Brian Wolly is an associate web editor at Smithsonian Magazine. ••• 1. Tom Bissell’s Breakdown of L.A. Noire on Grantland When ESPN and Bill Simmons’ Grantland debuted in early June, the knives were out and its initial reaction was mixed at best. Like many, I approached the new project with simultaneous skepticism and optimism, but it […]
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The origins and the politics of the New York-based Freelancers Union—now 150,000 members strong: The shift toward short-term contracts was underway long before the 2008 financial crash. Charles Heckscher, director of the Center for Workplace Transformation at Rutgers University, sits on the board of the Freelancers Union, and likes to describe this shift in terms […]
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Longreads Best of 2011 e-book
Announcing: Our first-ever e-book! Longreads: Best of 2011 includes seven of our favorite stories from the past year. The e-book is a unique partnership with the writers and publishers—we want to help celebrate outstanding storytelling, and this is just another way for us to do it. Additionally, money from the ebook sales will be shared with the […]
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Former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum jumps from the traditional publishing world to “the dark side,” heading up Amazon Publishing. Meanwhile, the Big Six watch closely: Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Jeff Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether […]
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Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next: John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed […]
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A writer loses everything on his iPhone, his iPad and his Mac—including all of the photos from the first year and a half of his daughter’s life—after a hacker infiltrates his Amazon, Apple, Gmail and Twitter accounts: Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about […]
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The Top 10 Longreads of 2012
About This List Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Longreads community this year, and to all of our guests who shared their favorite stories of 2012. The below list represents our editors’ favorite stories of the year, for both nonfiction and fiction. Longreads is edited by Mark Armstrong and Mike Dang, with Kjell Reigstad, […]
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On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business
“He viewed money as energy, the energy that makes concrete things happen out of worthy ideas.”
