Ned Stuckey-French | The Normal School | Fall 2012 | 20 minutes (4,999 words) For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share “Don’t Be Cruel: A Brief History of Elvis-Hating in America,” from Ned Stuckey-French and The Normal School. Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and support our service. You can also […]
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The Re-education of Chris Copeland
How Copeland went from European basketball unknown to 29-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks: “You are never fully at ease, but you begin to transition. Maybe you date a local girl, or even marry her. You begin to buy tighter jeans, learn some of the language and before you can blink, you are in […]
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Rescuing Cesar
“Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan is turning his life back around after a series of bad business deals and a messy divorce caused him to attempt to take his own life: “I visited Millan at the ranch a few months after his suicide attempt. When I arrived he was lying on a bench in the shade, […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America
Duff McDonald | The Firm, Simon & Schuster | 2013 | 12 minutes (3,000 words) The American Century In 1941 Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce coined the term “American Century” in a Life magazine editorial. He was describing the country’s global economic and political dominance leading up to World War II. But Luce was also correct in the […]
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Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons
The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”: “As I read the medical literature, I remember the violent fantasies that sometimes seized my mind so fully that not even meditation—with which I luckily had a modicum […]
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Yesterday My Daughter Emigrated
A father in Spain laments the lack of a future for his daughter in their home country: “Like many young people her age, my daughter was caught by surprise upon completion of her professional training. In the spring she returned to Spain with the intention of looking for a job here — it didn’t really […]
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The Anointing
[Fiction] A woman at the end of her rope turns to a pastor for help: Seven months into her husband’s depression, Diane called the church secretary. She wanted the elders to come over and anoint Mitch with oil. He hadn’t put his pants on in a month. In the past week he hadn’t left the […]
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Obama vs. Poverty
Eradicating urban poverty was a priority for Obama when he was running for president in 2008, but it has not become a focus for the president during his first term. A look at what still needs to be addressed, and the neighborhood of Roseland, where Obama got his political start: “The reason for this shift […]
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The New Republic of Porn
One man’s quest to reshape the online porn industry through the “.xxx” top-level domain: “The resistance to Lawley, whatever its merits, has the ring of desperation. ICM arrived at a moment of crisis for commercial porn. After enabling several boom years, the Internet has brought many smut marketers to their knees. Rampant freebies on “tube” […]
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The Bottom
Musician Jim White on Knoxville, and how Cormac McCarthy saved his life: “In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take […]
