Category: culture

The story of a Somali family uprooted by war and separated by America’s broken refugee resettlement system — and the siblings who brought them back together.

How a journalist found her voice as her mother lost hers.

In an interview at GQ, Patricia Lockwood talks about the perils of being extremely online.

“Plant-based eating has a long, radical history in Black American culture, preserved by institutions and individuals who have understood the power of food and nutrition in the fight against oppression,” writes Amirah Mercer in “A Homecoming.” The piece, published at Eater, explores Mercer’s path to veganism and the plant-based diets of the Black diaspora. While […]

“The men call up to Sofiane, telling him that he and his brother have to jump. Guelord shouts that the younger boy needs to go first. Sofiane should throw him down.”

“Gilliam does believe that the end of society may soon be upon us. The question for him is: What shape will the new one take?”

An essay on growing up in the South, legacy, and a place rooted in white supremacy.

“Tyrian purple was a difficult color to manufacture. Thousands of snails were required to create a single ounce of dye.”

Our top editors’ picks in arts and culture writing this year.

Blake Butler writes movingly about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak.

A hidden diary, a love story, and a mystery.

When your name is Osama and you’re living in post-9/11 America, you always know The Question is coming.

Are Instagrammers and selfie culture destroying the outdoors? At Outside, Lisa Chase sets off to find out.

“Five dollar now five gidibid five dollar now ten gidibid ten, ten now fifteen digibigit now fifteen now fifteen gidibid, now twenty?”

“Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for.”

“With a drink in my hand and earplugs responsibly in place, I’m very aware that I’ve spent more than half my life essentially standing in the same spot: off to one side of the stage (close but not too close), eyes forward, shifting weight from foot to foot.”

Essaying on the way white supremacy shapes life.

“It’s strange to think that the Righteous Brothers outlive my mother. Sometimes I pretend they are singing to her.”

I will become power-mad and lock my boyfriend inside forever!

Lawrence Wright did it again; Jordan Peterson in a coma?; Myriam Gurba forced out of her job; Woody Allen canceled by his publisher’s employees; THE VIRUS; and more.

Jessica Lynne remembers a long distance love affair that began in Miami and the Billie Holiday song that kept her company through the relationship’s transitions.

Hive is a new Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

“To watch those people vanish and be replaced by people who shine like glass, who cut through the sidewalks like knives but reflect nothing back, has been another scraping out. Am I still here? I don’t know anyone here anymore.”

Audiences wanted Disney to give Elsa a girlfriend. But the Frozen franchise is at the center of the corporation’s latest princess project, whose nationalist concerns are decidedly here for the gay agenda.

Too Japanese for Americans and too American for the Japanese, one New Jersey native traces the influence of racism on her parents’ careers and her own life.

Jeanna Kadlec considers the impact of Little Women’s matriarchy — and its heroine — on the formation of her own queer identity.

From Martin Luther to The Nutcracker, Germany’s original national nightmare was a tangled knot of writhing rats.

Almost everything you think you know about Aladdin is wrong.

Five months into her first pregnancy, one writer pursues a research project about the history of home economics, as she struggles with her own concerns about motherhood.

To understand what the Golden State is compared to what it was, one solitary hiker follows the trail of the first overland Spanish expedition into California 250 years later.