Longreads

Just after midnight on April 25th, a Syrian medical technician who calls himself Majid Daraya was sitting at home, in the city of Daraya, five miles from the outskirts of Damascus, when he heard an…

Jemile Weeks, the Oakland A's second baseman, has the hips of a 15-year-old girl and a puny batting average, but he makes a sweet pivot on the double play and he's a travel-size terror on the base…

Travel By Aaron Lake Smith, Photos by Nadia Shira Cohen A young man angrily kicks one of the many piles of trash that are strewn about Oniontown. There are certain places that, by their very nature,…

Richard and Linda Thompson (1982, NYC) - “This was one of the most intense photo shoots I’d ever...

Remembrances of the first year of high school, and advice for getting through your own, from some of our favorite grown-ups. Joss Whedon: "Rule One: DON’T BE LIKE THEM. I knew I was going to be mocked as an outsider and a weirdo, so I established my weird cred before anyone had time to get their mock on. Our study area was a great room ringed by tiny wooden cubicles (called 'toys,' in both the plural and the singular—Know Your Notions!), about 50 to a room. On the first day of term I posted a notice outside my toys that was pure nonsense, a portentous abstraction that conveyed the simple message that ridiculing me would not only be weak and redundant, but might actually please me in some unseemly way. As boy after boy read the notice and either laughed or puzzled, I could feel a small patch of safe turf firm up under my feet."

As anyone sold by the Sea-Monkey ads could tell you, it was hard to say exactly where von Braunhut was walking on the terrain between truth, embellishment and con. That was his gift. He convinced us to look at the jazz hands and lose sight of the footwork. Von Braunhut’s inventions were not quite what they seemed to be. Neither was he.

At a time when unions are floundering and popular sentiment toward organized labor is at an all-time low of 45 percent, one workers’ organization is thriving. The Freelancers’ Union, a…