The media entrepreneur’s vision for the future of content and journalism: DENTON: The Panopticon—the prison in which everybody is exposed to scrutiny all the time. Do you remember the website Fucked Company? It was big in about 2000, 2001. I was CEO of Moreover Technologies at the time. A saleswoman put in an anonymous report […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Murderer and the Manuscript
Alaric hunt is writing detective novels, while serving a life sentence for murder, arson, robbery and other charges: Alaric Hunt turned 44 in September. He last saw the outside world at 19. He works every day at the prison library in a maximum-security facility in Bishopville, S.C., passing out the same five magazines and newspapers […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Cost
“I want to tell you something: it is nearly impossible for a young black man to stay out of trouble in a country where skin color is the marker for suspicion and violence and grief.”
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War
In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Autistic and Searching for a Home
Between jail and the hospital, Savannah Shannon’s life is in limbo.
Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
‘Like Being in Prison with a Salary’: The Secret World of the Shipping Industry
Rose George | Metropolitan Books | August 2013 | 17 minutes (4,213 words) The following is the opening chapter of Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything. Our thanks to the author for sharing it with the Longreads community. * * * Friday. No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of the Crucifixion or the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Standard of Care
What happens when a former prison inmate sues for medical malpractice: Tonight in a nursing home in the North End neighborhood of Boston, not far from where his family owns a restaurant, there is a man with the brain of a boy. He is blind. He is 375 pounds because he doesn’t know when he […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Smokey and the Bandit
Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder wanted an unobstructed view of the Potomac River from his Maryland mansion, which would require cutting down trees in a park designated a national historic site. Snyder’s desire for that view ended up wrecking a park ranger’s career: It was a small concession in the grand scheme of things, the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘A Hive of Mysterious Danger’
The author, on teaching a literature class at Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York: As I mentioned earlier, the class I taught at Auburn was on existentialist literature, with works by Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the syllabus. Existentialism, I told my students, and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Did Your Father Touch You?’
A daughter regrets the lie that sent her father to prison: When he asks Chaneya why she told officials at the medical clinic that her father had sexually assaulted her, she gives the same answer three times: “I don’t know.” When he asks what she’d say to the judge if he interrogated her about why […]
