Lolly Bowean writes that every black woman has a hair biography. Hers includes an aunt with “growing hands,” a cousin who straightened her hair against her mother’s wishes, and a disastrous teenage Jheri curl. Eventually, she comes to realize that for black women, finding the right hairstyle isn’t about looking like everyone else — it’s […]
Dana Snitzky
Posted inEditor's Pick
Chasing the Man Who Caught the Storm: An Interview With Brantley Hargrove
An interview with Brantley Hargrove, the author of a new biography of the storm chaser Tim Samaras, who was killed by the biggest tornado ever recorded. To understand the life of a chaser, Hargrove had to become one himself.
Posted inBlog Post, Books, Commentary
Get With the Modern Age, Sign Up for the Longreads Books Newsletter
Sign up for the Longreads Books Newsletter, and you too could be never not reading a book.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Sharp Women Writers: An Interview With Michelle Dean
Cultural critic Michelle Dean discusses her new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. Topics covered range from emotionally fraught book reviews of Susan Sontag to male blowback against the famous first line of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer to how horrified Elizabeth Hardwick was by her friend Adrienne […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar
Now what I remember most about my guide is what he said about the Rohingya. But I walked 50 kilometers with him before he said it.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals
In this moving lyric essay on grief, pain, and the body’s frailty, Ellen Wayland-Smith recalls, with heart-wrenching intimacy, how bodies have failed and fallen in her own life, and reflects on various literary and historical reckonings with the finality of death and the inevitability of the fall.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Quest for the Collision Zone: An Arctic Expedition
Geologists on a mission to vindicate their theory of a lost mountain range discover something even more significant buried beneath the ice. An excerpt from A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Stuff That Came Between Mom and Me: A Story About Hoarding
In this unsettling personal essay, Susan Fekete describes the minute ways in which her mother’s compulsions add up to an alarmingly dysfunctional whole. What emerges is a startling portrait of a woman who is wildly generous with her possessions — but also totally overcome by them.
Posted inCurrent Events, Nonfiction, Story
The Ban, the Wall: Bearing Witness
Which of our neighbors have been rounded up so far?
Posted inBlog Post, Current Events, Nonfiction
You’re Fired! The Unemployable Trump Administration
The firing of FBI Director James Comey is the latest high-profile firing by the administration. It’s also one of the most troubling.