Liberals’ history with regard to gay rights is not as progressive as some would like you to remember: It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American […]
Tag: longreads
A writer goes undercover at a shipping warehouse in Mississippi—and wonders whether Americans will ever demand higher standards for how their Internet purchases are being fulfilled: We will be fired if we say we just can’t or won’t get better, the workamper tells me. But so long as I resign myself to hearing how inadequate […]
The Book of Revelation is the Bible’s “Hollywood ending”—but author Elaine Pagels’ new book explores what the author originally intended: Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about […]
A family discovers new details about their son’s death in Iraq, and wonders why the U.S. lieutenant responsible was not punished: A year after Dave Sharrett II died, his parents, Vicki and Dave Sr., were nearly at peace. They had come to accept the Army’s explanation of how it all happened in the “fog of […]
How the 2012 GOP primary became such a mess—and what it means for the future of the party: That Mitt Romney finds himself so imperiled by Rick Santorum—Rick Santorum!—is just the latest in a series of jaw-dropping developments in what has been the most volatile, unpredictable, and just plain wackadoodle Republican-nomination contest ever. Part of […]
A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland: Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were […]
Filmmaker Kunle Afolayan is looking to push the boundaries of moviemaking in Nigeria—but it’s still too early to know whether the audiences can support a film with even a $500,000 budget: Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles […]
Reminder! We’ll be in D.C. next Wednesday, Feb. 29 for a special night with The New Republic at Busboys and Poets. It’s a free event, and you can RSVP on the Longreads Facebook page. “Uncovering the Cover Story” will feature The New Republic’s Rachel Morris, Eliza Gray, Alec MacGillis, Timothy Noah and Editor Richard Just. Want some #longreads to […]
A weeklong investigation to discover who created the Twitter account that spits out “context-free nonsense” and in doing so has now amassed more than 40,000 followers and a devoted fanbase: The feed’s strangely poetic stream has been embraced like a life-preserver by internet users drowning in a sea of painfully literal SEO headlines and hack […]
A review of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, and a different perspective on the dark side of Steve: Sometimes the repetition serves a purpose: The drug LSD, referred to 33 times, is clearly important to Jobs. (The FBI thought the same, according to documents released this month.) “How many of you have taken LSD?” Jobs taunts […]
Inside the making of the social network for programmers—which now has 1.3 million users and more than 2 million source code repositories: At first, GitHub was a side project. Wanstrath and Preston-Werner would meet on Saturdays to brainstorm, while coding during their free time and working their day jobs. “GitHub wasn’t supposed to be a […]
More than 100 police officers from 18 different agencies accessed the driver’s license records of Rasmussen, a former officer. She’s now suing for invasion of privacy: Rasmusson’s lawsuit, which will be filed in the coming weeks, alleges that not only was her privacy compromised, but that her story is merely a symptom of a larger […]
High school hockey player Jack Jablonski was left paralyzed after a hit during a game—leading Minnesota to get tougher on rules, and leading families to rethink hockey’s risks: “I forgot to tell you,” he says. Something in his voice is strange. He looks at me. Cade and Raye are both staring at me now. Peter […]
Revisiting—and correcting—the stories of Frances Farmer. The star of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood was once thought to have been lobotomized after being involuntary committed to an institution: Let’s make something perfectly clear: Frances was not lobotomized. Granted, Dr. Walter Freeman did visit Steilacoom and perform lobotomies while Frances was incarcerated there—but correlation isn’t commission, obviously, […]
Scientists are discovering how chemicals can affect the way memories are formed, paving the way for a future where it could be possible to forget anything we wanted by taking a single pill: This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style mindwiping. In some ways it’s potentially even more effective and more precise. Because of […]
Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics: Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him […]
Flechtheim was driven out of Germany by the Nazis—and many works from his galleries are now in private collections and museums around the world. A lawsuit brought by his heirs raises questions about provenance: Works in the MoMA online database today with Flechtheim in their provenance histories were sold prior to 1933, meaning they are […]
[Fiction] A woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her past: At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of […]
Nick Roses is a 22-year-old Hollywood agent who specializes in working with child actors. But former clients say he’s scamming families with promises of Disney stardom: Howard Meltzer, a longtime casting director, calls Roses “Bernie Brillstein in a 20-year-old’s body.” Many others in Hollywood deem him either a gimlet-eyed child prodigy prone to the occasional […]
What happens when your teenage son is obsessed with nuclear research and wants to experiment in the backyard? How 17-year-old Taylor Wilson found support from his family and a group of scientist mentors: Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a […]
The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane on banking, risk and how to bring social and financial equity back into the system: Consider the effects of the too-big-to-fail problem on risk-taking incentives. If banks know they will be bailed out, those holding their debt will be less likely to price the risk of failure for themselves. […]
Ex-president and CEO Michael Woodford says he tried to blow the whistle on fraudulent accounting related to $1.6 billion in transactions. He was then fired: Woodford, 51, recounted how he had just returned from Hong Kong, having fled Tokyo after a board meeting in which Olympus Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa had fired him. The cause for […]
How Quentin Rowan (aka Q.R. Markham) went from aspiring writer to serial plagiarist—and how everything unraveled after the publication of his spy novel, Assassin of Secrets: By then, the mystery about whether Rowan was, so to speak, an authentic plagiarist had been solved. Two days earlier, he’d sent a series of apologetic e-mails to Jeremy […]
Exploring the social etiquette of Couchsurfing.org—and how its rapid growth is challenging the community’s expectations of safety and mutual respect: Orange Acres takes all kinds, provided you follow a few simple rules: • No alcoholics, crackheads, or members of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, or PETA • ‘[O]n the subject of hippies and rainbow people,’ please […]
Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading. This week, Andrea Pitzer examines Susan Orlean’s “Orchid Fever,” which was originally published in The New Yorker on Jan. 23, 1995. Orlean builds her study of obsession out of a vocabulary of desire and devastation, ranging from the apocalyptic to […]
The strange story of Martin Amis’s lost book, Invasion of the Space Invaders, which offered tips on how to play video games like PacMan: He is almost as enthusiastic about PacMan, although you get the sense that he sees it (in contrast to Space Invaders) as a fundamentally unserious endeavor. “Those cute little PacMen with […]
Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman. But moments of kindness […]
The power of habits in guiding our behavior—and how companies like Target have used customer data to create new buying habits: There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around […]
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