“Stretchy seaweed, reverse vending machines, QR-coded take-out boxes: They’re how we can break society’s absurd addiction to single-use plastics.”
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Pamela Colloff, Jasper Craven, Omer Bartov, Judith Sanders, and Lale Arikoglu.
Award Wins, Note-Taking Advice, and Our Top 5
“So as soon as my reporting was done, I would go home. I would never permit myself to do anything, make dinner, nothing, until I’d sat down with the notebooks.” Happy Friday! We have several updates to share this week. We’re working to improve your overall Longreads experience, and you may notice some small changes while browsing […]
The Code That Controls Your Money
COBOL, an old coding language that not many people know about, controls the world’s financial systems.
Planning for the Death of Parking in American Cities
In the latest issue of Mother Jones, Clive Thompson investigated how the rise of autonomous cars, and Americans’ desire to live in more walkable cities, will mean no longer having to set aside vast amounts of land for parking lots. Many articles have offered a utopian vision of our autonomous driving future, but what I particularly like […]
No Parking Here
Clive Thompson investigates how the rise of autonomous cars, and Americans’ desire to live in more walkable cities, will mean no longer having to set aside vast amounts of land for parking lots.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
The best stories of the week, as chosen by the editors of Longreads.
Remembering Is a Social Act
The worry about mental laziness is a really big one; the idea that because we can turn to Wikipedia or turn to our phone and we can get an answer to a question that somehow our brain is becoming slack like an empty wine bladder. In a way, when I started the book [Smarter Than […]
A Longreads Guest Pick: Tim Cigelske on Clive Thompson's "Is Google Wrecking Our Memory?"
Tim is Director of Social Media at Marquette University and writes about beer and running for DRAFT Magazine. “Whenever I hear people talking about how technology is ruining our attention spans and turning our collective brains to mush, I like to tell them about #longreads. This article is a perfect example. I saw a link […]
Michelle Legro: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Michelle Legro is an editor for Lapham’s Quarterly (who you should be following on Tumblr!) michellelegro: If you aren’t one of the more than 10,000 people who follow @longreads on Twitter, or get the Longreads Instapaper feed on your iPhone or iPad, then do so immediately. Every day there are perfectly curated features of long-form journalism, […]


