The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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1. Ghosts of Greenwood

Nikole Hannah-Jones | ProPublica | July 8, 2014 | 27 minutes (6,891 words) words)

“Freedom Summer baptized Mississippi as part of the nation,” Moses said. “It was no longer a rule unto itself.” On Mississippi, race and civil rights—then and now.

2. Lance Armstrong in Purgatory: The After-Life

John H. Richardson | Esquire | July 8, 2014 | 33 minutes (6,891 words) words)

What happens to the great work a man has done, after a great fall.

3. Anxiety, Depression and OCD: Treating the Animals Inside America’s Zoos

Alex Halberstadt | The New York Times | July 9, 2014 | 27 minutes (6,821 words)

Halberstadt meets Dr. Vint Virga and explores the scientific research into the feelings of animals. “He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras. ‘Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,’ Virga told me. ‘But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.’”