The best stories of the week, as chosen by the editors of Longreads.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Russian Information War
“The point is to spoil [the internet], to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it.” –Adrian Chen, in The New York Times Magazine, on Russia’s massive troll army—and their plot against him. Read the story
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Gentrification Affects Musicians
In Radio Silence, Ian S. Port writes about the way musicians continue to get squeezed out of cities like San Francisco, Paris and New York.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’
Twenty-five years ago, Meier turned human history into a video game, and sold 33 million copies along the way. With the launch of Civilization VI, Kanishk Tharoor takes a closer look at its impact.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution
Few are excited about the Apple Watch—its burdens are too easily imagined. And yet we treat it as an inevitability. How did this happen?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Shut-Ins and the Sharing Economy
With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Rebooting the Automobile
Auto and tech companies are racing to bring safer and more useful smartphone-style interfaces to cars. Will CarPlay and Android Auto change the way we drive?
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
Do Modern Readers Only Want to Read Easy Books?
Dear Thief is, without a doubt, stronger and more raw, the book her fans knew she could write. But just when the world should have behaved as if it had been waiting for that very novel to arrive, Harvey’s career seemed to lose momentum. Her editor Dan Franklin explains, a little despairingly, that “the really […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Catholic Churches Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls
After centuries of war, Catholicism and science reconciled over meridian lines.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How the Modern Modeling Agency Came to Be
This was a precursor for what would become the protocol by which models were paid for the rest of the century, but as Natálie [Nickerson] put it to Eileen [Ford] in their late-night Barbizon conversations, the system was back to front. According to Eileen, Natálie told her, “Models were treated as if they worked for […]
