I’ll Be Loving You Forever By Rebecca Schuman Feature My best friend and the New Kids on the Block, 30 years later.
‘Horror Is a Soothing Genre … It’s Upfront About How Scary It Is To Be a Woman.’ By Laura Barcella Feature Sady Doyle discusses the connection she draws between society’s monstrous treatment of women and woman’s archetypal monstrosity.
Mountains, Transcending By Ailsa Ross Feature “Ever since I was five years old,” wrote opera singer–turned–Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.”
Nashville contra Jaws, 1975 By Longreads Feature In their time, “Jaws” and “Nashville” were regarded as Watergate films, and both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act.
Reading Lessons By Irina Dumitrescu Feature You never stop learning how to read — probably because you also never stop forgetting how to read.
A Minor Figure By Longreads Feature While searching for photographs that depict black young women and girls living free in the second and third generations born after slavery, Saidiya Hartman finds a disturbing image.
A Once and Future Beef By Will Meyer Feature Beef is a major culprit of the climate crisis, but if you want to consider beef’s future, then look to its past. The industry’s tactics have not changed as much as you might think.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors By Katy Kelleher Feature Mirrors are sparkly and shiny and hypnotic. They’ve fascinated us for thousands of years. And they might show us a lot more about our society’s misplaced priorities than we care to see.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency By Rose Eveleth Feature What a 19th-century scammer can teach us about women, lying, and economic boom-and-bust cycles
A Manson Murder Investigation 20 Years In the Making: ‘There Are Still Secrets’ By Zan Romanoff Feature ‘Everything that Manson did with his women was exactly what the CIA was trying to do with people without their knowledge, in the exact same time, at the exact same place.’
We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics By Audrey Farley Feature From abortion to immigration, a long-debunked scientific movement still casts long, confusing shadows over our most fraught debates.
‘The Underland Is a Deeply Human Realm’: Getting Down with Robert Macfarlane By Tobias Carroll Feature “I thought the underland would be — of all the landscape forms that have drawn me to explore them — the most uninhabited. This proved wildly incorrect.”
We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning By Longreads Feature Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do.
‘They Happen To Be Our Neighbors Across the Span of a Century, But They’re Our Neighbors.’ By Adam Morgan Feature One hundred summers ago, black Chicagoans were terrorized by whites during the Red Summer. Poet Eve Ewing talks about reaching out to her neighbors across time in “1919.”
I’ve Done a Lot of Forgetting By Jordan Michael Smith Feature When I was a kid, I wanted my antisemitic tormentors to accept me. I wanted to be their friend.
House Un-American By Leslie Kendall Dye Feature On public lives, secret memoirs, and censoring the dead.
Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare By Longreads Feature In an excerpt from his essay collection, Australian journalist Richard Cooke reports on the American opioid crisis through the astonished eyes of a foreigner visiting steel and coal country.
Why Can’t California Public Schools Quit Teaching a Eurocentric Version of State History? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Despite decades of effort, activists are still trying to get California public schools to teach an accurate history of the state’s indigenous people and the cruelties of European settlement.
Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers By Longreads Feature From exploding Ford Pintos to racist algorithms, all harmful technologies are a product of unethical design. Yet, like car companies in the ’70s, today’s tech companies would rather blame the user.
Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun By Sean Howe Feature Before he founded High Times, Tom Forcade was a renegade journalist willing to throw a pie—or a lawsuit—in the face of anyone restricting his constitutional freedoms.
The Anarchists Who Took the Commuter Train By Longreads Feature The Stelton colony, initially associated with the likes of Emma Goldman and Eugene O’Neill, was a radical suburb whose anarchist residents took the commuter train to New York.
‘What Is Missing Is Her Soul’: Women and Art, Girls and Men By Alana Mohamed Feature In a new book, Camille Laurens examines the life of the model for Degas’ masterpiece, “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen.” But there’s still so much we don’t know.
Orwell’s Last Neighborhood By Longreads Feature While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Malmaison to More-Than-Monarch By Anne Thériault Feature In fraught games of power politics, sometimes the best revenge is not being exiled to die alone on an island in the South Atlantic.
When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip By Longreads Feature In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston gave Langston Hughes a lift to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie.” It was one of most fortuitous hangouts in literary history.
Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel By Tobias Carroll Feature “I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”
Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Martinique to Merveilleuse By Anne Thériault Feature Even the Reign of Terror was no match for a determined young woman with a pug and a prophecy on her side.
Welcome to Sinaloa, Home of Chiltepín By Michelle Weber Highlight Your favorite Mexican shrimp dish isn’t about the shrimp at all: “People think the star of the dish is the shrimp, but really it’s the chile.”
The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson By Longreads Feature In 1935, a group of New York communists boarded a German luxury liner during a lavish sending-off party attended by celebrities, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Their goal: capture the swastika.
