Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words) The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community. * * * ‘Music Is a Mirror of What […]
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Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Story of H.M.: The Amnesiac Who Profoundly Changed the Way We Think About Memory
Sam Kean | The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons | 2014 | 12 minutes (3,008 words) For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, a new book from science reporter Sam Kean looking at stories about the brain and the history of neuroscience. Here’s Kean: […]
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About
A list of stories that resonated with us.
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, The Wilson Quarterly, Smithsonian Magazine, Chicago magazine, New York Magazine, fiction from Outlook India, and a guest pick from Jessica Misener.
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 […]
