Longreads · Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Hobbes · 2012 年最佳长读：迈克尔·霍布斯

Michael Hobbes lives in Berlin.

迈克尔·霍布斯住在柏林。

His essays from his blog, Rottin’ in Denmark, were featured on Longreads this year.

I read news when I want to be entertained.

当我想娱乐的时候我就看新闻。

I read features when I want to learn something.

当我想学习一些东西时，我会阅读专题。

Here’s nine articles I read this year that changed the way I look at the world, and made me wonder how I seem when it looks back.

“Diary of a Mad Fact-Checker,” James Pogue, Oxford American

It’s been a bad year for truth.

对于真理来说，这是糟糕的一年。

From Mike Daisey and Jonah Lehrer to Rush Limbaugh and Mitt Romney, 2012 felt like a yearlong debate about the role of exaggeration, hyperbole, fact-checking and outright fabrication in the pursuit of an argument.

从迈克·戴西 (Mike Daisey) 和乔纳·莱勒 (Jonah Lehrer) 到拉什·林堡 (Rush Limbaugh) 和米特·罗姆尼 (Mitt Romney)，2012 年感觉像是一场长达一年的辩论，围绕着夸张、夸大、事实核查和彻头彻尾捏造的角色展开辩论。

Pogue’s piece, a kind of letter from the extreme-pedant end of the spectrum, illustrates how fidelity to facts can obscure the truth, and how embellishment can reveal it.

波格的文章是一封来自极端迂腐派的信件，它说明了对事实的忠诚如何能够掩盖真相，以及修饰如何能够揭示真相。

“Lost in Space,” Mike Albo, Narrative.ly

“迷失在太空”，迈克·阿尔博，Narrative.ly

Maybe I only feel like I learned something from this essay because I’m in essentially the same position as Albo.

I’ve been single for almost 10 years, and I’m realizing that if I had applied all the hours I’ve wasted on the promiscu-net to something useful, I could have knitted a quilt, learned French, mastered Othello and read all of Wikipedia by now.

我已经单身近十年了，我意识到，如果我把在杂种网上浪费的所有时间都花在有用的事情上，我现在就可以织被子、学法语、掌握奥赛罗并阅读所有维基百科了。

If our society has learned anything from the first 20 years of internet access, it’s that looking for what you want isn’t always the best way to get it, and that getting it is a great way to stop wanting it.

如果说我们的社会从互联网接入的前 20 年中学到了什么的话，那就是寻找你想要的东西并不总是获得它的最佳方式，而获得它是停止想要它的好方法。

Albo’s essay couldn’t have been written by any gay man in America because they’re not as good at writing as he is, but I get the feeling it’s been lived by most of them.

阿尔博的文章不可能是美国任何同性恋者写的，因为他们不像他那么擅长写作，但我感觉他们大多数人都经历过这种情况。

“The Innocent Man,” Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly

and

和

“The Caging Of America,” Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

OK, so it’s not exactly earth-shattering news that America’s prison system is problematic and that “Texas justice” is an oxymoron.

But this year brought a new impetus for action, partly due to new numbers (the widely reported stat that 1% of America’s population is incarcerated), legislative action (Obama’s plan to combat prison rape, scorchingly reported in the New York Review of Books) and, qualitatively but no less essentially, longform pieces like Gopnik’s and Colloff’s.

但今年带来了新的行动动力，部分原因是新的数字（广泛报道的统计数据显示，美国有 1% 的人口被监禁）、立法行动（《纽约书评》对奥巴马打击监狱强奸的计划进行了严厉报道），以及定性但同样重要的长篇文章，如戈普尼克和科洛夫的文章。

People are always quoting the MLK-via-Obama line “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” and articles like these—one a macro view of the problem, one micro—is what that bend looks like.

人们总是引用马丁·路德·金通过奥巴马的名言“历史的弧线很长，但它会走向正义”，而像这样的文章——一个是对问题的宏观看法，一个是微观问题——就是这个弯道的样子。

“Does Mitt Romney Have a Soul?” Wells Tower, GQ

“米特·罗姆尼有灵魂吗？” Wells Tower, GQ

It’s easy now to forget that this was an election year, and that we spent basically all of it squabbling, speculating and pontificating about its outcome, which we now say we knew all along.

现在很容易忘记，这是一个选举年，我们基本上把所有的时间都花在了对选举结果的争论、猜测和武断上，而我们现在说我们一直都知道这一点。

Most election reporting is disposable, either gaffe play-by-plays (“Binders Full of Women: Interactive Timeline”), instantly obsolete hypotheticals (What if Romney picks Christie for VP?) or politically orchestrated profiles (“Obama’s audacious plan to save the middle class from Libyan airstrikes”).

