In Lapham’s Quarterly, Renata Adler returns to her familial homeland to explore Germany’s present-day reaction to the millions of people now trying to get in rather than out.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Six Years Later, Over 400,000 Dead: The Graffiti Kids Who Sparked the Syrian War
Mark MacKinnon tells the story of Naief Abazid — who, at the urging of some older boys, graffitied a school wall on a lark in Daraa, Syria, at age 14. The “writing on the wall” enraged Syria’s Baathist dictatorship, and became the source of ignition in the Syrian war.
Posted inBooks, History, Story
When the Movies Went West
Scorned by stage actors and mocked by the theater-going upper classes, filmmakers nevertheless developed a bold new art form — but they needed better weather.
Posted inNonfiction
The Shames of Men
An anthropologist on a return visit to a remote village in Papua New Guinea learns that all the village’s young men are terribly wounded.
Posted inReading List
Longreads Best of 2017: Sports Writing
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year. Here is the best in sports writing.
Posted inNonfiction, Story, Writing
Hierarchy of Needs
Angela Palm learns to find joy in a world filled with suffering.
Posted inBooks, Story
Fairy Scapegoats: A History of the Persecution of Changeling Children
Distraught over a sick or disabled child, parents would torture — sometimes even kill — what they believed to be a malevolent stand-in for a stolen baby.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Stripped: The Search for Human Rights in US Women’s Prisons
The US prison system is broken. It sucks up billions of dollars each year and destroys lives. Could a Thai princess and an accidental criminal justice reform activist in the Pacific Northwest have the answers?
Posted inBooks, History, Science & Nature, Story
Taming the Great American Desert
By advocating for agriculture in the arid West, Major John Wesley Powell challenged the way America viewed its right to develop the continent.
Posted inNonfiction, Op-Ed, Story
What Thomas Jefferson Taught Me About Charlottesville and America
University of Virginia grad Joshua Adams believes that if you want to understand the recent violence there, look back at history and the school’s complicated founder.
