Joan Rivers, comedy legend, has died at age 81. Three stories from the Longreads Archive: The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers (Terry Gross, NPR) GROSS: So, like, that’s kind of a paradox to me that you live to be on stage and at the same time, there’s this dread of being on stage. Ms. RIVERS: […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
All Together Now
The Spice Girls were the biggest, brashest girlie group ever to have hit the British mainstream. Kathy Acker was an avant-garde American writer and academic. They met up in 1997 to swap notes—on boys, girls, politics. They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Life, After
TV reporter Miles O’Brien’s first-person account of what it’s like to lose your arm: I’d always heard amputees talk about the stares and the acute awareness of being viewed as different. During my first shoot for the NewsHour with one arm, I was wearing a blazer when I met a researcher I was to interview. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Miss American Dream
How Britney Spears went to Vegas and became a feminist role model. No, really. Fifty stories above all this, Britney Spears was working. She didn’t know about the wind or the dancers or the fire-breather or about the old lady whose day she had fucked up immeasurably, the one who might be the Queen of […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Comedy and the Single Girl
An excerpt from Armstrong’s book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, on how Treva Silverman helped create TV’s most memorable characters: One night in 1964, Silverman was playing at a piano bar in Manhattan’s theater district—it was another one of those dark, smoky places, but this one had a well-tuned baby grand. She took […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
How Karina Longworth Is Reimagining Classic Hollywood—and the Podcast—in ‘You Must Remember This’
“I have consciously tried to refocus my attention away from being a film critic and toward being a film historian.”
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima
Through her work on clone-thriller Orphan Black, science consultant Cosima Herter has helped open our eyes to the possibilities and perils of synthetic biology and the pursuit of genetic perfection.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War
In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
