Unfinished hotel rooms, terrorist threats, egregious human rights violations and thrilling athletic feats: Sochi’s got it all. But Russia’s dangerous, government-sanctioned homophobia precedes and extends far beyond this year’s Olympic games. 1. “Closed, Destroyed, Deleted Forever.” (Dmitry Pashinsky, n+1, February 2014) Incredible interview with Lena Klimova, founder of Children 404, a social networking resource for […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Time Jason Zengerle and a Gorilla Stalked Michael Moore for Might Magazine
Thanks to our Longreads Members’ support, we tracked down a vintage story from Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine. It’s from Jason Zengerle, a staff writer for Politico and former contributing editor for New York magazine and GQ who’s been featured on Longreads often in the past.
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, Reading List
9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List
Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. A few weeks ago, I found a box in my attic labeled “Old College Papers.” After cringing through the first notebook on top — Lord, that […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year
Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor? Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969 Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page. In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Video Pick: The Detroit Bus Company
A mini-documentary on one resident who took matters into his own hands after the city killed its light-rail plans. Plus: Detroit stories from the Longreads archive, from Mother Jones, GQ, Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica.
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience
Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here. “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
A Magazine’s Assignment: Find Someone ‘Ugly’
“When you get a phone call from your editor telling you he wants an in-depth profile of an ugly guy, you panic a little.”
Posted inUncategorized
“In 2011, Air Force psychologists completed a mental-health survey of 600 combat drone operators. Forty-two percent of drone crews reported moderate to high stress, and 20 percent reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. The study’s authors attributed their dire results, in part, to ‘existential conflict.’ A later study found that drone operators suffered from the same […]
Posted inUncategorized
“Somehow Anthony is blaming me and my 8,000-word story for the fact that everything turned to shit for him. I wish I knew if there was a word for all this. There’s probably a German word for it. And maybe I am naïve, but I am telling you that when you spend so many hours […]
