Nearly every exclusive field runs on assistants. The actor James Franco, like Buddha before him, had an assistant keep track of his meals and school assignments. The critic and writer Daphne Merkin has employed a steady stream of Ivy-educated elves. They’re tasked with everything from editing to returning dead houseplants. Bestselling novelist John Irving (The […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Is W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ the Most Pillaged Piece of Literature in the English Language?
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
The ‘SNL’ Skit on Racial Profiling That Never Made It to Television
Robert Smigel, writer: It wasn’t until my last season that the network refused to air a “TV Funhouse.” It was a live-action one that was meant to be about racism and profiling, an airline-safety video with multilingual narration, and whenever you heard a different language, they would cut to people of that nationality. First, typical […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Stories
Stories that deserved more attention in 2015.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
We Keep Testing, and Nothing Changes
It is worth noting that American students have never received high scores on international tests. On the first such test, a test of mathematics in 1964, senior year students in the US scored last of twelve nations, and eighth-grade students scored next to last. But in the following fifty years, the US outperformed the other […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, Gawker, New York Magazine, D Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Maisonneuve.
Posted inEditor's Pick
In Conversation: Chris Rock
Things discussed with the comedian: if the Obama presidency is a disappointment; the difficulty of workshopping stand-up material in the age of social media; Ferguson and the lack of black leaders.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. The Horror Before the Beheadings Rukmini Callimachi | The New York Times | October 25, 2014 | 20 minutes (5,247 words) What […]
