Well-written, long form articles are increasingly difficult to find in this day & age of Twitter-sized sound bites, even off the internet. It's nice to see that a publication billed as a sci/tech magazine is taking the time and effort to write them.
"Give Me Something to Read" is a pretty good online aggregator: http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ .
http://www.spiegel.de/international/
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics
Spiegel International I believe has the best coverage of European affairs and The Atlantic the best of US affairs. The New Yorker will, on occasion, have bar none the best investigative journalism around, but at the cost of the coverage being too spotty to use as a primary news source. Recently Spiegel International has mostly become that for me. (I live in Germany, and actually the fact that they only publish 3-4 articles per day in English I find quite nice since it tends to reduce the noise and just publish the most important stuff – usually in long-ish format.)
An interesting tidbit on Spiegel – despite being (in print format) a German language magazine, if I remember correctly, the only news magazines with larger circulation in the world are Time, Newsweek and The Economist and it reportedly has the largest fact-checking department in the world.
It's a weekly, and I find 2/4 issues will have nothing to read, 1/4 something decent, and 1/4 so outstanding I literally want to dance for happiness. The two I enjoyed most recently were:
1) An article on Fukushima about how the japanese government structured incentives for nuclear power safety and proliferation. 2) An article on the NSA's warrantless wiretapping whistleblower Thomas Drake (a spectacular example of terrible management's attempt to organize a software project)
Unfortunately, those articles aren't easy to search up because they're buried in my iPad somewhere. Here is a link to a wired story about #2, although it makes the story sound less interesting. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/new-yorker-on-thoma...
It also starts with an intriguing hook but ends like a damp squid. I looked at the bottom thinking "oh great I have another three more pages to endure before finding out why the rod was there" and then realised that was it.
I suppose they didn't want to hold off on publishing it for another several months until the investigators in Leipzig came to a conclusion as to its origin and reason for being in that container.
I actually found that part pretty interesting, but admittedly it depends on what you already know and what you were hoping to get out of this article. To me, the radiation-disposal incident served as a nice set-up to explain the interlocking networks of containerized shipping and security, which aren't normally on my radar (I know all that exists, I just know nothing about it). I'll admit that if you approach it as a pure whodunnit, it's got a ton of padding and could be summarized in a paragraph or two.
I'll get voted down for this but what the hell
Apparently the guy who wrote it wants to be the next James Joyce but couldn't get his crap published, so now he has to work as a journalist to make a living and experiments with nonlinear reporting...
Nook Color + CM7.1 + InstaFetch Pro + Instapaper + Longreads.
The Longreads website integrates with instapaper, and the instafetch client will cache articles to the nook, so I don't have to be online to read. I haven't gotten around to playing with it, but I'm sure iPad + instapaper client would work well
Web application: if anyone is looking for a Web application idea, how about something like readability that can spit out web pages as PDF files formatted to A6 with no margin and a choice of font size? Ideal for book readers.
Calibre can pull from news sites and format to epub then donwload to your ebook readr IITC