Adventure turns to tragedy when a troubled army vet joins the fight against Assad in Syria.
Search results
Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
Autograph Collecting as a Feat of Historical Inquiry
The graphing community [“graphing” is a term for the craft of autograph seeking] is one of uncommon depth, into which people have spent decades carving their fiefdoms and burrowing out their niches, whether that be players in the single-A Midwest League or members of the Whig Party. Flam’s fellow grapher Rich Hanson supervises inspections at a meatpacking […]
Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War
In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
Hooah to All That: On Leaving NYC for a Writing Life in a Military Town
My writer friends tend to see my new world as grist for writing, and I suppose it is. But this is also my life, not some sociological quest. I am not play-acting the soldier’s wife; my husband is not play-acting deployment; we are not play-acting strained 1 AM phone conversations that are being monitored in […]
A Brief History of Solitary Confinement
Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.
Fact-Checking ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’
[William] Powell quit his job and began writing for up to ten hours a day. Despite the title, there is nothing about anarchism as a political theory in the book, which focuses on drugs, surveillance, weapons, and explosives. About drugs, Powell knew plenty. He had overcome a speed habit, smoked lots of pot, consumed his […]
The Henry Ford of Books
A profile of James Patterson, the world’s best-selling author, who has an army of co-writers and television deals in the works, but many detractors as well.
A Brief History of Solitary Confinement
Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.

