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Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. Share your favorite stories in the comments.

The writer, who has written about the notorious crack kingpin Freeway Rick for nearly two decades, profiles Ricky Ross once more as Ross attempts to legitimately hustle his way back to success: “On the streets he once flooded with drugs, Freeway Rick is hawking weaves. A staple of the African American cosmetology industry, the weave—or […]

The writer travels to Verona, Italy to examine why racism is so prevalent in soccer: “It was a little stadium, and Boateng could see their faces. Fifty or so people called him an animal. He locked eyes with them and could see the hate. He pointed to his head, to say, ‘You’re an idiot.’ The […]

This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Among Murderers, a new nonfiction book by Sabine Heinlein, published by University of California Press, examining the lives of criminals as they prepare to re-enter society. Heinlein, who was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her Iowa Review essay “A Portrait of the Writer as a Rabbit,” […]

Michael Morton, who spent 25 years wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife, takes the stand again, against the real killer: “The jury regarded him with what appeared to be both sympathy and fascination. One of the many strange aspects of The State of Texas v. Mark Alan Norwood was that at no point […]

A disfigured woman is given a face transplant, which currently remains an experimental procedure: “In the US, there are five institutions — Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, UCLA, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University — that are now either performing face transplants or actively recruiting their first patient. And for the […]

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so this week, she put together a #longreads list about robots.

The writer on his friend Tony Davis, a middle-age man who was convicted of killing a 13-year-old boy when he was 18. Adapted from Stray Bullet, a new single from The Atavist: “I first met Tony Davis in the early 1990s, when I was a young reporter for an Oakland-based alternative weekly. The city was […]

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick was reported and written by Kyla Cheung at Columbia University for The Eye.

Novelist Adam Johnson meets Kenji Fujimoto, a man who became the Dear Leader’s cook, confidant, and court jester: “Many people envied me because I was a favorite of Kim Jong-il. At the parties, I poured sake for Shogun-sama, but Shogun-sama also poured sake for me, which was very rare. Every time Shogun-sama said to me, […]