In the ancient hot mess known as Judea, a young queen had to navigate a self-destructive royal dynasty and one of history’s worst husbands.
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Queens of Infamy: Njinga
The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.
How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries
A professor embarks on a six-month binge of celebrity-led online courses.
Nashville contra Jaws, 1975
In their time, “Jaws” and “Nashville” were regarded as Watergate films, and both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act.
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.
Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’
Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Lockets
Lockets simultaneously display and hide. But does squirreling our love and grief away in a piece of jewelry keep the memories and emotions present for us, or minimize them?
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.
The Little Book That Lost Its Author
How will artificial intelligence change literature?
The Cost of Reading
Ayşegül Savaş contemplates the way women’s and men’s time is valued and the uneven burden taken by women writers in literary citizenship.

