David Wolf
@davidedgarwolf
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I regret to announce that this is a 'professional news' tweet. However, I am really happy to announce that I am the new editor of @gdnlongread. I will continue to sit in the same chair and do similar things, but with an increased level of authoritarian menace.
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If you are attempting a devastating takedown of a book of essays, it is very, very important not to include the sentence "Since Montaigne, the best essays have been, as the French word suggests, trials, attempts.".
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Big fan of this question from the Eton Scholarship Exam in 1943
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We've been hoping to do this for years, so I'm really excited to say the first issue of The Guardian Long Read Magazine – ft 10 of our best pieces from this year, with incredible design by @chrisclarkecc & Bruno Haward – is finally here! . Find out more:
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This is huge: Yanis Varoufakis's wife may be the Greek woman with a thirst for knowledge in 'Common People' by Pulp http://t.co/C80ZIfzMjS.
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“If Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave that room.”
Clinton is a fox who knows many things you can fact check. Trump is a hedgehog who knows one very big thing: We need change.
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In a world of cringing embarrassment about the value of the humanities, it's a tonic to read Iris Murdoch unashamedly saying that nothing matters more (even if she may be somewhat overstating it)
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RIP Bob Silvers. I think of this quote from him every day
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Just how bad are things getting under Modi? "In its 72 years as a free country, India has never faced a more serious crisis.". This is an incredible, wide-ranging piece by @Samanth_S about India's slide into fascism .
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This piece by @scottsayare is possibly the most gripping @gdnlongread we've published this year
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This is one of the best things we've published this year.
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"To come forward as a witness in India is an act of extreme bravery, possibly madness, because witnesses are themselves on trial.". This @gdnlongread by @rahulabhatia is extraordinary. One of the best things I've read on India today
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"That was when I understood the method of the camps: not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear. So slowly that no one would notice.". Today's @gdnlongread .
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"This is the story of how global financial meltdown was averted by central banks taking decisions that, just a month earlier, they would have dismissed as utterly impossible.". Brilliant new @gdnlongread by @adam_tooze .
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"For Modi, he is what Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were for George W Bush – the muscle as well as the brain – rolled into one.". Today's @gdnlongread by Atul Dev is an electrifying profile of India's second-most powerful man, Amit Shah.
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A few years ago, there was a crackdown on child labour in the Indian sandstone industry. Then businesses found a workaround: rather than bringing the children to the mines, they brought the mines to the children. Today's @gdnlongread by @RomitaSaluja .
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This is a really incredible piece by @shaunwalker7 –about his grandfather, a disappearing religion, and his time on a tour to India modelled on Birthright Israel, but for Zoroastrians
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If you would like to hear me talking about editing for an hour, then this @takenotesalways episode is one for you
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(this is what an actually devastating takedown looks like .
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Astonishing fact in this piece: the CIA's 'expert' on Saddam Hussein could not speak Arabic
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Selling Kissinger in China, doing drugs with Lou Reed, singing Homer to Muhammad Ali, wooing Borges’s widow, taking tips from the CIA, slagging off half the industry. Today’s @gdnlongread is the Andrew Wylie profile to end all Andrew Wylie profiles
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The best of @gdnlongread in 2023. Every one of these pieces is a banger. Please spread far and wide!
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Here are some fun @gdnlongread pieces – about oil rigs, art fraud, lily theft and Edward Luttwak – if you are looking to avoid the news .
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"Critics of #MeToo have said 'Grow up, this is real life'. This is a very strange belief: that the epitome of maturity and personal strength is the resigned acceptance that the world cannot be better than it is." Must-read by @MoiraDonegan
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I love this story of Flaubert itching for 16 years to change a single word in Madame Bovary. (He eventually got his way.)
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In 2020, one of the most famous journalists in the Netherlands was invited to participate in the biggest criminal trial in recent Dutch history. Less than 18 months later, he was dead. Who killed him, & why?. Incredibly gripping @gdnlongread by @jl142.
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(to be clear, because it is, by now, the single most clichéd and boring sentence you can write in a piece about essays, and it isn't even true.).
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A writer just filed the second draft of their piece. I haven't read it yet but Gmail auto-responses suggest it's a banger
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'When Williams says "a library should be a safe space for everyone", he means it. Even the drunk person who just wants to put their head down on the table, or the addict coming down. "They need to feel safe too," he said. Today's @gdnlongread by @aidae.
