The first thing Kiki Ostrenga saw as she ran out the front door of her family’s white ranch house were the neon-green words spray-painted across the front path: “Regal Slut.” She stopped short. Maybe this is just a dream, she thought. The 14-year-old took a few fearful steps forward. She gasped when she reached the […]
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The Beck of Revelation
I’m coming to the conclusion that searching for the “real” Glenn Beck makes no sense. The truth is, demagogues don’t have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are. This nonresistance is […]
Longreads Best of 2012: Wired's Mat Honan
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired’s Gadget Lab. Best story about a monkey that’s really about the role of government that’s really about nature’s place in the modern world that’s actually, maybe, really just about a monkey. “What’s a Monkey to Do in Tampa?” (Jon Mooallem, New York Times Magazine) This is the […]
How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney
Jennifer Reingold | Fortune | March 2014 | 29 minutes (7,108 words) Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle) Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks) When you find a savior, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron […]
The End of the Line: A Microbus Map of Damascus
Matthew McNaught | Syria Comment | June 2013 | 18 minutes (4,615 words) Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2009. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here. 1. Here is a […]
The Battle for Whitney Houston
Two years later, Griffith got a call from a friend. Had he ever heard of Whitney Houston? She asked him. He remembered her name immediately from the show he’d seen and said so. “You better move fast,” she cautioned. “She’s negotiating with Elektra for a deal.” The news shook him up. “I said, ‘Uh-oh – […]
[Fiction] Taking a trip to Times Square: Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the electronic billboard […]
