Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. (See his Longreads page here.) *** First of all, I am not even going to bother listing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Disney World piece because it was obviously the best thing anywhere this year but everyone agrees and […]
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The search for an amateur philosopher who anonymously paid university professors thousands of dollars to review his work: The institute’s letter claimed that a “very substantial sum” had been earmarked to help contribute to “the revival of traditional metaphysics.” Given the number of philosophers involved, that sum was at least in the neighborhood of $125,000. […]
Filmmaker Kunle Afolayan is looking to push the boundaries of moviemaking in Nigeria—but it’s still too early to know whether the audiences can support a film with even a $500,000 budget: Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles […]
Brendan I. Koerner's All-Time Favorite #Longreads
Brendan I. Koerner’s All-Time Favorite #Longreads tetw: As chosen by Brendan I. Koerner A selection of all-time favourite articles from Wired contributing editor, former Slate and New York Times columnist, and the author of 2 excellent books, Brendan I. Koerner: The Hunger Warriors by Scott Anderson – The story of Turkish women starving themselves to death for the […]
Learning how to code, and searching for a legendary figure in the Ruby who mysteriously disappeared: Hackety Hack solved the “Little Coder’s Predicament”: It was fun enough to engage a kid, and smart enough to teach her something to boot. But just a few months after launching it, to the astonishment of the community of […]
Life on the job with a team of nuclear divers. As nuclear power plants age, they require more upkeep—and much of that work can happen underwater: Last March, a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to a disastrous series of reactor meltdowns. The consequences were immediate. Germany vowed to phase out nuclear […]
What happens when a grizzly bear kills a human being in Yellowstone National Park? An examination of a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears, while giving leeway to euthanize bears that kill humans in ways that are deemed “unnatural”: It’s a squirrely notion, that a team of government biologists might be able […]
How did pedestrians become an endangered species in the United States—and why is the word “pedestrian” wrong anyway? First in a four-part series: A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a ‘Pedestrian Safety’ panel was being held. The speaker […]
A writer adopts the Choose Your Own Adventure book format to write a story about a disastrous love affair: “The answer, of course, is that you should dump Anne before it’s too late. But the absurd options the book gives ‘you’— later ‘choices’ include dueling with an Ant-Warrior, or attacking the Evil Power Master—simply highlight […]
Ethan Imboden is founder of Jimmyjane, a Bay Area company that is aiming to bring design standards and mainstream acceptance to a product that has long been hidden away from the public: Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as ‘the Sex and the City vibrator,’ but in 2007, Imboden approached the company […]
