Staff

Our top stories of the week, as chosen by the editors at Longreads.

An obituary for Gwen Ifill, a pioneering journalist who covered eight presidential campaigns and served as co-anchor of the PBS NewsHour.

The students in Kelly Zunkiewicz’s pre-calculus class at Earl J. Lennard High School in Ruskin, Florida excel because they’re able to work in groups and help each other grasp mathematical concepts.

In their “How to Plot a Novel” package this week, New York magazine explores the inner workings of fiction from every angle. Christian Lorentzen analyzes how story works and affects readers. Boris Kachka provides an encyclopedia of every possible kind of plot, a history of plot, and a piece about computer mapping of story plots. Bonuses: Sadie Stein on the worst endings in history, and a round-up of quotes from famous authors about where they stand on plot as a device.

Over Memorial Day Weekend, 64 people were shot in Chicago, a shocking level of gun violence that’s become standard in the city and is increasing. A group of journalists and photographers spent the weekend portraying the profound affect gun violence has on those who live here.

A Mother Jones investigation reveals the total cost of gun violence in America: $229 billion per year.

An examination of how the neighborhood of Highland Park in Los Angeles is quickly gentrifying. The team at Marketplace interviewed current and former residents, business owners, and investors and developers to paint a full picture of what’s occurring.

A candid conversation about race in St. Louis.

A look back at the wine industry in the United States shortly after the end of Prohibition. Wine consumption was growing, but it was unclear whether American companies could compete:

“Since repeal became imminent the U.S. has been flooded with wine propaganda. In every metropolitan newspaper, experts have conducted daily columns on the art of wine drinking. Makers of the variously shaped glasses from which one drinks hock and Sauternes and Burgundy have done a boom-time business. The Marquise de Polignac, whose husband makes French champagne, has been repeatedly interviewed. The propaganda has been paid for by the French wine interests and by California’s. (The French are now feeling pretty glum about their quota.) But however it started, it has made the drinking and serving of wine, for the moment, as much a fad as was the cross-word puzzle or mah jong. So U.S. wines have a market worth competing for, an opportunity which may not come again for many, many years.”

Ten years after the arrival of the first detainees, officials, lawyers, prisoners and soldiers speak out on how it all started—and how difficult it has been to close it:

“When I first got down to Guantánamo, I, along pretty much with everybody else in my group, thought that we were going to be dealing with the worst of the worst. That’s what we had been told.

“When I started to get a broader view, I realized that a large majority of the population just had no business being at Guantánamo. Maybe they had been picked up on the battlefield, and maybe they were involved in low-level insurgency. That would’ve been the worst of it with a large portion of these characters. The majority of the ones that I saw—really, we just didn’t have anything on them. So it was kind of a shock to the system on the level of the detainees.”