Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday, and it’s been a thrill to watch this community grow since we introduced this service and Twitter hashtag in 2009. Thank you to everyone who participates, whether it’s as a reader, a publisher, a writer—or all three. And thanks to the Longreads Members who have made it possible for us […]
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First Chapters: ‘You Are One of Them,’ by Elliott Holt
Elliott Holt | The Penguin Press | 2013 | 12 minutes (2,854 words) Our latest First Chapter is from Elliott Holt’s novel, You Are One of Them. Thanks to Holt and The Penguin Press for sharing it with the Longreads community. * * * Prologue In Moscow I was always cold. I suppose that’s what Russia […]
The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty
He was the heir to the televangelist’s empire, but Richard Roberts soon disappeared from the university that his father founded.
The Good Girls Revolt
In 1970, Lynn Povich and 45 other women sued Newsweek for discrimination. Here is what the workplace was like for them.
This Book Is Now a Pulitzer Prize Winner: An Excerpt from ‘Toms River’ by Dan Fagin
Dan Fagin | Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation | 2013 | 9 minutes (2,153 words) This year’s Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction was awarded yesterday to Dan Fagin, an NYU science journalism professor, for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. According to the Pulitzer committee, Fagin’s book, which chronicles the effects of chemical waste […]
How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney
Jennifer Reingold | Fortune | March 2014 | 29 minutes (7,108 words) Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle) Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks) When you find a savior, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron […]
How One Magazine Shaped Investigative Journalism in America
The following story comes recommended by Ben Marks, senior editor for Collectors Weekly: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most recent history, The Bully Pulpit, chronicles the intertwined lives of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, often in excruciating detail, from Roosevelt’s struggles with the bosses of his Republican party to the fungal infections that plagued Taft’s groin. […]
Mother Jones: Whose Tumblrs Are We Digging On This Week?
ilovecharts: motherjones: Glad you asked: Lapham’s Quarterly has this webs thingy all figured out. Longreads ensures we never stop reading, even after work hours. I Love Charts brings graphic order to disorder. And Cajun Boy is, well, Cajun Boy. Just read him, dammit. And speak well of the Saints. Thank you for digging on us! […]
Abusive Afghan Husbands Want This Woman Dead
Abusive Afghan Husbands Want This Woman Dead For Afghan women, self-immolation has become a way to externalize private injustice, to push hidden pain into the public square. They are expressing a demand for human rights in a culture that does not allow them to articulate that wish. As chief prosecutor, Maria Bashir has sought to […]
