Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive the Top 5 Longreads email every Friday. 1. I Smoked Pot with David Brooks Gary Greenberg | garygreenberg.com | January 3, 2014 | 6 minutes (1,700 words) A satirical response to New […]
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What It's Like to Outrun Death: The Survival Story of a New Orleans Blues Legend
Barry Yeoman | The New New South, Creatavist | December 2013 | 52 minutes (13,100 words) For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. […]
Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s
Starting with just a mail route, Juan Terry Trippe helped create a uniquely American luxury experience.
Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Sentence I Read This Year
Catherine Cloutier is an online producer at The Boston Globe’s Boston.com. “Life, Feinberg says, guarantees misfortune. The wolf is always at the door.” James Oliphant’s profile of Ken Feinberg in the National Journal transformed the way I view our nation’s response to tragedy. The monetary value of a life lost to violence is rarely equal. […]
College Longreads Pick: 'A Canine in a Cummerbund,' Peter Kaplan (1977)
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: The New York media world grieves for editor Peter Kaplan, who died last week. Kaplan worked at several publications during his career, and he’s best known as the longtime editor of the New York Observer, but […]
Longreads Best of 2013: Favorite New Writer Discovery
Above: Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr. *** Ross Andersen is a Senior Editor at Aeon Magazine. He has written extensively about science and philosophy for several publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist. “Flinder Boyd’s piece about an aspirational streetballer and his cross-country trip to New York’s legendary Rucker Park had me from the very first […]
Longreads Best of 2013: The Most Surprising Piece of Cultural Criticism of the Year
Elizabeth Hyde Stevens is author of the book Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career. “I was shocked that Todd VanDerWerff was able to write such a serious essay about the show DuckTales. As a kid, I saw every episode, and didn’t think much about why it was good, […]
The Difference Between Being 'Trusted' and 'Trustworthy'
“Rupert Murdoch, an animatronic al-Qaida recruitment poster, in his private letter to Sun staff, after the News of the World was briefly closed for a makeover (not through remorse, or shame, no, because they couldn’t sell advertising space and because he wanted to launch the Sun on Sunday anyway because it’s cheaper to run one […]
The Post-GMO Economy: Our Longreads Member Pick
Elizabeth Royte | Modern Farmer, FERN | December 2013 | 7 minutes (1,700 words) For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to “The Post-GMO Economy,” a new story by Elizabeth Royte that will be published next week by Modern Farmer, in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Become a Longreads Member to receive the […]
Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About
A list of stories that resonated with us.

