About

Feature Length is a daily digest of longform journalism — the kind of features, investigations, profiles, and essays that used to arrive in print magazines, and mostly still begin there. It is built in open homage to Longform.org, which recommended more than ten thousand pieces of non-fiction between April 2010 and January 2022 and is much missed.

The bar

Like Longform, this site has rules. A pick must be non-fiction; it must be a piece of writing rather than a video, a recap, a review, an interview, or the day’s news; and it must be long — at least 10 minutes of reading, measured by actually counting the words of the article (about 2,300 of them, at 230 words a minute). New pieces are drawn from roughly two dozen magazines and newsrooms with a record of publishing that kind of work, and most days one classic — a piece that has aged into the canon — is added alongside them.

How it works

Once a day, a small robot editor reads the publications’ feeds, fetches each candidate article, measures it, and throws out everything that isn’t a feature. Each survivor gets a one-sentence note on what the piece is about — written to be spoiler-free, in the old Longform house style — plus a short excerpt from its opening, the estimated reading time, and a link. That’s the whole product. Nothing is republished here: every pick links to, and belongs to, its original publisher.

Colophon

The site runs entirely on Netlify — a scheduled function fetches and measures the day’s candidates, the picks live in Netlify Blobs, and pages render from there at the edge. No database, no framework, no tracking; the only script in your browser is the day/night switch. Type is set in Newsreader and Inter. Subscribe by RSS.