Longreads

I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once…

'Los tacoyos Carlos' – Hernandez and DeLuna looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. Photographs: Corpus Christi police department/DeLuna family/Hernandez family/Texas dept of…

"Before I lived in Paris, I didn’t really understand how one could have a love affair with a city..." Rebekkah Dilts on Paris:

"Later that first evening, I walked back to my new home after drinking wine with friends on the Champs de Mars, the park that surrounds the Eiffel Tour. I was in disbelief at what seemed extraordinary luck and fumbled to get the strange hunks of metal which were my very complicated French keys to open the front door of the apartment. I twisted and turned in vain, and then suddenly, a hand on the other side of the door swung it open. A handsome young man with intensely blue eyes and an inquisitive smile was standing at the threshold. He was one of my host parents’ two sons: 28, a naval engineer who loved to travel, rock climb, discuss history and eat ice cream. Over the course of the next year, we would live across the hall from one another and I would quickly fall in love with him.

"He has a lot to do with my loving Paris, but I think my love took shape in him as a common representation–when set free, it expanded into so much more. It was connected to all the components of the city and that time in my life, one of the most intense kinds of love I’ve ever known. I pressed myself into his delicate antiquity, which was that of Paris–I breathed it, and I wanted nothing more than for it to take me in."

1. The revolution that many commentators predicted when President Bush appointed two ultra-right-wing Supreme Court justices is proceeding with breathtaking impatience, and it is a revolution…

For the past half-century, the author of this book—now in his seventy-second year—has been on a relentless quest to discover the truth about reality. In 2000, the author completed a…

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk…

The wonderful site Longreads is collating people’s picks of the best long features of the year. Some say that the internet is triggering a renaissance for long-form writing and I very much…

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along…

Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free. —Kingsley Amis Pointed threats, they bluff with…