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.
America’s Post-Frontier Hangover By Will Meyer Feature America binged on expansion, relying on land grabs as an engine of growth and a way to externalize racial hatred. Historian Greg Grandin asks, without a frontier, what can America be?
A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Entirely Underground By Longreads Feature Journalist Will Hunt, who made the crossing with a group of urban explorers, recounts being menaced by rainwater and rats — and meeting fellow subterranean wanderers along the way.
Jill the Ripper By Tori Telfer Feature True crime’s massive gender gap (95% of murderers are male) isn’t really one that needs fixing. And yet, since the beginning, a steadfast minority of Ripperologists have argued that Jack was really Jill.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls By Katy Kelleher Feature Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.
How To Hide An Empire By Bridey Heing Feature Daniel Immerwahr says studying the history of the Greater United States opens our eyes to how “racism has shaped the actual country itself. The legal borders of the country, but also the borders of the heart.”
Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela By Zoe Valery Feature In light of recent events in crisis-ridden Venezuela, its last vertebrate paleontologist puts together key pieces of the baffling puzzle that the country has become in the past couple of decades.
‘I Saw My Countrymen Marched Out of Tacoma’ By Joy Lanzendorfer Feature It started in Eureka, then it spread. Up and down the Pacific Coast, white mobs turned on Chinese-Americans.
Stalin’s Scheherazade By Longreads Feature An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape.
The Precarity of Everything: On Millennial (Blacks and) Blues By Danielle Jackson Feature Reniqua Allen — the author of It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America — on Black millennials, millennial burnout, and hope in a time of uncertainty.
‘Black Flight’ out of Chicago By Danielle Jackson Highlight By 2030, Chicago’s Black population will have decreased by half a million people in 50 years.
‘I Inherited Luck’: Bridgett M. Davis on Her Family’s Life in the Numbers By Sheila McClear Feature In a new memoir, novelist Bridgett M. Davis reveals that her mother was a Numbers operator in Detroit from the 1960s through the 1980s.
‘Salvini’s Decree’ Evicts Italian Migrants from Temporary Shelter By Danielle Jackson Highlight Italy’s “Salvini Decree,” passed last November, has already altered life for many migrants to the country.
