Longreads
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“The Sheer Fun of Researching” Cults
Sociologist Susan Palmer studies new religious movements—“cults,” as the rest of us might call them—not out of morbid fascination or a desire to catalog their evils, but because she considers them “beautiful life forms, mysterious and pulsating with charisma.” Of…
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Art and Money and Muppets
Because it taught children across the country, Henson became a household name, and through Sesame Street toys, Henson became a millionaire….However, licensing toys, to Henson, felt like selling out. The cage-match-to-the-death between art and business can be brutal, but Muppet-master Jim Henson…
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“Fear and Anxiety…Link All of Us Across the Centuries”
An excerpt from Joel F. Harrington’s book The Faithful Executioners is a featured Longreads Members Pick and well worth a few minutes of your time. Starting with a creative nonfictional account of an executioner in Germany in the 1500s, the piece…
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Happy Birthday, Longreads!
Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday. Check out their rundown of frequent #longreads contributors and recommendations. And then do some reading to celebrate!
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Welcome to the Clone Zone
Via Longreads, a Carl Zimmer story on his National Geographic blog about bringing lost species back from extinction. Dinosaurs are probably out of the question because their remains are too old to contain usable DNA, but according to “an expert on mammoth DNA at McMaster…
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I Don’t See You
“I Don’t See You,” Tim N. Taylor’s essay on the racism he witnessed while coming of age in Waterloo, Iowa, made The Top 5 Longreads of the Week. Thanks, Longreads!
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Sugar Love
Writer Logan Sachon included Sugar’s “The Truth that lives there” in her top five longreads of 2011. Hooray! “I’m a Sugar devotee; her columns have been such a help to me during a rough year. This one, in which five…
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A History of Gun Control
One of the Longreads selections from the past week is this article in the Atlantic on gun control and the ambiguity of the second amendment’s language. This story doesn’t just divide into a two-sided argument over the right to bear…