From New York magazine and The Cut, an essay from Sasha Sagan about the lessons that her father, astronomer and author Carl Sagan, taught her. Here, Sasha recalls what her parents told her when she went through what she describes as a “mini existential crisis”: “You are alive right this second. That is an amazing […]
Category: Nonfiction
1. “Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing and Death.” (Shane Morris, Bro Jackson, September 2013) Every batch of Molly is different. And that’s what makes the pills or powder you’re buying at your local music festival so dangerous. Shane Morris offers a first-person account of his time in both the EDM and Molly industries. 2. “Is Marijuana Withdrawal […]
At Oxford American, writer and musician Ginger Dellenbaugh looks at how the steel guitar established itself as an American instrument, and why there may be so few people mastering it today: Recently, I met a friend at his studio in East Nashville to listen to some of his new demos. The second track featured a […]
Dan Fagin | Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation | 2013 | 9 minutes (2,153 words) This year’s Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction was awarded yesterday to Dan Fagin, an NYU science journalism professor, for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. According to the Pulitzer committee, Fagin’s book, which chronicles the effects of chemical waste […]
Clinkle’s growth team proved effective at signing up more than 100,000 would-be users — this, despite being a little hazy about precisely what they were selling. Says one former growth team member, “I never saw a direct demonstration of the product.” The growth teams met ambitious goals by targeting the most influential students on campus, […]
This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners are out: The Washington Post and The Guardian shared a Pulitzer for public service for their reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks and widespread NSA surveillance, the Boston Globe was honored for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity won for his black […]
Warren believes that the two-income family has contributed to the bankruptcy rate. “For middle-class families, the most important part of the safety net for generations has been the stay-at-home mother,” Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, wrote in “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” (2003), a book aimed at […]
Tom Molanphy | Loud Memories of a Quiet Life (OutPost 19) | May 2012 | 18 minutes (4,652 words) Tom Molanphy earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He freelances for 10Best/Travel Media Group at USA Today and teaches creative writing, composition and journalism at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. This […]
“Recipes I’ve seen suggest it was about 0.01 grams of cocaine used in fountain sodas. That’s about a tenth of a line of coke,” he says. “It’s hard to be sure, but I don’t think it would’ve given people a massive high. It would definitely be enough to have some kind of effect, probably stronger […]
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: It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually […]
There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren’t nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they’re not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough…. Thin in […]
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 […]
Chris Wilson: I still remember the very first time I got HTML content pulled over the network through Libwww and I was displaying it on my debugging monitor in my office at NCSA with Jon Mittelhauser sitting over my shoulder looking at it, and thinking that was amazing. I knew that it was going to […]
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 […]
Once the lords of East Africa, the Maasai have been close to peerless in the modern age for maintaining the continuity of their traditions—traditions now imperiled by the tentacles of the market and by technology, as cell phones and cheap Chinese motorcycles, like the one we rode, upend the very possibility of isolation. Compulsory and […]
This week’s College Longreads selection is as much for the publication as it is for the story. Richie Siegel’s article about a Japanese street food restaurant in Chicago called Yoshu is mostly a profile of the owners, with a little bit of a restaurant review on the side. Siegel, a sophomore at NYU, is an […]
This week, we’re thrilled to share a new Longreads Member Pick from Fortune magazine. “How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying” is Jennifer Reingold’s definitive account of what really happened inside J.C. Penney—from the dramatic reinvention of the company, led by new CEO Ron Johnson, to its disastrous unraveling (and Johnson’s firing) less […]
Jennifer Reingold | Fortune | March 2014 | 29 minutes (7,108 words) Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle) Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks) When you find a savior, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron […]
Gif via Justin Blinder’s ‘Vacated’ project. 1. “Urban Church Planting Plantations.” (Christena Cleveland, March 2014) White suburban churches invade urban spaces with no regard for the churches already in place. 2. “Gentrification Sparks Surge In Landlord Sabotage.” (Lauren Evans, Gothamist, Feb. 2014) Setting fires, locking tenants out and willfully destroying a building’s infrastructure–evil landlords will go to […]
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to a new story by journalist Eva Holland, to be published next week by Pacific Standard. “The Peacemaker” tells the story of Schaeffer Cox, the 30-year-old activist and founder of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia who was sentenced last year to 26 years in […]
The dream of the “Food Movement” is for all meat to be humanely raised and locally sourced so we can all be “conscientious carnivores.” In The American Scholar, James McWilliams looks at a dilemma the Food Movement is facing: Can animals be raised humanely if the end goal is not for animals to live a […]
Ivory Tower veterans, many of whom were students in the 1960s and 1970s, lament the lack of student activism on college campuses. There are few protests, only a smattering a vigils, and barely any quad chalking. But is all that passion and activism gone, or has it just moved – along with everything else – […]
Paul Monette | Open Road Media | 1992 | 4 minutes (797 words) Below is a brief excerpt from Open Road Media’s reissue of Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, the National Book Award-winning autobiography by Paul Monette. Purchase the book here. *** Everybody else had a childhood, for one thing—where they were coaxed […]
As a white woman, my role in conversations about race is to listen and learn. This week, I wanted to include pieces about empowerment, stereotypes and intersection in the realm of race. One reading list cannot encompass the vast array of experiences of black Americans; this is not meant to be exhaustive. Send me your […]
In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought […]
I think the look of the show is great. There was a bit of an adjustment for me. I had been living with these characters and this world since 1991, so I had close to twenty years of pictures in my head of what these characters looked like, and the banners and the castles, and […]
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