Why the Red Cross hasn’t been as effective as small community groups when it has come to disaster relief post-Sandy: The real problem with the Red Cross was not that it was stretched thin, but rather that it was simply too big, and its people too inexperienced in disaster recovery, to be able to respond […]
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The Problem with the Red Cross
Why the Red Cross hasn’t been as effective as small community groups when it has come to disaster relief post-Sandy: The real problem with the Red Cross was not that it was stretched thin, but rather that it was simply too big, and its people too inexperienced in disaster recovery, to be able to respond […]
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A writer joins her friend Ben Heemskerk, the owner of the Brooklyn bar The Castello Plan, as he organizes a group of community volunteers to help in the hardest hit areas post-Sandy: On Monday the same thing started all over again. Our numbers were smaller, people were returning to work, and we’d lost our escorts, […]
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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Financial Times, Grantland, Rany Jazayerli, The Baffler Magazine, The New Yorker, fiction from The Guardian, and a guest pick from Mark Berman.
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“The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills.” —Ben Austen, Grantland More from Austen
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A look at what led up to the passing of Amendment 64 in Colorado, which legalized recreational marijuana use in the state: While the medical marijuana industry was evolving, activists continued to push for recreational use of marijuana. In 2005, Mason Tvert’s newly founded Safer Alternatives to Recreational Enjoyment pushed — and passed — resolutions […]
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The life and last days of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed during a Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya: It’s curious that a kid from California who grew up knowing nothing about the Arab world would come to devote his career to the Middle East and North Africa—as opposed to, […]
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Longreads Member Exclusive: Cormac McCarthy's Apocalypse
This week we’re excited to feature a Longreads Exclusive from David Kushner, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse” is Kushner’s 2007 Rolling Stone profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Road,” “No Country for Old Men” and “All […]
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A critical look at the political newspaper and website Politico: One classic method of unleashing irresistible Drudge bait on the Internet is to boil another outlet’s story down to a couple salacious-sounding excerpts, or (failing an effective condensing strategy) to simply reinterpret the material to fit a Drudge-friendly narrative. This past May, for example, Vanity […]