“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”
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Posted inBooks, Business, Current Events, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Maybe What We Need Is … More Politics?
Recent books by economists who hope to “save capitalism” dismiss popular ideas as “just politics.” But why assume the popular is the enemy of the good?
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture, Essays & Criticism, Story
Alexa de Paris
Miles Marshall Lewis remembers a love of Prince and Paris.
Posted inNonfiction
It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer
Hip-hop was a different kind of music that needed a different kind of writer to cover it. This is how Michael A. Gonzales came of age in a time when Black writers began breaking the white ceiling.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
On Subtlety
What’s so great about having things spelled out clearly?
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
Hellhound on the Money Trail
Standard recording contracts screwed Bluesmen out of royalties in the early 1900s, and the system was no different when Columbia released “Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings in 1990.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Story
Fruitland
Privately made records enjoy a cult following among collectors, but few are as legendary as Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 LP Dreamin’ Wild.
Posted inReading List
Longreads Best of 2017: Political Writing
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in political writing.
Posted inBooks, Food, Nonfiction, Story
“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine
How the scruffy kids of the ’60s youth movement turned cooking from a shameful job into a lauded profession.
Posted inNonfiction, Sports, Story
Losers’ Lunch
Dining out with courtsiders, a rogue, impish species in the tennis ecosystem.
