“They don’t know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we’re black.”
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Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.”
Posted inFirst Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
‘I’m One of the Others Now’: What Life Was Like for a Family in East Germany
“What had driven us apart? What was so important that it had turned us into strangers, even today?”
Posted inUncategorized
Playlist: 5 Pioneering Computer Demos, featuring MIT, Stanford and Xerox
Mark Armstrong is the founder of Longreads and editorial director for Pocket. 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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Diary: Google Invades
Making sense of San Francisco through Google and Apple’s commuter buses to Silicon Valley: “The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Long Good-Bye
On the 1962-1963 printers strike in New York City that effectively shut down the seven biggest newspapers in the city, killed four of them, and made names for writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron: “A city without The New York Times inspired rage and scorn, ambivalence and relief. A ‘Talk of the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Murder of an Idealist
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, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Cosmo, the Hacker ‘God’ Who Fell to Earth
An in-person encounter with a hacker named Cosmo, who has infiltrated accounts on Amazon, Apple, AOL, PayPal, and AT&T. In real life he’s a 15-year-old high school dropout: “Cosmo explained exactly how it is done. “‘You have to add a bank account. You can make a virtual bank account on eTrade.com with info from FakeNameGenerator.com.’ […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
A writer loses everything on his iPhone, his iPad and his Mac—including all of the photos from the first year and a half of his daughter’s life—after a hacker infiltrates his Amazon, Apple, Gmail and Twitter accounts: “Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Graphing Calculator Story
In the early 1990s, a contractor for Apple had his project cancelled. He then decided to “uncancel” it, and began sneaking into corporate headquarters to finish the job: “I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would […]
