The Longreads Blog

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

kimaskew: My Favorite #Longreads This Week

kimaskew:

In Search of Spiraling Time (Bookslut)

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets (Vanity Fair)

Michael Chabon: How to Salvage a “Wrecked” Novel  (The Atlantic)

David Mitchell: Earth calling Taylor (FT.com)

Capital New York: 7 great longreads by Tom Robbins

Capital New York: 7 great longreads by Tom Robbins

The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

A Basketball Carol

A Basketball Carol

Michelle Legro: Top Longreads for Animal Behavior

Michelle Legro: Top Longreads for Animal Behavior

The Web After You're Dead

The Web After You’re Dead

Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data

Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data

However much the book was revised, it should have been revised more. The opening may have been reworked, as Gedin says, but it still features an episode—somebody telling somebody else at length (twelve pages!) about a series of financial crimes peripheral to the main plot—that, by wide consensus, is staggeringly boring. Elsewhere, there are blatant violations of logic and consistency. Loose ends dangle. There are vast dumps of unnecessary detail. When Lisbeth goes to IKEA, we get a list of every single thing she buys. The jokes aren’t funny. The dialogue could not be worse. The phrasing and the vocabulary are consistently banal.