“Building a relationship is important, because it makes the pictures secondary.”

“The way we die is changing. So, too, is the way we think about dying — and about the opportunity, even the right, to die at a time and place of our choosing.”

With physical distancing the order of the day as COVID-19 spreads, cultural locales — sites for communal experiences, like museums and theaters — are emptying out. What are we sharing if we’re not sharing these spaces? And were we really sharing them to begin with?

“It’s strange to think that the Righteous Brothers outlive my mother. Sometimes I pretend they are singing to her.”

“She can be shy and insecure. And yet she didn’t hesitate to stare down the cameras on American television to call out one of the most powerful men in the world.”

Rachel Vorona Cote on how the Victorian era’s restrictive prescriptions for acceptable female behavior pollute society to this day.

“Whether this (continuous deflection) is intentional or not, it’s a good way of avoiding giving too much away.”

‘“Notre Dame will come out of this experience enriched,” she says. “And so will we.”’

“My dad every now and then will toe that line and be like, You could try women!” says Bowen, laughing. “And I’m like…Don’t. It’s almost an endearing kind of homophobia, if such a thing exists.”

Rules can ruin the kind of exciting language that makes literature rewarding, but some rules also enhance writing. It’s challenging to find the middle ground.

For one poet, conducting a satisfying literary life off-page required living life outside the classroom.

Dialogue, Twitter-style: you get called out on social media. People pile on to you. Other people pile on to the pile-oners. Soon everyone’s anxious or angry or both, no one’s really talking (or listening), and a few tech CEOs are buying new houses in Jackson Hole.

For years, singer-songwriter Paul Curreri was a shouter of singular beauty. Then he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

“Live your life now in a positive way. Help people if you can. Don’t hurt people. That works perfectly for me, man.”

Every era bears its aesthetic burden. This is ours.

“Before he died a few years later, my father told me there were almost no tocaoras — female flamenco guitarists — in the world. If I kept practicing, he said, I could be one of the first.”

Eight must-read stories that investigate science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.

What the people we envy online can tell us about ourselves.

“Having children has simultaneously fried my brain and made it sharper and more focused.”

A selection of 25 successful article-to-film adaptations that made it all the way to the box office.

Jessica Lynne remembers a long distance love affair that began in Miami and the Billie Holiday song that kept her company through the relationship’s transitions.

Hive is a new Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

“And yet I am also, in the darkest corners of my heart, a doomsday prepper myself.”

Every Portis fan has a different favorite passage from his novels, but they agree on one thing: no one wrote like Portis.

It’s surprising when stodgy institutions award progressive artists, and surprises, even good ones, are alarming — so we immediately burden the winners with the weight of symbolism.

The posthumous Buckley industry began with this problematic album, proof that the people who control a musician’s estate don’t always have his music in mind.

New York character actress Lynn Cohen died on Valentine’s Day 2020, survived by an extended family of friends and collaborators.

Although music often involves emotional expression, pop star Carly Rae Jepsen has built a career and a persona out of big, unguarded emotions, a range that could be called “too muchness,” which is just right for some of us.

A ninth grader’s creation explodes on TikTok, without acknowledgement or credit.

American music may be Black music, but it has now become the music of displacement.