Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
***

Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books, on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book from Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics:

This month, Longreads is celebrating its fifth anniversary. I started this service in April 2009, and it has grown into an incredible global community of readers, writers and publishers. Together, we helped create a thriving ecosystem for longform storytelling and helped reverse the myth that the Internet has shortened attention spans or diminished our appetite for reading. Read more…

College campuses are full of ghosts. Alumni magazines have the glossy success stories about the alumnus who made good, but what students remember are the cautionary tales. The tormented writer who worked here for a while. The student who fell to his death from the eighth floor of your dorm. But these stories are almost always more legend than fact. Alexander Deedy’s chronicle of the University of Montana fraternity brother who built an online poker site into a multimillion dollar outfit and then went to jail for it is as much a celebration of the fantasy life of young men as it is a sober warning about the long arm of the law. Deedy’s pacing and sympathy makes his story compelling and his main character relatable.
Alexander Deedy | The Montana Kaimin | March 27, 2014 | 15 minutes (3,863 words)

–An oral history of Netscape on its 20th anniversary, from the perspective of its creators. Read more oral histories.

Twenty-seven years ago, in December 1987, three kids in Aberdeen, Wash. formed the original line-up of Nirvana. They recorded a 10-song demo the next month. Bleach was released on Sub Pop six months later, followed by Nevermind in September, 1991. It opened at #144 on the Billboard charts. The next January, it hit #1, and the band played “Saturday Night Live” that same night. Three months later they were on the cover of Rolling Stone. In Utero, their third and final album, was released in September 1993, debuting at #1 on the Billboard charts and selling 180,000 copies within a week of its release. Seven months later, Kurt Cobain was dead; a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
That was 20 years ago. Nirvana will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this Thursday. Kurt Cobain’s life and legacy have been examined in far too many books, dissertations and teenage diary entries to name. This list is the opposite of comprehensive; instead it offers seven specific snapshots.
According to Opper, Cobain’s death was arguably the first major celebrity suicide since Marilyn Monroe’s passing in 1962. This piece, which examines both Cobain’s death and the phenomena of suicide contagion, provides a fascinating look at how suicide prevention specialists sprung into action after the tragedy, providing resources to devastated fans.
Two years after Cobain’s death, High Times investigated the rumors that foul play—and not a self-inflicted gunshot wound—were to blame.
Crisscrossing the country with Courtney Love, this story follows the strange saga of Cobain’s earthly remains, which, in search of nirvana, are divided, molded, stuffed in a teddy bear, held up in customs, and inhaled by many).
Rolling Stone traces Cobain’s final days—from his nearly fatal drug overdose in Rome to the discovery of his body one month later in Seattle.
An LA Times interview in the living room of Cobain’s Hollywood Hills apartment; he addresses drug rumors and tenderly explains that as a new father he doesn’t want his daughter “to grow up and someday be hassled by kids at school… I don’t want people telling her that her parents were junkies.”
From the seminal teen magazine Sassy, a cover story on the then-newly engaged poster couple for grunge love. Bonus: an I Heart Daily video interview with the story’s author and former Sassy editor Christina Kelly.
From the now defunct British music weekly Melody Maker, a very early interview—right after Bleach, and back when Cobain still spelled his name “Kurdt.” Cobain jokes around, sports a goatee and is described as “your archetypal small guy—wiry, defiantly working class and fiery.” Note: This interview comes via Flavorwire’s excellent compendium of essential Kurt Cobain books, interviews and photos.
Photo: Ramsey Beyer, Flickr

Age 7: Dear Diary, Today I went to Clarisse’s house. It was fun.
Age 13: Dear Diary, We are leaving for Mom-mom’s funeral soon. Mom and Dad are fighting and THE WORLD IS FALLING OVER.
Age 23 [written on this laptop, not my Moleskine]: I am fulfilling my daydream of feeling like a Privileged Artist & sitting in an artisanal coffeeshop, working on my freelance assignment, next to my boyfriend who is drawing Russian-inspired characters for his latest creative endeavoring.
My diaries aren’t all that thrilling and over time, they’ve transformed from hit-or-miss “daily” self-missives to emotional ramblings over the anarcho-Communist boy who was in my 10th grade geometry class to what they are today: a commonplace book full of ticket stubs, lists of anxieties, doodles and observations. Lately, I’ve been inspired by Dear Queer Diary on Autostraddle. But enough about my journaling habits. What are yours?
From the Dear America series to the Princess Diaries, fictional diaries gave the author a set of “emotional blueprints” by which to navigate adolescence: “Finding a way to decode your feelings and figuring out how to spend your days are worthy pursuits, characters like Harriet [the Spy] tell us.”
Professor Gerda Saunders’ mind is dementing. She provides excerpts of her own diary and examines her mother’s Day Book, a collection of 27 diary entries written in her native Afrikaans, as she, too, suffered from undiagnosed dementia.
“2-5-2011
During my going-away meeting with Gender Studies, the faculty gave me this journal. In it I’ll report my descent into the post-cerebral realm for which I am headed. No whimpering, no whining, no despair. Just the facts.”
Oversharing or honesty? Trivial or timeless? The worth of women’s writing rages on, and Anais Nin is a complex character in this drama.
“Let’s start with a few unpleasant facts. First: Anais Nin was a fraud. Fifteen volumes of her diary (which disillusioned fans have referred to as “the liary”) have been published, and all of them are untruthful.”
•••
Photo: Magic Madzik
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Below is a guest reading list from Maisie Allison, digital editorial director of The American Conservative.
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Here is a (mostly critical) reading list for conservatives and others interested in a deeper consideration of conservatism, and how the post-movement right might draw creatively from older sources to chart a way forward. My former boss Andrew Sullivan’s rule of thumb: It gets worse before it gets better. Read more…

–David McDannald, in The American Scholar (subscribers only), on the effects of globalization on the Maasai tribe in Kenya.
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