John Green is the author of the wildly popular young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, which remained No. 1 on Amazon in the U.S. and Britain two years after its release. Guardian writer Emma Brockes profiled Green for Intelligent Life this month, and here Green discusses what is problematic about another wildly popular series: […]
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Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads
Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) I. In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was […]
“Getting Stuffed: A Tale of Love and Taxidermy,” David Sedaris, The Guardian.
The Snowden Leaks and the Public
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on what we’ve learned so far about the Edward Snowden leaks, our privacy, and the way our government, press and commercial Internet companies have handled it. In many cases, it can come down to people who aren’t quite sure what’s going on trusting the people who do know: But I did […]
When the Ruins Were New
In 1862, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII fled a sex scandal and took a trip to the Middle East. At the last minute, he was joined by a photographer named Francis Bedford, who proceeded to capture some of the earliest images of the Egyptian ruins. His work is featured in the […]
Longreads Member Exclusive: A Visit to Havana
(Subscribe to Longreads to receive this and other weekly exclusives.) This week, we’re proud to feature a Member Exclusive from Alma Guillermoprieto and The New York Review of Books. Born in Mexico City, Guillermoprieto has covered Latin America for NYRB since 1994, and she has also written for The New Yorker, The Guardian and the Washington Post. […]
Ink-Stained Assassins
A brief history of the political cartoonist, whose job is endangered in the digital age: “Martin Rowson in particular seems to revel in mixing allusions to obscure literary texts with lashings of excrement. A cartoon he drew last month for the Morning Star features a ‘fivearsed pig’, shitting turds emblazoned with the logos of London […]
The Girls at the Front
A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland: “Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were […]
Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing
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; […]
The Guardians
Remembering a New York friendship. Excerpted from Manguso’s new book, The Guardians: An Elegy, out Feb. 28: “The Thursday edition of the Riverdale Press carried a story that began An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the Riverdale station on West 254th Street. […]
