The author of more than 20 books confronts personal tragedy and some truths about himself.
Search results
Posted inNonfiction, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. The Great A.I. Awakening Gideon Lewis-Kraus | New York Times | Dec. 14, 2016 | 60 minutes (15,174 words) The story of how Google developed artificial intelligence to vastly improve its translation service, […]
Posted inBooks, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
The Real Obama: An Interview with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographer David J. Garrow
The author offers insights into the 44th President of the United States after interviewing over 1,000 people for Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
Posted inArts & Culture, History, Story
Percy Ross Wants to Give You Money!
He was was a self-made, blue-collar millionaire in Reagan’s America. But when Percy Ross decided to give away his fortune, he made things simple: all you had to do was ask for it.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
At War With the Rat Army
A refugee from Nazi Germany has trouble adjusting to life in America, so she decamps to the countryside, where she discovers that the war follows you in unexpected ways.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Defending Journalist Joseph Mitchell
In the April issue of the New York Review of Books Janet Malcolm wrote about the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell, and responded to Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell biography. The biography reveals how Mitchell invented some of his beloved material, which raises questions about larger journalistic standards, betraying readers’ trust, and what effect Mitchell’s invention and embellishment might have on […]
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Essays & Criticism, Podcasts, Reading List, Uncategorized
Leave Them Alone! A Reading List On Celebrity and Privacy
Why do we feel like we own celebrities—not just their art or their products, but their images and their personal lives?
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
Robert Caro on Understanding a President Through the Rooms He Occupied
There are facts in journalism, but there are other truths hidden in the room. In this 2016 Paris Review interview with James Santel, Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson, gives a masterclass on how to report on a subject’s behavior, his environment, his breath, and the cushiness […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Behind the ‘Literary Brat Pack’ Label
At Harper’s Bazaar, Jason Diamond offers a look back at the “literary brat pack–Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz and a group of other writers in the 1980s as famous for their coke-fueled late nights at the Odeon as they were for publishing celebrated novels before the age of thirty.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Signs of Change on the Streets of Baghdad
Indeed, for a city that only last summer feared it would be overrun by jihadis, Baghdad feels uncannily lacking in trauma. Perhaps Iraqis have learned how to live with their fears, but ISIS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Too complacently, Iraqis talk about ISIS in the past tense, as […]
