The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *
Kathryn Schulz takes down Henry David Thoreau: “It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But ‘Walden’ is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.”

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

–In New York magazine, Kathryn Schulz takes a walk with the bestselling author and explores what made her book such a huge hit.
How did Wild become such a huge bestseller? Oprah helps, but Kathryn Schulz talks to the author about how her story—now a movie starring Reese Witherspoon—resonated with readers.
A new book explains how “social jet lag” is interfering with our internal clocks:
Modern human beings are not much like mimosas. It’s true that both have biological clocks, but only one of us has culture. And culture, delightful as it is, turns out to radically complicate—“fuck up” would not be an overstatement—our relationship to time.
Among species, we humans are to time what Polish villagers have long been to place: unhappy subjects of multiple competing regimes. The first regime is internal time: the schedule established by our bodies. The second is sun time: the schedule established by light and darkness. These two we share with houseplants and virtually every other living being. But we are also governed by a third regime: social time. That sounds benign enough, like afternoon tea with a friend. But don’t be fooled. Social time is the villain in this drama, out to turn you against health, happiness, nature, sanity, even your own inner self.
My Top 10 Business #Longreads of 2010
Round Two with the excellent @BrainPicker. I tried to minimize repeats with this one—stories here from David Carr, Kathryn Schulz, Nicola Twilley, Mike Riggs, Felix Salmon, David Segal, Tony Hsieh, Paul Graham, James Surowiecki and Bryan Urstadt.
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