Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Astounding, a forthcoming book on the history of science fiction, digs into the writing career of L. Ron Hubbard, gaining new insights into the life of the controversial founder of dianetics and the origins and nature of Scientology itself.
Search results
Posted inNonfiction
Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin
Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
The best stories of the week, as chosen by the editors of Longreads.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Shaming of the Cherry Sisters
How “Vaudeville’s worst act” fought for fame and respect on the stage.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
The Pleasures of Protest: Taking on Gentrification in Chinatown
Working as a tenant organizer in New York’s Chinatown opened Esther Wang’s eyes to the ugly—and complicated—realities of gentrification in New York City.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800
A madman versus a crook? Unexpected twists? Fake news? Welcome to the election of 1800.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Ruback
A newspaper journalist’s attempt to correct the record.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How the First Ebola Outbreak Was Identified and Contained
In May, the Financial Times published a story by Peter Piot, a microbiologist who, in 1976, helped contain and identify a deadly new virus called Ebola in Yambuku, a remote Congolese village. Piot returned to the village nearly 40 years later to see how much had changed. Here, Piot recalls what it was like to […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Home Is Where the Fraud Is
At the height of the housing crisis, one woman’s bureaucratic odyssey to discover who really owns her home leads her to startling revelations about the housing market.
Posted inNonfiction
Little Government in the Big Woods
Melissa Gilbert’s lost bid for Congress and the forgotten political history of ‘Little House on the Prairie.’
