Matt Pearce: My Top 5 Longreads

Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch.

马特·皮尔斯 (Matt Pearce) 是《洛杉矶时报》、《The New Inquiry》和《The Pitch》的特约撰稿人。

He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square.

他居住在堪萨斯城，最近报道了埃及选举和解放广场的起义。

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1.

1.

Paul Ford – “The Epiphanator” – New York magazine

保罗·福特 – “主显者” – 纽约杂志

I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a critical mass people have finally accepted the deep role social media plays in the way we live our lives, a progress I’ve measured largely through 1.

我认为今年我们已经达到了这个饱和点，临界点的人们终于接受了社交媒体在我们生活方式中发挥的深刻作用，我主要通过 1 来衡量这一进展。

former New York Times head honcho Bill Keller’s decreasingly humiliating comments about Twitter and 2.

《纽约时报》前总裁比尔·凯勒 (Bill Keller) 对 Twitter 和 2 的侮辱性言论日渐减少。

this brilliantly droll smoker by Paul Ford, who writes about social media’s arrival the way some people write about coming to terms with their mortality.

保罗·福特（Paul Ford）笔下的这位出色的滑稽吸烟者，他描写社交媒体的到来，就像一些人描写如何接受死亡一样。

I don’t think the tone in Ford’s essay would have been possible even last year, which is what makes it so definitive of the moment, and it has that David Foster Wallace quality of articulating deep feelings about a phenomenon I didn’t quite realize I’d felt and certainly never could have expressed so wonderfully.

我认为即使是在去年，福特文章中的语气也是不可能的，这就是它在当下如此明确的原因，而且它具有大卫·福斯特·华莱士的品质，表达了对一种现象的深刻感受，我当时并没有意识到自己有这种感受，当然也永远不可能如此精彩地表达出来。

2.

2.

Édouard Levé – “When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue” – The Paris Review

Édouard Levé – “当我看到草莓时，我想到了舌头” – 巴黎评论

Levé was a photographer, but right before he committed suicide in 2007, he wrote a book called, um, “Suicide.” His prose here, distracted and fissiparous, reads like a kind of literary pointillism: Each individual fleck doesn’t make much sense on its own, but by the end the mass agglomerates into something dark and quite beautiful.

Levé 是一名摄影师，但就在 2007 年自杀之前，他写了一本名为《自杀》的书。他的散文散乱且分裂，读起来就像一种文学点彩派：每个单独的斑点本身并没有多大意义，但到最后，质量聚集成某种黑暗而美丽的东西。

It’s like tossing through a box of unsorted and unmarked photographs to deduce the life of the man who shot them — and damn, what a life it must’ve been.

这就像翻阅一盒未分类、未标记的照片来推断拍摄这些照片的人的生活——该死的，那一定是怎样的生活。

3.

3.

Alex French and Howie Kahn – “The Greatest Paper That Ever Died” – Grantland

Alex French 和 Howie Kahn – “有史以来最伟大的论文” – Grantland

I’m still not sure what to make of Grantland, but I liked it a lot more after I read this oral history of The National, which was an national sports daily with huge ambitions whose collapse read like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novella set in contemporary New York.

我仍然不知道如何看待《格兰特兰》，但在读了《国家报》的口述历史后，我更喜欢它了。《国家报》是一份雄心勃勃的全国性体育日报，但它的崩溃读起来就像加布里埃尔·加西亚·马尔克斯以当代纽约为背景的中篇小说中的情节。

In a lot of ways, The National is Grantland’s forebear, and so if Grantland doesn’t work out, the least we could hope for would be an autopsy as funny as this one.

从很多方面来说，《国家报》都是格兰特兰的前身，所以如果格兰特兰没有成功，我们至少可以期待像这次尸检一样有趣。

4.

4.

Jon Lee Anderson – “King of Kings” – New Yorker

乔恩·李·安德森——《万王之王》——《纽约客》

Over the summer, I reported on a Libyan-American trapped in Libya during the civil war.

今年夏天，我报道了一名利比亚裔美国人在内战期间被困在利比亚的情况。

He’d grown up there, and after he escaped, we became friends.

