Search Results for: This Magazine

An Old Magician Named Nabokov Writes and Lives in Splendid Exile

Longreads Pick

From the author of the new novel All That Is, a 1975 profile of Vladimir Nabokov that he wrote for People Magazine:

“The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta.”

Source: People Magazine
Published: Mar 17, 1975
Length: 7 minutes (1,999 words)

“Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s Post-Scandal Playbook.” Johnathan Van Meter, New York Times Magazine.

Our Longreads Member Pick: Symmetrical Universe, by Alan Lightman

This week’s Member Pick is “Symmetrical Universe,” an essay by physicist Alan Lightman, published in the latest issue of Orion magazine. In it, Lightman explores the wonder of nature and the principles that guide its design—helping to answer questions like why a honeycomb is a hexagon, or why human-created art embraces asymmetry.

Lightman is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of books including Einstein’s Dreams and Mr g: A Novel About the Creation.

Read an excerpt here.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Longreads Member Exclusive: Symmetrical Universe, by Alan Lightman

Longreads Pick

This week’s Member Pick is “Symmetrical Universe,” an essay by physicist Alan Lightman, published in the latest issue of Orion magazine. In it, Lightman explores the wonder of nature and the principles that guide its design—helping to answer questions like why a honeycomb is a hexagon, or why human-created art embraces asymmetry.

Lightman is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of books including Einstein’s Dreams and Mr g: A Novel About the Creation.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Mar 1, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,453 words)

“In Conversation: Robert Silvers.” Mark Danner, New York magazine.

Longreads Is Joining Forces with The Atlantic

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We have some big news to share today: Longreads is teaming up with The Atlantic, in a partnership that will allow us to expand our site and membership model—and continue to serve this community of readers, writers and publishers. 

When I first started the #longreads hashtag four years ago, The Atlantic was one of the earliest publishers to embrace it, and they understood what makes it special—the diversity of readers’ tastes, sharing the stories they love, from a mix of well-known and undiscovered publishers and writers, across both nonfiction and fiction.

We’re excited about the opportunity to work together with The Atlantic, and to continue expanding this site and community.

If you’re curious about the business side of things, here are some specifics about how the partnership is set up:

Longreads remains an independent company and editorial team, just as we always have been. We’re six people who have invested our time and resources into building Longreads—and we will continue to do what we do best, which is spotlight the best work from magazines, newspapers, books, and across the web.

Our site will be featured alongside the rest of The Atlantic’s growing network of sites, and their team will be helping us with business and operations.

By now, you’ve already seen the two big pieces of the Longreads business model, and in the spirit of transparency, I’m outlining it here:

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Our goal has been to create a business that supports readers, writers and publishers in different ways, through a mix of paid memberships and advertising.

With paid memberships, we’re creating a system where you, our subscribers, are helping to pay writers and publishers for rights to stories and book chapters that are featured as “Longreads Member Picks.” (Here’s this week’s Member Pick, a short story from Amelia Gray and Tin House.)

Through our membership, we want to keep building a secondary market for publishers and writers to make money off licensing, and we’re doing so with your financial support. (You can join for $3 a month or $30 a year.)

On the advertising front, we teamed up with Virgin Atlantic last year on Travelreads, and we’d like to continue pursuing these types of creative initiatives. Advertising, done thoughtfully, will help support new channels like Travelreads, as well our daily editor picks across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and the weekly Top 5 Longreads email.

We’re excited for what’s next, and we’re so thankful for this community’s continued support. We can’t do this without you, and we’ll share more details as things come together.

Mark and rest of the Longreads team (Mike, Kjell, Hakan, Jodi and Joyce)

articles read & loved no. 47

dietcoker:

  1. An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop in Toronto specializes in the strangest, most wonderful books.
  2. Katherine Arcement writes about her adolescent love of fan fiction.
  3. Monica Torres writes about majoring in English while not being white.
  4. Dating While Feminist and Christian

Emily Perper’s always excellent reading list. 

“Will.” Robert Sanchez, 5280 Magazine.

The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones

Longreads Pick

[Fiction, National Magazine Award finalist, 2004] A girl is sent to stay with her cousin in Israel:

“My cousin says that when I go home I should encourage my parents to keep kosher, that we should always say b’rachot before and after eating, that my mother and I should wear long skirts and long-sleeved shirts every day. She says all this will help my mother recover, the way it helped her mother recover from the divorce. I try to tell her how long it’s been since we’ve even done the normal things, like go to the movies or make a big Chinese dinner in the wok. But Esty just watches me with a distant, enlightened look in her eyes and says we have to try to do what God wants. I have been here a month, and still I haven’t told her any of the bad things I’ve done this year—sneaked cigarettes from my friends’ mothers’ packs, stole naked-lady playing cards from a street vendor on West 33rd, kissed a boy from swim team behind the bleachers after a meet. I had planned to tell her all these things, thinking she’d be impressed, but soon I understood that she wouldn’t.”

Published: Mar 1, 2003
Length: 36 minutes (9,145 words)

De Nimes

Longreads Pick

A history of blue jeans:

“Initially, jeans were proletarian western work-wear, but wealthy easterners inevitably ventured out in search of rugged cowboy authenticity. In 1928, a Vogue writer returned East from a Wyoming dude ranch with a snapshot of herself, ‘impossibly attired in blue jeans… and a smile that couldn’t be found on all Manhattan Island.’ In June 1935, the magazine ran an article titled ‘Dude Dressing,’ possibly one of the first fashion pieces to instruct readers in the art of DIY denim distressing: ‘What she does is to hurry down to the ranch store and ask for a pair of blue jeans, which she secretly floats the ensuing night in a bathtub of water—the oftener a pair of jeans is laundered, the higher its value, especially if it shrinks to the “high-water” mark. Another innovation—and a most recent one, if I may judge—also goes on in the dead of night, and undoubtedly behind locked doors—an intentional rip here and there in the back of the jeans.'”

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Mar 11, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,244 words)