Longreads

By Marilynne Robinson March 2012 Marilynne Robinson looks to the stars for clues about our nature. Photographs courtesy of Bill McDowell All thinking about the good society, what is to be wished for…

There were no buildings, no roads, only burning dunes of debris. His brother, Patrick, was somewhere here, and Sean Gallagher was conscious of wanting, a little too much, to be the one to…

Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was. A user in 1996, when the Web comprised hundreds of thousands of “sites” with millions of “pages,” did not expect to be able to search for “Olympics” and automatically find the official site of the Atlanta games. That was too hard a problem. And what was a search supposed to produce for a word like “university”? AltaVista, then the leading search engine, offered up a seemingly unordered list of academic institutions, topped by the Oregon Center for Optics.

She walked into the place and without saying a word, handed the man the wrinkled yellow slip of paper she had worked and fussed over for hours the night before. There were only two words written on it in careful block letters. After glancing at it (she watched his eyes closely to see his reaction but his face remained blank), he looked at her and then once more at the paper to be sure he’d seen correctly. Then he asked, “Where do you want it?”

If theres one thing I learned in graduate school, its that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.) At the time, I was a…

I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave. I guess the girl with the pink high heels woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t remember where she was. She went out naked in the hall and closed the door behind her. She said that she had asked me, and I told her that was the way to the bathroom, to go out the front door. I don’t remember doing that.

Jonathan Franzen is among the most admired and popular novelists of his generation, a distinction confirmed by the rapturous reception to his fourth novel, Freedom, earlier this fall. But it wasnt…

If theres one thing I learned in graduate school, its that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.) At the time, I was a…

The Other Side of the Mirror: An American Travels Through Syria by Brooke Allen