Longreads

1. Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin. Mac McClelland | Mother Jones | April 29, 2013 | 33 minutes (8,317 words) Deinstitutionalization moved thousands of mentally ill people out of hospitals and into…

by Dan Zak Last summer, in the dead of night, three peace activists penetrated the exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. A…

This week, the magazine publishes Robert A. Caro’s account of Lyndon Johnson’s accession to the Presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The article is taken from the…

Rick Turley molested children for nearly two decades. "It was easy," he said. (CBC News: the fifth estate) By Jason Felch and Kim Christensen, Los Angeles Times October 29,…

By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer In Print: Sunday, October 23, 2011 GREENWOOD Allie Mae Neal pushed through the screen door and found a shady spot on her porch where the summer sun didn't…

Wash the apple before you bite into it, because that's the way you were raised. Germs, pesticides, dirt, gunk, it doesn't matter—just wash it. The fingerprints, too, go down the drain with the rest. It's easy to forget that there are people who harvest our food. Sometimes, maybe, we are reminded of the seasons and the sun and the way of the apple tree, and if we multiply that by millions of apple trees, times millions of tomato plants, times all the other fruits and vegetables, we realize, holy potato chips, that's a lot of picking. Without 1 million people on the ground, on ladders, in bushes—armies of pickers swooping in like bees—all the tilling, planting, and fertilizing of America's $144 billion horticultural production is for naught. The fruit falls to the ground and rots.

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name. She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed. "The little one must make it," Leon Weinstein told his wife. "We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive." He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: "I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this."

Since September 11, 2001, we have finely honed our fear of the other. But the truth is, the overwhelming majority of our terrorism has always been homegrown. And it is times like these — times of anger and disaffection — when we turn on ourselves, and kill.

The tragicomic 1961 novel that sprang from Joseph Heller’s experience as a W.W. II bombardier mystified and offended many of the publishing professionals who saw it first. But thanks to a fledgling agent, Candida Donadio, and a young editor, Robert Gottlieb, it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. In an adaptation from his Heller biography, Tracy Daugherty recalls the tortured eight-year genesis of Catch-22 and its ultimate triumph.