Nonetheless, whenever I see masked and helmeted police in photographs and movies or on the street going after protesters, I wonder, as I did during a battle royal between peasants and cops in the summer’s class-war sleeper Snowpiercer: “Who are these hidden people?” It crosses my mind anytime I see a helmet swing a nightstick […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Mysteries and Truths of Illness: A Reading List
In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘I Knew They Loved Spending Time With Us…But I Also Knew We Were Good Cover.’
When Weathermen did get around to bombing things, the preparation and execution remained fraught with risk. Long-haired young people lingering outside courthouses and police stations late at night tended to draw attention in the early 1970s. It occurred to Dohrn, and to others in the leadership, that disguises alone wouldn’t ensure their safety. Thus the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Cinderella Story’?
To try to figure out what exactly that story is and why we still have it, we have to separate out the folk tale that is Cinderella, though, from the turn of phrase that is “Cinderella story.” Americans will call almost anything a Cinderella story that involves a good thing happening to someone nice. We slap that title on movies and books, but also on basketball games won by tiny schools full of scrawny nerds, small businesses that thrive and even political ascendancies that upend established powers.
Posted inNonfiction
The Most Haunted Road in America
Ghost boy, cannibals, disappearing trucks: A journey into the darkness of New Jersey to uncover the mysteries of Clinton Road.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
He Looked Like a Detective in the Movies
The door opened. Two men in suits walked in. The man in front was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, thin-waisted, thick-haired fellow with deep-set, dark eyes and an icy glare. The precinct detective knew this man. He’d seen him around the precinct. It was hard to miss him. He looked, colleagues often said, how a detective in […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How McLovin Was Cast From a Camera Phone Headshot
[Allison] Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page. […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Nine Lives of Cat Videos
Are cat videos mindless distraction or a radical form of pure entertainment? A visit to the Internet Cat Video Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Most Haunted Road in America
Ghost boy, cannibals, disappearing trucks: A journey into the darkness of New Jersey to uncover the mysteries of Clinton Road.
Posted inQuotes, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine, Pacific Standard, a co-investigation by NPR and ProPublica, and The New Yorker.
