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 […]
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The Courage of Jill Costello
The Courage of Jill Costello “When she asked her doctors about rejoining the team, they looked at her as if she were crazy. Crew? She’d need all her strength just to make it through each day. Jill didn’t care. She told her mom she saw cancer as ‘just another thing on my plate.’ Besides, she’d […]
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Grandpa Joe & Secretariat: A Christmas Story
Grandpa Joe & Secretariat: A Christmas Story In mid-October, he’d seen his beloved Charlie Rose interview Diane Lane and John Malkovich. Ever since that interview, he’d been carrying with him the notion that he would see this movie at his earliest opportunity. Never mind his preceding fondness for the racehorse and its moment in history—there […]
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AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A Longreads List
Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland. *** Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals 1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman. 903 words / 3.5 minutes No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of […]
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The Case Against Lance Armstrong
The Case Against Lance Armstrong Mike Anderson says he felt a dull sadness as he stared at the little white cardboard box in Armstrong’s bathroom cabinet. His eyes focused on the word ANDRO written on the label. Anderson tried to rationalize it. Maybe it was leftover cancer medication, but this was 2004, long after Armstrong’s […]
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The Radical
The Radical By day, Joseph Harris studied potential treatments for gastrointestinal cancer — work that invariably required the use of animal models. By night, he crusaded against such animal research, sabotaging companies with links to it. Within a month, Harris would be caught vandalizing another company. Ultimately, he would become the first person in the […]
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Clayton Christensen: The Survivor
Clayton Christensen: The Survivor Clayton I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn’t see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty. Matthew One time we visited my […]
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[Fiction] “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I mean, my sisters get pregnant looking at a cologne ad. They get pregnant in pollen season.” For six months they had been trying to conceive, and still her period was as regular as the tide. She decided to see a doctor. He told her it would […]
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The late Marjorie Williams on her cancer battle: We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like […]
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Time's Radhika Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Radhika Jones is executive editor of Time. I got to work on a number of great longreads at Time this year, among them Lev Grossman on fan fiction, Kate Pickert on the perils of cancer screening, and Kurt Andersen on the Year of the Protester. But these are a few of the pieces from other […]
