The Awl: A Q&A with a Vacuum Cleaner Salesman They’re like, “You sold to an old woman.” And, I mean, she was 90. She was. But I definitely try and make sure that old people want it. “You want this right?” I say that. But the neighbors were like, “I would never sell to somebody […]
Search results
Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America
Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America “As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,” he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path we’ve seen in more than two hours. It’s easy, when a car edges too close or cuts him off, […]
Hate Man
Hate Man From the time he was young boy, Mark Hawthorne understood the power of words. His father was a reporter for the Associated Press and his mother was a school teacher. So when Hawthorne landed his dream job and became a reporter for The New York Times, everything seemed to fall into place. Except […]
Rolling Stone's Doree Shafrir: My Top Longreads of 2011
Doree Shafrir is an editor at Rolling Stone, where she hangs out with the Misfits on a regular basis. She can also be found at doree.tumblr.com. *** When I went back into my Kindle and my Twitter and Tumblr and email and all the other places where I noted or saved especially noteworthy stories from […]
Sady Doyle: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown. *** There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal is political.” This phrase was one of the most transformative ideas to emerge from second-wave feminism, or from the 20th century. It’s the underpinning assumption of all my own work. […]
wikiweeks: Two Thousand Eleven Was A Year: #Longreads
wikiweeks: Two Thousand Eleven Was A Year: #Longreads wikiweeks: Here’s my favorite longish things I read this year so far as I can remember. A lot of these are unoriginal and you’ve probably already seen them in someone else’s best longreads of the year list but fuck it. It’s because it’s good reading. The confessions […]
A writer tries to figure out if he’s any smarter than he was at age 17: Many times, I had to skip a question because I couldn’t figure out the answer, and then I got that paranoia that’s unique to someone taking a standardized test. I became fearful that I had failed to skip over […]
[Fiction] A teenager’s grief and its aftermath: Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her. You’d fuck […]
A new book explains how “social jet lag” is interfering with our internal clocks: Modern human beings are not much like mimosas. It’s true that both have biological clocks, but only one of us has culture. And culture, delightful as it is, turns out to radically complicate—“fuck up” would not be an overstatement—our relationship to […]
Break All the Way Down
[Fiction] A baby’s arrival stirs up difficult memories: I sat with the baby in the living room, setting her on a clean blanket. When I tired of watching her, I stretched out, resting my hand on her stomach. I fell asleep with the baby staring at me, her eyes wide open. In the morning, my […]
