“Our friendship was a lifelong game of ‘Who Am I?’ It was frustrating, exasperating, and sometimes downright silly, but it was a good, rewarding game.”
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard
On trailblazing geneticist Pardis Sabeti, who balances being in a rock band with her work in computational genomics: “There’d be plenty of people eager to talk to Sabeti before long. That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s ‘profound implications for the study of human […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Time Jason Zengerle and a Gorilla Stalked Michael Moore for Might Magazine
Jason Zengerle | Might magazine | 1997 | 19 minutes (4,685 words) Introduction Thanks to our Longreads Members’ support, we tracked down a vintage story from Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine. It’s from Jason Zengerle, a correspondent for GQ and contributing editor for New York magazine who’s been featured on Longreads often in the past.
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America
Duff McDonald | The Firm, Simon & Schuster | 2013 | 12 minutes (3,000 words) The American Century In 1941 Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce coined the term “American Century” in a Life magazine editorial. He was describing the country’s global economic and political dominance leading up to World War II. But Luce was also correct in the […]
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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Longreads Member Exclusive: ‘Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse’
This week, we’re excited to feature a Longreads Exclusive from David Kushner (@DavidKushner), a contributing editor to Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired. He’s been featured many times on Longreads, and he’s the author of Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse” is Kushner’s 2007 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Island Where People Forget to Die
Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond: “Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Growing Up Romney
A profile of Gov. Mitt Romney’s eldest son Tagg, and his family’s “myth of self-reliance”: “Not long after graduating from Harvard Business School, he turned down offers from several prominent firms to join an obscure start-up called eGrad, whose meager resources gave it a kind of grunge aesthetic: secondhand furniture and heating so erratic he […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How to Fix America from Below
A Yale law professor argues that we’re not doing enough to empower the minority voices in America—and change should start at the local level: “The ideas Gerken is known for first took shape, appropriately enough, as a disagreement. Several years ago, not long after she’d been hired as a young professor at Harvard, she sat […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus
Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’”: “What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not […]
