Kate Silver: Bringing Up Kennedy: A Longreads List frontofbook: The February Vanity Fair is out, and in the feature well is a look at the JFK inaugural, 50 years later. (Justin Bieber’s youthful mug adorns the cover, not Jack’s.) It seems like, oh, just last month, the mag excerpted Greg Lawrence’s Jackie as Editor. Because […]
Tag: longreads
The Man Who Saw Too Much Fellow Aspen first responders were momentarily shocked by Ferrara’s news. PTSD was supposed to happen to soldiers, a malady incurred on jittery battlefields far from home, not in a Xanadu dedicated to strenuous good fun. But Ferrara had long suspected he had PTSD and wasn’t surprised. “Of course he […]
Ballad for a Plain Man: Singer Jeff Finlin Thought He’d Hit the Big-Time—Until He Didn’t I loaded his songs into my iPod and while living on the road, while sitting on planes and trains, while lying in strange motel rooms, I closed my eyes and focused on his lyrics and thought: This guy’s channeling the […]
Game of Her Life: On 14-Year-Old Ugandan Chess Player Phiona Mutesi News eventually spread around Katwe that Katende was part of an organization run by white people, known in Uganda as mzungu, and Harriet began hearing disturbing rumors. “My neighbors told me that chess was a white man’s game and that if I let Phiona […]
The Constitution and Its Worshippers Crying constitution is a minor American art form. “This is my copy of the Constitution,” John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. “And I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in […]
Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun I asked a ton of people, and while there were a few in favor of singular “they,” this exchange with my old friend Michael, a San Francisco musician, composer and poet (and executive, by day) is representative: Me: Do you write “she” for indeterminate pronoun? What do […]
The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers “Some man, 60 years old, that couldn’t take the business and went and killed himself. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with that when you’ve got a 16-year-old daughter who gets the call? Huh? And I’ll tell you how you deal with that. You go […]
Jim Joyce Still Haunted By Blown Perfect-Game Call gq: “I think about it still, almost every day,” Joyce says. “I don’t want to be known as Jim Joyce, the guy that blew the perfect game. But I think that’s inevitable.” Why? “Because I’m Jim Joyce,” he says, “the umpire who blew the perfect game.” From […]
A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over the Shrimping Life A few months later, Buddy traded $800 and bartered time and equipment for a 51-foot boat that needed, among other things, a new layer of fiberglass. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 41 miles offshore last April, they were almost done with the seemingly […]
The Boy Who Died of Football Three days after he collapsed from heatstroke at practice in 2008, 15-year-old Max Gilpin became one of at least 665 boys since 1931 to die as a result of high school football. Here’s what made his case different: The Commonwealth of Kentucky tried to prove Max’s coach had a […]
Afghanistan: Land of War and Opportunity In Herat, Kabul, and cities large and small, Paul Brinkley serves as tour guide, ambassador, fixer, motivational speaker, and leader of the unofficial Afghanistan chamber of commerce. With all of his titles and duties, he prefers to think of himself primarily as a matchmaker, negotiating high-stakes unions between multinational […]
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a […]
Capital New York: 7 great longreads by Tom Robbins capitalnewyork: I was introduced to Tom Robbins while I was in college. My mentor at the time was the editor of the Industrial Workers of the World’s newspaper and he printed packets of reporting for me. I gobbled it up, especially Mr. Robbins’ muckraking at the […]
The Tyranny of Defense Inc. For those at the top, the American military profession is that rare calling where retirement need not imply a reduced income. On the contrary: senior serving officers shed their uniforms not merely to take up golf or go fishing but with the reasonable expectation of raking in big money. In […]
The Man Who Spilled the Secrets On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. […]
A Basketball Carol “The Washington Generals always lose: to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. They lose on indoor basketball courts and outdoor courts. They lose on ships, they lose on aircraft carriers, they lose in prisons and they lose on the back of trucks. … This must be distinctly understood, or […]
Michelle Legro: Top Longreads for Animal Behavior michellelegro: They ignored the signs: 100,000 fish floating belly-up in an Arkansas River, 5,000 blackbirds falling out of the sky. Please feel free leave your cat with me when the rapture comes. Until then, enjoy these three longreads about animals and their uncanny behavior. Darcy Frey, “The Bears… […]
The Web After You’re Dead Mac Tonnies’s digital afterlife stands as a kind of best-case scenario for preserving something of an online life, but even his case hasn’t worked out perfectly. His “Pro” account on the photo-sharing service Flickr allowed him to upload many — possibly thousands — of images. But since that account has […]
Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data “Going digital” was supposed to be an environmentally conscious way for governments to cut costs while improving efficiency. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way yet. Storage capacity is increasing, but the volume of data is also increasing, perhaps just as quickly. Over the next decade, the […]
However much the book was revised, it should have been revised more. The opening may have been reworked, as Gedin says, but it still features an episode—somebody telling somebody else at length (twelve pages!) about a series of financial crimes peripheral to the main plot—that, by wide consensus, is staggeringly boring. Elsewhere, there are blatant […]
Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not—But You Can Have Fun Trying When I asked these skeptics about the future, even their most conservative visions were unsettling: a future in which people boost their brains with enhancing drugs, for example, or have sophisticated computers implanted in their skulls for life. While we may never be able […]
The Atlantic: The Rise Of The New Global Elite theatlantic: F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. […]
The Dubai Job: The Mossad’s Mission to Take Out a Hamas Leader Tamim also turned out to be extremely media-savvy. He presided over well-planned press conferences, carefully doling out information in a manner guaranteed to keep viewers—especially in the Arab world—coming back for more. He publicly called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin […]
‘True Grit’ Author Charles Portis: Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny In The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe invokes the original laconic cutup, who happened to sit one desk behind him at the Trib office south of Times Square, as stubborn proof that the dream of the Novel—with its fortune-changing, culture-denting potential—never really died, even at a […]
Allen Iverson: Fallen Star The greatest Sixer of his era finds himself playing minor-league basketball in Turkey and spending his nights at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Istanbul. I kid him about going to TGI Friday’s in Istanbul, though he doesn’t seem to see it as teasing: “Man, listen,” he says. “I didn’t know that the […]
December was an incredible month for the Longreads community. Thank you to everyone who has shared, discovered, Instapaper’ed and Flipboarded your favorite longreads. From the daily #longreads recommendations to the year-end “Top 5 Longreads of 2010” lists, you’re all proving that the desire for in-depth storytelling, online and offline, is strong—and here to stay. Last […]
NYT: Longreads: A Digital Renaissance for the Long-form? Thanks to David Carr and the NYT for this story, and thank you to everyone for their amazing year-end “Top 5 Longreads” lists. Mr. Carr also just helped me introduce #Longreads #Lists, so a bit more on that coming shortly.
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