I've Found A New Site: Longreads

[Longreads is a site devoted to uncovering the best long-form nonfiction articles available online. And they tell you the number of words in each article and the length of time it took them to read it. They have a searchable archive; while I didn't get any hits for skydiving, windsurfing, or skiing, the search term "cia" brought 542 results. (Readers can also subscribe to The Top 5 Longreads of the Week by clicking here.)]

Here are some of them, all published in the last couple of weeks. You're guaranteed to find something that interests you.

Canada! How Does It Work?
Friday’s vote took the form of a vote to hold the government in contempt of Parliament for failing to release financial projections about its purchase of 65 fighter jets and certain proposed anti-crime measures. This is the first time in Canadian history a government has been found in contempt of Parliament. But no one who isn't an op-ed pundit cares about that. The real issue is that our politics is paralyzed—largely by mediocrity but also by certain historical circumstances related to the party machinery in Canada.
AUTHOR: Michelle Dean
SOURCE: The Awl
PUBLISHED: March 30, 2011
LENGTH: 12 minutes (2920 words)

The Acid Sea
The carbon dioxide we pump into the air is seeping into the oceans and slowly acidifying them. One hundred years from now, will oysters, mussels, and coral reefs survive? "In 2008 a group of more than 150 leading researchers issued a declaration stating that they were 'deeply concerned by recent, rapid changes in ocean chemistry,' which could within decades 'severely affect marine organisms, food webs, biodiversity, and fisheries.'"

AUTHOR: Elizabeth Kolbert
SOURCE: National Geographic

PUBLISHED: March 25, 2011
LENGTH: 14 minutes (3469 words)

Microsoft's Odd Couple
It’s 1975 and two college dropouts are racing to create software for a new line of “hobbyist” computers. The result? A company called “Micro-Soft”—now the fifth-most-valuable corporation on earth. In an adaptation from his memoir, Paul Allen tells the story of his partnership with high-school classmate Bill Gates, until its dramatic ending in 1983.

AUTHOR: Paul Allen
SOURCE: Vanity Fair

PUBLISHED: March 30, 2011
LENGTH: 30 minutes (7623 words)

Man vs. Machine on Wall Street: How Computers Beat the Market
Cliff Asness's Applied Quantitative Research—which makes its fortune, like other "quants," by using high-speed computers and financial models of extraordinary complexity—has made a stupendous recovery in the past two years. At the end of 2010, AQR had $33 billion in assets under management. Its funds' performance was up nearly 20 percent last year, after being up 38 percent in 2009. This is all the more striking because many analysts believe the quants helped cause, or at least exacerbated, the meltdown by giving traders a false sense of security.
AUTHOR: William D. Cohan
SOURCE: The Atlantic
PUBLISHED: March 29, 2011
LENGTH: 17 minutes (4191 words

The Kill Team
Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji. Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.
AUTHOR: Mark Boal
SOURCE: Rolling Stone
PUBLISHED: March 28, 2011
LENGTH: 34 minutes (8449 words)

Online Poker's Big Winner
The vast sums of money shuttled among the accounts of these young professionals — and the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness with which they played — deepened the divide between the young online players and the older guard who earned their millions when poker was still a game played by men sitting around a table. Since the rise of online poker in the early 2000s, every principle of the game, every lesson learned over hundreds of thousands of hours of play, every simple credo uttered in some old Western gambling movie — all those tersely stated, manly things that made up the legend of poker — has been picked apart and, for the most part, discarded.
AUTHOR: Jay Caspian Kang
SOURCE: New York Times
PUBLISHED: March 25, 2011
LENGTH: 13 minutes (3214 words)

Huffington's Cultural Revolution
You can change the particulars however you want, and set the time anytime you want. Some examples: The website, famous for its slideshows and linkbait, wants real reporting now; the magazine, famous for its celebrity profiles and fashion spreads, wants features on the state of women in Afghanistan; the newspaper, famous for its discounting of the importance of work on the web, wants to liberate you to blog all day; the blog, famous for its short, pithy takes on other people's news, wants long essays. A website that has traditionally treated its "editors" as "product managers" who spend more time in bizdev and marketing meetings than editorial meetings wants to liberate them to provide meaningful guidance, support and direction for a new editorial team with beefier journalistic bona fides.
AUTHOR: Tom McGeveran
SOURCE: Capital New York
PUBLISHED: March 23, 2011
LENGTH: 11 minutes (2847 words)

Going...Going...Gone
Since his final at-bat, on September 26, 2007, Barry Bonds has been living in near total seclusion. He’s made only a handful of public appearances and declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story. But from more than thirty conversations with his friends, former teammates, agents, and baseball insiders, a portrait of Bonds in hiding emerges. He’s at an inflection point between his baseball past and an uncertain future. On many days, he enjoys his involuntary retirement and the privacy it affords him. But part of Bonds still desperately wants to play. He looks around, sees a sport that’s lousy with known juicers, and can’t comprehend why no one will make him an offer, even for the league minimum of $400,000 a year.
AUTHOR: Gabriel Sherman
SOURCE: GQ
PUBLISHED: April 1, 2009
LENGTH: 18 minutes (4552 words)

Power and the Presidency, From Kennedy to Obama
To be sure, the President’s control over foreign affairs had been growing since the Theodore Roosevelt administration (and still grows today). TR’s acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone preceded Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I, which was a prelude to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s management of the run-up to the victorious American effort in World War II. In the 1950s, Harry S. Truman’s response to the Soviet threat included the decision to fight in Korea without a Congressional declaration of war, and Dwight Eisenhower used the Central Intelligence Agency and brinksmanship to contain Communism.
AUTHOR: Robert Dallek
SOURCE: Smithsonian
PUBLISHED: March 21, 2011
LENGTH: 16 minutes (4090 words)