What are your favourite sites for long reads?
November 30, 2017 1:53 AM

My early-70s father has asked me for recommendations for more websites with "good reading". What are some of your favourite sites for reasonably long reads - not necessarily news, but about literature, science, art?

He really enjoys Arts & Letters, and reads the New Yorker and the Economist until he runs out of free articles. He described The Guardian as "a bit boring". He has broad interests.

I recommended Longreads to him. He finds both Twitter and Facebook baffling as methods of link gathering, and likes to go directly to a site and read. I'm thinking of getting him some subscriptions for Christmas to sites he enjoys, but would like to have some new places to send him in the meantime.
posted by fever-trees to Writing & Language (20 answers total) 89 users marked this as a favorite
Definitely Hazlitt
posted by churlishmeg at 2:48 AM on November 30, 2017


For life and biosciences Mosaic Science is generally good quality/varied. (Some of it is also available as a podcast)
posted by AFII at 2:55 AM on November 30, 2017


ALong with Arts & Letters, my staples are 3 Quarks Daily and Aeon. He might appreciated those—they feature longform in both the arts and the sciences.
posted by fire, water, earth, air at 4:02 AM on November 30, 2017


Longform
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:07 AM on November 30, 2017


Not exactly what was requested, but The Browser ("Writing worth Reading") serves up a half dozen links of interesting items daily. Not all of them are longform, but for a person with time and broad interests something of value will be encountered on a regular basis.
posted by 6thsense at 4:44 AM on November 30, 2017


Harper's and the Atlantic; both have print versions if he prefers reading on paper.
posted by stillmoving at 5:40 AM on November 30, 2017


Granta, The Offing, and Nautilus.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:46 AM on November 30, 2017


The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books are both partially paywalled, but both keep several articles from their most current edition freely available on their sites. Both do a fairly broad-ranging selection of politics, science, culture and art topics, usually with a new book or books as the hook for the essay to hang on.
posted by Diablevert at 6:35 AM on November 30, 2017


Sarah Weinman's mailing list (link to subscribe way down the page) gives you a monthly or so roundup on crime writing with an emphasis on literary merit and solid research. Links to lots of amazing pieces.
posted by BibiRose at 7:00 AM on November 30, 2017


I have been enjoying Aeon recently as well. Nonfiction mostly...
posted by jim in austin at 7:07 AM on November 30, 2017


Atavist Magazine.
posted by carabiner at 7:09 AM on November 30, 2017


Pacific Standard. Very leftist but if he reads the New Yorker that shouldn't be a problem.

Reverse Shot from the Museum of the Moving Image. I started reading them when The Dissolve closed up.

Paste Magazine which is all over the place topic-wise but is also a print publication like Pacific Standard.

The Verge's Longform section.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:34 AM on November 30, 2017


Sorry if this is obvious, but the New Yorker. I subscribe online-only.
posted by ferret branca at 7:42 AM on November 30, 2017


Longform.

It provides links to longer articles on websites around the internet on a wide range of subjects, much like Longreads. I have read some fascinating articles through there.

You could maybe set up a feedly account or something for him to track RSS feeds if he does want to keep them all in one place for easy access without having to click through to see if things update. It's something this old timer does as I too find trawling facebook & twitter for links an annoyance. You could just set it up & then send him the log on info.
posted by wwax at 8:07 AM on November 30, 2017


I do not subscribe to Texture, but I hear about it in podcast ads. But supposedly it’s a combined subscription to a whole bunch of different digital-edition magazines.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 8:38 AM on November 30, 2017


Longreads
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 10:39 AM on November 30, 2017


Definitely Brain Pickings.

And this is news, but NextDraft is a nice daily roundup by email, and does long reads on Fridays.
posted by snorkmaiden at 11:10 AM on November 30, 2017


I always enjoy Guernica, which has a nice mix of fiction, essays, interviews, and more--their website says they're "a non-profit magazine dedicated to global art and politics".
posted by stellaluna at 11:33 AM on November 30, 2017


The Texas Monthly does fantastic long-form reporting (scroll down to the Longreads section)
posted by rtha at 5:51 PM on November 30, 2017


Quanta is an excellent new magazine primarily around maths/physics/computer science. Probably a little heavy if you know little about those subjects, but very accessible to the amateur.
posted by solarion at 8:46 PM on December 3, 2017


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