Editor’s Pick

The writer on growing up with news reports of a serial rapist and killer who eluded capture for years before finally getting arrested, and how it impacted her own experience with sexual assault: According to media reports, after Bernardo’s arrest a police officer assigned to prepare the official transcript of the footage of French’s and […]

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

Akers revisits his hometown ballpark, Herschel Greer Stadium, where the Triple-A Nashville Sounds have played since the 1970s. The team is lobbying for a new park, just like other cities around the country: This leaves Tammen, who will give a speech at this year’s winter meetings about “how to make the best of an old […]

Despite all the progress in stamping out child labor and exploitation around the globe, kids are still working in dangerous conditions. In Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, has one out of every three children working, and there is even an organization working to relax restrictions for those working under age 15: I’d gone […]

After their twin daughters were diagnosed with Niemann-Pick Type C, a fatal genetic disease, Hugh and Chris Hempel sought experimental treatments to save their daughters’ lives. They went public with their findings and kept detailed medical records to share with researchers, assuming the role of “citizen-scientists”: Ms. Hempel began giving cyclodextrin to the girls in […]

Hardwick’s classic 1959 essay on the dismal state of book criticism. (Robert Silvers has pointed it out as an early inspiration for founding the New York Review of Books.) For the world of books, for readers and writers, the torpor of the New York Times Book Review is more affecting. There come to mind all […]

Excerpt from a new book by former sitcom writer David Raether, who reflects on how he went from making $300,000 a year working on Roseanne to ending up homeless: The worst moment is the day the sheriff comes. Two armed members of the county sheriff’s department showed up with a locksmith as we were moving […]

Bilger goes inside Google’s self-driving car project: Engineers have made big leaps since the DARPA Grand Challenge nearly a decade ago, but a commercial release is still years away: The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before […]

New story picks from Emily Perper, featuring VQR, The Daily Beast and The New Yorker.

A bleak picture of working in the United States. Meyerson points to 1974 as the pivotal year in which worker pay stopped rising in accordance with productivity, and traces all the changes have since wiped out the American middle class: All the factors that had slowly been eroding Americans’ economic lives over the preceding three […]