Exploring the life and work of the Czech playwright, politician and philosopher: ‘I approach philosophy somewhat the way we approach art,’ Havel once confessed. Despite his lack of method, he took a reading of Heidegger and a handful of homegrown metaphors and set forth in his writing powerful ideas about politics, truth and human nature. […]
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Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money: At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of […]
Inside the making of a hit pop song—or hundreds of them. Stargate and Ester Dean are a producer-“top-liner” team that helps write hits for stars like Rihanna: “The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—’taking control … never die tonight … […]
They helped overthrow Qaddafi, and now “women want what is due to them”: Until the war broke out, women generally were forced to keep a low profile. Married women who pursued careers were frowned upon. And Qaddafi’s own predatory nature kept the ambitions of some in check. Amel Jerary had aspired to a political career […]
The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about: At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He’s a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice […]
[Fiction] Two couples, living in a “Yooper town,” dreaming of a better life: Craig is sweet and smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for. After a long day of work, he smells like sweat and sap. He likes to read Decadent literature, especially Oscar Wilde. I’m the only one who knows that. […]
10 Great Reads About the Senses tetw: A Tetw reading list The Blind Man Who Learned To See by Michael Finkel – A fascinating profile of a man who is helping other blind people to see using echolocation. Mixed Feelings by Sunny Bains – How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses, and […]
James Erwin, a writer for software manuals in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to a Reddit thread wondering what would happen if the U.S. Marines battled the Roman Empire. His comments lit up the Internet: The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes. The section of […]
One of the coolest things about Longreads is when someone tweets: “I’m at the airport about to fly to San Francisco / New York / London / India / Argentina. I need some #Longreads for the trip.” This got us thinking: What if we started gathering the best #longreads for every destination in the world? […]
When do we really die? Is it when the heart stops—or is there a certain point that brain death means actual death? As we make advances in medicine, it’s raising new questions about what’s final. An excerpt from Teresi’s new book, The Undead: Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at […]
Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading. This week: Deborah Blum examine’s Buzz Bissinger’s “Shattered Glass,” which was originally published in Vanity Fair in Sept. 1998: You might think that devious and uncooperative Glass would end up simply the evil counterpoint to the dauntless Lane. But Bissinger […]
[Not single-page] From the 2012 James Beard Award nominations: A profile of Sam Mogannam, who transformed his tiny family grocery store, San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market, into one the most influential stores in the country: When Mogannam was 15 years old, the market was owned by his father and uncle. The Mission district hadn’t yet been […]
A trip around Italy, from Venice to Lampedusa, and how immigration is changing Europe: A mere five or six years ago, foreigners in Italy, and indeed in Europe, did not pose the problem they do today. Anti-immigration, and in particular anti-Muslim hysteria, intensified after the publication of controversial caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, […]
Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing state attorneys general in the Supreme Court fight against Obama’s health care law—and it’s just one of seven cases he’ll be arguing before the court: There are two ways to assess a Supreme Court argument. One is to view it as an act […]
Shin In Geun was born into Camp 14, a prison for political enemies of North Korea. His first memories were of executions, and he had come to hate the parents that gave birth to him knowing that their son would also remain a prisoner: The guards taught the children they were prisoners because of the […]
[Fiction, not single-page] A lawyer can’t stop walking: He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse — too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He’d look […]
When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation: The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer […]
The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches: The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. […]
A couple’s personal experience dealing with Texas’s new sonogram law, which requires a woman to have a sonogram and hear a doctor describe her child before moving forward with an abortion: “I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want […]
atavist: Don’t miss our New America NYC event “From Science to Obsession” on Monday, March 19, featuring Joe Kloc, Jay Kirk, Amy Harmon, and John Rennie. Here’s a reading list with some great stories by our panelists: Joe Kloc, The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks Jay Kirk, Burning Man Amy Harmon, Navigating Love and […]
Learning how to code, and searching for a legendary figure in the Ruby who mysteriously disappeared: Hackety Hack solved the “Little Coder’s Predicament”: It was fun enough to engage a kid, and smart enough to teach her something to boot. But just a few months after launching it, to the astonishment of the community of […]
A family, convinced that homeownership was a requisite part of the American dream, ends up with a foreclosure: We tried to short sale. A realtor named Sharon came by the condo to see the property and talk about our options. Normally a friendly and exuberant child, our two-year-old daughter Amelie was immediately suspicious of Sharon, […]
A writer visits a fifth grade classroom at a northern California elementary school, where she observes the class’s anti-bullying curriculum: “Stop it, you are bullying me,” he says. Then he lets his body go slack. He bows, then sits down. “You labeled it, you said ‘stop,’ you stood up straight,” Linda says, “Good job.” “Very […]
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