Essays

Pieces that take their time to make a point.

Sites

• Read Something Great (Website) — “timeless articles from the belly of the internet”, hand-curated and served five at a time, sorted into categories like Living Better and Business & Tech with each piece’s author and reading time shown up front; a Change My Reads button deals a fresh five, and separate tabs hold shorter Snippets and the curator’s own corner.

Longreads (Website) — fifteen years of curating the best long-form journalism and personal essays on the web, alongside features it commissions itself; Editors' Picks, a weekly Top 5, Best of lists and a Story Recommender for when you don't know what you want to read next.

• Reading Lists (Website) — Longreads’ recurring format, bundling five to nine stories around one specific throughline: ice cream’s cultural pull, constructed languages, why inconvenience can be meaningful, multigenerational caregiving. Ordinary longform pieces gain a second life once someone finds the connective tissue between them.

Articles

• The Wisdom Project (Article) — Merlin Mann’s several-hundred-line list of things he had to learn himself, mixing the mundane (“buy slightly larger shoes”, “tip more”) with the load-bearing (“whenever you’re not sure what to say, either say nothing, or ask a question”), and framed throughout as personal sensibility rather than instruction: “it’s only advice for you because it had to be advice for me.”
• The Brand Age (Article) — Paul Graham on what happens when technology erases the substantive differences between products: using the Swiss watch industry’s shift from engineering to branding after quartz, he argues that “brand is what’s left when the differences disappear.”
• The Adults Don’t Exist (Article) — George Mack on “Adult Syndrome”: there are no grown-ups, only flawed former children improvising, a case he makes through Mozart’s debts, Napoleon’s leeches, and Reagan’s horoscopes. The payoff is a definition of high agency — “you never become your older wiser self, you create your older wiser self.”

Videos

• The Violent Desire to Change (Video) — Final Somow’s essay on the ache to reinvent yourself, told through the anime and manga that keep circling the theme.