“Screenshots are also proof of memory — proof that I was there, online at a moment in time.”
essay
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted
“The culture of negation inspires a taste for nothingness and glorifies numbness.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Highlight, Quote Posts, Quotes
Quarantine Brain: How ‘the Internet Became More Internet’ in 2020
Nothing made sense in 2020 — unless you were on the internet.
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2020: Arts and Culture
Our top editors’ picks in arts and culture writing this year.
Posted inCulture, Essays & Criticism, Highlight, Writing
The Secrets of a Hidden Diary
A hidden diary, a love story, and a mystery.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Illuminating Kirinyaga: Meaning and Knowing in Mount Kenya’s Forests
“Anyone can walk in the woods, but who truly knows them?” Tristan McConnell writes about the shrinking mountain forests of Mount Kenya, and the people there with a deep understanding of the land and the trees.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Death and Life of the Greatest American City
“The city feels simultaneously attacked, abandoned, and bereft of competent leadership. It also feels very, very alive.” In an essay at GEN, Glynnis MacNicol explores New York City’s #NoFilter era.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Buying Myself Back
Emily Ratajkowski writes an essay on celebrity, objectification, and consent. “I’ve become more familiar with seeing myself through the paparazzi’s lenses than I am with looking at myself in the mirror. And I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own.”
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut
Beirut’s disintegrating sewage system and corrupt politics have put its residents in a shitty situation.
Posted inEditor's Pick
He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita
Amia Srinivasan on language and pronouns: “Language is a public system of meaning. No individual can unilaterally decide what a word means, or whether any given word, according to standard usage, truly describes them. And yet the definitions of words – as any lexicographer will tell you – depend on patterns of actual human usage, […]