Tennessee Williams tasked James Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work—Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Marlon Brando and others—so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered?
longreads
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much
Dolphin trainer Ashley Guidry loved her job and the animals she worked with—in particular, a dolphin calf named Chopper. But years of seeing how business was done behind the scenes at a small marine park made her come to the painful conclusion that she had to walk away from it all.
Posted inNonfiction
The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much
Dolphin trainer Ashley Guidry loved her job and the animals she worked with—in particular, a dolphin calf named Chopper. But years of seeing how business was done behind the scenes at a small marine park made her come to the painful conclusion that she had to walk away from it all.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
The Woes of the Corporate Anthropologist
In classical anthropology, there’s a rigid distinction between “field” and “home.” Field’s where you go to do your research, immersing yourself, sometimes at great personal risk, in a maelstrom of raw, unsorted happening. Home’s where you go to sort and tame it: catalogue it, analyze it, transform it in to something meaningful. But when the […]
Posted inBooks
House Heart
“I love this story for its wryness and subtlety, but most especially for its willingness to take me where I don’t want to go.”
Posted inReading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, The Dallas Observer, The Marshall Project, GQ, Dissent, and SB Nation.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Fabulous (and Sometimes Dead-End) Opportunity of Being an Assistant
Nearly every exclusive field runs on assistants. The actor James Franco, like Buddha before him, had an assistant keep track of his meals and school assignments. The critic and writer Daphne Merkin has employed a steady stream of Ivy-educated elves. They’re tasked with everything from editing to returning dead houseplants. Bestselling novelist John Irving (The […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The King’s Last Game
Elvis Presley and I had at least one thing in common: A love of racquetball.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The King’s Last Game
Elvis Presley and I had at least one thing in common: A love of racquetball.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Three and a Half Decades of Denying that I’m Transgender’
Inspired by the recent National Trans Day of Visibility, here’s a bracingly candid essay by Jane Demuth published at BuzzFeed: “How Running Helped Me Explain My Transition To Myself.” The piece is a sober meditation on running, literally and figuratively. At a time when she’s first transitioning from male to female, Demuth clocks many miles daily, up […]