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On trailblazing geneticist Pardis Sabeti, who balances being in a rock band with her work in computational genomics: “There’d be plenty of people eager to talk to Sabeti before long. That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s ‘profound implications for the study of human […]

This week, we’re excited to feature a Longreads Exclusive from David Kushner (@DavidKushner), a contributing editor to Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired. He’s been featured many times on Longreads, and he’s the author of Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto.  “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse” is Kushner’s 2007 […]

Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond: “Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the […]

A profile of Gov. Mitt Romney’s eldest son Tagg, and his family’s “myth of self-reliance”: “Not long after graduating from Harvard Business School, he turned down offers from several prominent firms to join an obscure start-up called eGrad, whose meager resources gave it a kind of grunge aesthetic: secondhand furniture and heating so erratic he […]

A Yale law professor argues that we’re not doing enough to empower the minority voices in America—and change should start at the local level: “The ideas Gerken is known for first took shape, appropriately enough, as a disagreement. Several years ago, not long after she’d been hired as a young professor at Harvard, she sat […]

Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’”: “What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not […]

President Obama is less skilled than Presidents Clinton and Bush when it comes to buttering up campaign donors. Is this a good thing? “As the Washington fund-raiser sees it, the White House social secretary must spend the first year of an Administration saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ Instead, the fund-raiser says, Obama’s first […]

A man with hypochondria attempts to understand his disorder: “Eleven years ago, when he was still a medical resident at Columbia University, Fallon was asked to help a man who was convinced, despite medical results to the contrary, that he was saddled with a brain tumor. ‘He tried Prozac, and it made a dramatic change,’ […]

What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City: “The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a […]

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed: “Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before […]