When Pauline Kael typed “prevert” instead of “pervert,” she meant “prevert” (unless she was reviewing something by Jacques Prévert). Luckily, she was kind, and if you changed it she would just change it back and stet it without upbraiding you. Kael revised up until closing, and though we lackeys resented writers who kept changing “doughnut” to “coffee cake” then back to “doughnut” and then “coffee cake” again, because it meant more work for us, Kael’s changes were always improvements.
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Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Story About Storytelling
In Conversation: Robert Silvers Mark Danner | New York magazine | April 2013 | 28 minutes (7,063 words) Nicholas Jackson is the digital director at Pacific Standard, and a former digital editor at Outside and The Atlantic. These year-end lists tend to be like the Academy Awards in that only work released during the […]
A Brain with a Heart
Inside the life and work of Oliver Sacks, whose newest book is Hallucinations: “He has been in psychoanalysis, continuously and with the same Freudian interlocutor, for 46 years—remarkable for a materialist neurologist. ‘We were both young men, and now we’re old men. There’s a longitudinal study for you,’ he says. The two remain on formal […]
Nature's Brendan Maher: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Brendan Maher is biology features editor for the news team at Nature, the UK-based science journal. *** My selection of the best science-themed longreads for 2011 suffers from two major limitations: 1.) I couldn’t read everything, so have probably missed some very worthy entries. 2.) I purposely did not include articles from Nature, where I […]
