Tag: The New Inquiry

The prison workshop where your adorable Maine souvenirs were made is more like a factory, and the inmates like slaves.

I used the seven deadly sins–lust, gluttony, envy, greed, sloth, pride, and anger — as the springboard for choosing these stories. 1. LUST: “Eileen Myles on the Excruciating Pain of Waiting for Love.” (Eileen Myles, The Cut, February 2016) Poet and novelist Eileen Myles muses on a summer fling that should’ve lasted forever. 2. GLUTTONY: […]

In these six stories, a drunk driver confesses via viral video, an ex-Catholic returns to confession, a high-school cheater reveals her indiscretions, and more.

Beauty criticism analyzes the ways we can subvert a society that would have us subsumed by self-loathing. We use the tools we’ve been given. Makeup, then, can be a weapon. And it can be damn fun.

Stories about looking for clues about the future.

In the following five pieces, you’ll meet foragers, hikers, researchers, anthropologists, drug dealers and puppies.

Revel in all the feels with these 14 (get it?) essays and interviews.

Every means of confession creates a kind of person who confesses. You become who you are by saying what you did. The details make a difference. That pronoun, “I,” feels one way when you say it as part of a formula, in the dusk of a confessional, to a priest you cannot see behind the […]

Here are five stories born of adultery. Read about technological advancements for philanderers and their cuckolds, personal perspectives from the cheater and the cheatee, a forbidden lust-fueled crime story, and a piece on how adultery became bedfellows with American popular culture and music—back in 1909. 1. “The Cuckold” (James Harms, Guernica, February 17, 2014) “The cuckold […]

Here’s the first official edition of Longreads’ Best of WordPress! We’ve scoured 22% of the internet to create a reading list of great storytelling — from publishers you already know and love, to some that you may be discovering for the first time. We’ll be doing more of these reading lists in the weeks and months to […]

Videogames fascinate me. I’m not very good at the majority I’ve tried to play, but, like kickball and baking, I still play, because they’re fun, and I don’t have to be good at everything. (Except Pac-Man World 2 for PS2. I rule that. Especially the ice-skating levels.) Friends have helped me play Bioshock Infinite and introduced […]