Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: One of the hardest rules of writing for students to follow is: “Don’t start a story with a quote.” Except… Except when the quote is so incredible that it makes the reader do a hard-stop. To […]
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Announcing the Longreads Member Drive: Help Us Reach 5,000 Members
My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads. What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best […]
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Longreads Member Drive Update: 400 New Members in Our First Day, plus Digg Buys the First Group Membership
Yesterday, we asked for your help, and you responded. Thanks to you, we welcomed 400 new Longreads Members. We’re now at 1,400 members—that’s great progress, but we’re still less than halfway to our goal of 5,000 Longreads Members. We need your help to keep spreading the word. You can share your support on Twitter here. […]
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Longreads Member Exclusive: Contest of Words, by Ben Lerner
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Contest of Words,” Ben Lerner‘s October 2012 essay from Harper’s Magazine. Lerner is author of the award-winning 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path. The story comes recommended by Matt O’Rourke, a longtime Longreads community member and creative director for Wieden […]
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Why Do Gay Porn Stars Kill Themselves?
A porn star reflects on the death of fellow actor Arpad Miklos, and argues that we shouldn’t make assumptions about what effect the industry had on him: “But others who knew him even less than me flooded twitter, wrote articles, posted to facebook about what had happened. The theories appeared as soon as the news […]
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Frontline and Longreads: Inside Obama’s Presidency
Coming Tuesday from Frontline: “Inside Obama’s Presidency.” We’ve collected a list of stories from Obama’s first term—share your favorite presidential stories on Twitter with the hashtag #longreads.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Valley of God
Faith, technology and Christianity in Silicon Valley: “The internet and social media present a conundrum for Chuck DeGroat, the pastor at City Church. With a congregation of hip modern professionals, from architects and financial advisers to programmers and venture capitalists, he can’t afford not to have a Facebook page, Twitter handle, or website. And yet, […]
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How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
A writer loses everything on his iPhone, his iPad and his Mac—including all of the photos from the first year and a half of his daughter’s life—after a hacker infiltrates his Amazon, Apple, Gmail and Twitter accounts: “Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about […]
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Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives
A look behind the scenes of Texas’s decision last year to cut funding for family planning and wage “an all-out war on Planned Parenthood”—and what that may mean for the future of women’s health care: “It was a given that reasonable people could differ over abortion, but most lawmakers believed that funding birth control programs […]
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How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down
A look at the rise of the hactivist group Anonymous, and why they’ve targeted certain organizations: “On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 […]
