“A really good idea might come to you at night and seem really wrong in the morning. So you’re always testing things.”
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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. Ghosts of Greenwood Nikole Hannah-Jones | ProPublica | July 8, 2014 | 27 minutes (6,891 words) words) “Freedom Summer baptized Mississippi as […]
#Nightshift: Minneapolis
Excerpts from an Instagram essay, by Jeff Sharlet. See part one. * * *
Q. Sakamaki and the Art of the Socio-Photo-Documentary
“Here, I see many barriers, many conflicts—between class, between race, between cultures, between ideologies, between jobs.”
Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Prep,’ 10 Years Later
Sittenfeld’s smart debut novel about social dynamics at an exclusive boarding school remains relevant—and not just as a “coming of age novel”—a decade after it was first published.
The Pun-derful World of Competitive Punning
In L.A. Weekly, Zachary Pincus-Roth profiles 38-year-old Ben Ziek, a world pun champion titleholder.
Certifiable
How a squad of self-appointed experts quietly took over the billion-dollar autograph industry: Today, few autographs are bought or sold without the blessing of either Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) or its competitor, James Spence Authentication (JSA). The two companies have come to dominate the market, verifying hundreds of thousands of signatures each year. Business is […]
Searching for John McPhee’s Secret Writing Tool
A book where you can enter “sport” and end up with “a diversion of the field” — this is in fact the opposite of what I’d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that’s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder John McPhee wrote […]
Theorizing the Drone
What does the rise of the drone mean for justice, for the ethics of heroism, for psychology? Most important of all, who is dying and why?

