Longreads

TRIGGER WARNING: This content deals with an account of sexual assault and may be triggering to some people. When you’re being raped time does not stop. Time does not speed up and jump ahead…

Writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Felicia H. Stewart and Dr. James Trussell have estimated that there are twenty-five thousand rape-related pregnancies each year in the…

Sergeant John Russell lay awake, wondering what his wife would do if he killed himself. He was so messed up that his first lieutenant removed the firing pin from his M16 assault rifle. Six weeks from…

Next week the city will celebrate the 43rd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which for many marked the beginning of the gay rights movement and the birth of one of the 20th century’s most…

New York’s biggest borough has reinvented itself as a postindustrial hot spot. In 1982, I moved with my husband and our two young children into a partly renovated brownstone in Park Slope,…

When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside before teaching on the Nanjing campus in the 1920s, so I knew a lot about the world of these girls’ grandmothers: a slow-moving world where traffic went by river steamer or canal boat, and the only wheeled vehicle most people ever saw was a wheelbarrow. Girls were shut up at home on reaching puberty with no further access to the outside world, and no voice in their own or their family’s affairs.