Longreads

Listen to David Samuels discuss this story and more on the Longform podcast. In a memoir published in 1954 in the Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society, the eminent American ornithologist…

In 1941, a rose killed a policeman. Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman in Oxford, England, was pruning his roses one fall day when a thorn scratched him at the corner of his mouth. The slight…

[Note for TomDispatch Readers:  As many of you know, without the Nation Institute, a no-name listserv would never have become TomDispatch -- and that splendid outfit has supported this site ever…

Near the end of an adventurous life spent wandering the fortress towns of central Europe, clashing with blood-letters and other tradition-bound healers of the day, the irascible sixteenth-century…

The unsolved civil rights murder of Clifton Walker: On February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed by a white mob on his drive home from the late shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez,…

The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is…

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Remembrances of the first year of high school, and advice for getting through your own, from some of our favorite grown-ups. Joss Whedon: "Rule One: DON’T BE LIKE THEM. I knew I was going to be mocked as an outsider and a weirdo, so I established my weird cred before anyone had time to get their mock on. Our study area was a great room ringed by tiny wooden cubicles (called 'toys,' in both the plural and the singular—Know Your Notions!), about 50 to a room. On the first day of term I posted a notice outside my toys that was pure nonsense, a portentous abstraction that conveyed the simple message that ridiculing me would not only be weak and redundant, but might actually please me in some unseemly way. As boy after boy read the notice and either laughed or puzzled, I could feel a small patch of safe turf firm up under my feet."

Last week, I was in Atlanta for a day. I went directly from the airport to meet Congressman John Lewis at the King Center, where he and I were to be filmed for a program that Henry Lewis…