Today we’re excited to make another recent Longreads Member Pick free for everyone. It’s a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison, by Sabine Heinlein. Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where…

The Sochi Winter Olympics are an examination of grace, movement and beauty as much as they are about barracking for your favourite athlete, writes Matthew Clayfield. Tatjana Huefner of Germany in acti

What does a 24-hour bar look like at 7 a.m.? Sarah Baird pulls up a round-the-clock barstool at NOLA's Brothers III to experience the full lifecycle of nightlife's greatest cultural intersection—the dive bar: It’s 10 a.m., and Spider is sweeping cigarette butts from the floor with all the finesse of…

Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducte

Deep Inside Baz Luhrmann’s Creative Chaos Baz Luhrmann in the courtyard of his home in the West Village. Credit... Marco Grob for The New York Times Baz Luhrmann likes to say that his life is “a circu

- Or, how to write an immersive, magic-realist, historical thriller experience for a museum about cold-war era navy warships… What place has a writers-room in the development of a museum exhibition? How do you write a spatial, immersive narrative for a museum audience? What is the role of Genre and…

Not long ago, fingerprints were the cutting edge of biometric profiling. Today, the use of biosignatures to identify individuals has expanded to include everything from iris and facial scans right thr

Problem: The problem is The Bucket List. The 2007 Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman film introduced the non-italicized non-capitalized term “bucket list” (a list of things one wants to do before one "kick

When Jonah Berger was a graduate student at Stanford, in the early aughts, he would make a habit of reading page A2 of the Wall Street Journal , which included a list of the five most-read and the fiv

On paper, and in the digital realm, Aaron Brown exists. He has a State of Ohio driver’s license, identification proving that he is member of the Lipan Apache Tribe in Texas, and is licensed to operate a boat. Brown is also a customer of Comcast and has a State Farm Insurance card. In reality, Brown…

Later this week, The Dissolve will feature an interview with Robocop / Starship Troopers screenwriter Ed Neumeier, as well as a special feature delving into the eight feature films (so far) based on t

I don’t remember any of what I’m about to tell you. Sure, I know the story, but it is just a story related to me by others, in bits and pieces, over many years. I have attempted to collect those scrap

Share on Facebook Winter 2014 Moments of Truth Tom Hooper used his experience in soaps and theater to capture the intimate details of The King’s Speech and the grand gestures of Les Misérables . But w

On Nov. 22, 1987, a Chicago television station was hacked, broadcasting a strange suited figure wearing a rubbery mask and sunglasses to viewers for a brief moment. The story behind the hack and the hunt to figure out who was behind it: In some corners of the Internet, the story of how Max Headroom…

The compulsion to be free of a limb is no imaginary illness Published in Matter · 33 min read · Dec 30, 2013 -- This wasn’t the first time that David had tried to amputate his leg. When he was just ou

The television drama series has come a long way in the past 15 years and yesterday’s Golden Globes emphasised the fact that in terms of quality, free-to-air networks can’t compete with their cable and

Share I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I

Summer 2010 MIKE NICHOLS Trouble in Mind In The Graduate , Mike Nichols captured not only the delicate mental state of his anti-hero, but the despair of the nation’s youth. The director looks back at

Fall 2013 Take Me to the River Frank Darabont had audiences cheering as Tim Robbins escaped from prison in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). The director explains how he set him free. By JEFFREY RESSNE

Winter 2014 A Kiss Is Still a Kiss The sinking of the ship in Titanic was unforgettable, but it was the kiss on the bow that gave the film its emotional center. James Cameron explains how he used all

Legend has it (okay, well, actually it was the Los Angeles Times ) that Joe Eszterhas once sold a script written on the back of a cocktail napkin for 4.7 million dollars. And it makes sense when one l

This story first appeared in the Nov. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. In the mid-1990s, Ben Stiller spent some time sleeping on David O. Russell ‘s couch. That’s when both were struggling

Credits Forms Manuals Start Button Notify the Guild when you start a screenwriting project Minimum Basic Agreement Obtain the 2017 MBA and Schedule of Minimums Credits Forms & Info Download: Official

David O. Russell: In Conversation David Russell, the director of “American Hustle.” Credit... Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times You could argue that, with his new film, “American Hustle,” coming on

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pi

When I visited the Jim Beam distillery and visitors center (known as the American Stillhouse), in Clermont, Kentucky, this past June, the guide started by explaining that we would all be addressed by

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“@TheAtlantic: How sleep deprivation decays the mind and body http://t.co/YMOYgfsyTc” some scary thoughts and research on lack of sleep

A recent study found recognizable images of human faces in high-res photographs of eyes, reminding us that surveillance technology improves more and more each day. But designers and technologists are

So here’s the thing: out of all your wizarding students and house elves and headmasters and Death Eaters and muggles and centaurs, there is really only one person who determines the course of the Harr

How a colleague’s death affects an office: Story after story, they’re all like this, proximity aspiring to intimacy, and it’s clear that no one here knew him, not the people in his department, not his managers, not the people he had lunch with and traveled with. They talk about his cluttered desk,…

Buying cocaine is like donating money to the Nazi party: http://t.co/SBY5IhZtMM

T he domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. You might think that the grains

"Hollywood execs kept asking him where was the white figure to 'open up' the story for mainstream (white) audiences?" http://t.co/54MCADHp6m

Fascinating cross-cultural study maps bodily response to emotions: turns out flushed cheeks of shame are universal http://t.co/Xua0cdmtYK

VORONEZH — If any foreigner deserves credit for President Vladimir Putin's rise to power, then perhaps it is Allan Pease, an Australian authority on body language who calls Putin "a very clever and capable student." Pease, a best-selling author who is known internationally as "Mr. Body Language,"…

Adi Shankar is the producer of several films, including The Grey, Broken City, and the upcoming Lone Survivor. The truth is, I’m humbled that I’m at a place in my life where someone would ask me to write something like this. I’m by no means an authority and I’m barely an adult, but here are some of…

good article on importance of writing in TV shows. How Netflix Is Making Traditional TV Better http://t.co/bzEGDPWh5V via @sharethis

A Florida sheriff’s deputy’s girlfriend is found dead, and the investigation—led by his colleagues—is botched. The case sets off a battle between investigators over whether Michelle O’Connell committed suicide or was murdered: In fact, though investigators collected the gun, clothing and other…