The Editors' Longreads Picks

1dTo my surprise, the string of jumping blue dots that indicate typing popped up on my screen. They disappeared, reappeared, disappeared, and appeared again. Fry finally responded, saying he didn’t know what I was talking about.
↩︎ Harper's
1w“I have to remind myself why we’re stinging. Like I have to seriously look for it when I’m in that much pain. I’ll question: ‘What the heck am I doing? This is weird. This is stupid. Why are we doing this?’”
↩︎ Texas Monthly
3wI don’t want to hear Biden say “I still stutter” to prove some grand point; I want to hear him say it because doing so as a presidential candidate would mean that stuttering truly doesn’t matter—for him, for me, or for our 10-year-old selves.
↩︎ The Atlantic
3w"It almost sounds like a timeshare. They set you up with people who have been in remission, so it’s kind of like they’re walking advertisements for their particular treatment."
↩︎ The Baffler
Nov 5, 2019In nearby Manchester, it was everyone dancing at the Tolstoi Club; in Chicago, all the patrons at the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant; in Lynn, Mass., 39 bakers, a third of them American citizens, in the middle of a meeting to discuss forming a cooperative.
↩︎ The New Yorker

Oct 10, 2019He moved into the guest room, where the hum seemed slightly fainter. Each night, he’d will himself to sleep, ears plugged and head bandaged, but he could feel the whine in his bones, feel himself getting panicky as it droned on and on and on and on and on.
↩︎ The Atlantic
Aug 28, 2019She is told repeatedly there are things you should do and should not do if you want to make it in Hollywood. Don’t be a contrarian. Don’t be a tough sell. Don’t wear your hair natural; it only makes you look dated.
↩︎ GEN
Aug 23, 2019The point of music, and of Young, is to make people feel less lonely. I had taken him to a dark place that he didn’t want to go. “I really wish this interview hadn’t happened,” he later said.
↩︎ The New York Times
Jul 19, 2019What is a name, when you get down to it? It isn’t something you can hold squarely in your hand like a lump of gold. It’s wholly immaterial. It can make you feel like a god before your time—but equally, maybe, a ghost in your own life.
↩︎ The London Review of Books
Jul 2, 2019Trigonometry and logarithms offered the best way to make these essential measurements: for these, a sailor needed to be adept at using dense numerical tables.
↩︎ Aeon
Jun 26, 2019Ryan Vallee wasn’t one of the popular kids at Belmont High. But he had two advantages his victims did not. He was a boy, and therefore not as vulnerable to slut-shaming. And he understood how to harness technology to seem powerful, controlling and terrifying [to] victims for years with only a smartphone and a computer.
↩︎ WIRED
May 31, 2019“As geologists, we’re used to looking backwards. [The Anthropocene] appears significant but it would be far easier if we were 200 to 300, possibly 2,000 to 3,000, years in the future and then we could look back and say: yes, that was the right thing to do.”
↩︎ The Guardian
May 29, 2019We will do this through Instagramming, blogging, podcasting, Facebooking, working with advertisers, knowing our angles. We are preparing ourselves to perform motherhood with a hashtag.
↩︎ Topic
May 14, 2019"Drop a bomb on a residential area? I never in my life heard of that," a neighborhood resident told a reporter that night. "It's like Vietnam."
↩︎ Code Switch
May 10, 2019Honeybee is one of a growing number of companies that are developing standardized lunar rovers. Small countries with no national space agency, as well as private entities, could soon have their own robotic resource hunters roving around the moon, with little honeycomb emblems on their sides.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Apr 18, 2019To “never forget” means you don’t solve a problem with state violence or with personal violence. Instead, you change the conditions under which violence prevailed.
↩︎ The New York Times Magazine
Apr 8, 2019The study of deep time trends toward a different lesson—that Earth changes unimaginably slowly except when it changes suddenly and catastrophically, like right now.
↩︎ The California Sunday Magazine
Mar 15, 2019Hader said, “The Russian writers were fascinated by people who kept moving toward being unhappy, despite their intentions. And I do feel like there’s a huge balance thing going on in the universe. My happiness level has gone up, ‘Barry’ is a giant success, and I finally get to direct. But I get divorced.”
↩︎ The New Yorker
Mar 12, 2019I said that I thought the white nationalists and the black radicals understood power as a much more concrete substance than Western liberals had been willing to see it over the past several decades.
↩︎ Harper's
This is the video version of one of the best things we read last week, Patricia Lockwood's "The Communal Mind," about internet humor, Michael Jordan's tears, and the collapse of context.
She was asked to give a lecture at the British Museum. This was hardly deserved. Still, she stood there, and locked them in her mind for an hour. Her face was the fresh imprint of her age. She spoke the words that were there for her to speak; she wore the only kind of shirt available at that time. It was not possible to see where she had gone wrong, where she would go wrong. She said: garfield is a body-positivity icon. She said: abraham lincoln is daddy. She said: the eels in London are on cocaine.
Mar 1, 2019The set of thefts he describes as the most exquisite of his career are a study in simplicity and sangfroid.
↩︎ GQ
Feb 13, 2019While Alex and Senovia were soliciting small donations from neighbors, Benzeevi got on a plane to Israel to meet with Psy-Group.
↩︎ The New Yorker

