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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A Think Piece About Think Pieces
Always pick sides! Team Aniston!! The internet demands it, even if it’s only half-thoughts it wants, thoughts like, “This, just this” or “This is everything.” “This” is not a sentence. Nor is “Best. Thing. Ever.” Nor “!!!!” But worse than inchoate enthusiasm is the “think piece” at the other end of the spectrum, a form […]
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What Happened When We Discovered What Mattered
“Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would beg me, breezily to integrate certain spaces and […]
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The Most Difficult Age to Be When You Work in Hollywood
“The Writer’s Guild of America has a term for my situation: They call it ‘The Gap.’ It’s the time period between when your years as a working writer end and your retirement begins. I actually have an excellent pension for when I finally retire. The Guild is a strong union and it has negotiated an […]
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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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Anthony De Rosa: Five Longreads from 2010
soupsoup: With a bit more time on my hands commuting a few stops on the subway, I need some reading material to Instapaper to my iPad. Longreads has been invaluable in providing me with a great selection of really interesting articles. Along the way, there were five particular stories this year that really caught my […]
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AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A Longreads List
Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland. *** Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals 1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman. 903 words / 3.5 minutes No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
