Every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year.
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Our Longreads Member Pick: Among Murderers (Chapter 7), by Sabine Heinlein
This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Among Murderers, a new nonfiction book by Sabine Heinlein, published by University of California Press, examining the lives of criminals as they prepare to re-enter society. Heinlein, who was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her Iowa Review essay “A Portrait of the Writer as a Rabbit,” […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
How a Convicted Murderer Prepares for a Job Interview
“In prison Angel thought that it wouldn’t be too hard to find a job once he got out. He believed he had come a long way.”
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Playlist: 5 Podcast Episodes on the History of Hip-Hop
Gabrielle Gantz (@contextual_life) is the blogger behind The Contextual Life, a frequent longreader, and a fan of podcasts. 1. How Hip-Hop Works (Stuff You Should Know, 52:13) In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck and Josh discuss the history of hip-hop, from The Sugar Hill Gang to the present. They add their own […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Gangster Princess of Beverly Hills
How Lisette Lee, a privileged young woman with ties to the Samsung fortune, turned to drug trafficking: “Lee would go on to tell federal authorities a lot of things about herself: that she was a famous Korean pop star as well as the heiress to the Samsung electronics fortune; she was so emphatic on this […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Kickers
A writer digs through his personal library of quitting-smoking books as he attempts to quit smoking: “Step 3: Go to the Strand. Buy a book you already own—Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime. (Your old copy—a gift from one of the girls next door senior year, the same ‘friend’ who another time gave you a carton […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Mystery of Charles Dickens
The life of the great English novelist, as documented in a biography by Claire Tomalin: “The great drama—which is to say, the abiding trauma—of Dickens’s childhood was his year-long stint in a rat-infested blacking factory near the Thames, when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of John Dickens for debt in 1824 and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Life as an Heiress
Nora Ephron on her uncle Hal, an inheritance, and working on a famous screenplay: “My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A New York Times Whodunit
Why was New York Times CEO Janet Robinson fired? A look inside the political battles and financial troubles that led Arthur Sulzberger to let Robinson go (with a $24 million exit package): “Interviews with more than 30 people who are intimately familiar with different aspects of the Times’ business (none but a spokesperson would speak […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
We’re All in the Same Boat—Aren’t We?
A brief history of the cruise ship industry—from its early idealism to its evolution into “funships” for “Huggets”: “Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast […]
