Longreads

If you were a kid in the 1980s or 90s, you probably spent some time reading, watching, or playing with four adolescent reptilian martial arts experts with irregular DNA. To make sure I got the scoop…

Karen Roach/Shutterstock With bullying in the news this week after the Washington Post's investigation into Mitt Romney's pr

Sady Doyle: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown.  *** There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal…

Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 422 pp., $29.95; $19.95 (paper)          …

3. The Movie Set that Ate ItselfMichael Idov | GQ | Nov. 1, 2011 | 17 minutes (4,336 words)A young Russian film director takes over a small Ukrainian city, enlists a cast of thousands, and creates…

Maurice Sendak looks like one of his own creations: beady eyes, pointy eyebrows, the odd monsterish tuft of hair and a reputation for fierceness that makes you tip-toe up the path of his…

He finds a lot of ordinary things delightful; in fact, he is one of the most consistently enthusiastic people I’ve ever met. He hates what he thinks of as the French habit of being blasé, of dismissing just about everything as pas mal. Instead, his usual mode of speech is fuelled by high-octane superlatives. The cat-food can was “super-super-beautiful!” Talking about it reminded him of other similarly undervalued things that have interested him over the years, especially subcultures like British punks (“super-elegant!”), street people (“I saw someone, very poor, he put a big pullover over his coat, and I thought it was super-beautiful!”), Hasidim (“I saw a lot of rabbis with their traditional clothes. I was amazed by how fabulous and beautiful it was!”), and redheads (“I feel like, red hair, it’s a surprise! A good surprise! It’s super-beautiful!”).

The British journalist Sam Leith recently opened a review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: The Biography with the following question: “Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders?…