The electric bass chose her, but it took 44 years to heed the call.
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The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls
The recently re-appreciated novelist Rachel Ingalls passed away last month. She was among a cohort of twentieth-century women writers who were ‘famous for not being famous.’
We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning
Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do.
The Teen Idol Vanishes
Luke Perry’s untimely death reminds us that Dylan McKay was one of the last icons of adolescence.
Orwell’s Last Neighborhood
While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Caviar Con
When caviar-crazed Eastern Europeans flocked to Warsaw, Missouri to poach eggs from a vulnerable species of fish, federal agents went undercover and spent two years to build a case against them.
The Story of Country Music’s Great Songwriting Duo
Before they released “Wichita Lineman,” the greatest unfinished song of all time, Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb lived surprisingly parallel lives.
How the Cosby Story Finally Went Viral — And Why It Took So Long
A journalist who reported on the accusations long before they went viral wonders, “What kind of profession am I in, where stories have no logical reason for unfolding?”
Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks
Here’s every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
‘I Saw My Countrymen Marched Out of Tacoma’
It started in Eureka, then it spread. Up and down the Pacific Coast, white mobs turned on Chinese-Americans.

