First Contact By Longreads Feature Sarah Watts details how science fiction shaped her family, her religion, and her own self-image.
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.’
If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would Be Worth $10,000 By Soraya Roberts Feature Journalism’s one percent would rather make up a fake feud than address the reality of the industry’s pay disparity, which benefits them and no one else.
An Ode to Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’ By Matt Giles Feature MTV’s “The Hills” was a memorable reality show with an even more memorable theme song.
The Shames of Men By Don Kulick Feature An anthropologist on a return visit to a remote village in Papua New Guinea learns that all the village’s young men are terribly wounded.
These Rooms Alone By Jill Talbot and Max Feature Two women, 20 years apart, on the choice they both made.
‘TV Has This Really Fraught Relationship with the Audience.’ By Jonny Auping Feature Emily Nussbaum talks about why TV’s relationship with its audience has become more intimate, whether we can blame Trump on True Detective, and how a TV critic’s biggest challenge is just figuring out what to watch.
Manic Street Preachers’ Album The Holy Bible By Longreads Feature How a band seemingly out of step with its times outlasted so many of its indulgent, in-step contemporaries.
Those Limits Were Not Hindrances: An Interview with Megan Pugh By Aaron Gilbreath Feature How a writer worked hard to understand one of American music’s most mysterious performers while protecting his past, and art.
Took You By Surprise: John and Paul’s Lost Reunion By David Gambacorta Feature Five years after the Beatles disbanded, a period fueled by intense acrimony, Lennon and McCartney set aside their differences and got back together one more time. Inside the rollicking atmosphere of that May 1974 recording session.
‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’ By Sam Jaffe Goldstein Feature The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.
Yentl Syndrome: A Deadly Data Bias Against Women By Longreads Feature The science of medicine is based on male bodies, but researchers are beginning to realize how vastly the symptoms of disease differ between the sexes — and how much danger women are in.
‘Women Created Our Worlds:’ Native Art Reclaims Its Power By Soraya Roberts Feature There’s a direct line from missing and murdered indigenous women to the repression of Native women’s contributions to art and culture, but those long-silenced voices are now making themselves heard.
¡Ay qué niñas! By Alice Driver Feature Niños migrantes, muchos de los cuales son menores no acompañados, viajaron a la frontera de los Estados Unidos para escapar de violencia y pedir asilo. ¿Alguien está escuchando sus historias?
Oh, Girl! By Alice Driver Feature Migrant children, many of whom are unaccompanied minors, are traveling to the U.S. border to escape violence and seek asylum. Is anyone listening to their stories?
How I Became ‘Rich’ By Stacy Torres Feature During a rare opportunity to vacation in Hawai’i, Stacy Torres is forced to confront her status as better off than where she came from.
On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense By Rebecca Schuman Feature What’s the German word for “the world’s most forthright people have deceit in their DNA”?
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.”
School for Girls By Jasmin Aviva Sandelson Feature Years after recovering from anorexia, Jasmin Sandelson writes a letter to the high school friend she idolized, and explores how hunger, love, and envy shaped — and ended — their relationship.
Don’t Come Around Here No More By Rebecca Lehmann Feature Tom Petty’s psychedelic Alice in Wonderland video reminded one woman of the way sexual harassment shaped her adolescence and made her want to disappear.
‘Brokenness and Holiness Really Go Together’: Darcey Steinke on Menopause By Jane Ratcliffe Feature Darcey Steinke says that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.”
Bearing the Weight of My Grandfathers’ Old Clothes By Aram Mrjoian Feature In adopting outerwear worn by the men who came before him, Aram Mrjoian considers his childhood misperceptions of traditional masculinity.
The View From 5-Foot-3 (and a Half) By Soraya Roberts Feature Maybe we can’t transcend height, but can we transcend the internalized misogyny that causes us to limit ourselves and judge other women?
Time To Kill the Rabbit? By Lily Meyer Feature In two new novels, the bunnies are anything but cute. (Unless … you use magic to turn one of them into a pre-TB Keats, or a talky Tim Riggins.)
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.”
Father’s Little Helper By Scott Korb Feature While under the influence of Valium, Scott Korb reflects on all the fathers he could have been and the father he has become.