Longreads

For an entry fee of $1.60, participants in the Barkley Marathons can come away with battered feet and legs and an exhaustion so deep that they might hallucinate. WARTBURG, Tenn. — On Fri

“How many women really make their voices heard? I can count them on my fingers”: Fawzia Koofi, MP for Badakhshan, who plans to stand as a presidential candidate in 2014. Photograph: Farzana Wahidy…

In prime time’s world of wish fulfillment, Freaks and Geeks was the opposite: 18 episodes that nailed the sad, hilarious unfairness of teen life. The cult following for its single, 1999 season—still…

One morning in early March, Michael Phelps emerged from the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car and stepped onto a Manhattan sidewalk busy with pedestrians. His chlorine-damaged hair was tousled and…

Mark Seliger/HBO Lena Dunham as Hannah Horvath in Girls There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham’s HBO television show Girls, and some of them have nothing to do with sex, but I’m…

One of McDonalds most divisive products, the McRib, made its return last week. For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short…

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I was calling Sleets because I wanted to talk to the man who invented the high five. I'd first read about him in 2007 in a press release from National High Five Day, a group that was trying to establish a holiday for convivial palm-slapping on the third Thursday in April. Apparently, Sleets had been reluctantly put in touch with the holiday's founders, and he explained that his father, Lamont Sleets Sr., served in Vietnam in the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry -- a unit nicknamed The Five. The men of The Five often gathered at the Sleets home when Lamont Jr. was a toddler. They'd blow through the front door doing their signature greeting: arm straight up, five fingers spread, grunting "Five." Lamont Jr. loved to jump up and slap his tiny palms against their larger ones. "Hi, Five!" he'd yell, unable to keep all their names straight.

If you don't live near any of the restaurants honored in last week's James Beard Awards, at least you can still read the great stories nominated in the journalism categories.