Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words) Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Story
Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats
Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words) 1st Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training. Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Innovation That Helped 'El Chapo' Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Drug Trafficking Empire
But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be […]
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Very few cases of law enforcement officers who are “feloniously killed” in the line of duty go unsolved. The murder of officer Tom Wood in Maywood, Chicago is one of those unsolved cases, and corruption in the Maywood force may have impeded the investigation: The ensuing homicide investigation was equally haphazard. Several witnesses whom Wood […]
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Thirty years after seven people in Chicago died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol, investigators, law enforcement officers, health and public officials, and friends and family members recount how it all unfolded. The perpetrator was never found, and the case was recently reopened: Nurse Jensen The [Janus] family was all at Adam’s house, planning the funeral and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Happens When a Poetry Magazine Gets $200 Million?
Poetry magazine started in Chicago in 1912, and during the ensuing century, the magazine’s history and the history of American poetry often were joined at the hip. It published an unknown T.S. Eliot, gave early support to Langston Hughes, discovered Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Gwendolyn Brooks. What Poetry rarely had was a history of picking […]
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The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly
The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly “He was part of [Blagojevich’s] inner, inner circle, about as close to the sun as you can get.” Those days were gone. Now Kelly was holing up on and off in this trailer near 173rd and Cicero. His marriage was on the rocks—he was shacking up […]
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The One-Man Political Machine
The One-Man Political Machine On a brutally cold morning in mid-December, Rahm Emanuel, hatless and wearing a glove on only his left hand, stood for an hour in front of the turnstiles at the Paulina el station, which sits in his old Congressional district on Chicago’s North Side. As the trains slammed and screeched overhead, […]
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Reading List: Interviews with Awesome Women Authors
The best interviews with authors make you want to read—not just their work, but read in general, and read all the time, and read with a new fervor. * * * 1. “The Art of Not Belonging: Dwyer Murphy Interviews Edwidge Danticat.” (Guernica, September 2013) Danticat gives a beautiful interview, discussing her book Claire of […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist
“If you survive me, tell them this: I never gave up.”
