Longreads

Rachel Maddow Virginia Sherwood/MSNBC "So just who is Sarah Palin?" This is Keith Olbermann talking, back in the summer of 2008, when the Alaska governor is brand-new to the national scene and…

The Victorian Society An 1894 drawing of Willesden Green Library Last time I was in Willesden Green I took my daughter to visit my mother. The sun was out. We wandered down Brondesbury Park towards…

In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his…

by Max Byrd A peculiar experiment inspired by the Enlightenment sheds light on the age-old question of what makes us human. Once or twice a year France's National Museum of Technology, on the…

On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google…

Writer Maria Bustillos: My Top Longreads of 2011 Maria Bustillos is a journalist who writes frequently for The Awl. *** The power of Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer…

1. Bleach My first connection to magazines, maybe my most immediate, is the smell of bleach. My father worked in a printers shop; it was a trade my mother had gotten him into, when she worked at a…

On the afternoon of July 18, in remarks from the Rose Garden amid the bruising showdown with congressional Republicans over the debt ceiling, President Obama made what the White House billed as…

Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But—like most of us who were in New York that week—I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. #Sept11