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This week’s Longreads Member Pick comes recommended by Longreads contributor Julia Wick: It’s “The Last Freeway,” a story by Hillel Aron, published in Slake in 2011, about the construction of a freeway interchange and a judge whose decisions shaped its scope.

The writer and her husband, who live in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, deal with a rattlesnake problem: “Nineteen-year-old Faith comes in the door after a bit, hunting her camera. ‘There’s a snake coiled in the yard,’ she says, her voice remarkably calm. Little eight-year-old C.C. marches to the living room, stands in […]

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.

How our environment, our sense of support, and our feelings of loneliness can activate or turn off specific genes in our bodies that affect things like how we fight or heal wounds. An examination of the “social science of genetics”: “Scientists have known for decades that genes can vary their level of activity, as if […]

From the opening chapter of Jon Mooallem’s book Wild Ones, as recommended by Maria Popova, a look at the lengths we go to preserve the animal kingdom: “At the furthest, most mundane reaches of this almost incomprehensibly sprawling program to protect the fish, the government has even hired ordinary Americans—retirees, housewives, at least one moonlighting […]

A profile of psychiatrist David Burns, who wrote Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, “one of the most successful psychotherapy books ever written” that has helped transform the field of psychiatry: “Equally surprising: Burns tells the therapists he wants them to fail. Time and again. They can afford to do this because—unlike when he was […]

After the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturned the mandate that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional, Prince Edward County in Virginia closed its public schools to resist integration. The story behind the small town that resisted integration and the legal battles that ensued during the Civil Rights movement: “After the […]

In August 2008, Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan were kidnapped and held hostage in Somalia. They spent 460 days in captivity. This is the story of their escape attempt, which is excerpted from Lindhout’s book A House in the Sky: “One afternoon, a light rain began to dapple the concrete wall across the alleyway from […]

New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from Emily Anderson, April Xiong, Jamaica Kincaid, and Armin Rosen.

A look at how a cofounder of the Home Depot started the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, Ga., which has been named an autism center of excellence by the National Institutes of Health. The center has hired a scientist from Yale who is looking at how eye-tracking technology can revolutionize autism treatment: “Within ten months […]