This week, we’re thrilled to share a new Longreads Member Pick from Fortune magazine. “How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying” is Jennifer Reingold’s definitive account of what really happened inside J.C. Penney—from the dramatic reinvention of the company, led by new CEO Ron Johnson, to its disastrous unraveling (and Johnson’s firing) less […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Good Girls Revolt: When 46 Women Sued Newsweek for Discrimination
Following this week’s news about the firing of Jill Abramson from the New York Times and the discussion of gender pay disparity, here’s some historical context: The full opening chapter of Lynn Povich’s book, The Good Girls Revolt, about the first female class action lawsuit against Newsweek. Thanks to Povich and PublicAffairs for allowing us […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Benjamin C. Bradlee: 1921-2014
Legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who led the newspaper for 26 years and oversaw coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, died today at the age of 93.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
The ‘SNL’ Skit on Racial Profiling That Never Made It to Television
Robert Smigel, writer: It wasn’t until my last season that the network refused to air a “TV Funhouse.” It was a live-action one that was meant to be about racism and profiling, an airline-safety video with multilingual narration, and whenever you heard a different language, they would cut to people of that nationality. First, typical […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Roger Angell on Baseball, the Game of the Summer
Baseball has one saving grace that distinguishes it—for me, at any rate—from every other sport. Because of its pace, and thus the perfectly observed balance, both physical and psychological, between opposing forces, its clean lines can be restored in retrospect. This inner game—baseball in the mind—has no season, but it is best played in the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Comedy and the Single Girl
An excerpt from Armstrong’s book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, on how Treva Silverman helped create TV’s most memorable characters: One night in 1964, Silverman was playing at a piano bar in Manhattan’s theater district—it was another one of those dark, smoky places, but this one had a well-tuned baby grand. She took […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Looking for Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
Tracing Raymond Chandler’s early days in L.A.
Posted inEditor's Pick
How I Met Edward Snowden
An excerpt from Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide, on how he first came into contact with the NSA whistleblower: It was at that point that C., as he later told me, became frustrated. “Here am I,” he thought, “ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life, to hand this guy thousands of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
‘Yours Lovingly’: A Collection of Stories About Writing Letters
A man writes to a convicted killer. Fan letters to a troubled country star. Letters by parents. Here are five stories about the letters we write to one another.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
‘The Rise of the Warrior Cop’
Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and […]