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If you only read one piece about Germany's biggest tabloid, make it this one by Thomas Meaney
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"A civilisation that could accommodate a business like this was a civilisation that had in some sense already collapsed". Today's @gdnlongread is an extract from @mrkocnnll's new book Notes From An Apocalypse, which is an actual masterpiece.
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I was an acceptable headline format. Then coronavirus happened.
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I'm not sure I've ever read anything as vivid and comprehensive on UK prisons as this devastating @gdnlongread by Isobel Thompson on the unravelling of Nottingham Prison. The product of 18 months of reporting & more than 60 interviews. Make time for this.
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For this piece @trillingual spoke with 40+ ppl – from former home secretaries to civil servants & frontline workers – to give a complete picture of a totally broken institution. Full of jaw-dropping quotes & details. Can't recommend highly enough.
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"While much has changed in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations.". Today's @gdnlongread by Rashid Khalidi .
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Attenborough was born 17 days after the Queen, the year before TV was invented. He's seen more of the natural world than anyone who has ever lived – and he's possibly the most popular person on the planet. Here's @patrick_barkham's profile of the big man
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If I saw this review of a non-fiction book I had published, I would not think 'oh yeah, that's one to slap on the paperback'
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🎉🎉🎉.
5 years ago today we published our first .@gdnlongread! Since then, we've published more than 750 pieces. You can find all of them here If you like what we do, please spread the word or consider supporting the Guardian's journalism
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“They were war heroes, really. It all makes what happened next so tragic, and such a tremendous betrayal.”. This @gdnlongread by @danhancox is unbelievably powerful and moving. One of the best things we've published this year
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Tfw you’ve absolutely had it with Paul Auster - but you’re also really digging the water-related metaphor you’ve come up with
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This would be a career-ender for a British politician
France has a new president who is able to recite the opening sequence of Molière's "Misanthrope" by heart
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This is a story we've been pursuing for @gdnlongread for 6 years. This season, it finally came together. @_WilliamRalston's unprecedented glimpse inside the world of Premier League referees .
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Today's @gdnlongread by @samanth_s contains many astonishing details. Here's one: . "In 2017, when United Airlines reduced the weight of its paper in its inflight magazine, it saved nearly 770,000 litres of fuel a year – or $290,000 in costs.".
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“The story of Golden Dawn is the closest we’ve yet come to seeing fascism in its most extreme form regain a foothold in European politics this century.”. Do not miss this definitive, 7-years-in-the-making piece by @trillingual .
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What a huge loss Ian Jack is. He was one of those writers who could take subjects that seem dull and exhausted, subjects that have been written about a million times, and make you see them anew. His pieces were genuinely deep, but so delightful and free of self-seriousness.
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“How can you even expect villagers to give a free and informed consent in such compromised situations?”. A giant coal company, a tiny village, and the 'social engineering of extraction'. Today's @gdnlongread is a brilliant piece of reporting by @Ankur_pali
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"Levy’s women are neither 'feisty' and 'gutsy' – those tiresome cliches – nor are they self-saboteurs, who put themselves down to ingratiate themselves with the reader. They are real & offer an example of how to live well". Today's @gdnlongread by @chiggi
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Today's @gdnlongread by @SophieElmhirst – about a couple who fell in love in a care home – is insanely good. On ageing, the passage of time, love, death, all the big stuff. Reminds me of Alan Bennett, John Berger, Larissa MacFarquhar – the greats!.
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Even if you've read a shitload about the French election, this is really worth reading
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"People in the sandwich industry talk about seminal new combinations – Pret’s crayfish and rocket; M&S’s Wensleydale and carrot chutney – like Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night Dream, or Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet."
