The author of The Satanic Verses on the fatwa issued against him in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. “The Disappeared.” — Salman Rushdie, New Yorker More New Yorker
Longreads
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Solvency has haunted Antioch College, a liberal arts school in Yellow Springs Ohio with a storied history, which shuttered its doors in 2008. The college reopened last year with 35 students, and is looking for new ways to draw students and maintain financial stability: When the first students arrived on campus last fall, they found […]
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A mistake on a Wikipedia entry for one of his novels leads an author to set the record straight: My novel ‘The Human Stain’ was described in the entry as ‘allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.’ (The precise language has since been altered by Wikipedia’s collaborative editing, but this falsity still […]
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Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia: Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included […]
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Inside Google’s secretive Ground Truth program—and why it suddenly makes sense that they are working on a self-driving car: Let’s step back a tiny bit to recall with wonderment the idea that a single company decided to drive cars with custom cameras over every road they could access. Google is up to five million miles […]
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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Sady Doyle, Rolling Stone, The Awl, Guernica, The Believer, plus fiction, and a guest pick from Jared Keller.
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[Not singe-page] The rap superstar discusses his career and how he’s remained relevant: In the years since his masterpiece ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ the rapper has often been accused of running on empty, too distant now from what once made him real. In ‘Decoded,’ he answers existentially: ‘How distant is the story of your own life ever […]
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On Keeping A Liary: Anaïs Nin, Autobiography, and the Lady Narcissism Debate
Examining the diaries of the French-born writer—what was true, what was a lie, and what each revealed about her: It’s not as simple as saying that Nin wrote exhaustively about her own life, or that she did it (as bloggers do now) with an emphasis on an unfolding day-to-day narrative, or even that she received […]
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People who suffer from parasomnias, or sleeping disorders, often sleepwalk and experience night terrors, putting them in potentially dangerous situations: My research tells me that most people who suffer from night terrors describe episodes that sound familiar: They feel suffocated, they are about to die, there is someone in the room with them. That doesn’t, […]
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More than 40 years after the “Fatal Vision” murders, Errol Morris’s new book re-investigates a case once covered by the likes of Janet Malcolm and Joe McGinniss: In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in […]