Longform
Longform is a web site dedicated to l-o-n-g nonfiction pieces from various magazines and journals. All of them are available in full-text for your reading pleasure.
I recently read a fascinating article on the crash of the Irish economy which included this excerpt. I love such details because they put the story in a starkly human context:
A few months after the spell was broken, the short-term parking-lot attendants at Dublin Airport noticed that their daily take had fallen. The lot appeared full; they couldn’t understand it. Then they noticed the cars never changed. They phoned the Dublin police, who in turn traced the cars to Polish construction workers, who had bought them with money borrowed from Irish banks. The migrant workers had ditched the cars and gone home. Rumor has it that a few months later the Bank of Ireland sent three collectors to Poland to see what they could get back, but they had no luck. The Poles were untraceable: but for their cars in the short-term parking lot, they might never have existed.
There are many intriguing pieces here, including: Film Director Paul Haggis rise to the top ranks of the Church of Scientology; or one on Travis the Menace (a chimp raised as a human child till it all ended in tragedy), and this one from 1945 on the Economics of a WWII POW camp. There are hundreds more from which to chose. Perhaps among these many there is something to pique your interest?
Here’s what Longform says about itself:
Longform.org posts new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web, that are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser.
We recommend enjoying them using read later services like Instapaper and Read It Later and feature buttons to save
articles with one click.
Launched in April 2010, Longform.org has been featured by Slate, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and others.
Happy l-o-n-g reading.
