“What happened?” “A nervous breakdown. I almost died.” “And you’re still drinking?” “Occasionally, when I think of things.” He smiled, “The wrong things, I suppose. However, I’ve talked enough about myself. What would you like for breakfast?” “What a sad business, being funny,” she said thoughtfully. The table was laid and now he was ready […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Ground Control
What will it look like when drones (like those envisioned by Amazon’s Prime Air) come to U.S. airspace? In this property-rights-obsessed nation, it turns out you actually don’t have a clear right to shoot down a drone hovering low over your backyard unless it’s putting you in imminent physical danger. “You have to acknowledge in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick
Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Andrew Wylie Rules
The renowned literary agent on his hatred of Amazon, commercial fiction, and the future of book publishing: “I didn’t think that [in 2010] the publishing community had properly assessed—particularly in regard to its obligations to writers—what an equitable arrangement would look like. “And I felt that publishers had made a huge mistake, because they were […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Budd & Leni
The story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Fish for Our Time: The Mystery of the Coelacanth
Inside the quest to understand whether the coelacanth is an early ancestor to tetrapods: The Coelacanthus fossils caused a stir in the scientific world, particularly after the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. In the coelacanth’s lobed fins, palaeontologists thought they saw clues to the identity of the “missing link”, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
One Thing We'll Miss About Blockbuster
“The death of Blockbuster is the death of the employee favorite shelf. With Netflix and Hulu and Amazon having rightfully eclipsed video rental stores, the recommendation is now largely accomplished by algorithm. If you didn’t agree with my taste in movies, there was definitely another employee you would agree with. There was someone for every […]
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The Secrets of Jeff Bezos
In an excerpt from his new book The Everything Store, Brad Stone explores how Jeff Bezos turned Amazon into an online retailing giant—and tracks down Bezos’s biological father: “I found Ted Jorgensen, Jeff Bezos’s biological father, behind the counter of his bike shop in late 2012. I’d considered a number of ways he might react […]
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Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. For cosplayers, dressing up isn’t just once a year on Halloween. It’s part of a complex identity and community lifestyle. 1. “Cosplayers are Passionate, Talented Folks. But There’s a Darker Side to this Community, […]
Posted inUncategorized
Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. For cosplayers, dressing up isn’t just once a year on Halloween. It’s part of a complex identity and community lifestyle. 1. “Cosplayers are Passionate, Talented Folks. But There’s a Darker Side to this Community, […]
