Longreads

Are you sitting down? Because this might come as a shock. Yes, it's true: Barack Obama is black. But the more shocking thing is that we have fooled ourselves into believing it doesn't matter. These…

Illustration by Katie Edwards COME BACK, DICK NIXON /// All is forgiven. And, oh, the Supreme Court says your crimes are now totally legal. (Sorry about all that!) In fact, this year we're going to…

 or most of the twentieth century, the hopes and frustrations of the global left were  stitched into the two red flags of communism and social democracy, political traditions marked…

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In 2000, Stuart Manley, the owner of Barter Books of Alnwick, Northumberland, found a folded poster at the bottom of a box of random books he'd bought at auction. (Barter Books is a very famous…

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"It’s taken me years to be able to discuss the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, partly because I needed to move past it and partly because I had forgotten the process of getting it built. I would not discuss the controversy surrounding its construction and it wasn’t until I saw the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision that I was able to remember that time in my life. But I wrote the body of this essay just as the memorial was being completed—in the fall of 1982. Then I put it away…until now."