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Exploring the social etiquette of Couchsurfing.org—and how its rapid growth is challenging the community’s expectations of safety and mutual respect: Orange Acres takes all kinds, provided you follow a few simple rules: • No alcoholics, crackheads, or members of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, or PETA • ‘[O]n the subject of hippies and rainbow people,’ please […]

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A former employee’s story of working inside the Sotheby’s auction house: Hired as a researcher, I was assigned the task of going through the catalogues raisonnés of the Contemporary Art department’s top-grossing artists—Warhol, Koons, Prince, Richter, Rothko—and determining the whereabouts of every piece that had ever come onto the global market. The Excel spreadsheets I […]

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A history of sprawl and escape routes in a Central California town, from the perspective of one family searching for its own escape: As I started high school my mom became convinced my dad had ruined her life. They’d married quickly, and for superficial reasons. Two immigrants from the same country, raised in the manacles […]

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A father recounts his family’s quest to diagnose a rare disease in their son: We discovered that my son inherited two different (thus-far-unique) mutations in the same gene—the NGLY1 gene—which encodes the enzyme N-glycanase 1. Consequently, he cannot make this enzyme. My son is the only human being known to lack this enzyme. Below, I’m […]

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Longreads Guest Pick: BKLYNR's Favorite Brooklyn Stories

Thomas Rhiel and Raphael Pope-Sussman are the founding editors of BKLYNR, a new online publication that features in-depth journalism—including more than a few #longreads—about Brooklyn. Thomas’s pick: “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” by Pete Hamill in New York magazine It’s 2013—three long years since New York magazine asked “What was the hipster?”—and yet there are still […]

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Reading List: Believe in Your Selfie

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I’m tired of middle-aged white dudes critiquing my generation as selfish and narcissistic. Often, the selfie is held up triumphantly as the very symbol of our self-degradation. Here, four other, more intelligent perspectives on selfie culture: 1. “A […]

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