Longreads

The following is a transcript of President Obama’s second inaugural speech: MR. OBAMA: Vice President Biden, Mr. Chief Justice, Members of the United States Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow…

Photo: Daniel D. Snyder/Sombatt Mutcheen/Lancelot/Shutterstock I hope you remember your duck-and-cover training from grade school because our nation is currently under attack. From what? Deer.…

Photo by C.J.W. Johson, 1870 On the winter solstice of 2008, I am wobbling in orange Wellies atop a bed of rocks and sea anemones, making my inelegant way to the “big rock.” Cupped in…

Anna Clark is a journalist and the editor of the literary blog Isak. (See more stories on her Longreads page.) The infamous 3% statistic points to the percentage of publications each year in…

As we hiked into the Zagros Mountains, which rise to nearly 12,000 feet along the border between Iraq and Iran, the driver grew nervous. "We're going to have lunch in Tehran," he said with a tense laugh. He had reason for his gallows humor: Six months earlier, three Americans—Shane Bauer, 27; his girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, 31; and Josh Fattal, 27, Bauer's former housemate from the University of California at Berkeley—had walked along this same trail, with disastrous results. The hikers had—accidentally, it seems—strayed across the unmarked border into Iran, been seized by border guards, accused of being U.S. spies, and transported to the notorious Evin Prison, in Tehran, where they remained as this story went to press, in March.

So, I find myself wondering, what am I going to do about the man who I think plagiarized me? Sue him? I’ve bleated to a few lawyers. Humiliate him in front of his editor? I’ve written her. Shame him? I’m writing this. My anger has the evanescence of an ephemeral stream. It dries up, then it comes gushing up in a basement two blocks away.

Vanity Fair by William Thackeray: Eco admits his three attempts to read it ended in failure. In a

"It’s taken me years to be able to discuss the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, partly because I needed to move past it and partly because I had forgotten the process of getting it built. I would not discuss the controversy surrounding its construction and it wasn’t until I saw the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision that I was able to remember that time in my life. But I wrote the body of this essay just as the memorial was being completed—in the fall of 1982. Then I put it away…until now."

With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters, gloating on videotape, taunting the united states and western civilization. #Sept11