他在那里长大，他逃走后，我们成了朋友。

On the day Qaddafi died, I texted him to see if he’d heard — he lived in a van because he didn’t have any money, and nor did he have a TV — and I didn’t hear back.

卡扎菲去世那天，我给他发短信，看看他是否听到了——他住在一辆货车里，因为他没有钱，也没有电视——但我没有收到回复。

While walking through a park later, he told me that when he got my text about Qaddafi, he sat down and didn’t move for several hours.

后来在穿过公园时，他告诉我，当他收到我关于卡扎菲的短信时，他坐下来几个小时一动不动。

It’s tough to explain how deeply Qaddafi had engrained himself into Libyan psyches, creating a distortion field where it was impossible to imagine existence without him.

很难解释卡扎菲在利比亚人心中的根深蒂固，创造了一个扭曲的场域，让人们无法想象没有他的存在。

While walking, I told him about the New Yorker and how it writes these comprehensive takes on a subject that often become the final word, and I told him we could expect something from the New Yorker on Qaddafi.

走路时，我向他介绍了《纽约客》，以及它如何对一个经常成为最终定论的主题进行全面的阐述，我告诉他，我们可以期待《纽约客》对卡扎菲的报道。

And shortly later, there it came: A brilliant postmortem by Jon Lee Anderson to explain the man-cum-phenomenon.

不久之后，结果来了：乔恩·李·安德森 (Jon Lee Anderson) 做了精彩的事后分析，解释了人与人之间的现象。

My friend had trouble finishing it because it hit so close to home, and that’s what great journalism should do.

我的朋友很难完成它，因为它离我的家太近了，而这正是伟大的新闻应该做的。

5.

5.

Tim Rogers – “Who Killed Videogames?

蒂姆·罗杰斯——《谁杀死了电子游戏？

(A Ghost Story)” – Insert Credit

（鬼故事）”——插入片尾字幕

This monster on the deep unhappiness behind the contemporary gaming experience came at me from out of nowhere a few months ago, and it hasn’t left me since.

几个月前，这个关于当代游戏体验背后深深的不快乐的怪物突然出现在我面前，从那以后它就没有离开过我。

I still have questions about it, actually: How much is real?

事实上，我仍然有疑问：多少是真实的？

How much is fiction?

小说多少钱？

In the end, the particulars didn’t matter so much as the dark way Rogers captures the Pavlovian sickness behind games created by companies like Zynga, whose games thrive by creating an itch in users rather than aiming for real joy.

最后，细节并不那么重要，罗杰斯抓住了 Zynga 等公司创造的游戏背后的巴甫洛夫病，这些公司的游戏通过引起用户的渴望而不是真正的快乐而蓬勃发展。

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Honorable mention:

荣誉提名：

Kim Zetter – “How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History” – Wired

Kim Zetter – “数字侦探如何破译历史上最具威胁性的恶意软件 Stuxnet” – 《连线》

One of these days, after The Big One hits, we’re going to wish we’d stuck more narrative writers on the tech beat to explain the malevolent 1s and 0s secretly undermining our lives online and, increasingly, our relationship with the world at large.

总有一天，在《大人物》上映后，我们会希望能有更多的叙事作家关注科技节拍，以解释那些恶意的 1 和 0 秘密地破坏我们的在线生活，并越来越多地破坏我们与整个世界的关系。

There will always be the Nicholas Schmidles to write the Osama bin Laden takedown (which might’ve been on this list if not for transparency qualms), but the day is soon coming where our most important national security enforcers write code instead of rappelling out of helicopters — if they aren’t already.

总会有尼古拉斯·施密德尔（Nicholas Schmidles）写下击倒奥萨马·本·拉登（如果不是出于透明度方面的疑虑，这可能会出现在这份名单上），但这一天很快就会到来，我们最重要的国家安全执法者将编写代码，而不是从直升机上垂降——如果他们还没有这样做的话。

Zetter’s piece is a brilliant argument that that day has already come.

泽特的文章是一个精彩的论点，表明这一天已经到来。

(Bonus points for Wired’s visual presentation of the story.)

（《连线》故事视觉呈现的奖励积分。）

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Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December.

整个 12 月，分享您自己的 2011 年 5 首长读作品。

Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook.

只需在 Twitter、Tumblr 或 Facebook 上标记#longreads 即可。