‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’ By Victoria Namkung Feature Steph Cha discusses her new novel “Your House Will Pay,” the LA Riots, the Korean American Angeleno community, her 3,600 Yelp reviews, and pushing back against gatekeepers in publishing.
‘Writing This Book Was a Weird Séance ’: An Interview With Deborah Levy By Tobias Carroll Feature “If you have the depth, the surface can be as light as it’s possible to make it…I don’t mind that ‘Swimming Home’ is sometimes described as a ‘beach read’ — actually that’s a triumph.”
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids By Katy Kelleher Feature Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.
Queens of Infamy: Njinga By Anne Thériault Feature The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.
“We’re All Still Cooking…Still Raw at the Core”: An Interview with Jacqueline Woodson By Adam Morgan Feature “When I look at that dress and how much intention went into the making of it…it’s like we want to have something that can’t be destroyed, because so much of the past has been destroyed…”
Mathematics as a Cultural Force By Jessica Gross Feature Historian Amir Alexander on Euclidean geometry’s far-reaching effects.
Downsizing the American Black Middle Class By Bryce Covert Feature Government jobs helped thousands of Black families move into the middle class. Now, increasing calls for government privatization are pushing them back out.
In the Age of the Psychonauts By Longreads Feature Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.
‘Nobody in This Book Is Going to Catch a Break’: Téa Obreht on “Inland” By Ryan Chapman Feature ‘The history of the West is a deeply turbulent one… that kept the living population in a constant state of unrest. I thought this constant state of unrest must be true for the dead as well.’
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.
