An essay on the author’s “Tinder decade” — ten years spent swiping, dating, ghosting, getting ghosted, and considering how the app shapes lives: I learned to be buoyant in the face of disappointment. So many of these dates were just people plucked out of a random void and returned to that void after. The memory […]
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Posted inStory
Longreads Best of 2020: Music Writing
Music has been a salve this year, helping us cope with the myriad challenges that 2020 brought. Here are some favorite pieces of music writing we picked in 2020.
Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Ed Park, Rachel Kushner, Will Tavlin, Michaela Cavanagh, and S.C. Gwynne.
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Neal Allen and Anne Lamott
The authors of the new book Good Writing share their insights on reading, writing, and their day-to-day life.
Posted inNewsletter
Loneliness, Power, and the Top 5 of the Week
“I want to be left alone, but I don’t want to be lonely.” Hanif Abdurraqib writes this about a tension that dominated the career of singer Phyllis Hyman—but it also feels like a familiar plea in this dim, early-January week, when many of us leave the chaos of extended family and drift back into our own homes, our own jobs, and perhaps our own small pockets of solitude.
Posted inNonfiction
Anatomy of Absolute Power
The people of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember a longtime sheriff as a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask.
Posted inFeature
The Art of the Steal
The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.
Posted inArts & Culture, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Shelved: Dr. Dre’s Detox
Killer beats, huge hype, and failure to follow through.
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Reads from Zefyr Lisowski, David Gessner, Susie Cagle, Brendan I. Koerner, and Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner.
Posted inUncategorized
The Enduring Joy of Maps (and the Week’s Top 5)
“Empty spaces on maps were so terrifying to ancient mapmakers that they filled them with decorations, fictional landscapes, and monsters. We moderns miss the beautiful monsters, but what if they never actually disappeared? What if the monsters were always part of the map, part of mapping itself?” After many months of hearing about how great […]
