Articles Tweeted

Newest Picks

Survivors

Years ago, along the cacophonous roads leading from Ramses Train Station in Cairo, I came across a small girl with a bright red headscarf weaving her way in and out of the slow-moving traffic, her…
SOURCE:Aeon
LENGTH: 17 minutes (4273 words)

How to fold a thong: A straight man working at Victoria’s Secret

“You are the first man I have ever seen working at Victoria’s Secret,” said a customer walking up to the cash register. I’d hear this a lot over the next year. For a while, I’d tell customers that I…
PUBLISHED: May 7, 2013
LENGTH: 8 minutes (2196 words)
2 RETWEETs

Mona Eltahawy on Egypt’s Next Revolution

Why are you so willing to head back into danger?” I ask Mona Eltahawy. We’re sitting in a café on the Upper West Side of New York City, not far from her Harlem apartment, and the…
PUBLISHED: April 23, 2013
LENGTH: 32 minutes (8201 words)

In Defense of Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, photographed in New York City on March 11 (Grant Cornett) In the summer of 2002, during the initial buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which he supported, Henry Kissinger told me he…
PUBLISHED: April 24, 2013
LENGTH: 20 minutes (5073 words)

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

4. When War Came A.J. Sherman | New England Review | April 8, 2013 | 20 minutes (4,955 words) The author recalls a childhood summer in New Jersey's countryside in 1939 before World War II:"Toward…

How to Spend 47 Hours on a Train and Not Go Crazy

Vickie, Alice, Lisa, Debbie, Barbara, Chris, Clair and Cootz boarded the Los Angeles-bound Sunset Limited in Schriever, La., and immediately took residence in the glass-sheathed Sightseer Lounge car.…
PUBLISHED: Feb. 28, 2013
LENGTH: 20 minutes (5006 words)

THE MAKING OF THE IDEA OF RACE

In my last post, on The Enlightenment’s “Race Problem”, I questioned the idea that that the modern roots of the idea of race lie in the Enlightenment. The  relationship…
PUBLISHED: Feb. 17, 2013
LENGTH: 15 minutes (3985 words)

Cocktail Party Physics, Scientific American Blog Network

This weekend I’ll be at Science Online 2013 in North Carolina, moderating a panel with io9′s Annalee Newitz on science and science fiction. It’s a topic near and dear to both our…
PUBLISHED: Jan. 27, 2013
LENGTH: 9 minutes (2430 words)

Vietnam was even more horrific than we thought

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been…
PUBLISHED: Jan. 17, 2013
LENGTH: 15 minutes (3918 words)
}