Ariel Levy’s devastating personal essay on losing her baby: I had been so lucky. Very little had ever truly gone wrong for me before that night on the bathroom floor. And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded […]
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The Rise of Joan of Arc: How a Visionary Peasant Girl Defied a Dress Code and Challenged the Patriarchy
Following the guidance of the voices only she could hear, Joan, a peasant girl living in a world dominated by aristocrats and men, left her home to convince the dauphin—and many men along the way—that only she could save France and make him king.
The Art of Arrival: Rebecca Solnit on Travel and Friendship
Rebecca Solnit | Orion | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,780 words) OrionOur latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Rebecca Solnit and Orion magazine—subscribe to the magazine or donate for more great stories like this. Get a free trial issue Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) [ 1. ] The word “journey” used to mean a […]
Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: 'The Poorest Rich Kids in the World'
Above: Doris Duke The Poorest Rich Kids in the World Sabrina Rubin Erdely | Rolling Stone | August 2013 | 38 minutes (9,653 words) Sabrina Rubin Erdely (@sabrinarerdely) is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. I often deal with interview subjects who tell variations of the truth. People don’t usually out-and-out lie, although that […]
What Happens When Your Business Partner Becomes Your Rival
“The Dodge brothers already made two fortunes from their relationship with Ford, by 1913 they were not thrilled about continuing to make parts for the Model T. Ironically, by the time the T started selling in really huge numbers in the nineteen teens it was obsolete and being technologically surpassed by by more modern cars. […]
“In America, the economic fortunes of ordinary people like those in Ramsey’s audience are stagnating, while the fruits of increased productivity and profits are accruing to the wealthiest among us, including Ramsey himself, at an accelerating rate. But Ramsey seems to think that concern over inequality just comes down to bitterness. ‘This idea that it […]
The Vulture Transcript: ‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz
Hurwitz offers serious advice on creativity and writing, as well as a brief history of how he came to cast actors like Jason Bateman and Michael Cera: “And Michael Cera, I had seen him in a pilot and I reached out through the casting director, like, ‘there was this kid in this pilot, can you […]
The Poorest Rich Kids in the World
Georgia and Patterson are teenage heirs to the $1 billion Duke family fortune—the same Dukes who controlled the American tobacco market and established Duke University. But they were also raised by drug addicts who neglected and abused them for years: “Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian […]
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat
An examination of Margaret Thatcher’s life as chronicled in the authorized biography by Charles Moore: “It’s depressing to suppose that fortune favours the people who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which […]
Freeway Rick is Dreaming
The writer, who has written about the notorious crack kingpin Freeway Rick for nearly two decades, profiles Ricky Ross once more as Ross attempts to legitimately hustle his way back to success: “On the streets he once flooded with drugs, Freeway Rick is hawking weaves. A staple of the African American cosmetology industry, the weave—or […]
