T he Palace Theater in Los Angeles was an odd place for a punk show. Its stage once featured worldwide stars like Harry Houdini. For many years it was an ornate movie theater. On this night in 2023, however, the cavernous five-story building was filled with bearded, flannel-wearing, middle-aged…

The author, without a clue There’s been a lot in the culture recently about whether having a kid ruins your life. Last month, a 27-year-old pop star went viral for telling a podcaster all her friends with babies are unhappy and ‘in hell’, sparking a mini-furore online. Right or wrong, she definitely…

Annals of Education The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education. June 30, 2025 There are no reliable figures for how many students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it.Illustration…

Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times. Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 13,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today. I want to support Longreads Mike Davis |…

Profiles “The Brutalist,” the director’s nearly four-hour study of immigration, identity, and marriage, flowed from his own struggle to create art without compromise. “You really have to dare to suck to transcend,” he said. December 13, 2024 Corbet drew on his industry experience to make “The…

Photo: Art Streiber / AUGUST This interview originally ran on February 7, 2018. We’re republishing it following Jones’s death at 91. In both music and manner, Quincy Jones has always registered — from afar, anyway — as smooth, sophisticated, and impeccably well-connected. (That’s what earning 28…

Marielle Heller sat in a post-production facility in lower Manhattan, looking shaken. It was June, 2023, and for months she’d been finalizing edits on “Nightbitch,” a movie with a Kafka-adjacent premise: a former artist, struggling to adjust to life as a stay-at-home mother, discovers that she’s…

A postmortem is meant to make sense of tragic occurrences and yet, at bottom, it is designed to soothe. “What went wrong?” is a perfectly sane response to something gone wrong, and the postmortem helps relieve that question of its daunting open-endedness. Secure in its knowledge, forensic in its…

In August of this year, Current Affairs editor-at-large Yasmin Nair wrote a blog post with a confident title: “Kamala Harris Will Lose.” Nair warned that Harris was already repeating Hillary Clinton’s mistakes from 2016, such as running more on personal narrative and empty rhetoric than on a clear…

A Reporter at Large Four daughters in the royal family were kept drugged and imprisoned for almost two decades. A physician who tried to free them speaks out for the first time. October 10, 2024 Illustration by Matt Rota Dwight Burdick, a private physician to the Saudi royal family, was on a…

Annals of Celebrity How the hip-hop star’s beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy turned a beach house in Malibu, designed by the Japanese master Tadao Ando, into a ruin. June 10, 2024 The house, in Malibu, carefully guided inhabitants through indoor and outdoor spaces. It was sold to Ye—formerly Kanye…

Greetings from Read Max HQ, directly beneath the dreaded Heat Dome. This week’s edition is a guest post about spooky Kindle A.I. slop from Leah Beckmann, an L.A.-based screenwriter and journalist and Chief Kindle Bullshit Correspondent for Read Max. But first, some self-promotion I was on TrueAnon…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. It was on the social-media platform some call X that I first encountered the slang term tea, an expression that originated in Black drag culture to mean “gossip” or “secret biographical information”—as in, “She…

In January, the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton gave a lecture to Are We Doomed?, a course at the University of Chicago. He spoke via Zoom about whether artificial intelligence poses an existential threat. He was cheerful and expansive and apparently certain that everything was going to go…

Personal History The constant discomfort of a genital injury creates a covenant of pain. It is impossible to think about anything else. October 4, 2021 Men are not supposed to talk about pain or disfigurement; they must laugh it off or remain stoic about what happened.Illustration by Javier Jaén On…

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Prince Williams/Wireimage, Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images The long-standing cold war between Drake and Kendrick Lamar came to a head over the weekend in a gauntlet of diss tracks and rapid responses that challenged both rap heavyweights’ character in…

Adjust Share I’m a father now. Please, hold your applause. As I write this, my son is fifteen days old, and I’m staring into the soft hurricane whorl of his hair, thinking thoughts as cute, pink, and insubstantial as his little toes. With every hour we spend together, I feel, not unpleasantly, my…

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Brave New World Dept. The company’s C.E.O. bet it all on a new kind of chip. Now that Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world, what will he do next? November 27, 2023 “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” a Wall Street analyst said.Illustration…

