Tag: guest pick

Below is a guest post from Pravesh Bhardwaj, a filmmaker based in Mumbai who has been posting his favorite short stories all year. 

David Grann’s “True Crime,” is a strange story of a Polish detective who becomes fixated on a disturbing, provocative, postmodern novel that may be the key to a brutal unsolved murder.

“You’re not showing any remorse, Dakotah. I’m not saying it in a bad way, but is something wrong with your head? Do you have problems with thinking? I mean, because you’re a very intelligent young man.” Steve told him to imagine what would happen “if you weren’t my kid, and I was in this room […]

Douglas Williams is currently a doctoral student in political science at the University of Alabama, where his research centers around public policy and politics as it relates to disadvantaged communities and the labor movement. You can find him on Twitter at @DougWilliams85, at a collaborative blog on Southern progressivism called The South Lawn, as well as at The […]

Nicole Greenfield is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. I must admit it was the photo of 90-year-old Roman Tritz, clear blue eyes and a blank stare to the camera’s side, that initially drew me into one of my favorite longreads of the week. But the photo didn’t prepare me for the truly […]

Chris Mahr is the managing editor of Lost Lettermen, a college sports website and athlete database. “Talk to any young sportswriter today and odds are that their introduction to both Sports Illustrated’s long-form journalism and renowned writer Gary Smith are one in the same: ‘Higher Education.’ Smith’s March 2001 masterpiece tells the tale of Perry […]

Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post. Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most […]

“The essay is remarkable from its opening memories of Levy’s own childhood to its heartbreaking ending.”

I’ve read just about every issue of The New Yorker for the past seven years, and despite all of the big, important journalism I’ve read in those pages, this minor-key piece about a small town druggist has resonated deepest with me.

Rebecca Hiscott is a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable. I’m still marveling at ‘Him and Her’ by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix’s stony-faced cameo on the cover — and […]

Andrew Pantazi writes for his hometown newspaper, The Florida Times-Union. From the gripping first paragraph in the first chapter of the first part of this longread, ‘In the dark, in the wet, whirling roar of Hurricane Sandy, on a ship tipping so badly the deck felt like a steep, slick roof …,’ Michael Kruse drew […]

Kate Cox is a freelance writer and editor living in New York. Nobody will say this, but the secret to New York City survival is a sturdy emotional filter. The flipside of said filter is that hundreds of our daily encounters fail to penetrate: the deli guy, the dry cleaner, fellow commuters—we so rarely engage […]

Drew Grossman is a writer living in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared on MensHealth.com, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, and his hometown paper, The Tallahassee Democrat. My Longreads pick this week is Diane Roberts’s ‘Game of Tribes’ for The Oxford American. The piece is an excerpt from a longer project, a book on […]

Tim is Director of Social Media at Marquette University and writes about beer and running for DRAFT Magazine. “Whenever I hear people talking about how technology is ruining our attention spans and turning our collective brains to mush, I like to tell them about #longreads. This article is a perfect example. I saw a link […]

Sari is a writer and editor living in Rosendale, N.Y. She writes the Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me column on The Rumpus. An anthology she edited for Seal Press, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, will be released Oct. 8. “My favorite longread this week is ‘Not Weird About […]

Girl reporter for Politics in Minnesota. Mother of Dragons. It was a great week for longreads in America (see: Reuters’ ‘The Child Exchange’ investigation and Rolling Stone’s interactive story on hackers who will probably save the world), but one piece was passed around on my social media feeds more than any other: ‘Finding Molly: Drugs, […]

Christine Kim is a civil rights advocate studying at Duke University School of Law. My favorite longread of the week is ‘What’s Killing Poor White Women,’ by Monica Potts, in The American Prospect. Health care is on the national stage. From Obamacare to health care costs to new state-run health exchanges, it seems that each […]

Jane R. LeBlanc is a freelance journalist who writes for the Dallas Observer where she covers the local comedy scene and anything strange and interesting. She has written for Denton Live, Mayborn magazine, Spirit magazine and the Denton Record-Chronicle. She has a humor blog, Everyone Hates You, where she pontificates about everyday life. You can find her online. Inspired […]

Nolan is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.  Jada Yuan’s profile of Mindy Kaling for New York magazine is almost a year old, but it has been a major influence on the way I write. It moves effortlessly from funny to sad, and it captures Kaling so well that it’s hard not read her quotes […]

Win Bassett is a writer, lawyer, and seminarian at Yale. My treasured longread of the week is Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “The Poorest Rich Kids in the World” in Rolling Stone. I lived down the road from Duke University for ten years, but one doesn’t need any familiarity with the Blue Devils to become enthralled with […]

Leigh Cowart is the Sex and Science Editor at NSFWCORP. She exists solely on rage and strange cheeses. Telling you how good David Quammen’s “The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion” is feels like a spoiler. No, I’d much rather slide my copy of National Geographic across the table and let you discover, for […]

Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the St. Louis Riverfront Times. She is a proud alumnus of the Minneapolis City Pages. More than you ever wanted to know about feral hogs and how to kill them. When federal agents are picking them off from helicopters, there’s obviously more at stake than just nuisance. Between […]

Valerie Vande Panne is an independent journalist covering life and human interests. This week, she chose a series of articles to help give readers a better understanding of Detroit. “As a journalist, I am often asked, ‘How do you cut through the noise?’ In other words, how do I sift through the thousands upon thousands of […]

Matthew is a business reporter at BuzzFeed. My longread of the week is ‘At Sears, Eddie Lampert’s Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles,’ by Mina Kimes in Bloomberg Businessweek. This is not a profile of Eddie Lampert, the hedge fund manager who masterminded Kmart’s acquisition of Sears and is now running the struggling retailer. […]

Shannon Proudfoot is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine. Previously, she was a national writer with Postmedia News. “It might not constitute a genre, exactly, but my favorite sort of journalism dives into obscure subcultures with their own rules, etiquette, heroes and hacks. This story is one of my all-time favorites of that type. The […]

Rustin Dodd is a sports reporter at The Kansas City Star. For the most part, he spends his time covering Kansas basketball and football, but he has also covered the Kansas City Royals for the last five years. He’s covered two Final Fours, two Major-League All-Star Games and The Masters. He resides in Lawrence, Kan., […]

Kristen Majewski is the social media editor of Prevention.com. My pick for this week is ‘How Meditation Works,’ by Liz Kulze, in The Atlantic. Meditation is often dismissed as New Age and hokey, but Kulze does a wonderful job of making mindful meditation an accessible notion and perhaps even a necessary one. She is absolutely […]

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 […]

Todd Olmstead is Mashable’s Associate Community Manager and an occasional music writer. He lives in Brooklyn. My favorite longread this week is ‘Random Access Denied,’ by Sasha-Frere Jones in the New Yorker. It takes you through the mind of the reviewer, writing about a big-deal album, and peels back the curtain a bit. Who wouldn’t […]

Margaret Ely is a web producer and reporter for The Washington Post. Maybe I was hungry and saw the word “sushi” in the headline, but I was hooked the moment I started reading Adam Johnson’s bizarre, outlandish story about a Japanese chef who served North Korea’s supreme, “dear leader” Kim Jong-il. While it’s known that […]