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, […]
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Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail?
Why Isn’t Wall Street In Jail? Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write […]
Longreads Is Joining Forces with The Atlantic
We have some big news to share today: Longreads is teaming up with The Atlantic, in a partnership that will allow us to expand our site and membership model—and continue to serve this community of readers, writers and publishers. When I first started the #longreads hashtag four years ago, The Atlantic was one of the […]
Reading List: A Bizarre Institution
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. What do Scientology, child abuse, financial exploitation, and millionaire parents have in common? They’ve all got a niche in the education system. 1. “Surviving a For-Profit School.” (Stephen S. Mills, The Rumpus, July 2013) A […]
Reading List: Stories From the Working Class
Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy. These are stories about […]
Transport: On Leaving New York for Rehab in Minnesota
“I learned to drive. But I never liked it.”
This Is Living
How burdens and values pass from fathers to sons, and the search for that one true thing.
Interview: ‘Poor Teeth’ Writer Sarah Smarsh on Class and Journalism
“There often is a ‘tone’ in writing about the poor. There is a presumption that people of a certain class are mired in misery.”
Interview: Maya Rao on Spending a Month Working as a Cashier in the Bakken
On “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil”
For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.
“I never figured out why they did that to me.”
