This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Contest of Words,” Ben Lerner‘s October 2012 essay from Harper’s Magazine. Lerner is author of the award-winning 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path. The story comes recommended by Matt O’Rourke, a longtime Longreads community member and creative director for Wieden and Kennedy in […]
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Longreads Member Pick: Graveyards, by Scott McClanahan
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Graveyards,” a short story by Scott McClanahan about a family visit to the cemetery. The piece was published last year in Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories collection, and it will appear in McClanahan’s forthcoming book Crapalachia, a portrait of growing up in rural West Virginia, published by Two Dollar Radio. Read an […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert
The Eat, Pray, Love author talks to the Lucky Peach editor about how she became a writer, and the key to creativity: “I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had […]
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Inside the Obama Campaign’s Hard Drive
Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level: “By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just […]
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Philip Levine, The Art of Poetry No. 39
When I was about nineteen I showed my poems to one of my teachers at Wayne. He said these were incredible poems, poems that should be published. I said, “Oh really?”—I was thrilled—“How would I go about doing that?” He walked over to his bookshelf and brought back a copy of Harper’s. He wrote down […]
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Moby-Duck: Or, the Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood
Moby-Duck: Or, the Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, misty November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duck’s closest relative […]
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Longreads Best of 2012: The New Yorker's David Grann
David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. I am never sure how to choose the “best” story as there are too many. But here’s a list of some of the most notable and memorable stories I read in 2012. Pamela […]
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Longreads Best of 2012: Nicholas Jackson
Nicholas Jackson is the digital editorial director for Outside magazine. A former associate editor at The Atlantic, he has also worked for Slate,Texas Monthly, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and other publications. Best Argument for the Magazine”The Innocent Man, Part One” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly)”The Innocent Man, Part Two” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly) I was going to give this two-parter from the always-great Pamela Colloff […]
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From Jason Fagone: my top five @longreads of 2010
jfagone: Jeff Sharlet, Harper’s, Straight Man’s Burden Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, Letting Go Patrick Symmes, Harper’s, Thirty Days as a Cuban Chris Jones, Esquire, What Happened to Roger Ebert? Moe Tkacik, Columbia Journalism Review, Look at Me!
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Jared Keller: Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Jared Keller, in addition to being in charge of the whole internet, is also social media editor for The Atlantic. michellelegro: Trust in what Jared says. He’s in charge of, like, the whole internet. Or at least the portion of it housed in the Watergate building. jbkeller: Dan Baum, “Happiness Is A Worn Gun” (Harpers, […]
