In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone: They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking […]
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Cosmopolitan magazine is often spurned as “mindless,” but it has also grown into 64 editions worldwide, and a readership of 100 million teens and young women in more than 100 nations—including those “where any discussion of sex is taboo”: Akisheva, the editor in Kazakhstan, told me that until recently, she received a handwritten note from […]
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[Fiction] A philandering husband’s next phase in life: Horace and Loneese Perkins—one child, one grandchild—lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Sunset House, a building for senior citizens at 1202 Thirteenth Street NW. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they made […]
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A Longreads Member Exclusive: When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy
Our second Longreads members exclusive! Our latest exclusive comes from Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone whose work has been featured on Longreads quite a bit. She wrote our latest Longreads Member pick, “When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy,” in 2002 for Philadelphia Magazine. It’s about a woman who enters marriage counseling—but ends […]
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Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’”: What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not […]
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Longreads Best of 2012: Elliott Holt's Favorite New Yorker Fiction
Elliott Holt‘s first novel, You Are One of Them, will be published by The Penguin Press in June 2013 One of my two favorite short stories published in 2012 is “Member/Guest” by David Gilbert, which appeared in The New Yorker the week of November 12, but since that story is not available online without a subscription, […]
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Malrotation
“No one makes it through life unscathed, but you usually get a grace period at the start. My son would not be so lucky.”
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‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience
Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here. “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published […]
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‘You’re in Trouble. Am I Right?’: My Unsentimental Education
Debra Monroe | 2012 | 20 minutes (5,101 words) Debra Monroe is the author of six books, including the memoir “My Unsentimental Education” which will appear in October 2015. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, Doubletake, The Morning News and The Southern Review, and she is frequently shortlisted for The […]
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Ingenious
How to spend your entire income building a car to travel 100 miles on a gallon of gas.
