“It always helps to understand what’s happening, and to be able to understand your enemy. It helps you cope and helps you panic less. Now that I know what depression looks like and I know what the general steps are, there’s also a progression I can look at and feel comforted by. I can feel […]
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Looking Back on 'The X-Files': A Reading List
I watched “The X-Files” in a Baltimore house I shared with eight people, at the end of days spent navigating the city’s shaky public transit system, alternating between feeling perfectly in place and wildly lost. That’s how I felt when I watch “The X-Files,” too: One moment I was perfectly attuned to Agents Mulder & […]
The Secret to a Successful Career, According to Cyndi Lauper's Makeup Artist
“It was for a new singer and it was for an Italian TV show called Popcorn, which was a music show. So they rented a flat and I walk in the next morning, and there’s this huge king-sized bed. And there’s Lou Albano and these other wrestlers and Cyndi and her mom. And I’m like, […]
Reading List: Where the Witty Things Are
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. 1. “This Wedding Season, Say Yes to Strangers: What I Learned From My Craigslist Date” and “A Brief Addendum to Our Craigslist Wedding Story.” (Lindsey Grad and Nick Hassell, The Hairpin, June 2013) When a bridezilla demanded that Grad find […]
A Brief History of ‘It’ Girls
“It isn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just ‘It’.” —Rudyard Kipling 1. “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl,” (Anne Helen Petersen, The Hairpin, May 2011) Clara Bow was the original It girl, so much so that her 1927 film, titled—what else?—“It,” more or less defined the phenomenon. This piece, from Petersen’s […]
Reading List: Where the Witty Things Are
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. 1. “This Wedding Season, Say Yes to Strangers: What I Learned From My Craigslist Date” and “A Brief Addendum to Our Craigslist Wedding Story.” (Lindsey Grad and Nick Hassell, The Hairpin, June 2013) When a bridezilla demanded that Grad find […]
Reading List: 21 Outstanding Stories from Women's Magazines and Websites
Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious. The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as […]
Longreads Best of 2012: Edith Zimmerman
Edith Zimmerman is founding editor of The Hairpin and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. She’s also written for GQ, Elle, The Awl and This American Life. I’m not a doctor, but … (always a confidence-inspiring way to start a sentence!), these pieces on healthcare were two of the best articles I […]
Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Mo Yan, SF Weekly, The Hairpin, fiction from Electric Literature and the Coffin Factory, and a guest pick by Jia Tolentino. Sign up to receive our Top 5 Longreads email every week.
Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010
aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic: The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired “Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger […]
