For me, the archive seems by far the most valuable part of longform.org. I'd guess no-one has even approximately read most of the best articles they recommended in the past.
This is now the chance to get to them and re-read the best ones, without being distracted by new things.
It's a bunch of links to Wired and GQ. Maybe they wouldn't have needed to shut down if only Yahoo hadn't killed del.icio.us which used to be the social media platform for bookmarks. I'm still crying on the inside over that.
Did Yahoo kill Delicious? They bought it, didn't do much with it, and sold it to YouTube's founders.
But would it have survived as anything more than a personal bookmark organiser (ie pinboard) anyway?
The killer feature of delicious was popular links, which has since been used as the main structure for forums such as Digg (originally), Reddit, and Hacker News. Curated feeds on Twitter/FB/etc also work to share popular links.
This is now the chance to get to them and re-read the best ones, without being distracted by new things.