Stanford White and Harry Thaw’s battle for the heart of model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit in 1906: One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and […]
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U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them: The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from […]
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The art of writing romance novels: The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss; […]
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A writer visits a fifth grade classroom at a northern California elementary school, where she observes the class’s anti-bullying curriculum: “Stop it, you are bullying me,” he says. Then he lets his body go slack. He bows, then sits down. “You labeled it, you said ‘stop,’ you stood up straight,” Linda says, “Good job.” “Very […]
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Helpful tips from a poet who lives in Brooklyn: 1. MOVE OUT OF BROOKLYN I know not every novelist in America lives in Brooklyn, it just seems that way. There are a million stories on the L Train, and they’re all basically about dorky people doing dorky things. Which is fine. The best novel to […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, New York Magazine, Inc. Magazine, The Awl, The New York Times Magazine, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Shellee O’Brien.
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The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government: What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The American Prospect, Outside Magazine, New York Magazine, The Awl, McSweeney’s, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Krysti Lesch.
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Bill Gates and George Soros are handing out billions, but there are downsides to foundation giving: The new focus on metrics has brought with it a new breed of nonprofit and for-profit partnerships. Foundations such as the Omidyar Network, established in 2004 by eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, provide both investments in for-profit companies and charitable […]
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More than 40 years after the “Fatal Vision” murders, Errol Morris’s new book re-investigates a case once covered by the likes of Janet Malcolm and Joe McGinniss: In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in […]
