Longreads

Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious.

The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as “serious journalism.” We’ve seen serious storytelling in both.

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

Share your favorite stories in the comments.

Our picks this week include The Washington Post, American Prospect, ESPN, Tampa Bay Times, Wired, and a guest pick by Todd Olmstead.

This week's Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner's new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who's been featured on Longreads in the past, explains:

For Father's Day, we've unlocked our recent Longreads Member Pick, chapter one from Drew Magary's new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books).

An examination of Margaret Thatcher's life as chronicled in the authorized biography by Charles Moore:

"It’s depressing to suppose that fortune favours the people who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they do. But she is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps chopping and changing long after they have gone home. She didn’t outsmart or outperform her enemies. She outstayed them."

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

Share your favorite stories in the comments.

Our picks this week include fiction from The New Yorker, plus FT Magazine, Texas Monthly, Washingtonian, The Verge and a guest pick by Margaret Ely.

This week's Member Pick is a chapter from Among Murderers, a new nonfiction book by Sabine Heinlein, published by University of California Press, examining the lives of criminals as they prepare to re-enter society. Heinlein, who was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her Iowa Review essay "A Portrait of the Writer as a Rabbit," explains the origins of this chapter, which focuses on "Job Readiness."