Thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Canada! How Does It Work?
Friday’s vote took the form of a vote to hold the government in contempt of Parliament for failing to release financial projections about its purchase of 65 fighter jets and certain proposed anti-crime measures. This is the first time in Canadian history a government has been found in contempt of Parliament. But no one who […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Wall of Sound: How the iPod Changed Music
Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh’s answer was […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born
The story of a family’s winery that changed Napa Valley forever.
Posted inBooks, Fiction
An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay's New Novel
Roxane Gay | An Untamed State | May 2014 | 11 minutes (2,742 words) * * * Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here. For more, read our Roxane […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson
Last year Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Five Stories About Sports for People Who Hate Sports
OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling. But that doesn’t mean, as it turns […]
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The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick
Mark Oppenheimer | The Atlantic Books | November 2013 | 88 minutes (22,700 words) Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, […]
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Who's Funding Russia's Skinhead Terrorists?
Who’s Funding Russia’s Skinhead Terrorists? “Five years ago,” said Dmitry Bakhirev, a lawyer for one of the National Socialist Organization defendants, “you would hear about some skinheads beating a Tajik migrant on the metro. Then it became knives and aluminum bats. Then firearms. Soon you will be hearing about machine guns and grenade launchers.” By […]
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What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor
What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle—engineers, psychologists and even sociologists—the connection is obvious. James Reason, […]
