In the wake of the U.S. Department of Justice’s shutting down Backpage.com for violating the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (which has not yet been signed into law), one time sex worker and Playing the Whore author Melissa Gira Grant talks with seven sex workers about the ways in which the absence of that bulletin […]
Sari Botton
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Our Bodies, Our Selves
Roxane Gay tapped 24 writers to address what it’s like to live in an “unruly” body today.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The ISIS Files
On five trips to Iraq, Rukmini Callimachi and a team of other New York Times journalists scoured files and other papers left behind by the Islamic State, which help explain how the so-called Caliphate had been able to stay in power there for a number of years. The impression left behind? That ISIS’s penchant for […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Own Bad Story: I Thought Journalism Would Make a Hero Out of Me
In an essay from his new collection: Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, Dear Sugars co-host Steve Almond considers his beginnings in journalism through the lens of the “bad stories” he believes delivered our country to the Trump era. Accompanied by a Longreads Podcast interview with Essays Editor Sari Botton.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Unruly Bodies
At Medium, Hunger: A Memoir of My Body author Roxane Gay created this excellent pop-up magazine, to be delivered in installments over four Tuesdays in April — “a month-long magazine exploring our ever-changing relationship with our bodies,” she writes. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do — to create a space for writers I respect and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Everyone Got The Pulse Massacre Story Completely Wrong
Over the course of Noor Salman’s trial for allegedly aiding her husband, Omar Mateen, in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, a different narrative has emerged than the false one the FBI erroneously constructed, and which the media tragically bought into. Melissa Jeltsen points out that not only was there zero evidence it was a targeted […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Whatever’s Your Darkest Secret, You Can Ask Me
A feature on a growing secret network women who — bucking the law and the medical establishment — are getting trained to offer abortions, safely and inexpensively, in the privacy of women’s homes.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Doctor is a Woman
An excerpt from Sloane Crosley’s new essay collection, Look Alive Out There. Crosley reflects on the experience of freezing her eggs, despite her ambivalence about having children — and as a way of putting off the pressing matter of facing that ambivalence as a woman in her late 30s.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
The Year of the Jumpsuit
A political art project calls for everyone to wear nondescript coveralls.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Jumpsuit That Will Replace All Clothes Forever
Heather Radke writes about JUMPSUIT, a political art project by The Rational Dress Society’s Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer. Glaum-Lathbury and Brewer aim to call attention to the ills of late capitalism — and to “make America rational again” — by manufacturing non-gendered, nearly shapeless jumpsuits, and encouraging people to wear them to the exclusion […]