by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Serious Piece = Long Shelf Life
Look past the silly man with a bushy mustache on the cover of the current Rolling Stone. (Will Ferrell – who is not actually funny but just pretends to be, if you ask me.) The new issue is chock full of ambitious, serious pieces: Bill McKibben on “Obama and the Climate,” Matt Taibbi on Camden, New Jersey, “America’s Most Desperate Town”; and Janet Reitman’s thrillingly strong double profile of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who took the secret documents Snowden took from the National Security administration and made them public in the Guardian. The last is by far the best piece I’ve read on Securitygate – though Ryan Lizza’s conversation with Leonard Lopate about his piece on the NSA in last week’s New Yorker suggested that the piece itself is very strong.
Why the long-form seriousness around the holidays? My first thought is that these days we wear ourselves out with light entertainment during the year and so must take the holidays to recover.
Second thought: No, that can’t be, because there’s been serious long-form journalism at year’s end for as long as I can remember. Back in the mid-eighties, it was Esquire’s annual December literary issue and Cullen Murphy’s awe-inspiring cover story about the historical Jesus (in the December 1986 Atlantic) that made me want to be a long-form journalist in the first place.
Third thought: Oddly enough, long-form journalism, allows magazine editors to relax around the holidays. These pieces – detailed, meticulously constructed, with a long view built in – are less susceptible to the news cycle than slighter stories. Barring assassination, an end to global warming, or a sudden rush of hipsters to Camden, these pieces will be current straight through the holidays.