“In 1986, Barbara Lowe Vollick won five games of ‘Jeopardy!’ in a row. Her episodes were then taken out of circulation. What followed was a nearly 40-year hunt for the missing tapes—and a quest to find out what really happened between the show and its most enigmatic champion.”
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Elusive Erykah Badu
“Twenty years ago, she dropped Baduizm, the album that created a genre. I wanted to know how she did it and found something I hadn’t bargained for.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Century-Scale Storage
“If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?”
Posted inNewsletter
Help Us Publish Stories That Outlast the Noise
We’re a home for stories that linger. In 2017, I reached out to Candace Rardon, a writer and artist whose watercolor sketches I’d admired for years. Up until that point, I’d only edited traditional essays for Longreads, but I wanted to experiment with illustrated personal narratives. We brainstormed a visual direction, and the final piece […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How I Became a Modern Bootlegger
“Even after 25 years in journalism, I never knew humanity the way I did working at a strip club and moving product.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
I Spent 10 Days in a Secret Chinese Covid Detention Centre
“What I learnt when I was ‘taken away’ to an island quarantine facility in the middle of the night.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
“What Price Was My Father’s Life Worth?”
“Right-wing doctors are still peddling dubious COVID drugs.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Adrift
“In the early morning hours of May 28, 2021, a strange boat appeared in the Caribbean. As local fishermen approached, they made a grisly discovery: Everyone aboard it was dead.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Conspiracy Theorists Made Tiffany Dover into An Anti-Vaccine Icon. She’s Finally Ready to Talk About It.
“The Tennessee nurse stayed quiet in hopes that her silence would quiet false claims of her death. Now, she says it only hurt.”
