“Empty spaces on maps were so terrifying to ancient mapmakers that they filled them with decorations, fictional landscapes, and monsters. We moderns miss the beautiful monsters, but what if they never actually disappeared? What if the monsters were always part of the map, part of mapping itself?” After many months of hearing about how great […]
We like to think Longreads furnishes more than simply emergency reading, and that’s certainly true this week.
“I peeled the list off the windshield and held it like an artifact: evidence of a life I didn’t know but suddenly cared about. It read like a poem. A confession. What was the story behind this list, I wondered—and what would come for this stranger after the checkout aisle?” I love making lists. They […]
This week, we’re sharing stories from Skip Hollandsworth, Kory Grow and Jason Newman, Jordan Kisner, Clare Fieseler, and Jessica Klein.
“Wallace was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort. A 54-year-old Massachusetts lawyer and real estate developer, he couldn’t afford to fly conservatively. Gas ballooning, similar to jockeyship, favored lightweight pilots, who could stock their baskets with more sand. Compared with his slighter opponents, Wallace’s six-foot-five, 240-pound frame meant that the equivalent of three additional 30-pound bags of sand […]
“When his celebrity was at its height and he couldn’t walk a street on this planet without getting recognized, jiujitsu gave Bourdain a new, anonymous world to traverse, one where he was just one of us.”
The soundtrack of my life goes back a long way. Here are six longreads about music, for the love of it.
“Tesfaye wan’t sure where the gunfire was coming from, and with service outages across Mekelle, he couldn’t look online for answers. He was certain something was very wrong. But what could he do? He got dressed and did what he did most mornings. He went to work.” Every month, we share an excerpt from our […]
“It’s our least popular and most enforced rule: we don’t allow people to sleep in the library. We know you’re tired, we know it’s warm, we know it feels safe. But someone who is dying also looks like someone who is sleeping, and we’ve all seen our share of overdoses. Also, if one person is […]
This week, we’re sharing stories from Jill McCabe Johnson, Stacey Anderson, Megan Pillow, Barry Blanchard, and Elizabeth Rush.
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