Longreads

One of the central paradoxes of life in France is that for all the French preen themselves as the most civilised nation on Earth, they are also quickly prone to collapse into self-lacerating fits of…

Whenever modern civilisations contemplate their own mortality, there is one ghost that will invariably rise up from its grave to haunt their imaginings. In February 1776, a few months after the…

On April 18, a transgenderwoman named Chrissy Lee Polis went to the womens bathroom in a Baltimore County McDonalds. When she came out, two teenage girls approached and spat in her face. Then they…

"That scum!" Boris Yeltsin fumed. "It's a coup. We can't let them get away with it." It was the morning of Aug. 19, 1991, and the Russian president was standing at the door of his dacha in Arkhangelskoe, a compound of small country houses outside Moscow where the top Russian government officials lived. I had raced over from my own house nearby, after a friend called from Moscow, frantic and nearly hysterical, insisting that I turn on the radio. There had been a coup; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been removed from power.