Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the […]
Search results
Monica Lewinsky's Vanity Fair Essay, Now Online
Yes, we’re all connected now. We can tweet a revolution in the streets or chronicle achievements large and small. But we’re also caught in a feedback loop of defame and shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims. We may not have become a crueler society—although it sure feels as if we […]
A Brief History of AOL
A short reading list on the many lives of AOL, which will be acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion. Fifteen years ago, AOL acquired Time Warner for $165 billion.
Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing
We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business writing.
The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800
A madman versus a crook? Unexpected twists? Fake news? Welcome to the election of 1800.
The Camorra Never Sleeps
For years before they caught him, the Italian police had no idea that Paolo Di Lauro was one of Naples’s most powerful crime bosses, running a drug and counterfeit-goods empire—and responsible for a peace his turf had rarely known. Writing for Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche goes deep into heart of the Neapolitan mob’s most dangerous […]
Making the Magazine: A Reading List
Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of 27 behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag.
The Perils of Writing About Your Own Family: A Conversation with George Hodgman
“Memoir is a total minefield, as you know. It’s best if you write the book and leave the country.”
Mike Nichols: 1931-2014
Mike Nichols, the beloved director of stage and screen—from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, to Barefoot in the Park and Working Girl— died Nov. 19, 2014 at the age of 83. Here are four pieces on the life of the artist.
‘Living for a Plank and Four Wheels in a Profligate Culture’
My wife, Daphne, got to something I’d been trying to figure out for years when, after reading a particularly asinine article in the February 2003 issue [of Thrasher magazine], she said: “It’s really not OK that these people are using so little of their brains.” “Using so little.” It’s the perfect indictment of everything that’s […]
