The following story comes recommended by Ben Marks, senior editor for Collectors Weekly: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most recent history, The Bully Pulpit, chronicles the intertwined lives of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, often in excruciating detail, from Roosevelt’s struggles with the bosses of his Republican party to the fungal infections that plagued Taft’s groin. […]
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Posted inFirst Chapters, Nonfiction, Story
‘There Is Nothing New in Wall Street’: A Stock Trader’s Life in the 1920s
Edwin Lefèvre | Reminiscences of a Stock Operator | 1923 Our latest Longreads First Chapter comes recommended by Michelle Legro: Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before the […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year
Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor? Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969 Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page. In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York […]
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Foster Kamer: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Foster Kamer (ex-BlackBook + Gawker + Village Voice) is online features and news editor at Esquire. *** 2010 was an incredible year for writing, bottom line. Despite the proliferation of things whose output is mostly antagonistic to great writing — like faceless “content farms” churning out hollow, Google-gaming information lacking anything of substance — great writing persisted. Twitter’s evolving […]
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Forty Years Later: How 'Oregon Trail' Was Born
Forty Years Later: How ‘Oregon Trail’ Was Born For the next two weeks, Dillenberger and Heinemann spent each night wedged into a tiny computer office—a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School—tapping code into a teletype machine. The teletype was a screen-less, electromechanical typewriter connected via telephone to a mainframe computer that could issue […]
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Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business
Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?” One student wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the […]
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motherjones: Inside the “lavish,” “debauched” lifestyle of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Beyond the oil money, all-night parties, Playboy bunnies, and 15,000-square-foot Malibu mansion, there’s the larger question of whether Teodoro has used shell companies to funnel $100 million into the United States. Click here for deets and […]
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To fight back against the warring gangs and violent offenders, the tribe has revived an ancient form of punishment: banishment. Legally called “exclusion,” it forbids the offender from entering the reservation’s trust land for at least five years. When it was used centuries ago, banishment was a thinly veiled death sentence. Without the rest of […]
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Kare’s first assignment was developing fonts for the Mac OS. At the time, digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that both a narrow I and a broad M were wedged into the same bitmapped real estate — a vestigial legacy of the way that a typewriter platen advances, one space at a time. Jobs was determined […]
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Ruettimann had visited Hereaux at a time when he knew his friend would be alone. In the modest but cozy living room, Ruettimann handed Hereaux a heavy brown accordion file. He wrote a name down on a scrap of paper, the name of a local journalist. “If anything happens to me,” Ruettimann said, “give this […]
