Longreads

On March 16th, the Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, who’d been in office for about a month, announced a strategy to solve the country’s banking crisis. This plan, which would be…

Fredrik Brodén Eleven days after the massacre, Wayne LaPierre – a lifelong political operative who had steadied the National Rifle Association through many crises – stood before an…

Posted about 15 minutes ago Last October, while hundreds of protesters were encamped in Zuccotti Park, a handful of people occupied a glass building in downtown Washington D.C. Wearing sheepish grins…

We will post remembrances of Nora Ephron soon. Please read some of the many wonderful pieces she wrote for the magazine: “My Life As an Heiress” Ephron’s Personal History about…

The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on…

Susan Sontag, photographed by Peter Hujar By all accounts, Susan Sontag found being alone intolerable. In Sigrid Nunez’s 2011 memoir, Sempre Susan, Sontag didn’t even want to drink her…

Stuttering: An Integrated Approach to Its Nature and Treatment by Barry Guitar Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 503 pp., $97.95                    …

Alvan Sanborn on New York at the turn of the 20th century:

"After he so far recovers from the shock of his initial disenchantment, however, as to be able to take note of details, he finds that there is some balm in Gilead, after all. At the end of a month he begins to catch the spirit of New York; and at the end of six months he has come completely under its spell, and loves it, as Montaigne loved the Paris of his day, "with all its moles and warts." The radiant white city by the Seine still appears to him at intervals, like the memory of a favorite picture or poem; but it has lost the power to disquiet him with desire. Paris is no longer a perpetual obsession,—the absolute norm by which he judges everything he sees. Indeed, it has passed so far out of his life that he is in danger of being as over-lenient in his judgments as he was at the outset over-severe.

"The truth is that New York is in the throes of creation. With infinite travail it is taking on a body adequate to its needs,—a feat Paris long ago accomplished. The operation necessarily involves disagreeable surprises, and the immediate result, viewed in its entirety, is, it must be confessed, much more grotesque than impressive. An orchestral performance in which each and every performer played a different tune could hardly be less prepossessing."