“His brother, he assumed, was in the island’s detention facility, waiting to be sent to Athens with hundreds of other migrants. Days turned into weeks. Every time Javed tried Masood’s phone, the call went straight to voicemail. After a month passed with no word, it dawned on Javed that his brother was missing.”
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This Week in Books: Farewell Longreads! I’m Taking This Rodeo to Substack.
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The Targeting and Killing of a Helmandi Combatant
I interviewed everyone present in the tactical operations center during a routine airstrike in Helmand Province. Without exception they believe themselves to be doing the right thing.
Longreads Best of 2020: Investigative Reporting
Our top picks for investigative journalism this year.
Without a Trace: Missing, In an Age of Mass Displacement
Masood Hotak left Afghanistan in December 2015, hoping to make it to Europe. On January 3, 2016, he posted on Facebook that he’d reached the Greek island of Samos. And then… nothing. His big brother Javed has traveled thousands of miles trying to find him.
A Music So Beautiful the Birds Fell from the Trees
How two exiled Sufi musicians returned to make traditional music in postwar Kabul, Afghanistan.
War, What is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing
“Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it.”
Inside the Chaos of Immigration Court
Gabriel Thompson takes us into San Francisco Immigration Court and the labyrinthine system that asylum seekers—and attorneys and judges—are up against.
‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’
In “An American Summer,” journalist Alex Kotlowitz tries to report on gun deaths on Chicago’s South Side with the same attention to survivors, anniversaries, and aftershocks that is paid to mass shootings.
A Reading List of Long-form Writing by Asian Americans
Longreads editor-in-chief Mike Dang shares some of his favorite long-form writing by Asian American journalists.
