Longreads

Bruce Springsteen on the cover of Rolling Stone. Aaron Rapoport

explore-blog: Gay Talese’s outline for the 1966 classic Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, one of the best long-form magazine pieces ever penned, written on a shirt board.  (↬ The…

Thank goodness for the House G.O.P. ultras—Eric Cantor, Allen West, Michele Bachmann, Steve Scalise, and the rest of the crazy gang who voted against the fiscal-cliff deal. That’s what…

I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like…

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I…

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 14.1 (Spring 2012). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission.…

The search for an amateur philosopher In the July/August 2001 issue of the late, great magazine Lingua Franca, James Ryerson published an enthralling article about an anonymous benefactor who was…

"It was eight years before I was able to say the word that describes what happened to me," says Maricella Guzman. "I hadn't even been in the Navy a month. I was so young. I tried to report it. But…

At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to—only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes—though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.