Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. The student journalist, the Afghani mother, the elderly custodian, the Chinese orphan boy: each of these pieces forces the reader to stop and consider the extraordinary stories of seemingly ordinary people. 1. “At 99, A St. Petersburg Man Finds Meaning […]
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. 1. “I Was A Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” (Laurie Penny, New Statesmen, June 2013) The difference between playing a leading role in your own life and playing a supporting role in everyone else’s. 2. “Promises […]
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. A few weeks ago, I was reading my weekly horoscope, courtesy of The Rumblr’s Madame Clairvoyant. The last three words of Leo’s outlook caught in my mind: “Don’t even worry.” “Don’t even worry,” I whispered […]
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. Salinger’s life is being made into a movie. Someone said writers work best with only one kid. Print journalism is, apparently, still the domain of white men. It’s been an unfortunate week. Here are four […]
Sarah Bruning is the associate features editor at Time Out New York and has contributed to Cosmopolitan, InStyle and CNTraveler.com, among other publications. In recent months, both before and after Sheryl Sandberg released ‘Lean In,’ the media has scrutinized the issue of gender equality in the workplace across myriad industries. This week and last, a […]
Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious. The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as […]
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. 1. “This Wedding Season, Say Yes to Strangers: What I Learned From My Craigslist Date” and “A Brief Addendum to Our Craigslist Wedding Story.” (Lindsey Grad and Nick Hassell, The Hairpin, June 2013) When a bridezilla demanded that Grad find […]
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. One reason I admire longform journalism is its ability to tell stories. Some of these stories gain national attention. Some are perfected in an MFA workshop. Some are written on the backs of receipts, after […]
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. 1. “Two Decades After Crown Heights, What’s It Like to Be Black and Orthodox Jewish?” (Wayne Lawrence & Molly Langmuir, New York magazine, December 2012) A gorgeous blend of photography and personal testimony give this […]
Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. As my service year winds down and I begin to look for jobs, I’m simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the New York mythos. Here are four pieces that explore the romance, the real estate, […]
With Mother’s Day on the horizon, I chose “mothers/relationship with moms” as the theme of my list this week: * * * 1. My Mom (Mary H. K. Choi, Aeon, April 2013) A deceptively simple title belies a gorgeous, funny, sometimes dark essay in which Choi attempts to communicate her strange affection for her mother. 2. The […]
Thomas Rhiel and Raphael Pope-Sussman are the founding editors of BKLYNR, a new online publication that features in-depth journalism—including more than a few #longreads—about Brooklyn. Thomas’s pick: “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” by Pete Hamill in New York magazine It’s 2013—three long years since New York magazine asked “What was the hipster?”—and yet there are still […]
For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” a personal story from GQ writer and National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello about a near-death experience. The piece was first published in GQ in 1995. Corsello explains: I was circling the drain in the spring of 1995—convalescent, out of […]
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, The Believer has just published a handful of classic stories for the first time on the web, and they were nice enough to share them with the Longreads community. Enjoy: Eddie Vedder Interviewed by Carrie Brownstein (June 2004) “Crimes Against the Reader” (Rick Moody, April 2005) “Transmissions from Camp Trans” (Michelle Tea, […]
Meaghan O’Connell is the editor-in-chief of meaghano.com: “I regard novel-writing with a heady combination of awe and dread, so when debut novelist Ted Thompson wrote about his book’s eight (eight!) year journey to completion last week, I opened it in a tab and walked away from my desk immediately. ‘The Evolution of a First Novel’ […]
(photo by teejayfaust, Flickr) This week’s Member Pick is “Yellow,” a story by Antonia Crane about the days following the death of her mother. The piece will be featured in Black Clock #17 this summer and is adapted from her forthcoming book Spent. We asked her to tell us how the story first came together: […]
Today’s guest pick comes from Emily M. Keeler, a writer, critic, and the editor of Little Brother Magazine. She recommends two stories, “To Err, Divine, so Improvise” by Kaitlin Fontana in Hazlitt and “Afterlife” by Chris Wallace in The Paris Review: “This past week was one of several missteps; headlines and cover lines and tweets let us down even though […]
This week’s Member Pick comes from Antonia Crane, the Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Rumpus has been featured on Longreads in the past. We’re excited to feature “Yellow,” a story about her relationship with her mother, about stripping, and about loss. The piece will be published in Black Clock #17, due out this summer, and it’s adapted […]
This week’s Member Pick is “Symmetrical Universe,” an essay by physicist Alan Lightman, published in the latest issue of Orion magazine. In it, Lightman explores the wonder of nature and the principles that guide its design—helping to answer questions like why a honeycomb is a hexagon, or why human-created art embraces asymmetry. Lightman is a professor […]
Article of the Week: Making art thearticleoftheweek: If you’ve been reading this blog (and thank you!), you may have noticed there are some topics I like more than others, and probably my number one favorite is arts and culture – the making of it, the digesting of it, the effects of it. Movies, tv, music, […]
dietcoker: An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop in Toronto specializes in the strangest, most wonderful books. Katherine Arcement writes about her adolescent love of fan fiction. Monica Torres writes about majoring in English while not being white. Dating While Feminist and Christian Emily Perper’s always excellent reading list.
This week, we’re thrilled to feature Jason Zengerle, a contributing editor for New York magazine and GQ who has been featured on Longreads many times. Our Member Pick is Jason’s 1997 story on Michael Moore for Might magazine: “Is This Man the Last, Best Hope for Popular Liberalism in America? And, More Importantly, Does He Have a Sense […]
Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Awl and Los Angeles Review of Books was featured on Longreads this year. In the essay “Freedom Is Overrated,” the theologian and scholar Sancrucensis contrasts the humanism of Jonathan Franzen with that of David Foster Wallace. A transcendentally beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on self and other. […]
Reyhan Harmanci is deputy editor of Modern Farmer, a not-yet-launched publication devoted to issues of farming and food (and animals!). Picking these stories activated an obsessive part of my brain and I’m already regretting throwing the “best” around without spending a few months reading all of the Longreads of 2012. But there’s always 2013! Best […]
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