The Longreads Blog

You will have been wondering about the drugs. Did we do them? Did I find myself on Fremont Street, cowering under an awning as a digital projection of Jim Morrison mounted the roof of the pedestrian mall’s 90-foot-tall barrel-vault canopy? Did I walk with many gaits, dragging first one leg and then the other, zig-zagging past blackjack tables and wolfish packs of Midwesterners? Was Caesars Palace where Fleur found her spirit animal, a puffer fish? Did she pet at it through the swank aquarium glass? Did it all end with me on my knees on the plush carpet that cradles the Bellagio Las Vegas, tears streaming down my face as I genuflected to the casino’s super-sized Liberty Bell, surmounted by a mighty eagle that clutched lightning bolts in its talons, the sign under which I grew up in faraway Philadelphia?

Of course not.

“Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas.” — Zach Baron, The Daily

More #longreads: “As Boom Times Sour in Vegas, Upward Mobility Goes Bust.” The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2009

The dark force in Syria is not the Alawi religion. It’s not exactly the cult of Hafez Al Assad, either. Only the aged and the infirm refuse to acknowledge his death. But love for the sacred sanctuary he invented, the one protected by the blue-eyed family of pilots and horsemen, has not died. The dark force in Syria is excessive belief in this realm of unreality. All those people who served in its police force, killed on its behalf, and kept the silence while the killing was going on carry its banner. This species of belief is a non-denominational phenomenon. It is enforced by the Alawis but Sunnis—and Kurds and Christians—are most welcome. For the time being, it is holding fast.

“The Cult: The Twisted, Terrifying Last Days of Assad’s Syria.” — Theo Padnos, The New Republic

See more #longreads from The New Republic

Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard, their assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers clanging against the hull. Paul activated an emergency beacon, which immediately started emitting an S.O.S., and then went up on deck. The men stank of the sea and nervous musk, and they jabbed their guns at the Chandlers.

“Stop engine!” they shouted. “Crew, crew! How many crew number?”

One pirate was particularly concerned about anything flashing, and Paul’s heart sank when the pirate stomped below deck and discovered the emergency beacon, blinking like a strobe, and promptly switched it off. The pirates ordered the Chandlers not to touch anything else, and then they demanded a shower.

This was Oct. 23, 2009. The Chandlers would be held for the next 388 days. 

“Taken by Pirates.” Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times Magazine

More #longreads: “Bootylicious.” The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 2009. On what the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts

Featured Longreader: @MosesHawk, artist extraordinaire. See his story picks from The Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, London Review of Books and more on his #longreads page.

It smelled like Pine-Sol. Of all the things that night to startle the senses, that’s what nearly everyone remembered. The trees smelled like that after they broke. The sky cleared. The breeze hushed up, and the stars popped out. John English found a flashlight and walked over what was left of his property. His johnboat was hanging up in a tree. Billy Briscoe helped pull Carlos Viera out from beneath the concrete slab of his family’s home, which had been turned and scattered all over the Porter property. John English checked on the Porters; Mike Porter went over to see about Ms. Willis. The houses were gone.

“The Town that Blew Away.” — Justin Heckert, Atlanta Magazine

See more #longreads from Atlanta Magazine


“Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia’s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, countered another theory, UVB-76 served as nothing less than the epicenter of the former Soviet Union’s ‘Dead Hand’ doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack. (The least sexy theory, which posited that the Buzzer was testing the thickness of the ionosphere, has never enjoyed much support.)”

“Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma.” — Peter Savodnik, Wired magazine

See more #longreads from Wired magazine

Lewis does his best to ignore what he calls “the noise.” “I’m sensitive enough to criticism that if I pay attention to it, it may make me a worse writer,” he says, maneuvering his car through the Berkeley Hills. “When I sit down to write, I like to think everybody’s going to love me,” he adds. “Or at least I don’t think anybody’s going to hate me. It’s pronoia, right, is that the word? Everybody’s out to love me, not everybody’s out to hate me? I think basically that way as I move through the world.”

“It’s Good to Be Michael Lewis.” — Jessica Pressler, New York magazine

See also: “It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!” — Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair, Aug. 10, 2011

Featured Longreader: Nick Baumann, news editor for Mother Jones. See his story picks from Grantland, The New York Times and more on his #longreads page.

“A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism. Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.”

“Koch Brothers Flout Law with Secret Iran Sales.” — Asjylyn Loder and David Evans, Bloomberg News

More #longreads: “Covert Operations.” Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, Aug. 20, 2010, on the billionaire brothers waging a war against President Obama

“At Twitter, where anxiety and optimism are never far from one another, the leadership is surprisingly frank about these problems. To start with, the audience is alarmingly fickle. Nielsen estimated that user-retention rates were around 40 percent. Twitter was easy to use at an entry level, but after a while it was hard for some people to see the point. Twitter has claimed as many as 175 million registered users, but numbers leaked to the online news site Business Insider in March put the number of actual people using it closer to 50 million, correcting for dead and duplicate accounts, automated ‘bots’ and spam.”

“Tweet Science.” — Joe Hagan, New York magazine

See more #longreads about Twitter