Mark Armstrong

10 stories we love right now, featuring The Awl, Harper’s, Grantland, the Washington Post, and more.

Here’s a collection exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act.

Authors and publishers on WordPress, submit stories for our new series.

Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place.

We will continue to serve this community just as we always have, and we can’t wait for what’s next.

Yesterday, we asked for your help, and you responded. Thanks to you, we welcomed 400 new Longreads Members.

We’re now at 1,400 members—that’s great progress, but we’re still less than halfway to our goal of 5,000 Longreads Members. We need your help to keep spreading the word.

You can share your support on Twitter here.

We’re also excited to announce that the team at Digg has purchased a group membership for its staff! We’d like to thank them for their support.

If your company would like to buy a Longreads Membership for its employees, simply use our PayPal donation page to purchase them ($30/year for each employee), then email us with the names of your employees: hello@longreads.com.

We’ll keep updating you on our progress, and thank you again for everything.

My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads.

What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best stories on the web, and tracks down stories never before published online.

Our service is self-funded, built by four people (and many contributors) who have worked nights and weekends to create something we believe in.

Now we need your help to keep this service running. We want to make good on our vision to build Longreads into a truly global hub for readers, writers and publishers.

Today, we’re announcing the Longreads Member Drive: A new way for you to support this service and give the entire #Longreads community a stake in our future.

“How foolish they are to try to make something.” Here’s the classic 1981 BBC interview highlighting the work of theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.” You can also read Feynman’s book of the same name.

Last week we lost a pioneer of early computing, Doug Engelbart, and Tom Foremski has an excellent short backstory about the inventor of the mouse. It was Engelbart’s 1968 demo of computer graphical user interfaces that inspired everything we now use today—yet despite his many accomplishments Engelbart struggled in later years to get attention or funding for his work.

Last week, the below YouTube video resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award: