Sabotage, bureaucracy, and emoticons: Inside the late ’90s chat wars between Microsoft and AOL, from the perspective of a former Microsoft programmer: The messenger war was a rush. Coming in each morning to see whether the client still worked with AOL was thrilling. I’d look through reams of protocol messages to figure out what had […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Before Google: Larry Page’s Early Ideas for Changing the World
Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
From Facebook Reject to Purchased by Facebook for $19 Billion
Over the next nine years the pair also watched Yahoo go through multiple ups and downs. Acton invested in the dotcom boom, and lost millions in the 2000 bust. For all of his distaste for advertising now he was also deep in it back then, getting pulled in to help launch Yahoo’s important and much-delayed […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Budd & Leni
The story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Making the Magazine: A Reading List
27 must-read stories on the making of the world’s greatest magazines.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Friendship Is Complicated
Art, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony.
Posted inNonfiction
Interview: Vela Magazine Founder Sarah Menkedick on Women Writers and Sustainable Publishing
An Q&A with Sarah Menkedick.
About Us
Longreads, founded in 2009 by Mark Armstrong, is dedicated to finding and sharing the best longform nonfiction storytelling on the web. We publish personal and reported essays, criticism, reading lists, and occasional book excerpts, interviews, and more in-depth features. Longreads has been nominated for four National Magazine Awards (and won a 2020 ASME for Best Digital […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why Hosting the Olympics Makes No Economic Sense
Before the 1990s hosting was usually a low-key affair. Los Angeles was the only bidder for the 1984 Olympics. It funded its games almost entirely with private money, as largely did Atlanta in 1996. Most football World Cups were played in scarcely renovated older stadiums. But globalisation and new television channels showing sport changed that. […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Book That Inspired Your Favorite Twitter Bots
After graduating from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Kazemi entered the world of video game development, building programs that could systematically test new games for bugs. Kazemi also designed his own games—like many game designers, he considered games an art form as much as a technical accomplishment—until one day in 2012, he decided that the medium […]
