Longreads

Excerpted from "Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing" The 18th and 19th centuries’ embrace of linguistic delicacy and extreme avoidance of taboo bestowed great power on those words that broached…

Brazil, while quickly becoming an emerging economic power, is still struggling to improve the socioeconomic problems brought on from the legacy of its autocratic past. This is the first of four…

JULY/AUGUST 2012 Injury and the Ethics of Reading Elaine ScarryDetail from Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung’s Le Roman de la Rose, Paris, 1348 / Bodleian Libraries, Oxford What is the…

Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting…

Nineteen clicks of the mouse, the electronic brandishing of a credit card, thirteen dollars of my savings. A box of communion wafers was on its way to my apartment. Five days later, it arrived: five…

Only the week before, she'd convinced herself he was going to be all right. "It was our summer holiday," says Joyce Young. "I looked at him there, playing in the sand on the beach with my niece, and…

16 NOVEMBER, 2011 by Maria Popova What the French ideology from 1791 has to do with creative meritocracy and the future of information. As the editor of what’s essentially a public-service…

by Sy Montgomery Published in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion magazine Photograph: Brandon Cole ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire…

The Paris Review first interviewed Ann Beattie in 1983. The transcripts of those sessions reveal a writer who had grown accustomed to being noticed and a little weary of answering reporters’ questions. “I can’t help it,” she said, “if people make the mistake of thinking that I am a prophet and that I am disguising my wisdom as short fiction that’s published in The New Yorker.”