Longreads

“Hey, babe,” Lance Armstrong called to his girlfriend, Anna Hansen. “I’ll take the girls. Do they have all their gear? Shoes and whatnot?” He stood in the door of…

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on…

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DISCUSSED: Dombey and Son, the Toodles, Bonnets, Sycophancy in Ruins, Nineteenth-Century Book Tours, Robert Altman, Capital-P Pride, Theatricality, Rob the Grinder. I have a suggestion: Forget…

Stephen Colbert dressing for a rehearsal of "The Colbert Report." More Photos » There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference…

DISCUSSED: Phonetic Delinquency, Words Repeating with Moderate Frequency, The Side Projects of H. G. Wells, The International Phonetic Alphabet, Quixotic Enormity, Russian Brutes, Orthographic…

DISCUSSED: Guys Who Winnow the White Album, Neil Young, The Art of Courtly Love, Trademark Pauses, Philadelphia, Singing Homeless Guys, Gilbert and Sullivan, The Human League Its…

DISCUSSED: What Really Killed Che Guevara, Hippie-Wannabes in Old Havana, Hemingways Fourteen-Daiquiri Diet, Cheap Creole Stogies, JFKs White House Humidor, Pat and Mike, Rolling Cigars to…

I answered an ad that asked, “Like amusement parks? Want to write about them?” and was called for an interview. Bill, editor-in-chief of Funworld, was enthusiastic about the magazine, the amusement industry, and, particularly, Funworld’s new computers—he called them machines—which were apparently very fast. When the interview was over, he told me the job was mine if I was interested. I was. At the time I knew almost nothing about amusement parks and attractions. Publications assistant was the sort of entry-level position that would give me a chance to learn. I’d file contracts and send copies of Funworld to anybody who requested them. I’d edit articles that no one else wanted to edit, like the twenty-six-page case study on the effects of G-forces on roller-coaster passengers (negligible), which had awaited revision for two years. And the article about shuttle coasters, which began with the sentence “Whooooooosh!”