Lord knows that I will always lend a sympathetic ear to complaints that culture sucks now, and am generally of the opinion that phone is bad for kids, teens, and adults. But I found myself extremely unconvinced by the versions of these arguments I encountered in Kyle Chayka’s new book, Filterworld,…

Adjust Share At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the…

Can a fashion brand make aging cool? If any designer can do it, it’s Phoebe Philo. The beloved Brit launched her eponymous brand Monday, and the 150 looks that debuted on a bare-bones website suggest that a high-fashion designer has finally articulated how wonderful, powerful and interesting it is…

If you want to learn something about change there is no better place to look than evolution. Nothing represents a continuous and unrelenting cycle of order, disorder, and reorder on a grander scale. For long periods of time, Earth is relatively stable. Sweeping changes—warming, cooling, or an…

We are Jewish writers, artists, and activists who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. Israel and its defenders have long used this rhetorical tactic to shield Israel from accountability, dignify the US’s multibillion-dollar investment in…

Jack FiskCredit...Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times How Jack Fisk, the master production designer behind ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and many other films, brings the past to life. Jack FiskCredit...Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times By Published Oct. 5, 2023Updated Oct. 20, 2023…

Letter from San Francisco It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask. October 16, 2023 Since the pandemic, San Francisco’s downtown has seen an exodus of office workers and retailers amid battles over its housing…

Taylor Swift onstage during her Eras Tour at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif, on July 28.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times The Great Read Taylor Swift’s greatest gift is for telling her own story — better than any journalist could. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner gives it a shot…

Narges Mohammadi at her home in Tehran last year during a medical furlough from prison.Credit...Reihane Taravati The Saturday Profile Fighting for change has cost Narges Mohammadi her career, separated her from family and deprived her of liberty. But a jail cell has not succeeded in silencing her.…

Annals of Inquiry Becoming You Are you the same person you were when you were a child? October 3, 2022 People have strong, divergent opinions about the continuity of their own selves.Illustration by Juan Bernabeu I have few memories of being four—a fact I find disconcerting now that I’m the father…

The Talk of the Town The rituals of private-school teens on the Upper East Side. February 12, 1995 Photograph by Susan Meiselas / Magnum The tenth graders heading up Madison Avenue at 7:30 A.M. to the private high schools are freshly liberated from their dental braces, and their teeth look pearly…

Some of the young creative people revitalizing Manhattan’s Chinatown, including, from left, the coffee-shop co-owner Sandy Truong; the ice cream maker Jason Liu; the restaurateur and chef Sam Yoo; the fashion designer Sandy Liang; Truong’s business partner, Daniel Lam; the ceramics seller Mei Lum;…

Pharrell Williams’s first runway show as Louis Vuitton’s creative director of menswear was a grand display of brand power and showmanship, but the clothes lacked risk or special artistry. Photo: WWD via Getty Images In July 1999, a summer about as hot as this one, Christian Dior held its haute…

Photo: Bobby Doherty This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Over the past three years, all but two of Sasha’s core group of high-school friends have had children, and of her core group of college friends, half of…

Illustration: Hannah Buckman This article originally appeared in Brooding, a newsletter delivering deep thoughts on modern family life. Sign up here. Good news: America has officially entered its messy-house era. It’s been a few years coming, at least since we all accepted slovenliness into our…

Joe Casabona’s love affair with Wirecutter began in 2013, when the site recommended a pair of inductive winter gloves—the kind that let you interact with a touch screen while staying toasty. They work

It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thous

“Black Mirror,” the anthology series best known for dreaming up dystopian uses for near-future technology, took aim at its own network in the timeliest episode of its most recent season. Settling on h

Tim Wehage grew up in South Florida. At home, the TV was often tuned to Fox News, where he heard a lot of rants about liberal hypocrisy, but he didn’t consider himself political. After high school, he

You are getting married, and of course I have feelings about that. I think I might go watch some TV. I am just beginning to know your man. He’s from another country, a carpenter with quick eyes under

N early two centuries into the history of recorded sound, there is still no neat place for the producer in the mythology of pop music. He — as an ideal type, he is nearly always a he — is both a major