Longreads

You’ve just had dinner at one of the best restaurants in the country, the kind of place where the chef talks about his passion for perfection, obsession with detail and demand for the best,…

Six months ago, my boyfriend and I were watching a movie in our apartment when he looked up and said, "Something's wrong." A moment later, he was pressed up against the front door, listening and…

In the grand scheme of things, 1992 is such recent history that it barely qualifies as history. When it comes to portable gadgets, however, it’s an era that we 21st-century humans…

An old-fashioned One cold morning many years ago, a grouchy old New Yorker cranked out a letter to the editor of the Times. Happen

Imagine you've been served with a legal complaint. Your startup company makes a very popular widget, and your chief rival, MicroWidget International, is suing for patent infringement. If…

Elizabeth Hardwick and the whale: although it is very dark inside the whiteness, she will read her way by oil lamp to Melville, “the most bookish of writers, a tireless midnight student.” Thigh-high in ambergris and spermaceti, she makes herself as much at home as on the prison ship, or the cannibal islands, or the Berkshire farm where Herman wrote in twelve-hour shifts, or inside the Manhattan townhouse down whose stairs he may have tossed his wife.

In 2009, Emily Yoffe, Slate's "Dear Prudence" shared the story of her husband's first wife, Robin, who died from breast cancer at age 34. In honor of Mother's Day, we are republishing the story…

For this bodiless replicator itself, Richard Dawkins proposed a name. He called it the meme, and it became his most memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity. “Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he wrote. They compete with one another for limited resources: brain time or bandwidth. They compete most of all for attention.

For a long while after David Foster Wallace's death, his widow Karen Green couldn't make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. "The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long," she says, "with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell." The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto.