Longreads

GQ’s Sean Fennessey: My Top Longreads of 2011 Sean Fennessey is the editor of GQ.com. (See more stories on his Longreads page.) I’ll try to follow a few guidelines for the sake of…

Last Wednesday night, about 50 girls huddled in front of Madison Square Garden, warmed only by North Face jackets and their burning love for Justin Bieber. They were Beliebers, and for the next…

When News Corp. officials gathered in the Hong Kong convention center in March to unveil their latest Chinese Internet investment, a tall woman in their midst handed out a business card that read simply, "News Corporation/Wendi Deng Murdoch." Ms. Deng is not a News Corp. employee. Once a junior executive at the company's Star TV unit in Hong Kong, the 31-year-old Ms. Deng quit her post before marrying News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch last year. Since then, she has been portrayed—by Mr. Murdoch and the company—as a traditional housewife who attends to decorating, her husband's diet and the like. But Ms. Deng is no homebody.

Without Spotify, labels know only when an album is sold. If a CD is ripped for a friend or borrowed for a party, they know nothing. Spotify gives them a record, by location, age, and gender, of every single time a track is played. Jay-Z used to think he was big in London, based on U.K. album sales; it turns out he’s big in Manchester. Spotify has discovered that radio plays—on real, terrestrial, electromagnetic spectrum—still drive interest in artists, as do Sweden’s summer talk shows. Sundin has a Spotify chart tracking Rihanna and Lady Gaga over seven weeks. Both show a bump on Friday and a spike on Saturday. They are weekend artists. Spotify knows when your party plays Gaga.

Interview: Laird Scranton Avi Solomon at 12:46 AM Sunday, Jun 26, 2011 Avi is a technical writer and gardener who lives in Philadelphia with his wife, young son and toddler daughter.

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. Baka malamig doon were among the few words she said. (It…

An unruly market may undo the work of a giant cartel and of an inspired, decades-long ad campaign

Eliza Gray, The New Republic What will it take for America to accept transgender people for who they really are? Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker Sex, love, and loneliness on the Internet.