In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband and her daughter’s sudden sickness, Didion describes being paralyzed by memories of her family triggered during mundane circumstances. She calls this experience “the vortex effect.” Matt Zoller Seitz’s Salon essay, “All The Things That Remind Me Of Her,” shows the […]
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Letter from 'Manhattan'
Letter from ‘Manhattan’ The characters in these pictures are, at best, trying. They are morose. They have bad manners. They seem to take long walks and go to smart restaurants only to ask one another hard questions. “Are you serious about Tracy?” the Michael Murphy character asks the Woody Allen character in Manhattan. “Are you […]
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Longreads Best of 2012: Doree Shafrir
Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September. This year I read a lot of great personal essays, but these were my favorites. Meaghan O’Connell, “Places I’ve Lived: A Nanny’s Room, the Perfect Sublet, and a Place You Can Instagram,” The […]
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Grief, Memory, and the Vortex Effect
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband and her daughter’s sudden sickness, Didion describes being paralyzed by memories of her family triggered during mundane circumstances. She calls this experience “the vortex effect.” Matt Zoller Seitz’s Salon essay, “All The Things That Remind Me Of Her,” shows the […]
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Letter from 'Manhattan'
Letter from ‘Manhattan’ The characters in these pictures are, at best, trying. They are morose. They have bad manners. They seem to take long walks and go to smart restaurants only to ask one another hard questions. “Are you serious about Tracy?” the Michael Murphy character asks the Woody Allen character in Manhattan. “Are you […]
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Matt O'Rourke: My Favorite Longreads from 2010
Matt O’Rourke is interactive group creative director for Crispin Porter+Bogusky in Boulder. copymattt: For those of you that like the internet for things other than cats and boobies, I give you 5 of my favorite Longreads from the past 12 months. Hit-and-run vicitm was quiet, dependable, co-workers say If you’re really lucky, Andrew Meacham will still […]
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Alex Pappademas: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Alex Pappademas is a staff writer for GQ. *** Rules: Nothing not published this year, nothing from GQ, because I work there, and—in the spirit of the assignment—nothing I didn’t first read on my iPhone. (And I realize now, having done this whole thing, that everything on the main list is from a print-based publication, […]
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Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was […]
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Grantland's Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Jay Caspian Kang (pictured above) is an editor at Grantland. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Morning News. His first novel, The Dead Do Not Improve, will be published by Hogarth/Random House in August 2012. *** David Hill: “$100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino” (McSweeney’s) This is the […]
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Elmo Keep: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Elmo Keep is a writer who has written for The Hairpin, and other places. ••• The Tetris Effect — Justin Wolfe, The Awl There really isn’t a way to talk about this without spoiling the reveals. Just read it, whether you understand gaming or not, it doesn’t matter: If you don’t, you will come away […]
