Longreads

Last year I saw a therapist who tried to teach me how to talk really loudly. She made me stand up and say my name with abandon, “so the plants on the porch can hear!” I was beginning a teaching job…

(Art by spoon+fork.) I used to love fishing.  I never got so deep into it that I would make my own flies or drift live bait in the water.  I was a sandworms-and-frozen-spearing kinda kid.…

Jessica Winter published: August 06, 2002 When Marc Jurnove first visited the Long Island Game Farm Park and Zoo in the spring of 1995, he found Barney, a chimpanzee,…

When Emanuel Haldeman-Julius drowned in his backyard swimming pool, on July 31, 1951, he was popularly regarded as a has-been, even in his adopted hometown of Girard, Kansas. Denounced as a communist in national newspapers and investigated by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, he had recently lost a federal tax evasion lawsuit and was facing time in jail. Amid the cold war atmosphere of the time, schoolchildren around Girard whispered that Haldeman-Julius had actually been assassinated for being a Soviet spy; adults speculated that his death was a suicide—though the only note he left behind contained a silly joke meant for his wife.

"Today what I do is—I do this every night we play—I have a little quiet moment where I picture some guy having a fight with his girlfriend, getting into his car—the battery’s dead—then he gets to the parking lot and it’s full. Meets up with his friends. Comes into the show. I try to picture this one person having their own experience, and I picture them way in the back of the room. And I try to remember how insignificant my experience is, and how people’s experiences with music are their own thing."

James Curtis was part of the first generation of reporters to work what we now think of as the crime beat. Of course, criminal proceedings had always held a fascination for readers: ever since the 1600s there’d been a roaring market in broadsheets that relished the details of a crime and a malefactor’s bloody end, usually with a crude accompanying woodcut showing them dangling from a gallows.