Longreads

Articles from ContributorSort by   In the middle of Bleak House, the heroine, an orphan named Esther S

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of…

Writer Lev Grossman: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 Lev Grossman writes about books and technology for Time magazine. He’s also the author of the bestselling novels The Magicians and

Imagine your life this way. You get up in the morning and breakfast with your three kids. One is already doomed to die in infancy. Your husband works 200 miles away, comes home twice a year and…

Who has time for pleasantries when the fate of Europe and the global economy is at stake? After Mario Monti, an economist with little experience in the rough world of Italian politics, was sworn in…

Inside a grad student's apartment at the University of Pennsylvania sits a slightly faded blue-and-white wooden sign from a post office in Malone, Wash., that no longer exists. If this were any…

In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was Tintin. Steven Spielberg didn't know what it meant. "Raiders of the Lost Ark had just opened overseas," he says, "and all through the French…

It's 10 minutes to midnight on a Thursday in Riyadh, the start of the Saudi weekend, and even though it's the middle of finals, Tahlia Street swarms with kids in Porsches and Ferraris looking for a good time. Throbbing bass beats back the syncopated rhythm of bleating car horns. The aim is not so much to get through the traffic as to draw attention to the young men in the driver's seats.

(Subscription Required) If there was one time in my marriage when life felt the most unfair, it was during the witching hour. When our children were young and I was working from home, I would relieve our babysitter at 5 p.m. and start to feed and bathe our 3-year-old and 6-month-old and begin various pre-bedtime rituals. By 6 p.m., this thought would be running through my head: If my husband doesn't come home from the office soon to help, I'm going to lose my mind. By 7 p.m., my panic would turn to anger: Do I have to do everything? Each minute before...