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So much to love in this piece: the mind-bending facts (there are currently 23bn broiler chickens on earth), the deep history of the planet, how geology changed the way humans conceived of themselves, the petty squabbles between academics
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Today's @gdnlongread by @jamiemartin2 is one of those invaluable pieces that brings a whole bunch of dimly understood news stories into sharp focus. If you only read one thing on the global debt crisis, make it this
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This short piece by @AntonJaegermm is one of the most insightful things I've read this year, and v pertinent to the Rwanda story
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"One night after he got home, he sparked a joint in his bedroom, and his mother kicked him out. He was 14. At first homelessness almost felt akin to maturity. It was now up to him to figure the world out by himself.". Today's @gdnlongread by @Ffranciscodgf
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So sad to hear about Clive James. This piece, about the worst sentence of all time, is one of my favourites and I think about it most days when editing
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You will never think about nuclear power in the same way again after reading this stunning piece by @samanth_s
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Today's @gdnlongread by @samirashackle about how a piece of dry academic research, commissioned by the Cambridge college Gonville & Caius, sparked a huge falling out at the college – and absurd claims of 'wokery gone mad' in national newspapers
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"The 'wood-wide-web' narrative gives us the trees for our times: anti-capitalist, feminist and extremely online." . Today's @gdnlongread by Daniel Immerwahr
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Here's the start of his piece about Ken Livingstone. So much literary skill, knowledge and thinking packed into three paragraphs. No one else could have written it.
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Farewell to the brilliant @guardiancities, which has published consistently fascinating stuff for the past 6 years
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18 months in the making, today's @gdnlongread is an incredibly deeply reported piece by @loisbeckett about racism in romance publishing, which also doubles as a brilliant overview of the whole world of romance novels. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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British media's obsession with the bust of Churchill in the Oval Office is profoundly embarrassing
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"Throughout his career Albini, perhaps more than anyone else, attempted to embody the righteous ideological tenets that once made punk rock feel like a true alternative to the tired mainstream."
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"Knotweed may be temporarily subdued – uprooted, mowed down, defoliated – and it can be controlled with poison, but it cannot easily be slain. This is a plant that survives hot lava flows.". Today's sensational @gdnlongread by @samanth_s
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This piece by @simuchigudu about growing up in Zimbabwe & Britain, and later studying at Oxford, beautifully shows the ironies of the relationship between colonisers & colonised. Also demolishes the idea that Rhodes Must Fall is ‘erasing history’ .
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A sign of how shit things are: no one is talking about how shit the weather is.
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So much amazing stuff in this @stephenburanyi piece, inc:.- Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to AC.- The US uses as much electricity for AC each year as the UK uses in total.- Surprise cameo from Mary McCarthy.
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A tale for our times, ft. a Chinese billionaire, many angry golfers, the Queen’s former physician, General Pinochet and the bass guitarist for Yes. Today's @gdnlongread by @samanth_s
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If you want to understand why the Rwanda deportation scheme failed, this @gdnlongread by @trillingual is the piece to read
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"Throughout the nearly two years I spent following her, I never heard Wakil describe any of them as terrorists. These were men she had taken care of as they grew up." This @gdnlongread by @chikaoduah is unlike any other piece I've read on Boko Haram.
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I have no interest in wine, but this piece is unbelievably fascinating
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To celebrate the launch of the new Guardian Long Read magazine – – I had a fun chat with @SophieElmhirst and @samanth_s about how they write their brilliant pieces
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In 1984, Leni Riefenstahl sued a German filmmaker for defamation. The filmmaker dedicated the rest of her life to proving Riefenstahl's complicity in Nazi crimes. This @gdnlongread by @connollyberlin – 6 years in the making – is amazing.
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“Ooh, I’ll be an African name. What was Lake Victoria before it was Victoria? That will be my name. Victoria, but not colonial.”. This piece by Carey Baraka, about Kenyan Ivy League graduates returning home for an EDM festival, is incredible.
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An incredible piece by @tomlamont – many years in the making – about exams, school, growing up, education, politics, algorithms, and what it's like to do everything right and still find yourself screwed by a brutally unfair system.
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Today’s @gdnlongread is a perfect piece by @tomlamont - warm, intimate and sad, filled with beautiful sentences and loving attention to the things and people being described.
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This is really interesting. @Bankfieldbecky spent 2 years interviewing MPs about climate change. In return for anonymity, they told her what they actually thought. Here's what she found
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Here is @holly_watt's meticulously reported piece on the epic shitshow behind the most expensive power station of all time
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What's it like to stow away in the underbelly of a plane? “You become part of the noise. It made me shake. I put some cotton wool in my ears, but it didn’t work. When you become the noise, it’s beyond comprehension.”. New @gdnlongread by @thedalstonyears
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Not a good thing to include on proof copies of books. But quite amusing. http://t.co/ZscMaubF.
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