About

Meet The Team

The goal of The Sunday Long Read newsletter is simple: To put the past week’s best journalism in your hands every Sunday morning—or, as a friend said, “to screw up my Sundays with far too much great stuff to read.” You can subscribe here.

Obviously, compiling these lists is a wildly subjective exercise. How do we choose what’s “best?” If we finish a long-read article and immediately want to recommend it to a friend, you’ll find it linked here. These stories brought us pleasure, made us laugh and think and, most of all, told us something we didn’t know. No “hot takes” here.

At this point you’re wondering – who are “we”?  Well, these are our founders:

Ruth Ann Harnisch

Now, through The Harnisch Foundation and her personal account (whence cometh the SLR sponsorship money), she invests in leaders and creative communities working for a more equal and inclusive world. She has a heart for the underpaid journalist, as her first on-camera job paid so little she qualified for (what was then known as) food stamps. When she pointed this out to the GM, he gave her a raise that put her one dollar over the threshold for public assistance.

“When I earned my living as a journalist, I was a combo platter of poor and broke. Currently I am neither. Supporting a fair and free press is a philanthropic priority, supporting good content (whether or not it’s “fair”) is a personal passion. I’m glad to help pay journalists for their work. And I like that the SLR is a new clubhouse for journalism’s cool kids,” she told our Don Van Natta Jr.

Contributor in memoriam

Lyra McKee

Lyra McKee (1990-2019) was a journalist from Northern Ireland, a Sunday Long Read contributing editor, and the author of two books (one published posthumously), Angels with Blue Faces, and Lost, Found, Remembered. Her life’s work was unraveling and documenting the aftermath of the Troubles and she was killed in April 2019 while covering republican rioting in the city of Derry. The spring she died, she published her final story, The girl who chased frogs, with The SLR.

Susan McKay told the story of Lyra’s incredible life and tragic death in The New Yorker in July 2019.