Hurwitz offers serious advice on creativity and writing, as well as a brief history of how he came to cast actors like Jason Bateman and Michael Cera: “And Michael Cera, I had seen him in a pilot and I reached out through the casting director, like, ‘there was this kid in this pilot, can you […]
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Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Interview with a Torturer
Documentary filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh spent hundreds of hours interviewing Duch, the commandant of the Cambodia “killing fields” and one of the most notorious torturers of the 20th century. This is his haunting memoir of those interviews.
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘The saddest fact I’ve learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.’
Jessica Hopper interviews former Chicago Sun-Times music journalist Jim DeRogatis, who first broke the story of dozens of alleged rapes committed by R. Kelly, on why more people have not paid attention to what really happened: I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment – something I […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Boy Next Door
The writer on growing up with news reports of a serial rapist and killer who eluded capture for years before finally getting arrested, and how it impacted her own experience with sexual assault: According to media reports, after Bernardo’s arrest a police officer assigned to prepare the official transcript of the footage of French’s and […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Interview with a Torturer
Documentary filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh spent hundreds of hours interviewing Duch, the commandant of the Cambodia “killing fields” and one of the most notorious torturers of the 20th century. This is his haunting memoir of those interviews.
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About
A list of stories that resonated with us.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.
“I never figured out why they did that to me.”
Posted inUncategorized
Playlist: 5 Podcasts on the Business of Film and TV
Gabrielle Gantz (@contextual_life) is the blogger behind The Contextual Life. She’s a frequent longreader and also a big podcast fan, so we asked her for some recommendations. For a while now we’ve been hearing about the rise of television, how shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones have surpassed the film industry when […]
Posted inUncategorized
Behind the Longreads: Dan Zak on the Nun and the Nukes
We asked Washington Post reporter Dan Zak how he stumbled upon “The Prophets of Oak Ridge.” Here’s his account: “This story happened because a generous colleague, Dana Priest, pitched it downstairs to my area of the newsroom. She had finished a series on the country’s aging nuclear arsenal and a shorter news story on security lapses […]
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.
