Universities had the chance to make higher education accessible to more students by making the price of online degrees affordable. But they didn’t.
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When Music Speaks to Our Experience
Anton Webern’s Concerto, Opus 24 had the structure that was missing from one young musician’s life.
Did Your Walls Keep Them Out, or Lock You In?
Gabriela Garcia’s short story about a women fighting a cold war with her new neighbor is deeply political without explicitly being about politics at all.
In Defense of Boris the Russki
Ayşegül Savaş calls into question a kind of racism in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and laments the liberal reluctance to rebuke discrimination outright, regardless of its targets.
House of the Century
Daisy Alioto reconsiders the nature of architecture while researching window alarms.
Teaching Writing and Breaking Rules
Rules can ruin the kind of exciting language that makes literature rewarding, but some rules also enhance writing. It’s challenging to find the middle ground.
Longreads Best of 2019: Music Writing
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in music writing.
Poetry and Prophecy, Dust and Ashes
“But twenty-three years after Genesis, Alter has completed his work: a finished Hebrew Bible, three volumes lovingly footnoted; an altogether worthier object of contemplation than some fantasy series, or Lyndon Johnson. And I, who am but dust and ashes, review it.”
The Soviet Children Who Survived World War II
Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses, a 1985 collection of testimonials from then-Soviets who were children during the Second World War, has been translated into English and excerpted at the Paris Review. “It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there’s no papa.”
Longreads Best of 2020: Business Writing
Our top story picks in business writing this year.
