Considering the Wall

Hadrian’s Wall, that is. Max Adams explores Britain’s lost early medieval past by walking its ancient paths.

Author: Max Adams
Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 11, 2017
Length: 16 minutes (4,012 words)

Building In the Shadow of Our Own Destruction

Those who would build enormous structures—skyscrapers, bridges, border walls—should do so with an eye toward their eventual ruin.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 3, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,060 words)

Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces

While visiting national parks to detox from the oppressive whiteness of the MFA experience, Minda Honey is reminded the only places to retreat from whiteness in this country are the spaces women of color hold for each other.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 29, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,986 words)

A Culinary Legend’s Next Fight

Paula Wolfert’s groundbreaking cookbooks changed the way we eat. An Alzheimer’s diagnosis changed her life, but not her outlook.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 23, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,256 words)

Moved by Kim

Seth Davis Branitz had an awful suspicion he’d feel relieved when, some day, his very troubled brother would pass. He had no idea about the other ends it would rapidly bring with it.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 23, 2017
Length: 16 minutes (4,085 words)

Literature by the Numbers

In Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, data journalist Ben Blatt takes a mathematical approach to writers of fiction.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 21, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,982 words)

Falling in Love with Words: The Secret Life of a Lexicographer

In an excerpt from her new book, Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper describes how she fell in love with words and offers a peek into the complex process of making dictionaries.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 14, 2017
Length: 26 minutes (6,691 words)

A Conversation With Ariel Levy About Writing a Memoir That Avoids ‘Invoking Emotional Tropes’

So let’s talk about your realization, or your narrative persona’s realization, through the course of the book, that the rules do apply. They do apply, although—

Well only one: nature, mortality, age, the body. There is that: nobody gets out alive. Like, that. Part of that is your fertility: your fertility will expire, particularly if you’re female; your body will deteriorate, you will age. That is never going to change, that’s life as a human animal. And I think that that’s one of the things that it means to be a grown-up is to slowly, slowly realize that. Remember when you’re a little kid and you’re like, “Yyyyeeeah, I’m actually not gonna die”?

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 14, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,391 words)

Bird Man

On birding as an extreme sport, and how observing birds satisfies a “bone-deep, soul-deep need to classify and organize the world around us.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 28, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,641 words)

Follow the Oil Trail and You’ll Find the Girls

A filmmaker travels the U.S. and Canada to speak with Indigenous women about the constant threats to their safety and their lives.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 1, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,400 words)