Longreads

THERE ARE AMERICAN FLAGS on school windows, on cars, on porch swings; it is the year I bring Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving. We park in front of my mom’s house, my mom who has been waiting…

IN 1962, ON THE EVE of the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin famously wrote: This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which…

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she…

Wednesday, February 29, 20127:00pm until 9:00pmThe New Republic and Longreads present: “Uncovering the Cover Story,” featuring Rachel Morris, Eliza Gray, Alec MacGillis, Tim

The first lie: money. The second: property (and borders). The third: government. The fourth: story.Rome, Fourth century AD. Sprawling, ungovernable. Information—roads,…

Product Description Like all magazines and newspapers, The New Republic struggled, in the wake of September 11, 2001, to make sense of an event that had left the world a…

The Pale KingBy David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, 548 pp., $27.99) Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free WillBy…

On April 18, a transgender woman named Chrissy Lee Polis went to the women’s bathroom in a Baltimore County McDonald’s. When she came out, two teenage girls approached and spat in her face. Then they threw her to the floor and started kicking her in the head. As a crowd of customers watched, Polis tried to stand up, but the girls dragged her by her hair across the restaurant, ripping the earrings out of her ears. The last thing Polis remembers, before she had a seizure, was spitting blood on the restaurant door. The incident made national news—not because this sort of violence against transgender people is unusual, but because a McDonald’s employee recorded the beating on his cell phone and posted the video on YouTube.

It was one of the most perplexing crimes anyone could recall—ten churches in East Texas torched in six weeks. But even more mysterious was the fact that the arsonists were two local boys, raised as Baptists, who had met in Sunday school.