Fifty years ago, the Freedom of Information Act gave the public access to government secrets — all you had to do was ask. How a simple request became a bureaucratic nightmare.
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Posted ininvestigations, Nonfiction, Story
The Lost Genocide
Why the United Nations may never be able to prosecute the Rohingya genocide.
Posted inCurrent Events, Story
The Bitter History of Law and Order in America
It has stifled suffrage, blamed immigrants for chaos, and suppressed civil rights. It’s also how Donald Trump views the entire world.
Posted inArts & Culture, History, Story
Percy Ross Wants to Give You Money!
He was was a self-made, blue-collar millionaire in Reagan’s America. But when Percy Ross decided to give away his fortune, he made things simple: all you had to do was ask for it.
Posted inDiscussions, Story
‘No One Should be Doomed to Just One Story’: An ‘S-Town’ Roundtable
How we feel about a person’s privacy seems to correlate with how much control they have in the decision to open up.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Fabulous (and Sometimes Dead-End) Opportunity of Being an Assistant
Nearly every exclusive field runs on assistants. The actor James Franco, like Buddha before him, had an assistant keep track of his meals and school assignments. The critic and writer Daphne Merkin has employed a steady stream of Ivy-educated elves. They’re tasked with everything from editing to returning dead houseplants. Bestselling novelist John Irving (The […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Truman Capote Compiled the Guest List for His Famous Black and White Ball, According to Gloria Steinem
What gave the Black and White Ball “its intoxicating piquancy,” according to Amy Fine Collins, was the fact that Capote’s guest list had “flung together, in a gilt-edged melting pot, the most alluring power brokers in the worlds of high society, politics, the arts, and Hollywood—disconnected universes that collided, if not for the first time that evening, then at least with unprecedented force.”
The Ball also found an unlikely chronicler in Gloria Steinem, an invited guest who had made Capote’s acquaintance after she interviewed him for Glamour the year before. Steinem wrote a feature on the party for Vogue in January 1967 in which she described the luminaries, feathers, masks, ball gowns, and jewels all whirling around the room: “The effect was like some blend of Hollywood, the Court of Louis XIV, a medieval durbar, and pure Manhattan.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘There Is Nothing New in Wall Street’: A Stock Trader’s Life in the 1920s
Our latest Longreads First Chapter comes recommended by Michelle Legro: Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before the crash of 1929. His life and times were […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
A Brief History of Epic Parties: Reading List
The following reading list comes courtesy Michelle Legro, editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. * * * No doubt you are on your way to one right now: an epic party, a night to end all nights. But will your epic party be as legendary as those thrown attended by Truman Capote, Cher Horowitz, Jay Gatsby, Jordan […]
