“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.”
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Posted inFirst Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction
‘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 inFirst Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Jesus Land
“They don’t know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we’re black.”
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
The Blind Man Making the World’s Best Glacial Vodka
A profile of Scott Lindquist, a blind Alaskan who harvests icebergs for a living: “Quickly, Lindquist grabs his most important tool: his son Hank’s old hockey stick, which he uses partly for good luck and partly because it works well for hooking ice. ‘Ease it back,’ he shouts at the captain, who idles the boat. […]
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 Inside Story Of Siri’s Origins
How Apple’s voice-recognition software got its start—and how it lost some of its power along the way: “This Siri — the Siri of the past — offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. […]
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.’ […]
