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“The higher education mantra is possibly the greatest cliché in American public life.” Thomas Frank argues that greed has taken over at most universities in the U.S., causing costs to spiral out of control, administrators to proliferate, and professors’ work to be outsourced to instructors with no benefits or job security: “We don’t pause to […]

A community in Texas grapples with the deaths of two high school students: “The Friday night before that Sunday at Possum Kingdom Lake, Coppell played an away game at Hebron High School in Carrollton. Jacob went up to Solomon and said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You haven’t gotten any sacks all season!’ The two had […]

Storm chaser Tim Samaras catapulted to fame for his scientific research studying tornadoes. The story of Samaras, his storm crew, and the tornado he couldn’t outrun: “Samaras had an uncanny ability for finding twisters and for escaping them with his life. But the monster hiding in the rain that day was something he had never […]

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from Next City’s Forefront magazine, by journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz. Aronowitz looks at the story behind the minimum wage increase in San Jose, which jumped to $10 per hour from $8 per hour after the city’s residents voted for the increase last November—”the […]

The writer on her parents’ interracial marriage during the Civil Rights movement: “She remembered only a time when a taxi driver refused to pick them up. They were with her parents, and my grandfather was outraged by the slight. A Jewish Ukrainian immigrant, my grandfather held high ideals of justice in his adopted land. He […]

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

On “super recognizers” — a small group of individuals with the ability to recognize nearly every face they have ever seen. Super recognizers are being studied to see if their recognition skills can be taught to other people: “Police officers also may draw upon perceptional ability to ID suspects. Josh P. Davis, a psychologist at […]

From Deep Throat to Thomas Drake: Julia Wick selects five classic stories from The New York Times, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair and more.

An excerpt from Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything on the current state of the shipping industry, which often gets underreported despite it driving our global economy: “Yet the invisibility is useful, too. There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive […]

An excerpt from Enemies Within, a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman on the NYPD’s secret spying unit: “Police collected the phone numbers and e-mail addresses from the website. One was for Agnes Johnson, a longtime activist based in the Bronx. ‘We were women and mothers who said, “We’re […]