Jan 25, 2019In Flint, Mich., a 2013 audit found just 14 detectives were each juggling an average of 927 cases, including homicides and other violent crimes—a number, auditors wrote, that was “almost beyond comprehension.”
↩︎ BuzzFeed News
Dec 14, 2018Joseph Thompson, a spokesperson for the Mesquite Police, said, “The suspect did use some racial slurs in each one of them, but it was insufficient to be able to prove that the offenses were motivated by racial bias.”
↩︎ BuzzFeed News

Dec 3, 2018“A lot of things we consider electrification and decarbonization are going to play out through local planning,” Kristov says. “Whether it’s rethinking mobility in urban areas or retrofitting buildings, these are local initiatives that will create local jobs.”
↩︎ Vox
Nov 19, 2018This battle is epic and undecided. If we miss the two-degree target, we will fight to prevent a rise of three degrees, and then four. It’s a long escalator down to Hell.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Nov 16, 2018As the lines started to build up, his employees got stressed out, and the stress would cause them to not be as friendly, or to shout out crazy long wait times for burgers in an attempt to maybe convince people to leave, and things fell by the wayside.
↩︎ Thrillist

Oct 31, 2018I had read the Didion essay, had imagined being her there, or being the friend the people owed at a party, or having been so impractical as to have my sheets blowing in the wind outside my window, and it was easy to imagine her past as my future.
↩︎ Longreads
Oct 18, 2018Those who have lived their entire lives in functioning democracies may find it hard to grasp how easily minds can be won over to the totalitarian dark side. We assume such a passage would require slow, laborious persuasion. It does not.
↩︎ The New York Review of Books
Oct 18, 2018I was glad I wasn’t wearing a wire, but mostly I was thinking, “If this gets bad, just claw your way over that fence to the street! Don’t let yourself fall to the ground with a hundred guys trying to stomp you with steel-toed boots.”
↩︎ Los Angeles Magazine
Oct 17, 2018He sent colleagues an email with video of the near-collision. Its subject line was “Prius vs. Camry.” He remained in his leadership role and continued taking cars on non-official routes.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Oct 16, 2018Walking around the Upper East Side, where I live, I find it striking how many of the establishments still standing among the many darkened windows are hair salons, nail salons, facial salons, eyebrow places, and restaurants.
↩︎ The Atlantic
Oct 16, 2018Because some guests still stumble in by chance while others make reservations months ahead, the clientele is notably eclectic: bow hunters and backpackers, Paul Simon and Scarlett Johansson and Jamaica Kincaid.
↩︎ The New Yorker

Welcome to The Morning News Tournament of Books, 2017 edition.
- Our championship match is decided in the Tournament of Books, with news of a Rooster surprise debuting this summer. Updated Mar 31, 2017
- In Thursday's action, Reyhan Harmanci sets up a colossal final.
- The Zombie round opens with Buzzfeed's Isaac Fitzgerald reading The Nix and The Underground Railroad.

Все ваши Белый дом принадлежит нам.
- "Will Putin expose the failings of American democracy or will he inadvertently expose the strength of American democracy?" Updated Mar 3, 2017
- Wilbur Ross just wanted to make some money in ethically gray areas (that should've prevented him from taking office).
- Jeff Sessions's spokeswoman can't help but continue to lie.

The oceans are under assault, and not just from the White House and friends.
- Trump's assault on the environment begins with American headwaters. Updated Mar 1, 2017
- Don't just blame the oil companies for destroying the oceans—blame sushi restaurants.
- Nothing escapes the deepest trenches of the ocean floor. Not light, not nutrients, not pollutants.

The future of protein will not include animal meat.
- Crickets are your new favorite sustainable food source—but they may not have enough protein to feed us all. Updated Feb 28, 2017
- Attention, Earthlings: The fate of your planet hinges on the success of the Impossible Burger.
- Study finds that Subway's "chicken" meat is only half chicken.