The site’s internal numbers show that page views for October were up just 6 percent, to 83.6 million, and unique visitors were down 21 percent — growing pains as the site weans itself from longtime traffic teat MSN.com and develops its own, more clicky readers. Over the same time period, Gawker has more than doubled […]
Search results
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Write Stuff
Holden Caulfield had it right. The test of a great book, he said in “The Catcher in the Rye,” was whether, once you finished it, you wished the author were a great friend you could call up at home. I remembered Caulfield’s insight when we convened a roundtable of writers to come to Newsweek. The […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Betraying Salinger
[Not single-page] I scored the publishing coup of the decade: his final book. And then I blew it.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Mao, King Kong, and the Future of the Book
From Mao to Microsoft, a conversation on the unrecorded history of online publishing.
Posted inUncategorized
The Gleeful Contrarian
The Gleeful Contrarian “The site is intended to expand the reader’s sphere of interest. It’s a grave mistake in publishing, whether you’re talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago Bill Gates was boasting that we’ll soon have sensors which will […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a […]
Posted inFeature, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact
David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press.
Posted inUncategorized
Paul Ford: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Paul Ford was an editor at Harper’s Magazine; now he’s wandering around, looking at stuff and writing computer programs. *** Tony Judt, “Night,” New York Review of Books (January 14) This was the year of the dying critic. Most writers would do themselves, and their readers, a service by dying without all the self-elegies (“selfegies”?). […]
Posted inUncategorized
Jay Caspian Kang: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Jay Caspian Kang is a fiction writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High, an essay on gambling addiction that appeared in the Morning News and has been named on several “Best of 2010” lists. *** In no particular order. […]
