Eradicating urban poverty was a priority for Obama when he was running for president in 2008, but it has not become a focus for the president during his first term. A look at what still needs to be addressed, and the neighborhood of Roseland, where Obama got his political start: The reason for this shift […]
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The founding editor of Sassy and Jane brings a new cast of characters to her site xoJane: Jane Pratt has been 15 for an awfully long time now. She calls that her ‘emotional age,’ and she thinks we all have one: It’s the time in our past that we can’t entirely let go, because of […]
A writer discusses the awful living conditions of China’s booming cities after seven years of living in the country for seven years, and visiting 21 of China’s 22 provinces: “A Beijing-based blogger who lived in Harbin in 2003 told me about leaving Blues after several drinks and flagging a taxi driver, whom he recognized. ‘The […]
A writer on his experience spending time in an artist colony—and why they actually work: The poet in the studio next to me, Kathryn Levy, was at the time revising her work by reading it aloud, recording it, and playing it back to herself. The murmur of it was reassuring somehow. Years later, when I […]
What are your career options when you are seven feet tall? A tall writer meets a tall wrestler: Paul Wight, bless him, seems to think of his massive size as a gift from God, not a devil’s bargain. There was a moment earlier this year when Wight was rumored to be fighting Shaq at this […]
A look at the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and how they’ve preserved their identity and customs after more than a 100 years of a tenuous relationship with the U.S.: Buried deep within the pages of the 2010 Defense appropriations bill, signed by President Barack Obama in December 2009, […]
The creator of The Wire remembers a young man whose life as a 15-year-old drug dealer in Baltimore was depicted in his book The Corner: At first, he was content with the book we wrote about his world. By the time The Corner was published it was something of an epitaph for people who were […]
Faith, technology and Christianity in Silicon Valley: The internet and social media present a conundrum for Chuck DeGroat, the pastor at City Church. With a congregation of hip modern professionals, from architects and financial advisers to programmers and venture capitalists, he can’t afford not to have a Facebook page, Twitter handle, or website. And yet, […]
A writer-comedian reviews his successes and failures, realizing there’s not much difference between the two: You might be thinking to yourself, ‘How do you know the fear never goes away?’ It could just be me. It could just be pessimism, or cynicism. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks a few years back […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Wired, The Verge, Rolling Stone, ESPN The Magazine, VICE, fiction, plus a guest pick by Joanna Lin.
