Every Portis fan has a different favorite passage from his novels, but they agree on one thing: no one wrote like Portis.
Search results
Posted inEditor's Pick
It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil
“I never knew I lived in an oil town until I went looking for the concealed infrastructure of fossil fuel production.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain
“If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race.”
Posted inUncategorized
The Enduring Joy of Maps (and the Week’s Top 5)
“Empty spaces on maps were so terrifying to ancient mapmakers that they filled them with decorations, fictional landscapes, and monsters. We moderns miss the beautiful monsters, but what if they never actually disappeared? What if the monsters were always part of the map, part of mapping itself?” After many months of hearing about how great […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Profile of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“‘Operation Joe’ finds our top expert on atomic energy confidently carrying forward his research in the field of pure basic science, where the atomic bomb is only a ‘gadget.'”
Posted inReading List
Working on the Edge: A Reading List About Extreme Jobs
A livelihood is not a life—yet many risk the latter in order to create the former.
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan, Dan McQuade, Crystal Wilkinson, Simon Akam, and Nicholson Baker.
Posted inNewsletter
40 Days in a Jungle and Our Top 5
“The skies were blue that day, and there was a light wind. For around half an hour all was well. But as the Cessna approached Caquetá, a Colombian department that contains one of the densest, wettest, most remote corners of the Amazon, something went wrong.” Pat yourselves on the back: you’ve made it through January. […]
Posted inUncategorized
Our Sister’s Netflix Hit and the Week’s Top 5
“But all was not well in the house on the corner of Lincoln Road and 52nd Street. It belonged to Dennis and Brenda Bowman, a married couple with two children. For the Bowmans, March 11 marked the last time they saw their 14-year-old daughter, Aundria, alive.” We’ve got some big news this week from our […]
Posted inStory
Disneyland of the Dead
London’s Highgate Cemetery shows us just how hard it is to keep the dead buried.
