Longreads

The CIA director revealed only a few details about the 21-year-old woman, a secretary among spies. In the agency’s annual memorial service for employees killed on the job, then-director Leon…

If you want to start a peaceful revolution, the person to call is a Serb with a passion for Tolkien. Srdja Popovic is advising rebels in 40 countries. Emma Williams watches him at work and at home...…

Survivors of March 26, 1987, gather at the Chi O house, January 2012. Back row, from left: Katie Rose Guyton, Mary Schiele Daniels Scanlon, Mary Helen Sandifer Thomas, Shannon Moore Dye, Snowe Wilks…

View full sizeThomas Boyd/The OregonianThirty-nine years later, retired teacher James Atteberry received an apology from an old student. Atteberry is now living in Astoria and says rarely a week goes…

by Belle Boggs Published in the March/April 2012 issue of Orion magazine Art: Lorna Stevens IT’S SPRING WHEN I REALIZE that I may never have children, and around that time the thirteen-year…

What the riots wrought. Photograph Courtesy of Dark Servier In 1992, when I was eleven years old, I saw a Korean man on TV for the first time. He resembled the immigrants my family knew from church,…

When the baby cried, I knew it wasn't gonna die. They had just pulled my son out of my wife and whisked him over to one of those fancy hotel pans that you put newborns in, and there was a brief…

In the summer of 1941, delegates at the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers’ convention in Cleveland, Ohio, listened to a keynote address from an astrologer named Louis de Wohl. The…

[Public Interest] A plague of sexual violence in Indian country:

My second day on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas, an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent a memo to all its law-enforcement employees forbidding them to talk to me. One of those officers working the jail at Fort Yates, North Dakota, walked into a tribal judge’s office, and throwing the memo down, said, “Can you believe this shit?” Since I was on the reservation to write about crime—sexual assault and rape, in particular, and how often these crimes go unreported when they take place on tribal land—I had naturally hoped to speak to the police. But after politely declining to be interviewed, Standing Rock’s police chief, Michael Hayes, referred me to Elmer Four Dance, who, as the BIA’s special agent in charge of District 1—which serves fifty-two tribes in the states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa—was the man who had issued the memo from his office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, 150 miles away.