The Month That Killed the Sixties
An oral history of how everything went to hell in December 1969. Fred Hampton was killed by the police, the hippie spirit died at Altamont, and the Weathermen went underground.
What Ever Happened to Planet Vulcan?
The story of the planet closest to our sun, aptly named Vulcan, which accidentally existed for half a century.
Your Phone Was Made By Slaves: A Primer on the Secret Economy
On the new triangle trade, and the surprising connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster.
When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman
On the rise and fall of American utopia.
Longreads Member Exclusive: The Power of a Crisis
From our first member exclusive: An excerpt from New York Times writer Charles Duhigg’s bestselling book, The Power of Habit, which examines the science behind how we form and change our habits, and how companies are profiting off of them (sign up here to join):
“‘Some doctors were fine, and some were monsters,’ one nurse who worked at Rhode Island Hospital in the mid-2000s told me. ‘We called it the glass factory, because it felt like everything could crash down at any minute.’
“To deal with these tensions, the staff had developed informal rules — habits unique to the institution — that helped avert the most obvious conflicts. Nurses, for instance, always double-checked the orders of error-prone physicians and quietly made sure that correct doses were entered; they took extra time to write clearly on patients’ charts, lest a hasty surgeon make the wrong cut. One nurse told me they developed a system of color codes to warn one another.
“‘We put doctors’ names in different colors on the whiteboards,’ she said. ‘Blue meant ‘nice,’ red meant ‘jerk,’ and black meant, ‘whatever you do, don’t contradict them or they’ll take your head off.”‘”
