Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. *** 1. The Murders Before the Marathon Susan Zalkind | Boston Magazine | March 1, 2014 | 32 minutes (8,130 words) A triple murder […]
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Longreads Member Pick: The Last Freeway, by Hillel Aron
This week’s Longreads Member Pick comes recommended by Longreads contributor Julia Wick: It’s “The Last Freeway,” a story by Hillel Aron, published in Slake in 2011, about the construction of a freeway interchange and a judge whose decisions shaped its scope. Aron explains: “Well, my friends Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa had this great quarterly […]
The Murders And The Journalists
More than 40 years after the “Fatal Vision” murders, Errol Morris’s new book re-investigates a case once covered by the likes of Janet Malcolm and Joe McGinniss: “In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in […]
Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail
A political reporter desperately searches for a sign of joy in this year’s presidential race: “I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about […]
The Woman Who Would Save Football
Neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKee, a Green Bay Packers fan, on her autopsies of former NFL players and research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy: “Over the last four years, McKee has become the most visible member of a cohort of research scientists and family members — wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the dead, dying, and demented […]
The Long, Lawless Ride of Sheriff Joe Arpaio
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, 80-year-old Joe Arpaio has made a name for himself “for being not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America.” He’s now being sued by the Justice Department for civil rights violations against Latinos: “Arpaio began focusing on illegal immigration about six years ago, after he watched […]
Suddenly That Summer
This summer marks the 45th anniversary of “the Summer of Love” in San Francisco. A look at the movers and shakers in Haight-Ashbury in 1967: “Joplin’s creative epiphany occurred after a friend of Getz’s gave her acid for the first time—slipping it into her cold duck—and they went to the Fillmore to hear Otis Redding. […]
The Ax Murderer Who Got Away
On June 10, 1912, a family was brutally murdered in a small Iowa town. The murders remain unsolved: “The Moores were not discovered until several hours later, when a neighbor, worried by the absence of any sign of life in the normally boisterous household, telephoned Joe’s brother, Ross, and asked him to investigate. Ross found […]
The Recluse
The writer becomes pen pals with an ornery old poet, Hayden Carruth: “For most of his life, the beard was cropped and average — it was an unserious beard. But by the time I met him in 2003, it was the broad, white beard of a poet in exile, grown out in his desolate corner […]
Veterans’ Struggle
U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them: “The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from […]

