Mark Leibovich

The Republican party is struggling to maintain party unity with Donald Trump as their presumptive presidential nominee.

A look at the football commissioner and the group of billionaire owners making all the decisions behind the N.F.L.

Inside the life and obsessive habits of Tom Brady—a 37-year-old star quarterback in a business where few play past the age of 40.

Inside the race to represent California’s absurdly wealthy — and sometimes just absurd — 33rd District:

A few days later, I was sitting in Marianne Williamson’s home in Brentwood, a luxury apartment just off Wilshire Boulevard. It is a warm and vast space, filled with books, art and frantic activity. “Can someone hand me my glasses?” Williamson called out, and an aide quickly fetched them. She was sitting in her living room, Googling around for a quote from Thomas Jefferson that she wanted to share with me. “You know the one,” she said. “It’s on the monument.” She said she would email it to me.

A new generation of entitled politicians may not have struggled much. So they’re stealing from their elders.

Candidates have been spinning Horatio Alger stories since the days of Horatio himself, or probably even the days of Great-Great-Grandpa Alger, who for all we know worked his nails to the nub scrubbing the decks of the Mayflower­. But politicians of the 20th century were far more likely to have actually struggled than today’s crop — they might have fought wars, grown up during the Depression or at least worked in a family store or on a farm. They were also less likely to have attended college or, if they did, were more likely to have helped pay for it themselves. Harry Truman, who graduated from only high school and fought in World War I, rode a compelling “story” of an Everyman “give ’em hell Harry” who transcended a run of failed business ventures. John Kennedy’s war-hero status mitigated his privileged family background.

This week’s Member Pick is from the new book by Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and a writer who’s been featured on Longreads frequently in the past.

This Town, published by Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, is Leibovich’s insider tale of life inside the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C., and how the social lives of political lifers, journalists and hangers-on complicate the truth about what really goes on in the capital. The prologue and first chapter, featured here for Longreads Members, take place at the funeral for NBC Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert.

Read an excerpt here.

Become a Longreads Member to receive this week’s pick.

A political reporter desperately searches for a sign of joy in this year’s presidential race:

“I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about politics because beneath that cynicism I understand that the stakes are high. On top of which, oddly, the job also keeps me patriotic, a byproduct of seeing — as I did at a Romney event in Ohio in July — things like a Korean War veteran in a wheelchair removing his insignia cap and struggling to his feet to salute the flag during the national anthem. (Immediately after which, I looked down at my BlackBerry to learn that the Democratic National Committee had just released a new ad ridiculing Ann Romney’s dressage horse.)

“But what’s been completely missing this year has been, for lack of a better word, joy. Yes, it’s always kind of fun to follow Joe Biden around and wait to hear what will come out of his mouth next, and who knows what Paul Ryan has hidden under his oversize jacket. But the principals don’t seem to be experiencing much joy as they go through their market-tested paces. A kind of faux-ness permeates everything this year in a way that it hasn’t been quite so consuming in the past. The effect has been anesthetizing and made it difficult to take any of the day’s supposed gaffes, game-changers and false umbrages seriously. The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers’ spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?”

The daily e-mail from Mike Allen, Politico’s star reporter, has become a morning ritual for Washington’s elite.

Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, has an emergency button under his desk that was installed 30 years ago after former City Supervisor Dan White entered City Hall through a window and fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Not knowing what the button was for, Newsom kept pushing it on his first day in office, only to have three sheriffs rush in repeatedly.