Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

I consider myself to be a crummy writer, if only because it seems like a week doesn’t go by without me coming across some really wise habit that some writer has that makes me say “Hey, why am I not doing that?”

Not this time! Here’s the lead from a story by Slate’s Jack Shafer:

I store my very favorite works of long-form journalism in a hard-drive folder titled “Keepers.” There’s Jonathan Rauch’s 1995 defense of prejudice from Harper’s, Gary Wolf’s stunning 1995 profile of Ted Nelson in Wired, John Tierney’s 1996 piece on recycling in the New York Times Magazine, Gary Greenberg’s 2001 brain-death exposé in The New Yorker; and Sean Wilentz’s 2007 masterpiece about Blonde on Blonde from the Oxford American, just to name a few.

I do this! In fact, nobody even had to tell me. I’m motivated by the same instinct that compelled me to not sell back any of my books in college. Firstly, those books are the only proof that I have any education whatsoever. Secondly, if I read something I like, I’m gonna hold onto it! Of course, my keepers aren’t organized into a fancy “electronic” “folder.” More like a pile that I keep between a pile of bills and a pile of comics. Real professional-like.

Proof!

Problem is, most of my pile is articles I ripped out of the New Yorker or New York magazine (which I have subscriptions to), Vanity Fair (which I buy from time to time), and random crap that I come across at work (which I randomly come across. At work.) Which is to say, while those are top-notch publications, my scope is limited.

That’s why I’m so thrilled about the advent of longform.org, which Mr. Shafer writes about above. If you didn’t actually click through to that link, the point of longform.org is to aggregate some of the best long-form, narrative journalism out there. The stories are chosen by the dudes that run the site, Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer, and by users. Two great features of the site: you can browse through stories, and if you come across one you’re interested in, you can tag it “Read later.” You can access your list of “Read later” stories any time you log onto the Internet. And then you can read them through Instapaper, a service that renders the text into printer-friendly, ad-free format. Tremendous! I’ve been tooling around a bit, and many of the stories come from the usual suspects (Harper’s, the New Yorker, Esquire), magazines that I know to be good but just never get around to checking out (Wired, Texas Monthly), and then some publications that I honestly would never think to check out (Virginia Quarterly, East Bay Express).

Folks in my line of work revere the long form. (You can tell, because we use the term “the long form” for, basically, long magazine stories.) Even ambitionless, unmotivated hacks like me, in the back of their minds, dream of someday getting that assignment where you’ve got six months, but more importantly, 10,000 words, to just tell a story. That Slate story above was exuberantly teased on its homepage with a subhead like “The site that will save long-form journalism,” but a quick trip around longform.org should make you feel pretty alright about the genre’s prospects. Every week, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and the Atlantic are producing high-quality, long-form journalism, telling important stories, and telling them well. But better than that, the site is culling stories from the likes of n+1, Fast Company, and the Boston Phoenix. All of this is to say, there’s not enough hours in the day to keep track of all the great stories being written in publications, large and small, all across the country. Have fun, and keep reading.

Dangerous, Dirty, and Updated: The Official Roommate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun checks in with the following message:

ORODD&U: you are indeed a crummy writer. “lead” instead of “lede” ? journalism 101!

My bad, readers! Please accept this supplementary graf as some small consolation.