With this in mind, a voice like Samuels’ has never been more important. Of those 12 million bloggers, 84 percent describe writing on their blog as “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on.” Coinciding with this rise of stripped-down, minimalistic writing is a decrease in literary journalism publishing: Only a few magazines- The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly-have continued to devote considerable page space to long-form journalism, while others- Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, countless newspaper magazines-have ceased to publish it or have folded altogether. According to a 2006 Pew study (pdf), 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million Americans adults, keep a blog 39 percent of Internet users, or 57 million American adults, read blogs. With the rise of blogging and online content aggregation-and, of course, the increasing demand for real-time, up-to-the-second news coverage-has come a sharp decline in the publication of literary journalism.

But in the media landscape today, one can’t help but question the future of literary journalism. Samuels, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, has made a career by writing, reporting, and crafting lengthy, in-depth stories. Samuels’ Only Love and his other recently published book, The Runner, a book-length profile of Ivy League impostor James Hogue, are two shining examples of modern literary journalism, a writing style pioneered by Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese, among others, starting in the 1960s. The real riot, he coolly explains, happened during the previous three days, 'not as a single, chaotic, explosive event but as a slow-motion disintegration of the bonds that might hold 225,000 people together.” He later notes that what newspapers the following day would describe as a riot was actually more like “oddly light” mayhem. But as the panicked, sleep-deprived crowd runs past him through lakes of raw sewage on the festival’s third and final night, Samuels maintains his journalistic poise.

Police fight off angry mobs of college students and aging hippies while they plunder food carts for free cans of Sprite. Hundreds of thousands of feverish, strung-out concertgoers tear down the concert festival’s “Peace Wall”-a 12-foot high and 16,000-foot long security barrier “decorated with murals of unicorns and B-52 bombers morphing into doves”-and feed the pieces to the towering fires burning nearby. Near the end of the opening essay in his new book Only Love Can Break Your Heart, journalist David Samuels watches as the corporate-powered Woodstock 1999 descends into utter chaos.

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