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.
Power to the People By Michelle Weber Highlight With Warren Jeffs in jail, Hildale, Utah has an opportunity to become a real town that serves and protects all its residents, no matter their faiths.
How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King By Longreads Feature The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.
Sacrificed for the Super Bowl: The Wiping Out of an Atlanta Neighborhood By Cheri Lucas Rowlands Highlight Thirty years ago, the entire community of Lightning was destroyed to build the Georgia Dome. This oral history, told by displaced residents, compiles memories of a long-gone neighborhood.
The Weather and the Wall By Will Meyer Feature Climate change and the border wall are more connected than you might think.
The Indignities of Poverty, Compounded by the Requirement to Prove It By Longreads Feature In an excerpt from her debut memoir, Stephanie Land recalls being poor, and moving with her young daughter from a homeless shelter to transitional housing.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee By Longreads Feature “Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”
The Silence of Women By Longreads Feature Women who spoke too angrily or too publicly were punished in cruel and unusual ways.
The Thrill (and the Heavy Emotional Burden) of Blazing a Trail for Black Women Journalists By Longreads Feature Dorothy Butler Gilliam remembers how exciting it was to integrate The Washington Post, but also how lonely — and often attacked — she felt as the first black woman reporter in the newsroom.
