“They’re a little eccentric” is a phrase I suspect most of us have heard used to describe a certain kind of memorable person. For me, it evokes my childhood dentist — an elderly man who favored colorful bow ties and humming loudly as he worked, and who once wagged his finger in my face and […]
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Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Froggie regrets. A precious ticket to a Chicago Bulls game. A conversation about AI and nature. A profile of the world’s most famous unknown writer. And to finish, a look back to last Friday and a St. Patrick’s Day tradition. 1. Frog Anne Fadiman | Harper’s Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words “There […]
Posted inFeature
Magical Mystery Toads
The long, tangled, and mostly wrong history of the psychedelic toad.
Posted inQuotes
Reading Doesn’t Have to Mean Keeping Your Books Forever
“The paradox of the library in our time is that it aspires to be vast but is also selective and bounded – a tiny droplet of material in a seemingly limitless sea of content.”
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Rebecca Solnit
The author of The Beginning Comes After the End talks about jackrabbits, her own “informational hypervigilance,” and the one word she won’t stop using.
Posted inReading List
Science Cheats: A Reading List on Unscrupulous Scientists
Six stories on the shady side of scholarship.
Posted inEditor's Pick
John Updike, His Stories, and Me
“But now I’ve been a writer for 30 years, I can understand the impulses that I and he and probably every other writer have: to go after a subject we’re compelled by.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Highlighting stories from Alex Morris, Gordy Megroz, Patricia Marx, Leigh Claire La Berge, and Anne Casselman.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Passion Plan
“Despite any collateral damage, Nintendo and their peers will keep squeezing maximum profit from the biggest, most proselytized audiences they can assemble for however long they can. In practice, this is what ‘convergence culture’ looks like. Playing games that cite other games that can be frictionlessly purchased on devices you can take everywhere, and then […]
Posted inUncategorized
Terror in the Woods and the Week’s Top 5
“I thought about the road leaving town, turning from pavement to dirt, mile after mile winding deeper into the woods. If I really thought about danger, that the road might bring me somewhere I couldn’t get out of, would I still go? Do I think anything can prevent this from happening? Why do I believe […]
