Longreads

Pity; they used to be such nice girls. Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake grew up together in a grim housing estate in North West London. They acquired university degrees, good jobs, political…

Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But—like most of us who were in New York that week—I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. #Sept11

Songwriters and producers Jerry…

Jessica Winter published: August 06, 2002 When Marc Jurnove first visited the Long Island Game Farm Park and Zoo in the spring of 1995, he found Barney, a chimpanzee,…

Collage by Jo Lynn…

Derek Jacobi stars in BAM's production of King LearThackeray found King Lear boring. Tolstoy was no great fan. Samuel Johnson dreaded rereading the playhe recoiled from the death of Lear's youngest…

Zach Galifianakis walks up to the driver's side of a FedEx truck and, pretending it's his, pulls out a key. Then he leads me to a beat-up 1997 Subaru station wagon. This is not a joke. It's his car.