Longreads

Ignore the tedious pundits bloviating about shrunken attention spans. There has never been a better time to immerse yourself in long, deep, rich science reporting. Here’s a list of my 12 top…

The wonderful site Longreads is collating people’s picks of the best long features of the year. Some say that the internet is triggering a renaissance for long-form writing and I very much…

GQ’s Sean Fennessey: My Top Longreads of 2011 Sean Fennessey is the editor of GQ.com. (See more stories on his Longreads page.) I’ll try to follow a few guidelines for the sake of…

Earlier this month, seven generations of past and present pupils gathered to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Summerhill, our progressive, controversial alma mater. The school was set up, in a…

Mother Jones guest blogger Mark Armstrong is the founder of Longreads, a site devoted to uncovering the best long-form nonfiction articles available online. And what better…

(Fiction) One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks. I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out after two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy.

That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide. And it's not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There's a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn't true.

A hundred years ago, on 21 August 1911, an Italian painter and decorator slipped from the cupboard in the Louvre where he had been hiding all night, stepped up to the Mona Lisa, freed her from…