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The Top 10 Longreads of 2011

I should preface this by saying I didn’t plan to do a list, because all of your Top 5 Longreads of 2011 really represent what the Longreads community is all about. But, in true WWIC form, I couldn’t resist.  Thank you for an incredible year. Special thanks to the entire Longreads team: Joyce King Thomas, Kjell Reigstad, Hakan Bakkalbasi and […]

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Cain, writer of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce,” on the pros and cons of living in Southern California in the 1930s: There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference, and that is the one thing the human imagination cannot […]

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Featured Longreader: Emily Keeler, books editor at The New Inquiry. See her story picks from The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The New York Review of Books, plus more on her #longreads page.

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[May 2005] How Steve Martin transitioned from comedy to writing, and how celebrity affected his day-to-day life: SM: You know, there’s a moment when you’re famous when it’s unbearable to go out because you’re too famous. And then there’s a moment when you’re famous just right. [Laughs] And then there’s kind of a respect or […]

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Radio broadcaster Harold Camping predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011. It didn’t. A look at what happened to some of Camping’s followers: I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken. The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me […]

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Consequence

In 2007, Eric Fair wrote an article in the Washington Post describing his experience as an interrogator in Iraq. He has had trouble finding a way to move on. I tell my professor I am sick. I put away verb charts, participles, and lexicons, board a train for Washington, D.C., and meet with Department of […]

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A history of Mormonism and how it has evolved:  Yet how much do specifically Mormon beliefs matter to contemporary Mormons? Brooks’s story, give or take a Nephite or two, could unfold in any fundamentalist community that provides comfort and meaning if you’re prepared to park your critical intelligence in the lot outside the church door. […]

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