being produced and Matt Langer provides some of the best. In this piece Langer discusses race, the Shirley Sherrod affair, Andrew Breitbart, and how we are still very far from living in a post-racial America.
