This week, we are excited to give Longreads Members exclusive early access to a new story from Matt Siegel, to be published next week on The Awl. Here’s more from The Awl co-founder and editor Choire Sicha: “Matt Siegel’s very funny nonfiction story of love, deceit and betrayal (oh my God, I know!!!) comes on […]
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Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The Bomb in the Bag
How America’s first suicide attack changed one man’s fortune forever.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Big Problem with Financial Journalism
One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Andrew Ross Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Financial Reality of a $200,000 Book Advance
In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Writing Genius of Harold Ramis
Of all of his collaborations with Bill Murray, Groundhog Day was his masterpiece.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Confessions of a WikiLeaks Ghostwriter: A Cautionary Tale About Agreeing to a Book Deal
I wrote through the night to assemble what we had. The thinness could become a kind of statement, I asserted; it could become a modernist autobiography. But the jokes wouldn’t hold and Julian, despite promising his publishers and me that he’d produce pages, paragraphs, even notes towards his book, produced nothing in all the months […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
From Facebook Reject to Purchased by Facebook for $19 Billion
Over the next nine years the pair also watched Yahoo go through multiple ups and downs. Acton invested in the dotcom boom, and lost millions in the 2000 bust. For all of his distaste for advertising now he was also deep in it back then, getting pulled in to help launch Yahoo’s important and much-delayed […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The True Cost of Our Almond Addiction
The global almond boom is being fueled in part by sleek marketing campaigns that have made almonds the nut of choice for consumers. Subway stations in China are blanketed with billboards proclaiming almonds to be a heart-healthy snack that makes people “perpetually feel good” (almond exports to China have more than doubled in the past […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Shadow Legal System on College Campuses, and What It Means for Reporting Sexual Assault
“Patrick Henry College is not alone in internally adjudicating sexual assault. Every college and university maintains its own shadow legal system—and many secular colleges have a terrible track record of investigating and punishing sexual assault. But Patrick Henry College is one of only four private colleges in the United States that eschews federal funds in […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Roger Ebert's Love Story
“How can I begin to tell you about Chaz? She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading. If my cancer had come, and it would have, and […]
