“I moved to Lower Manhattan when I was seventeen. The only things I cared about were books and music.”
Search results
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Budd & Leni
The story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
About Us
Longreads, founded in 2009 by Mark Armstrong, is dedicated to finding and sharing the best longform nonfiction storytelling on the web. We publish personal and reported essays, criticism, reading lists, and occasional book excerpts, interviews, and more in-depth features. Longreads has been nominated for four National Magazine Awards (and won a 2020 ASME for Best Digital […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
'It Will Change the Way We Think About Society and the Way We Do Economics'
Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books, on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book from Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics: It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Operation Delirium
Colonel James S. Ketchum oversaw years of research into new methods of chemical warfare—which included testing on U.S. soldiers: “Today, Ketchum is eighty-one years old, and the facility where he worked, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings attached to a military proving ground on the Chesapeake Bay. The arsenal’s records are boxed and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies
Internal memos and documents show how the sugar industry worked to cover up evidence of its dangerous health effects: “In January 1976, the GRAS committee published its preliminary conclusions, noting that while sugar probably contributed to tooth decay, it was not a ‘hazard to the public.’ The draft review dismissed the diabetes link as ‘circumstantial’ […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Stiffed
Who in the 99 percent really need help? A review of the Occupy Handbook: “Amid all the grandstanding and parading of manifestos in the Occupy Handbook, one essay that stands out is an old-fashioned piece of historical reportage by Michael Hiltzik. It’s called ‘The 5 per cent’, and it tells the story of the campaign […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It
It is “a national disgrace”: The U.S. prison system, for years, failed to stop rampant sexual abuse from occurring behind bars. Inside the new program to stop it: “The review panel’s most recent report describes the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, a maximum-security state prison in Troy, Virginia. About 1,200 women are confined there, and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Blow-Up: An Oral History of Transformers Director Michael Bay
In 1998, a national magazine asked in an article “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” Thirteen years later, you can still buy T-shirts that answer yes. The 46-year-old director has long been treated by cineastes as the macho spawn of Ed Wood—a testosterone-sweating embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern Hollywood. (Those quotes up there […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker
Before the Civil War, the clerk was “a small but unusual phenomenon.” By the end of the 19th century, clerical workers were a social force to be reckoned with. This is the story of their rise.
