Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
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Posted inFeature
‘Some Things Never Leave You’: Christian Livermore on Poverty’s Indelible Marks
“For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.”
Posted inReading List
Monsters, Mothers, Mulieres: A Reading List on The Women of Classical Antiquity
Five stories of ambitious empresses, fearsome gladiators, and ordinary working-class residents — glimmering snapshots of the female experience in the classical world.
Posted inNonfiction
‘Stay Away From Miller’
A pioneering humanities program shaped a generation of students and brought acclaim to a public high school in Los Angeles. But beneath the excellence lurked a culture of abuse.
Posted inFeature
Finding a Path in a Broken System
Thailand is a top destination for gender confirmation surgery. Its success is a symptom of Western failure.
Posted inNonfiction
Down the Rabbit Hole: A Psychedelic Reading List
The science, the strangeness, the promise, of psychedelic journeys.
Posted inStory
The Emptying
“I’m amazed at our human capacity to adapt to the unbearable. Almost anything can seem normal if it’s inflicted on us long enough.”
Posted inStory
The 19th-Century Hipster Who Pioneered Modern Sportswriting
More than a century before GoPro, Thomas Stevens’ around-the-world bike ride vaulted first-person “sports porn” into the mainstream.
Posted inStory
The Hare Krishnas of Coal Country
The world is full of make-believe. Some of it is sweet, some of it is sick. It persists because we have found no other antidote for pain.
Posted inCuration, Nonfiction, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Hannah Dreier, Jeremy Miller, Katherine LaGrave, Wes Ferguson, and Omar Mouallem.
