Girl reporter for Politics in Minnesota. Mother of Dragons. It was a great week for longreads in America (see: Reuters’ ‘The Child Exchange’ investigation and Rolling Stone’s interactive story on hackers who will probably save the world), but one piece was passed around on my social media feeds more than any other: ‘Finding Molly: Drugs, […]
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Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Student publications have always served as simulators for journalists in training. Your college paper is where you learn to write, to edit, and to challenge authority. You fall in love there, both with journalism and at […]
The best interviews with authors make you want to read—not just their work, but read in general, and read all the time, and read with a new fervor. * * * 1. “The Art of Not Belonging: Dwyer Murphy Interviews Edwidge Danticat.” (Guernica, September 2013) Danticat gives a beautiful interview, discussing her book Claire of […]
Christine Kim is a civil rights advocate studying at Duke University School of Law. My favorite longread of the week is ‘What’s Killing Poor White Women,’ by Monica Potts, in The American Prospect. Health care is on the national stage. From Obamacare to health care costs to new state-run health exchanges, it seems that each […]
This week’s Longreads Member Pick comes recommended by Longreads contributor Julia Wick: It’s “The Last Freeway,” a story by Hillel Aron, published in Slake in 2011, about the construction of a freeway interchange and a judge whose decisions shaped its scope. Aron explains: “Well, my friends Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa had this great quarterly […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Journalism requires a relentless focus on the now and the next. But in order for journalists to give their audience any sort of context, they must always have a sense of the past. It’s not enough […]
Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things,” wrote Henry Miller. Travel changes the traveler, obviously. Here, authors look at themselves, their societies, and their conceptions of home. 1. “Fat and […]
For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from Next City’s Forefront magazine, by journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz. Aronowitz looks at the story behind the minimum wage increase in San Jose, which jumped to $10 per hour from $8 per hour after the city’s residents voted for the increase last November—”the […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Stories about people outside the margins of convention can have a “Check out these weirdos!” leitmotif. We write about these people because they are different. But a clumsy writer accentuates the differences instead of finding the […]
Above: Mark Felt Julia Wick is a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC. With Chelsea Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison and Edward Snowden’s future still uncertain, it seems a pertinent time to look at what becomes of our whistleblowers after […]
Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. The following four pieces resist cliches about social media and its impact. These authors do not shame nor condone; they do not preach. They take a deeper look at the tendency and luxury to share our lives with […]
Nolan is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic. Jada Yuan’s profile of Mindy Kaling for New York magazine is almost a year old, but it has been a major influence on the way I write. It moves effortlessly from funny to sad, and it captures Kaling so well that it’s hard not read her quotes […]
This week’s Member Pick is from a brand new publication, The New New South, which has just published a new ebook by Belle Boggs, who’s been featured on Longreads in the past for pieces including 2012’s “The Art of Waiting.” Her latest, “For the Public Good,” looks at forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States and the […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Americans spend a lot of time with sports, so “healing power of sports” stories that elevate games beyond, well, games, have an undeniable appeal. But sports writing, when trying to transcend its subject matter, can run […]
From Matt Graves: Here are six of his story picks on the topic of music producers, the often-overlooked architects of the music we hear and love. * * * 1. “The Song Machine: the Hitmakers Behind Rihanna,” by John Seabrook (The New Yorker, March 2012) In her ascent to the pop throne, Rihanna had some unlikely help: a […]
As the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington approaches next week (August 28), Longreads has teamed up with Al Jazeera America’s “America Tonight”to collect the best civil rights stories. We want your help: Share your favorite stories below in the comments, and we’ll spotlight some of your picks next week. They can be historical […]
Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. This week’s theme is sex work and sex workers. Such a complex subject is best explored through a variety of forms—essay, investigation, photo essay and interview. 1. “When the Fight Against Slut-Shaming Overlooks Victim-Blaming.” (Sometimes Magical, June 2013) The […]
Win Bassett is a writer, lawyer, and seminarian at Yale. My treasured longread of the week is Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “The Poorest Rich Kids in the World” in Rolling Stone. I lived down the road from Duke University for ten years, but one doesn’t need any familiarity with the Blue Devils to become enthralled with […]
This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth and bestselling author of The Family, C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. “Quebrado” is a chapter from Sweet Heaven, first published in Rolling Stone in 2008, about Brad Will, a young American journalist and activist. Read an excerpt here. Become a Longreads Member to […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Good reporting demands observation, but student journalists often struggle with the kind of focused hanging around you have to do with a subject to capture some accurate sense of them. How does the subject move? How […]
Gabrielle Gantz (@contextual_life) is the blogger behind The Contextual Life, a frequent longreader, and a fan of podcasts. 1. How Hip-Hop Works (Stuff You Should Know, 52:13) In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck and Josh discuss the history of hip-hop, from The Sugar Hill Gang to the present. They add their own […]
Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. During rough weeks, I tend to refer back to a good #longread over and over. Here are four of the funniest around. Bookmark them, read them to your best friend on the phone, or save them for a particularly […]
Leigh Cowart is the Sex and Science Editor at NSFWCORP. She exists solely on rage and strange cheeses. Telling you how good David Quammen’s “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion” is feels like a spoiler. No, I’d much rather slide my copy of National Geographic across the table and let you discover, for […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Everett Cook, a rising senior at the University of Michigan, profiled former Wolverine and now NBA player Trey Burke last March. There are plenty of stories about athletic phenoms, but elite athletes are not the most […]
This week’s Member Pick is from the new book by Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and a writer who’s been featured on Longreads frequently in the past. This Town, published by Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, is Leibovich’s insider tale of life inside the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C., and […]
Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. In light of the recent Zimmerman trials, I’d like to share these four pieces. I’ve thought a lot about this blog post by Mary, who writes, “Another thing I’ve noticed is that people are more concerned with being the best ally than they […]
Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the St. Louis Riverfront Times. She is a proud alumnus of the Minneapolis City Pages. More than you ever wanted to know about feral hogs and how to kill them. When federal agents are picking them off from helicopters, there’s obviously more at stake than just nuisance. Between […]
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: The Internet may have turned us all into self diagnosticians, but we still crave health guidance from the media. “Eat this, not that,” admonishes Dave Zinczenko. Exercise 30 minutes a day, three times a week. Or […]
‘They don’t teach us about money in high school.’ Today’s video pick is Modern Comedian’s short documentary on comedian Sara Schaefer, who fell deep into debt even while she was pursuing her dream career and earning two Emmys as a writer for Jimmy Fallon. (Schaefer now co-hosts the MTV series Nikki & Sara LIVE, which […]
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