“I’m certainly as revolting and privileged and narcissistic as any of the hipsters described in my book, if not more so. I mean, there’s nobody worse than me.”
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Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Call It Rape
Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words) The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.Subscribe to The Normal School * * * Still life with man and gun Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high […]
Posted inCollege, Reading List
What We Talked About on Campus This Week: A Reading List
Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower […]
Posted inQuotes
In Her Own Words: Being Maxine Kumin
I was a closet poet always. I didn’t stop writing poetry just because Wallace Stegner told me I was a terrible poet. I went underground. I had exempted English A at Harvard, which was a big mistake. Everybody should take it. They bucked me up to a high-level class in creative writing. It was all […]
Posted inQuotes
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 […]
Posted inCollege, Nonfiction
College Longreads Pick: 'A Canine in a Cummerbund,' Peter Kaplan (1977)
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: The New York media world grieves for editor Peter Kaplan, who died last week. Kaplan worked at several publications during his career, and he’s best known as the longtime editor of the New York Observer, but […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education
“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Detachment
The writer accompanies a neuroscientist from Harvard on a trip to a Romanian orphanage. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project—a study of the effects of early institutionalization on brain and behavior development—has become well-respected on the scientific community, but it also raised questions about the ethics of scientific research: “Two days before our visit to the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Walter Willett’s Food Fight
Harvard professor Walter Willett is one of the most influential nutritionists in the world whose studies tracking hundred of thousands of health professionals have resulted in data shaping what we eat and how it affects our health: “He’s tasting an almond-and-grape gazpacho when someone brings over a woman named Cindy Goody and, by way of […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Let’s Eliminate Sports Welfare
Cities are slashing school budgets to pay for professional sports stadiums, and the NFL is still a nonprofit. An argument for cutting off all public funding for professional sports across the U.S., which could save taxpayers billions: “Consider stadium subsidies. When Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure dome above a sunless sea, he did not […]
