The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds.
Longtime Reader columnist Michael Miner wrote about the piece in 2011 for the paper’s 40th-anniversary dive into its past, calling it “the article that would forever define [the Reader].” The paper does have a history of extremely long cover stories, and I’ve heard it used to be a running joke that no one ever finished reading them. It wasn’t even the longest article ever published in the Reader: in the 1990s there were several essays by Lee Sandlin that each came to more than 30,000 words in length.
