The hundreds of people who show up each week to party at Mister Sunday are out for a good time. What the carefree fun-seekers likely do not realize is that they are also a part of a powerful real-estate developer’s plan to remake Industry City—and the Sunset Park community in which it sits—into the Next […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Medellín: Latin America’s New Superstar
How Medellín went from crime-ridden cocaine capital to one of the world’s most innovative cities: The Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, perhaps the only drug lord to become a worldwide household name, transported billions of dollars worth of cocaine, which had surpassed coffee as Colombia’s leading export by 1982. Arriving on U.S. shores, the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Longreads Member Pick: In Washington, D.C., Where ‘We’re All Obituaries Waiting to Happen’
This week’s Member Pick is from the new book by Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and a writer who’s been featured on Longreads frequently in the past. This Town, published by Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, is Leibovich’s insider tale of life inside the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C., and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
City of Dreams
An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China’s current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai, the financial capital elbowing its way into competition with New York and London, or Shenzhen, the megalopolis built on marshland. But Shanghai was punished by the Communist party for the city’s history of cosmopolitanism, and is still […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean
“It was the end of the story of John DeLorean as part of the American Dream—how a humble kid from Detroit could rise to the very top.”
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s
Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words) ‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’ When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the […]
Posted inNonfiction
Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats
Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words) 1st Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training. Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Examining the Religious, Economic, Architectural, and Cultural Facets of Gentrification: A Reading List
Gif via Justin Blinder’s ‘Vacated’ project. 1. “Urban Church Planting Plantations.” (Christena Cleveland, March 2014) White suburban churches invade urban spaces with no regard for the churches already in place. 2. “Gentrification Sparks Surge In Landlord Sabotage.” (Lauren Evans, Gothamist, Feb. 2014) Setting fires, locking tenants out and willfully destroying a building’s infrastructure–evil landlords will go to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. *** 1. Ghosting: Confessions of a WikiLeaks Ghostwriter Andrew O’Hagan | London Review of Books | February 23, 2014 | 105 minutes (26,390 words) […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson
Last year Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there.
