Happy Holidays!
We’ve reached the last lap of another monumental year of news, stress and phenomenal long form journalism. This newsletter is our final regular edition of 2019. Rather than curate our many contributors’ favorites this year, we decided to hand over this list to you. You’ll find the SLR’s most-read stories in 10 categories. You also helped curate our down-list contributors’ “Best of 2019” lists.
Over the holidays, our members will receive not one but two special editions—one with some of our late-year favorites and the other will contain a surprise we’re confident our members will enjoy. If you’d like to receive both of those Members’ Only editions and haven’t yet joined the SLR membership program, please do so—and please consider giving a membership to a family member or friend as a holiday gift! Your support helps defray the ever-growing costs of sending out this newsletter, hosting our website and podcast—and helps us pay for original work by freelance writers.
Speaking of SLR Originals, we have plans to continue growing our original storytelling operation and we’d love to hear from any writers out there as we put together our 2020 calendar. If you have a story you’d like to tell with us, please send us your pitch at editors@sundaylongread.com.
We’ll return on Sunday, January 5 with our first SLR of 2020 for all our subscribers.
We began this newsletter five years ago this month. Those first few beta editions dropped in the inboxes of about 1,000 people, our charter subscribers (nearly all of whom are still with us). Since then, we’ve grown exponentially, mostly through word of mouth but also through a multi-platform effort that includes a website, an SLR Originals program, social media feeds and a popular podcast of 40-plus episodes. It’s mind-boggling to think that a passion project that the two of us began on a whim has grown to include the invaluable contributions of 20 hard-working staffers and editors—and a highly esteemed group of nearly 100 contributing editors, all of whom rank among the very best journalists in the world (see the bottom of any newsletter for our staff box). We’d like to thank and salute them for their hard work and dedication this past year; each and every one of them help make The Sunday Long Read special and valued by our readers.
Enjoy the long reads and the holidays!
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