大多数选举报道都是一次性的，要么是失态的实况报道（“充满女性的粘合剂：互动时间线”），要么是立即过时的假设（如果罗姆尼选择克里斯蒂为副总统怎么办？），要么是政治精心策划的简介（“奥巴马为拯救中产阶级免遭利比亚空袭的大胆计划”）。

If you remember these articles past ctrl+w, it’s only until events catch up, and then they poof out of your consciousness forever.

Towers’s Romney profile is one of the few still worth reading after the election.

Nominally a standard “let’s hang out in the campaign bus!” piece, it transcends its premise by capturing the conflicting forces tugging at the hem of the Republican party, and how Romney’s sheer empty-vesselness managed to please, and displease, everyone at once.

Nominally a standard “let’s hang out in the campaign bus!”它超越了它的前提，捕捉到了共和党边缘的冲突力量，以及罗姆尼纯粹的空虚是如何同时让所有人高兴和不高兴的。

“Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation,” Max Fisher, The Atlantic

Maybe it’s just the ubiquity of its subject, now the most-viewed-ever video on YouTube, but no article stuck with me this year quite like Fisher’s.

也许只是因为它的主题无处不在，它现在是 YouTube 上观看次数最多的视频，但今年没有一篇文章能像费舍尔的文章那样让我印象深刻。

In a culture that strains to call itself postracial, sharing “Gangnam Style” on Twitter and Facebook was a safe, quiet way to shout ‘look how weird Koreans are!’ and invite your friends to gawk alongside you.

在一种极力自称为后种族的文化中，在 Twitter 和 Facebook 上分享“江南 Style”是一种安全、安静的方式，可以大喊“看看韩国人多奇怪！”并邀请你的朋友和你一起看。

According to Fisher, “Gangnam” isn’t an expression of Korean culture, but a satire of it.

Psy was saying the same thing we spectators were, only in a visual language (and, obviously, a verbal one) we couldn’t understand.

He was laughing at his culture too, he just had no idea how easy it was to get the rest of the world to join him.

“The Truck Stop Killer,” Vanessa Veselka, GQ

《卡车停靠站杀手》，Vanessa Veselka，《GQ》

It’s all in the execution, they say, and nothing demonstrated that this year better than Veselka’s harrowing investigation into whether the guy who kidnapped and then released her on the side of the road in 1985 was a serial killer.

他们说，一切都在执行中，没有什么比维塞尔卡今年对 1985 年绑架并在路边释放她的人是否是连环杀手进行的令人痛心的调查更能证明这一点了。

She never finds the answer to her question.

她始终找不到问题的答案。

But who cares!

但谁在乎呢！

It’s a great piece, super interesting, suspenseful, creepy, introspective in all the right places.

We all know that compelling stories don’t always need happy endings.

In this case, it doesn’t need one at all.

在这种情况下，它根本不需要。

“The Bloody Patent Battle Over A Healing Machine,” Ken Otterbourg, Fortune

and

和

“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, New York Times

I admit it: I have no idea how the international economy works.

I used to feel about this the way I feel about not being able to describe asexual reproduction, or the Spanish Civil War, or how to grow tomatoes.

我曾经对此的感受就像我无法描述无性繁殖、西班牙内战或如何种植西红柿的感受一样。

I can see why somebody’s got to do it, I just can’t see why it’s got to be me.

Since the 2008 crash, though, knowledge of economics has gone from nice to have to can’t miss, and things like competitiveness, productivity and efficiency have taken a place in politics previously reserved for life-and-deathers like sports doping and the Ground Zero Mosque.

然而，自 2008 年金融危机以来，经济学知识已经从美好变成了必须，而不容错过，而竞争力、生产力和效率之类的东西已经在政治中占据了一席之地，这些东西以前是为体育兴奋剂和归零清真寺等生死攸关的事情保留的。

Patent trolling and outsourced manufacturing aren’t the only issues facing the US economy, of course, but both these articles demonstrate how businesses, governments and consumers have made the wrong thing too easy, and how the hard thing might not be the way back.

当然，专利流氓和外包制造并不是美国经济面临的唯一问题，但这两篇文章都展示了企业、政府和消费者如何让错误的事情变得太容易，以及如何困难的事情可能不会有回头路。

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

阅读 Longreads 2012 年度最佳嘉宾精选。