Rebecca Solnit | Orion | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,780 words) OrionOur latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Rebecca Solnit and Orion magazine—subscribe to the magazine or donate for more great stories like this. Get a free trial issue Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) [ 1. ] The word “journey” used to mean a […]
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Photo: Richard Barnes *** Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. *** 1. No Exit: ‘Your Feeling of Autonomy Is a Fantasy’ Gideon Lewis-Kraus | Wired | April 23, 2014 | 42 minutes […]
The Last Hand-Me-Down: Retracing My Brother’s Life Through His Clothes
Tom Molanphy | Loud Memories of a Quiet Life (OutPost 19) | May 2012 | 18 minutes (4,652 words) Tom Molanphy earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He freelances for 10Best/Travel Media Group at USA Today and teaches creative writing, composition and journalism at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. This […]
The Future of Online Education: A Longreads Guest Pick by Teddy Worcester
Above: Sebastian Thrun *** Teddy Worcester resides in San Francisco and helps to build products that support the free and open web. Max Chafkin’s Fast Company story covering Sebastian Thrun’s change of course for Udacity is a must-read for anyone interested in online education. The brilliant Thrun admits that MOOCs are not necessarily the right […]
The Black Car Company That People Love to Hate: Our Member Pick
Nancy Scola | Next City, Forefront magazine | November 2013 | 26 minutes (6,561 words) Illustration by Kjell Reigstad Longreads Members support this service and receive exclusive stories from the best publishers and writers in the world. Join us to receive our latest Member Pick—it’s a new story from journalist Nancy Scola, published in Next […]
The Summer of Love and Newsweek
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg reflects on his early career working as a correspondent for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering Jefferson Airplane, Ronald Reagan and hippies: “If the S.F. music scene (I quickly learned that ‘Frisco’ was a no-no) was scarcely known outside the Bay Area, and neither was the larger cultural phenomenon it drew […]
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero
Jason Everman was kicked out of both Nirvana and Soundgarden, before the bands went on to sell millions of albums. He then decided to do something completely different: “So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered […]
Reading List: Stories From the Working Class
Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy. These are stories about […]
Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American?
On Iron Eyes Cody and “the tribe of the Wannabe.”
Making the Magazine: A Reading List
27 must-read stories on the making of the world’s greatest magazines.

