This post comes via Longreads contributor Laura Bliss: In this week’s Economist, a remembrance of “font-god” Mike Parker, the typographer who developed more than 1000 fonts in his 50+ year career. Parker, who died last month at age 84, was a champion of great type: never drawing fonts himself, but rather coaxing others into perfection. His […]
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The Secret Behind Pixar's Storytelling Process
Fast Company has an excerpt from Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), which goes inside the creative process at the studio. Catmull attributes much of their creative success to their internal process for continually refining stories. It includes meetings with the Braintrust, a group of executives, directors and other […]
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The Year That Cars Took the Roads Away from Pedestrians
In a new essay for Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford and Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic, examine the history of the automobile in America, and how our perception of city streets changed: In 1924, recognizing the crisis on America’s streets, President Herbert Hoover launched the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. Any organizations interested […]
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When a Child Becomes Aware of Death and Mortality
The following is from Rachael Maddux, who wrote about contemplating the idea of death and mortality at a young age. Maddux wrote this essay for The Paris Review last June: For almost as long as I’ve been alive I have known that I am going to die. This awareness came to me when I was […]
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Remembering the Life and Work of Journalist Matthew Power (1974-2014)
Matt was the bravest writer I’ve ever known. He covered conflict, climbed mountains, and followed in the exploratory footsteps of so many unfortunate travelers of yore in order to write his own account of what such trips felt like today, to a modern consciousness. This last piece was his specialty. They were why we read […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Remembering the Life and Work of Journalist Matthew Power (1974-2014)
Matt was the bravest writer I’ve ever known. He covered conflict, climbed mountains, and followed in the exploratory footsteps of so many unfortunate travelers of yore in order to write his own account of what such trips felt like today, to a modern consciousness. This last piece was his specialty. They were why we read […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Joe McGinniss: 1942-2014
Nixon had refused the teleprompter from the start. He kept all the figures—crime rising nine times as fast … 300 cities … 200 dead … 7,000 injured … 43 percent of the American people afraid … He kept them all in his head, like the date of the Battle of Hastings. Now he was starting […]
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On Texas's 'Law of Parties' or Accomplices as Killers
In 1998 a district attorney sent a teenager to life in prison for his role in a murder of a 16-year-old girl. In Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff revisits the case and looks at why the DA is questioning the life sentence years later: The DA did not pull any punches once The State of Texas […]
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The Kidnapping Case: Seizure and Recovery
Solomon [Northup], the subject of the following narrative, is a free colored citizen of the United States; was born in Essex County, New York, about the year 1808; became early a resident of Washington County, and married there in 1829. His father and mother resided in the county of Washington about fifty years, till their […]
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Television vs. the Novel
Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, writing in The New York Times Book Review, about television vs. the novel: Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel. In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, […]