How the Go-Go’s emerged from the L.A. punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album in Beauty and the Beat.
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‘A Hidden Universe of Suffering’: The Palestinian Children Sent to Jail
“Hadi’s lawyer, who encouraged the family to take whatever deal was offered, brought a proposal for 19 months in jail.”
Excerpt From American Prometheus
“Into this world of promise was born J. Robert Oppenheimer, on April 22, 1904. He came from a family of first- and second-generation German immigrants striving to be American.”
I’m Never Fine
“As a proponent of transparency, especially one who stands in opposition to the demonization of feeling, I can’t—I won’t—use the word anymore.”
Messengers From the Past
“I may have seen all there is to see at the Bosque yet I keep returning each year. It’s as though I, too, migrate to the Bosque.”
I Remember the Bookstore
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
‘Some Things Never Leave You’: Christian Livermore on Poverty’s Indelible Marks
“For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.”
Holiday Gift Guide: 8 Books We Excerpted on Longreads in 2021
A short list of books we loved (and featured) this year.
Even the Steam Had a Shadow
“He couldn’t remember coming here, or going anywhere. He looked down at himself. With a writhe of horror, he found he couldn’t even remember getting dressed. His clothes were unfamiliar.”
Happy is a Relative State
“The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me.”