“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”
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Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Story
What Ever Happened To the Truth?
Michiko Kakutani is interested in how the distinction between fact and fiction has blurred — and how this makes us all complicit.
Posted inCommentary, Nonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
Longreads Best of 2016: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2016. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Cyberchondria: D.I.Y. Diagnosis in Overdrive
In researching his chronic headache on the web, veteran journalist Barry Newman takes a terrifying walk down the Via Dolorosa of digital self-diagnosis.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Revenge, Ego and the Corruption of Wikipedia
How “revenge edits” and the case of a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” raise questions about how much we should trust the site: “In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named ‘Qworty’ made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Talking Cure
[Fiction] A couple shares their secrets with each other: “We live together in a third-floor apartment near campus and are both A.B.D. We’ve been dating for about three years, and engaged for exactly seven weeks. It’s Friday night. We’re just getting home—late—from a reception at the school followed by a few nightcaps with some of […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower
“Barry Hannah is America’s greatest living writer” is something I started saying when I first read Hannah’s work in the late 1990s. I’m sad I had to stop saying it on March 1 of this year, when Barry passed away. … “HANNAH: The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, […]
Posted inUncategorized
Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower
Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower Hannah: The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work. The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think […]
Posted inUncategorized
Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower
Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower Hannah: The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work. The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think […]
