Language shapes every facet of our lives—how we communicate, how we act, how we feel.
Search results
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Postwar New York: The Supreme Metropolis of the Present
Forty labor strikes on one day, French existentialists on the loose, and a 50-foot G.I. blowing enormous puffs of REAL smoke.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
A Book in the Mail is the Cure For Ferrante Fever
As a regular book browser, or shelf stalker, and former employee of Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, I’ve recently watched several customers come in asking for recommendations of what to read next after finishing Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s four-volume saga, The Neapolitan Quartet — a masterwork concerning issues of class, status, and the remarkable complexity of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Video
What Happens When a Doctor Decides to Battle a Drug Cartel
Cartel Land, the new documentary by director Matthew Heineman in theaters July 3, follows Dr. José Manuel Mireles, a small-town physician known as “El Doctor,” who leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel in the state of Michoacán in Mexico. The above clip, exclusive to Longreads, features Mireles attempting […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo
The story of how pigs became the world’s most divisive meal.
Posted inFeature
The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion
Eighty years ago, in Berlin, Stella Walsh won her second Olympic medal. Decades later, Walsh’s murder and subsequent autopsy threw the legacy of track’s first female superstar into turmoil.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Garlic, Grilled Chicken and Murder in Los Angeles
In the April 2008 issue of Los Angeles magazine reporter Mark Arax wrote about Los Angeles’ beloved Zankou Chicken chain, and how one owner tore the founding family apart by murdering two of its members and killing himself. The story is a compelling mix of family dynamics, fast food and the complex American dream. It was […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
It’s A Big Ocean, Full of Seaweed
In Lucky Peach‘s twelfth issue, Rachel Khong writes about the harvesting of wild algae, more commonly known as “seaweed,” on California’s coast: The seashore is where all our stories start. It’s understood that present-day humans evolved in littoral spaces, where the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and shellfish, originally from seaweed, were needed to evolve complex nervous systems […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Home Is Where the Fraud Is
At the height of the housing crisis, one woman’s bureaucratic odyssey to discover who really owns her home leads her to startling revelations about the housing market.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
On Learning & Losing Language: A Reading List
Language shapes every facet of our lives—how we communicate, how we act, how we feel.
