OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling. But that doesn’t mean, as it turns […]
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“In the days before this Halloween, it was especially hard for me to avoid interpreting its elements too bluntly. If you have cancer, if you’ve had it for a while, at some point you start really seeing all those skulls and skeletons and Styrofoam headstones, all those children in hooded capes, bearing scythes on their […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Tale of Two Drugs
A cancer drug offers no obvious advantages over an alternative drug, but is also twice as expensive. Why? The writer looks at how drug companies determine prices: “Because of medical insurance, co-pay reductions, and expanded access programs for the uninsured, relatively few Americans pay more than a few thousand dollars per year for even the […]
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The Evangelist
Jim Gilliam was a precocious young conservative Christian who grew up in Silicon Valley and became a talented programmer. After fighting cancer, he lost his faith in God and found a passion for progressive causes. NationBuilder, a piece of software he built to—in his own words—help “democratize democracy,” has had some of his progressive friends […]
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The Man Who Buried His Treasure in a Poem
An art dealer diagnosed with kidney cancer formulates a plan to bury some of his treasure and leave clues to its whereabouts in a self-published book: “Dal Neitzel is just one of hundreds of people who have contacted Fenn to let him know they’ve been searching for his haul. Before he set out, after poring […]
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The Social Life of Genes
How our environment, our sense of support, and our feelings of loneliness can activate or turn off specific genes in our bodies that affect things like how we fight or heal wounds. An examination of the “social science of genetics”: “Scientists have known for decades that genes can vary their level of activity, as if […]
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Reading List: Amazing People for Desperate Times
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I have a group of comedian friends; we go bowling every Wednesday and contribute to a magazine called The Annual. In the wake of recent personal misfortune, they’ve been a refuge for me. After […]
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 […]
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Reading List: Amazing People for Desperate Times
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I have a group of comedian friends; we go bowling every Wednesday and contribute to a magazine called The Annual. In the wake of recent personal misfortune, they’ve been a refuge for me. After […]
Posted inNonfiction
My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art
Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words) Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint […]
