Has the U.S. government already betrayed the activists seeking regime change in North Korea?

An embroidery collective in Mexico sews the stories of slain women.

“I called out the names, and they’d tell me who they wanted to vote for. Then, very carefully, I put my finger by each name they’d chosen.”

“When we arrived, she was sitting with a baby girl who she said was five months old and she had just snatched moments before, after winning the mother’s trust.”

“She wielded her guitar like a weapon and distorted the sound: a guitar technique that was completely original at the time and would be copied by legions of rock guitarists in the decades after.”

A reading list on travel influencers and the implications of Instagram on tourism and politics.

How the death of a lone wolf triggered a Canadian community to question themselves.

“Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.”

How a trans woman found the surgery that could restore her sense of self.

“I didn’t know at first what I was doing. I was just trying to represent the inside of the feeling.”

“They’re on the front lines of a relentless and overwhelming news cycle that is pushing them to the edge.”

“The structural conditions shaping care work are highly exploitative—and are profoundly linked to the high degree of COVID-19’s spread within both long-term care facilities and the communities that supply their labor force.”

“Darkness obscures and sunlight reveals, but dusk—that liminal moment in between—murmurs suggestions.”

A friendly and charming hiker was known on the trail as “Mostly Harmless.” After his body was discovered in a tent in Florida, no one could figure out who he was.

“A young guy has received admission into two American universities, but still gets rejected. One boy from my queue is given the visa. His smile is so luminous it is like he’s going straight to heaven. “

“Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”

“Having spent thousands of hours preparing thousands upon thousands of specimens, Laybourne had accumulated a library’s worth of knowledge about birds.”

James Jung thought he rode the winding narrow roads of the Alps to memorialize his dad. He was wrong.

Rachael Buchanan details the long and arduous journey to separate twins Safa and Marwa Bibi, who finally went back home to Pakistan this week.

We may not have a COVID-19 vaccine, but who will even get it when we do?

Congratulations to Tim Requarth, whose Longreads essay has won the 2020 award in the Longform Narratives category.

With the Cameo app, you can buy a video message from a celebrity — increasing in popularity since COVID-19, will this way of communicating become the new norm?

“There’s no Dropbox plan that will let us upload body and soul to the cloud. We are still here on the ground, with the same people and on the same planet we are being encouraged to leave behind.”

“He tried to explain that the tomb was his final creative act, one that he would make with love, as he had made ceramics daily for the past forty-four years.”

“I don’t think you can talk about police accountability in our region without also talking about the murder of John T. Williams.”

“I’m working on a book about Arctic explorers, and that means swimming in a sea of sorrow.”

How multiple Canadian women entered a relationship with a man who was scamming them for money.

A reporter covering the protests in Portland reflects on fear and trauma, police violence, and her voice as a journalist.

It’s against the law to examine someone without their consent — but one ER doctor’s colleagues do it anyway.

“A friend who teaches at another university tells me that a new Yiddish word has been invented: oysgezoomt, ‘over-exposed to Zoom,’ as in ‘Ich bin azoy oysgezoomt!’ (‘I’m so done with Zoom!’)”