Writer Lev Grossman: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Lev Grossman writes about books and technology for Time magazine.
列夫·格罗斯曼为《时代》杂志撰写有关书籍和技术的文章。
He’s also the author of the bestselling novels The Magicians and The Magician King.
他也是畅销小说《魔术师》和《魔术师之王》的作者。
***
***
• “One Man’s Quest to Outrace Wind,” by Adam Fisher, Wired
• 《一个人战胜风的追求》，亚当·费舍尔 (Adam Fisher)，《连线》
Why do I never find stories like this?
为什么我从来没有找到这样的故事？
Probably because I’m not working as hard as Adam Fisher.
可能是因为我没有亚当·费舍尔那么努力。
Apparently there’s this whole subculture of dirt sailing: people who race wind-powered vehicles on land.
显然，存在着整个土航亚文化：人们在陆地上驾驶风力车辆进行比赛。
Apparently this one guy announced that he’d figured out a way to build a dirt boat that, while sailing directly downwind, can go faster than the wind that’s propelling it.
显然，这个人宣布他找到了一种建造一艘土船的方法，当它直接顺风航行时，它可以比推动它的风行驶得更快。
Impossible, right?
不可能吧？
This whole insular community of dirt sailers got up in arms about it.
整个孤立的土航者社区都为此勃然大怒。
But no. It was not impossible.
但没有。这并非不可能。
You just have to be really, really clever to figure it out.
你必须非常非常聪明才能弄清楚。
• “Adventures in Depression,” by Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half
• 艾莉·布罗什（Allie Brosh）的《抑郁症历险记》，夸张半句
Writing about depression is hard, for the simple reason that when you’re depressed you can’t write, because you feel worthless, and who would want to read something written by a worthless person?
写抑郁症很困难，原因很简单，当你抑郁时你就无法写作，因为你觉得自己毫无价值，谁会想读一个无价值的人写的东西呢？
I don’t know who Allie Brosh is, but this hybrid essay — half words, half pictures — gets as close as anything I’ve ever read to describing it.
我不知道艾莉·布罗什是谁，但这篇混合文章——半文字、半图片——与我读过的任何描述它的文章一样接近。
• “Ads of Dragon,” by James Maliszewski, Grognardia
• 《龙的广告》，作者：James Maliszewski，Grognardia
I’m cheating a bit here, because this is a series of posts rather than one single longread, but it’s important that people know about Grognardia, because it is the shit.
我在这里有点作弊，因为这是一系列的帖子，而不是一篇长篇文章，但重要的是人们了解 Grognardia，因为它就是狗屎。
Maliszewski writes brilliant and incisive essays about old-school role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.
Maliszewski 撰写了有关《龙与地下城》等老式角色扮演游戏的精彩而深刻的文章。
Most people who go down that rabbit hole lose the ability to write about gaming with any real perspective, because when you’re obsessed with something, you lose all perspective about it.
大多数掉入兔子洞的人都失去了以任何真实视角撰写游戏的能力，因为当你沉迷于某件事时，你就会失去对它的所有视角。
(I speak as one has been down that hole.) Somehow Maliszewski hung onto his, and it shows in this glorious series, in which he analyzes a series of ads that appeared in the gaming magazine Dragon back in the 1980s.
（我这么说是因为有人已经陷入了这个困境。）不知何故，Maliszewski 坚持了他的观点，这一点在这个辉煌的系列中得到了体现，在该系列中，他分析了 20 世纪 80 年代游戏杂志《龙》中出现的一系列广告。
• “Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?” by Errol Morris, The New York Times
• “我的兄弟和 Tom Van Vleck 一起发明了电子邮件吗？”作者：埃罗尔·莫里斯，《纽约时报》
There isn’t anybody else quite like Errol Morris.
没有人能像埃罗尔·莫里斯那样。
I thought of him as a filmmaker before I started reading these essays that he posted on a New York Times blog.
在我开始阅读他在《纽约时报》博客上发布的这些文章之前，我认为他是一名电影制片人。
They’re not flashy writing, but his patient, unhurried, relentless pursuit of truth is a model for anybody who’s trying to tease apart a historical mystery crawling with ambiguity and unreliability.
这些作品并不华而不实，但他耐心、从容、不懈地追求真理的精神对于任何试图解开充满模糊性和不可靠性的历史谜团的人来说都是一个典范。
Here the mystery concerns Morris’s brother Noel, who went to MIT and was part of the very early computing scene in Cambridge the late 1960s, when the protocols of the proto-Internet were being hashed out.
这里的谜团涉及莫里斯的兄弟诺埃尔 (Noel)，他曾就读于麻省理工学院，是 20 世纪 60 年代末剑桥早期计算机界的一员，当时原始互联网的协议正在制定中。
Morris’s brother died young, and Morris interviews his colleagues and goes through his notes to try to figure out whether he and his collaborator were the first people to use e-mail.
莫里斯的兄弟英年早逝，莫里斯采访了他的同事并浏览了他的笔记，试图弄清楚他和他的合作者是否是第一批使用电子邮件的人。
I won’t spoil it for you.
我不会为你破坏它。
• “Peyton’s Place,” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ
•《Peyton’s Place》，作者：John Jeremiah Sullivan，《GQ》
Sullivan is my favorite magazine writer right now, bar none.
沙利文是我现在最喜欢的杂志作家，没有之一。
Here he talks about the fact that his house was regularly used as a location for the filming of the soapy teen show One Tree Hill, and what that felt like.
在这里，他谈到了他的房子经常被用作肥皂剧《一树山》的拍摄地点的事实，以及那是什么感觉。
Which is something I would find inherently interesting anyway.
无论如何，我觉得这本质上很有趣。
The fact that Sullivan is the guy telling it and feeling makes it something more: An Important Fable for Our Time.
事实上，沙利文是讲述这个故事和感受的人，这一事实使它具有更多意义：我们这个时代的一个重要寓言。
Whatever Sullivan writes about automatically becomes a portal into the black soul of our stupid culture, and he gazes into it and somehow manages to remain calm and funny and smart while he reports back about what he sees.
无论沙利文写什么，都会自动成为进入我们愚蠢文化的黑色灵魂的门户，他凝视它，并在报告他所看到的内容时设法保持冷静、有趣和聪明。