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 […]
Search results
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, City Pages Minneapolis, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, plus a guest pick from 5280 Magazine editor Natasha Gardner.
Posted inUncategorized
Featured Longreader: Karolina Waclawiak, deputy editor at The Believer. See her story picks from The Days of Yore, Senses of Cinema, and a wealth of picks from The Believer on her #longreads page. She says to be sure to check out “In the Atomic City.” Because, “It’s super, super awesome.”
Posted inUncategorized
Writer Jessica Lussenhop: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages. See her stories on her Longreads page or find her on Twitter. *** The ones I couldn’t stop thinking about. *** • Jon Ronson , “Robots Say the Damndest Things,” GQ, March 2011 Besides the fact that Ronson is such a consistently fascinating writer, […]
