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Memories and bad math from Menaker’s life in the publishing business, excerpted from his memoir My Mistake: “We make about $3 for each hardcover sale, $1 for each paperback.” “So if we sell 10,000 hardcovers, that’s $30,000.” “Right.” “And say 10,000 paperbacks. That’s $40,000.” “Right—so the P-and-L probably won’t work. So we have to adjust […]

A history of the Texas textbook wars, and questions of whether those seeking to influence changes to textbooks can hold onto their power: But highly placed stakeholders — ranging from those in publishing to sitting board members — believe the culture warriors are losing the ability to run roughshod over state education. After years of […]

The first chapter from Jason Fagone‘s new book, Ingenious, about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Thanks to Fagone and Crown Publishing for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book here.

Condé Nast executives, editors, designers and writers look back on the 1983 relaunch of Vanity Fair, which originally stopped publishing in 1936 and had been folded into Vogue: As word leaked out that the company was pumping more than $10 million into the magazine, the sniping began. An enterprising Chicago Tribune reporter tracked down Clare […]

The renowned literary agent on his hatred of Amazon, commercial fiction, and the future of book publishing: “I didn’t think that [in 2010] the publishing community had properly assessed—particularly in regard to its obligations to writers—what an equitable arrangement would look like. “And I felt that publishers had made a huge mistake, because they were […]

David Byrne on whether New York City can hold onto its creative class: “This city doesn’t make things anymore. Creativity, of all kinds, is the resource we have to draw on as a city and a country in order to survive. In the recent past, before the 2008 crash, the best and the brightest were […]

In 1968, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine wondered if eating food in American Chinese food restaurants caused feelings of numbness and fatigue. Decades of research has shown little consensus on whether consumption of MSG is bad for us. How the MSG myth was born and propagated: “‘The Chinese food causes thirst,’ […]