Coming Home, One Word At A Time By Sharanya Deepak Feature Upon returning to India, a course in Urdu helps Sharanya Deepak embrace the rich and turbulent history of her native country.
‘Women Can Be Required To Wear Something That’s Painful.’ By Victoria Namkung Feature Summer Brennan talks about femininity and suffering, beauty and biology, and the startlingly dark turn she found herself taking when writing about women and power in her new book ‘High Heel.’
Of Safe Words and the Sacred By Britni de la Cretaz Feature A BDSM relationship gone wrong helped Britni de la Cretaz find God.
Barely There By Jennifer Baker Feature Jennifer Baker considers the ways in which hair removal rituals, begun in her tween years, have helped her achieve body acceptance and connect with her own desire.
Is It Ever Too Late to Pursue a Dream? By Matt Giles Feature Dan Stoddard believes there is room in the NBA for a 42-year-old rookie.
The Fertility Doctor’s Secret Children By Krista Stevens Highlight Donald Cline justified his deception with choice bible verses, so that makes everything okay.
The Power of a Neighborhood’s Name By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight When Google Maps’ data renamed an African American neighborhood, it opened up residents to the looming forces of gentrification.
How the Guardian Went Digital By Longreads Feature Remaking itself from a little leftie newspaper to a powerhouse of internet journalism required experimentation, transparency, and embracing uncertainty.
Our Words Will Save Us and Set Us Free By Jackson Bliss Feature In the wake of having his writing career belittled, Jackson Bliss becomes an interpreter for a refugee and comes to see words, translations, and storytelling as important acts of resistance.
A Rare Toy Heist, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away By Cheri Lucas Rowlands Highlight In 2017, the theft of a rare toy — a Boba “Rocket” Fett prototype that was never released for sale — rocked the Star Wars collecting community.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week By Longreads Weekly Top 5 This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Chloe Cooper Jones, Adam Serwer, Emma Marris, and Mik Awake.
Revisiting My Grandfather’s Garden By Mojgan Ghazirad Feature During a return trip to Tehran, Mojgan Ghazirad searches for her childhood home and witnesses the damage U.S. sanctions have brought to Iranian lives.
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?
Everything is Fine By Sara Fredman Feature Sara Fredman thinks about the voices in her life as she raises young children and reckons with her fading father.
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.
The End of Poker Night By Mindy Greenstein Feature Mindy Greenstein looks back on the gambling that was a big part of life with her Holocaust refugee parents.
Deciphering the Language of the Body in China By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight In China, a British expat learns a whole new way to speak with her body.
‘We All Live in the Great Database in the Sky’: On Silicon Valley and UFO Culture By Cheri Lucas Rowlands Highlight “The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.
‘I Cannot Name Any Emotion That Is Uniquely Human.’ By Hope Reese Feature According to primatologist Frans de Waal, we don’t like to admit that animals, especially apes, have emotions just like ours, and science has become better at studying apes’ behaviors than human ones.
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.
Diabetes in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley: ‘The Inevitable Inheritance’ By Krista Stevens Highlight “We’re literally cutting people’s limbs off, when they could just be taking medication. It’s kind of crazy in a developed country.”
After the Tsunami By Matthew Komatsu Feature After the 2011 disaster, which killed his grandmother and laid waste to his ancestral home, an American journeys to Japan to search for what the tsunami left in its wake.
The Darwinian View of Our Storytelling Species By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight What the history of folktales reveals about the role storytelling played in human evolution.
Remembering Mark Hollis of Talk Talk By Tom Maxwell Feature The singer of “It’s My Life” left us a brilliant solo album, then chose to be a family man.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week By Longreads Weekly Top 5 This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Jen Gann, Christine H. Lee, John Birdsall, and Anna Callaghan.
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.”
The Teen Idol Vanishes By Soraya Roberts Feature Luke Perry’s untimely death reminds us that Dylan McKay was one of the last icons of adolescence.
Maintaining Mental Health as a Rescuer in the Grand Tetons By Krista Stevens Highlight “What was important was that each of us had been there; we all, in another way, had blood on our hands—we had all shared the same experiences. We needed each other.”
Shelved: Brian Wilson’s Adult/Child By Tom Maxwell Feature Music from the time after the good vibrations ended.
