Tag: longreads
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 […]
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 […]
Columbia University’s School of Journalism has released its report investigating what went wrong with Rolling Stone’s story of a rape at UVA, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Among its conclusions: Rolling Stone’s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. “It’s not like […]
It’s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen. But the Audubon that emerges from Franzen’s essay is a band of once-scrappy conservationists who have grown content to peddle squeaky plush toys and holiday cards; we’ve seized on climate change, apparently, in a last grab at relevance. In order to gin up […]
In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
April 17 marks six years since we started this community—growing from just a few readers to over a million, with people now sharing stories in dozens of different languages from hundreds of publishers. Christian Jørgensen put together a really nice Storify timeline of how the Twitter hashtag #longreads first evolved. This community also has grown […]
I don’t care that the earth’s shadow eclipses the moon, said the Admiral. I have seen terrific irregularity with mine own eyes, and have been forced to the sensible conclusion that this earth is not round as some wrongly insist, but the shape of a pear or violin. A thousand years before the Admiral made […]
This month, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, South Korea, and a handful of other U.S. allies announced plans to join the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite American pressure not to. The multilateral fund is essentially China’s answer to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, organizations where the U.S. has long had more influence than China. China has […]
The Protestant work ethic here was very familiar to me. Johannes hadn’t had it, and probably not Magnus either; they had been cheerful men with more dreams than they had will to realize them, at least my grandfather. My mother’s mother had the work ethic, and she had passed it on to my mother, who […]
Before I depart the subject of spin-offs, let’s look at a lesson to be learned from a conglomerate mentioned earlier: LTV. I’ll summarize here, but those who enjoy a good financial story should read the piece about Jimmy Ling that ran in the October 1982 issue of D Magazine. Look it up on the Internet. […]
The excellent and underfunded nonprofit art and politics magazine Guernica has a special issue this month dedicated to exploring the boundaries of gender. In it, novelist Alexander Chee writes about the surprising realizations he had the first time he dressed in drag for a night on the town with the man he loves: He is really spellbound, though, in a […]
Nick Leiber | Longreads | March 2015 The first battery, a pile of copper and zinc discs, was invented more than 200 years ago, ushering in the electric age. Subsequent versions led to portable electronics, mobile computing, and our current love affair with smartphones (1,000 of which are shipped every 22 seconds). Now batteries […]
TERRY GROSS: So were you writing the song on assignment? Were you writing it for The Righteous Brothers? BARRY MANN: Yes. CYNTHIA WEIL: When we wrote the song, they weren’t that crazy about it (laughter). GROSS: Really? MANN: Well, when I sang it – I loved The Everly Brothers at the time, and I sounded […]
Longreads is coming to Portland! Join us for a free story mixer on Friday night, March 27, as part of WordPress.com’s Press Publish conference—featuring stories from some of our favorite writers: * * * Nathaniel Friedman (aka “Bethlehem Shoals,” writer and founder, FreeDarko.com) Meaghan O’Connell (author, “A Birth Story”) Nancy Rommelmann (author, “The Queens of […]
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