Phil Busse stole McCain lawn signs in Minnesota during the 2008 presidential campaign. The prank made him infamous: “Within hours, I received several hundred angry emails and phone calls, including three death threats. A man in Michigan yelled at me over the phone, calling me ‘sick’ and ‘demented,’ and informing me that he was going […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws
How a get-tough law in California led to life sentences for petty thieves and drug offenders—and how support for its repeal came more from Republicans than Democrats: “Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. As the years passed and word of great […]
Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.”
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press.
Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.”
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Time Jason Zengerle and a Gorilla Stalked Michael Moore for Might Magazine
Jason Zengerle | Might magazine | 1997 | 19 minutes (4,685 words) Introduction Thanks to our Longreads Members’ support, we tracked down a vintage story from Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine. It’s from Jason Zengerle, a correspondent for GQ and contributing editor for New York magazine who’s been featured on Longreads often in the past.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Story Behind Mitt Romney’s Loss
Campaign aides on both sides deconstruct where the Republican candidate went wrong: “It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney’s political director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his ‘better ground game,’ could lose the key state of Ohio or the election. The race […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Mormon Reporter On The Romney Bus
How the Mitt Romney campaign, its supporters and the media addressed the candidate’s Mormon faith: “On the night of the South Carolina Republican primary in January, I sat near the front of a dark campaign press bus and listened to reporters talk about Mitt Romney’s underwear. “Earlier in the day, one of them had happened […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The GOP and Me
A Muslim-American’s history with the Republican Party—and how they lost him: “Newt Gingrich, who also ran for President, introduced an angle that I – and presumably every American of sound mind – had never considered before. Speaking at a Texas church in March, 2011, Gingrich brought up his grandchildren to the audience, and then said, […]
