Hardwick’s classic 1959 essay on the dismal state of book criticism. (Robert Silvers has pointed it out as an early inspiration for founding the New York Review of Books.) For the world of books, for readers and writers, the torpor of the New York Times Book Review is more affecting. There come to mind all […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
False Confessions: NYC Still Struggles in Aftermath of Central Park Five
In the spring of 1989, five teenagers from Harlem were convicted of raping and assaulting a woman jogging in Central Park after four of the five confessed to the crime. The confession of a convicted rapist and killer named Matías Reyes overturned the five men’s convictions in 2003. Since then, the NYPD announced it would […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family
“Indians don’t ‘fall,’ Debie. We don’t marry by accident. We choose.”
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Call It Rape
Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words) The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.Subscribe to The Normal School * * * Still life with man and gun Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg
An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family
“Indians don’t ‘fall,’ Debie. We don’t marry by accident. We choose.”
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Call It Rape
Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words) The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.Subscribe to The Normal School * * * Still life with man and gun Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
All You Have Eaten: On Keeping a Perfect Record
An experiment in food as a mnemonic device.
Posted inUncategorized
A trip to an oil boomtown transformed by thousands of young men arriving to find work: I’d heard Williston was a magical place. A small town where the recession didn’t exist, where you could make six figures driving a truck, and where oil bubbles straight up from the Earth’s Bakken layer like water from an […]
Posted inUncategorized
A man travels to the Dhamma Giri meditation center in western India to learn the meditation style known as Vipassana—the same meditation used by the Buddha to reach enlightenment 25 centuries ago. Enlightenment doesn’t come easy: There are no further instructions. And I can’t ask anyone what I’m supposed to do. So I sit, striving […]
