The Editors’ Longreads Picks
- An excellent essay on poverty and writing by Starr Davis. Updated May 31, 2022 ago
- Novelist Héctor Tobar tries to understand the 1992 Los Angeles riots through the experiences of a single high school.
- Steven Johnson with a long assessment of the current state of A.I. and language. (The illusion has gotten very good.)
May 31, 2022In the middle of my imagination, I am a girl who will always be homeless, but in reality, I am an educated Black woman who rents an apartment in Downtown Columbus. Trying to outrun poverty has cost me a piece of my soul.
↩︎ Catapult Magazine
May 2, 2022I always felt, as a reader and as a reporter, an underlying insistence that conversations about race were about conflict rather than the peculiar ways in which Angelenos construct multiethnic lives together.
↩︎ The New York Times Magazine
Apr 18, 2022‘Give me a list of all the ingredients in Bolognese sauce,’’ ‘‘Write a poem about a French coastal village in the style of John Ashbery,’’ ‘‘Explain the Big Bang in language that an 8-year-old will understand.’’ The first few times I fed GPT-3 prompts of this ilk, I felt a genuine shiver run down my spine.
↩︎ The New York Times Magazine
Dec 6, 2021I couldn’t consider abortion or adoption, but the weird thing is I also couldn’t consider having a baby. I never decided; I never chose.
↩︎ The New York Times Magazine
Oct 11, 2021Miles handcuffed the 8-year-old with pigtails. “Just acting out of habit,” he said later. Walking to a patrol car, Miles stopped and thought, “Wait a minute,” and removed the cuffs. “I guess my brain finally caught up with what was going on.”
↩︎ ProPublica
Sep 22, 2021I am not some special kind of human who just sits around reading the Iliad for fun. I’m not that different from the students I teach. They get their energy from me, I get my energy from them. That’s how a university works.
↩︎ The Point
Sep 1, 2021Federer the gallant. Nadal the reticent. Djokovic the ingratiator. I mean, no wonder they’re known for being polite—who wants their Martian overlords being dicks?
↩︎ GQ
Jun 28, 2021They camped and fished and attended car meets. Black’s family lived in Kenosha, but he often stayed in Antioch with the Rittenhouses. Upstate, where the Blacks owned property and liked to hunt, the boys practiced shooting at bull’s-eye targets and bottles.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Mar 11, 2021Prosthetic arm technology is still so limited that I become more disabled when I wear one... mostly what it does is helps me mimic two-handed people.
↩︎ INPUT
Feb 23, 2021I love these birds for their beauty, the way birders love actual birds, for the exalted brushstrokes of their wingspans that lift us from the drudge of survival. Some birds are reclusive. For example, the Florida scrub jay and Mexican jay have long been trapped behind a hunter green construction fence.
↩︎ Orion Magazine
Jan 4, 2021Fox News stopped hyping hydroxychloroquine, but Trump still wanted a quick fix. While cases in New York were doubling every three days, and doctors were treating patients in tents in Central Park, he declared that he wanted America “raring to go” by Easter.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Nov 25, 2020Actionable threats against him and his family began to be reported. The Michigan State Police worked with local law enforcement to arrange a security detail. All for doing his job. All for upholding the rule of law. All for following his conscience and defying the wishes of Donald Trump.
↩︎ POLITICO
Oct 30, 2020During a speech at a factory in Ohio, Trump wondered aloud whether Democrats had committed treason against the United States for withholding their applause during his State of the Union Address.
↩︎ McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
Sep 25, 2020Ruth really did love being “the notorious RBG.” At the opera, when her tiny figure, wrapped in a coat and babushka, would enter the Kennedy Center opera house from a side entrance, I don’t know how, but people would see her, and the roar would begin, soon followed by a standing ovation, and loud cheering.
↩︎ NPR
Sep 15, 2020Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.
↩︎ The New York Times Magazine
Sep 11, 2020America has enough renewable resources such that we could probably keep exactly the same lifestyles, and if we do it all electrically, we can do it at half the energy. And we can produce all of that energy cleanly, domestically in America.
↩︎ Vox
Aug 27, 2020This is the world I imagine when I picture what I want for my children—a world where social consequences are weighted along with criminal consequences, where incapacitation is not conflated with torture, and murder and rape are taken so seriously that we do all we can to prevent either from happening in the first place.
↩︎ Vanity Fair
Jul 7, 2020“They’re so mad, and they turn that hatred inward and feel inadequate. But Trump says, ‘No, I can ease your pain. These people over there, they’re to blame. It’s their fault.’”
↩︎ BuzzFeed News
Jun 24, 2020Wealth is, as a recent Yale study states, “the most consequential index of economic well-being” for most Americans. But wealth is not something people create solely by themselves; it is accumulated across generations.
↩︎ The New York Times Magazine
Jun 2, 2020When the voters begin to turn, maybe Lindsey Graham will turn with them, arguing, as Jaeger did, that “their will was so great… there was no other alternative.”
↩︎ The Atlantic
Apr 22, 2020“When there’s a disaster, police and fire aren’t first responders, they’re second responders.... First responders are a family member or a neighbor.”
↩︎ GQ
Apr 8, 2020There is a handing off between generations. The word he used was transmettre. Le goût et les valeurs sont transmis. Flavor and value: those are the qualities that are transmitted. Only in France would “flavor” and “value” have the same moral weight.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Apr 3, 2020Formerly fringe ideas on the left like universal basic income or universal health care are now household terms, online misinformation and disinformation are no longer abstract concepts but constant presences in our group chats, and malicious ideologies like ecofascism are taking root.
↩︎ BuzzFeed News
Mar 12, 2020The real choice we face is not whether to eat meat or how many children to have, but how to make profound and rapid structural changes, without which no personal choices will matter. As one climate scientist recently put it to me: “Fuck hope.” She is pregnant with her second child.
↩︎ The London Review of Books
Feb 26, 2020Mountain climbing is a modern curiosity, a bourgeois indulgence. It consists mostly of relatively well-to-do white people manufacturing danger for themselves.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Feb 14, 2020We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time.
↩︎ The Atlantic
Jan 31, 2020The speed of machine learning is startling, often creepy. It’s hard to tell what is creepier: the feeling that someone is somewhere out there, following your every step, or the fact that no one is, just the tracking device you carry with you in your pocket.
↩︎ n+1
Jan 14, 2020California is critical of wealth inequality and the impact of companies like Standard Oil on the environment. Texas is more likely to celebrate free enterprise and entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie.
↩︎ The New York Times
Dec 20, 2019The internet can’t hurt you. If it does, that’s your fault. That was the refrain feminist bloggers kept hearing in the early days of fending off “trolls.” “At first we were just like, ‘Oh my God, who are these fucking losers’?” Valenti said.
↩︎ Jezebel
Dec 18, 2019Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Dec 16, 2019I was picturing all the small decisions across the world and multiplying them by time. I was grieving the future in the present, and—since there were so few people who wanted to talk about it—I was grieving it alone.
↩︎ The Believer
Dec 13, 2019To 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
Dec 5, 2019“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
Nov 26, 2019I found the present-day crypto landscape to be less like a bygone market, more like the parallel universe found in Westworld, a wasteland of corpses and creeps muttering vows of revenge.
↩︎ GQ
Nov 22, 2019I 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
Nov 19, 2019“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
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
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.