This week, we’re sharing stories from John Lanchester, Bethany Barnes, Stephen Kearse, Warren Ellis, and Soraya Roberts.
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Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes, Science & Nature
Civilization Was Supposed to Make Our Lives Better, Right?
Cultivating crops led to permanent settlements, but also greed and exploitation. Was it all worth it?
Posted inArts & Culture, Business & Tech, Nonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
When Is an Internet Company Evil?
What is Facebook *really* about? Surveillance and advertising, not about “the power to build community” as its new mission statement so disingenuously puts it.
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks
Here’s every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Drawing Parallels Between Elon Musk and the Wright Brothers
There are a number of suggestive parallels between [Elon] Musk and the Wrights, beyond the obvious ones to do with an interest in flight. The [Wright brothers’ father] had very high standards and set no limits on the intellectual curiosity he encouraged in his children; Musk’s father had the same standards and the same insistence on […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, Seattle Met, London Review of Books, More Intelligent Life, Mother Jones, and Matter.
Posted inUncategorized
Longreads Best of 2012: David Roth
David Roth is a co-founder of, writer for and editor at the sports website The Classical. He writes columns for Sports On Earth and Vice, co-writes The Daily Fix blog-column for the Wall Street Journal online, and writes for The Awl, GQ and other places when there’s time and when they’ll have him. He’s on […]
Posted inUncategorized
What Marx got right—and wrong—about capitalism: The most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do with class. There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat dispersed through the world. But Marx foresaw that this proletariat would be an increasingly centralised and organised force: indeed, this was one of the reasons it […]
Posted inUncategorized
Incredible Edibles: The Mad Genius of 'Modernist Cuisine'
Incredible Edibles: The Mad Genius of ‘Modernist Cuisine’ The most instructive dish, however, was one of the failures, a slow-and-low chicken, cooked for several hours and served when its internal temperature had hit 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem was that, with all its juices still inside, it tasted far too chickeny. If you oven-roast chicken […]
Posted inUncategorized
Let Us Pay: On the Future of the Newspaper Industry
Let Us Pay: On the Future of the Newspaper Industry I feel equally certain in saying that what the print media need, more than anything else, is a new payment mechanism for online reading, which lets you read anything you like, wherever it is published, and then charges you on an aggregated basis, either monthly […]
