“When you get a phone call from your editor telling you he wants an in-depth profile of an ugly guy, you panic a little.”
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Posted inUncategorized
“In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is ‘price inelastic’: increasing the price doesn’t reduce how much the drugs are used. Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Afghanistan Undone
CBC reporter Mellissa Fung was kidnapped, stabbed, and thrown down a hole outside Kabul where she spent 28 days in captivity. Five years later, she returned to Afghanistan: “Back at home after my ordeal, I refused to let my nightmares rise out of the darkness. I took on the cause of wounded soldiers as a […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Michael Hastings’ Dangerous Mind
On the life and death of a haunted journalist. The tragic death of Michael Hastings also gave birth to a number of conspiracy theories: “Hastings never identified himself in his writing as someone suffering from PTSD. The closest he came to such an admission was in May, when he retweeted an article about using pot […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s
Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words) ‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’ When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the […]
Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
The Good Girls Revolt
In 1970, Lynn Povich and 45 other women sued Newsweek for discrimination. Here is what the workplace was like for them.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born
The story of a family’s winery that changed Napa Valley forever.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney
Jennifer Reingold | Fortune | March 2014 | 29 minutes (7,108 words) Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle) Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks) When you find a savior, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: New Questions About a Legendary Tennis Match
The Match Maker Don Van Natta Jr. | ESPN | August 2013 | 34 minutes (8,461 words) Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. My story, The Match Maker, was online at ESPN.com only a few hours on Aug. 25 when I heard from a California man […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Why Did You Shoot Me? I Was Reading a Book’
An excerpt from Radley Balko’s new book Rise of the Warrior Cop, on the militarization of U.S. police forces and the reasons SWAT teams have been able to conduct raids for seemingly minor alleged crimes: “In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost for hosting charity poker games. Players […]
