Tag: New York

A robust local media is important to rooting out corruption, but so is a well-informed electorate.

Sloane Crosley faces the music. Jared’s music. Knock it off, Jared. Jared?! Jared!!!

The collective redefined feminism in the 1970s, but it’s blind spots still linger, especially for black women.

Fats Domino passed away on Oct. 25 at the age of 89.

When industrial laundry workers weren’t touching human feces, they had to deal with third-world working conditions and sexual harassment.

Hilton Als on photographer Diane Arbus’ uncanny ability to capture the humanity of her marginalized subjects.

Forty labor strikes on one day, French existentialists on the loose, and a 50-foot G.I. blowing enormous puffs of REAL smoke.

At Narratively, Anthony Taille goes underground into New York’s tunnels to tell the stories of the legendary Mole People.

Americans have been playing softball with their co-workers since the game grew out of several variants of baseball in the late 19th century. In 1895, Louis Rober, a lieutenant in the Minneapolis fire department, organized games of “kittenball” to entertain firefighters between runs. Blue-collar company teams proliferated over the next half-century. Office workers joined in later, […]

If you’ve never heard of this acclaimed author, treasure your last moments of innocence; then, read this primer at Vulture on DFW’s contested legacy.

“Memoir is a total minefield, as you know. It’s best if you write the book and leave the country.”

I didn’t pay attention to font until I worked for my college newspaper. After months of poring over proofs in InDesign, I realized I was learning the differences between fonts, their specific names, where they fit best.

Sigmund Freud called dreams ”the royal road to the unconscious” and theorized that they reflected highly individual unconscious wishes. His student Carl Jung, who later broke with him, thought the recurring use of enduring symbols in dreams, like mazes, mirrors and snakes, reflected something more collective and universal. *** Many people interviewed said they dreamed […]

I feel very strongly that almost the entire city has copied my glasses. I went to a fashion show during fashion week, and everyone there had on my eyeglasses. Warby Parker has also copied my eyeglasses. Here’s what started happening: A few years ago, kids—and by which I mean, my friends kids—started coming up to […]

What gave the Black and White Ball “its intoxicating piquancy,” according to Amy Fine Collins, was the fact that Capote’s guest list had “flung together, in a gilt-edged melting pot, the most alluring power brokers in the worlds of high society, politics, the arts, and Hollywood—disconnected universes that collided, if not for the first time that evening, then at least with unprecedented force.”

The Ball also found an unlikely chronicler in Gloria Steinem, an invited guest who had made Capote’s acquaintance after she interviewed him for Glamour the year before. Steinem wrote a feature on the party for Vogue in January 1967 in which she described the luminaries, feathers, masks, ball gowns, and jewels all whirling around the room: “The effect was like some blend of Hollywood, the Court of Louis XIV, a medieval durbar, and pure Manhattan.”

[William] Powell quit his job and began writing for up to ten hours a day. Despite the title, there is nothing about anarchism as a political theory in the book, which focuses on drugs, surveillance, weapons, and explosives. About drugs, Powell knew plenty. He had overcome a speed habit, smoked lots of pot, consumed his […]

My writer friends tend to see my new world as grist for writing, and I suppose it is. But this is also my life, not some sociological quest. I am not play-acting the soldier’s wife; my husband is not play-acting deployment; we are not play-acting strained 1 AM phone conversations that are being monitored in […]

Times Square is one big, busy machine. Powered by American ingenuity and more than a few megawatts of electricity, these six square blocks stay bright 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ve seen Times Square in movies and on TV a million times. A lot of you have probably seen it in real life, teeming […]

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)   Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book […]

27 must-read stories on the making of the world’s greatest magazines.

Gif via Justin Blinder’s ‘Vacated’ project. 1. “Urban Church Planting Plantations.” (Christena Cleveland, March 2014) White suburban churches invade urban spaces with no regard for the churches already in place. 2. “Gentrification Sparks Surge In Landlord Sabotage.” (Lauren Evans, Gothamist, Feb. 2014) Setting fires, locking tenants out and willfully destroying a building’s infrastructure–evil landlords will go to […]

“Still, I decided, age alone was no basis for rejection. That’s exactly the basis on which I have been rejected many times. The bank, given my age, refused my request for a loan when, in my first year of renting, I found a small house I wanted to buy. The loan I could get—based on […]

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there […]

“I learned to drive. But I never liked it.”

This week a debate erupted about “serious journalism” in women’s magazines—and as part of this discussion, several magazine editors reflected fondly on the work of the late, great magazine New York Woman and its founding editor, Betsy Carter. New York Woman was published from 1986-1992; Carter went on to work for O, the Oprah Magazine […]

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. As my service year winds down and I begin to look for jobs, I’m simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the New York mythos. Here are four pieces that explore the romance, the real estate, […]

A look at the power, money and politics behind building the Freedom Tower that has delayed its completion: The PA is run by a board of twelve unpaid commissioners, six appointed by New York’s governor, six by New Jersey’s. Traditionally, the board chair is a New Jersey commissioner, and the executive director — effectively the […]

What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City: The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a […]

In 1908, teams from four countries — the United States, France, Germany, and Italy — raced from New York to Paris by driving across the American west, and the frozen Bering Strait: The contestants represented an international roster of personalities. G. Bourcier de St. Chaffray, driving the French De Dion, once organized a motorboat race […]

A New York Chinese restaurant loses a former member of its kitchen staff—who then opens his own, very similar restaurant. Inside the legal battle: In essence, the suit claimed, they’d tried to become Mr Chow—the Invasion of the Body Snatchers of haute Chinese cuisine. “They want to not just clone me, they want to take […]