Longreads

Lipreading, which makes one sense do the work of another, is a skill daunting to describe. Rachel Kolb, '12, deaf since birth, shares its mysteries. I am sitting in my office during a summer…

TALES FROM THE WORLD BEFORE YESTERDAY In Guns, Germs, and Steel, I set out to explain why, after the end of the last Ice Age, the most powerful and technologically advanced societies developed…

A call for feminists to not forget their labor roots:

"While we debate the travails of some of the world’s most privileged women, most women are up against the wall. According to the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, women make up just under half of the national workforce, but about 60 percent of the minimum-wage workforce and 73 percent of tipped workers. In the New York area, a full 95 percent of domestic workers are female. Female-dominated sectors such as retail sales, food service, and home health care are some of the fastest-growing fields in the new economy, and even in those fields, women earn less; women in the restaurant industry earn 83 cents to a man’s dollar.

"This is where most women spend their time, not atop the Googleplex. This is where feminists should be spending their time, too."

From hipster racism to Honey Boo Boo, and Sarah Phillips to John McAfee, it's been quite a year. For your viewing pleasure, here is a look back at a year in Gawker Media longreads. The Year In Kotaku…

For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses…

STORY HIGHLIGHTS Studies have shown people generally find women's voices more pleasing than men's Scholar: "It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice" In…