Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Last Thursday, the NBC series “Community” returned with its creator and original showrunner, Dan Harmon, at the helm. I like “Community.” I do. It’s warm and dark and funny and self-referential. In spite of its absurdity—perhaps […]
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Posted inReading List
Reading List: If Christmas Were Forever
I wish Christmas lasted forever. Okay, maybe not forever, but at least a week. I try to make this a reality by visiting different family members and friends and exchanging gifts during the week between Christmas & New Year’s, “forgetting” these gifts and having to revisit aforementioned friends, listening to Christmas music longer than conventionally appropriate, and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
An Old Magician Named Nabokov Writes and Lives in Splendid Exile
From the author of the new novel All That Is, a 1975 profile of Vladimir Nabokov that he wrote for People Magazine: “The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Mother Jones Reading List: Fashion #Longreads
A collection of stories from Salon, Jane, The New Yorker, New York Times and more.
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin
Four advice columnists, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, Salon’s Cary Tennis, Slate’s Emily Yoffe, and The Globe and Mail’s Lynn Coady, discuss what it’s like to give advice to people online: “Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Scars
[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom: “The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter. “‘Sure you’re in the right place?,’ I asked. ‘This ain’t no nail salon.’ “‘Is […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Jane Jacobs and the Rebirth of New York
A few weeks ago I took a break from reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities to visit the block of Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village where Jacobs lived when she wrote her classic book on urban planning. One block over, on Bleecker Street, the storefronts bear the names of […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Three Minutes to Fort Totten
A chaplain from Walter Reed. A doctor from Walter Reed. The owner of a new hair salon. An architect. On a Metro train, in one terrifying instant and its aftermath, their lives became forever intertwined. This is their story.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Grief, Memory, and the Vortex Effect
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband and her daughter’s sudden sickness, Didion describes being paralyzed by memories of her family triggered during mundane circumstances. She calls this experience “the vortex effect.” Matt Zoller Seitz’s Salon essay, “All The Things That Remind Me Of Her,” shows the […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Gleeful Contrarian
The Gleeful Contrarian “The site is intended to expand the reader’s sphere of interest. It’s a grave mistake in publishing, whether you’re talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago Bill Gates was boasting that we’ll soon have sensors which will […]
