Hi there, Last week, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced the finalists for this year’s National Magazine Awards. At Longreads, the first thing we noticed was that our sister publication, The Atavist, was a finalist in the Profile category for the story “Coming to America.” The second thing we noticed was how many of […]
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Amor Eterno
“One year ago, before the school shooting in Uvalde, Kimberly Mata-Rubio had never been on a plane or given a public speech or scolded a U.S. senator right there in his office. A year in the life of a grieving mother.”
Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer
“The violence of his era can be found in his serene masterpieces — if you know where to look.”
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 […]
The Search for the Lost ‘Jeopardy!’ Tapes Is Over. The Mystery Behind Them Endures.
“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.”
Century-Scale Storage
“If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?”
Code Snitching
In Nashville, it’s become all too common for homeowners to find themselves on the receiving end of spurious fines for alleged code violations — an unnerving pattern rooted in the city’s policies, and weaponized by disingenuous (and gentrifying) neighbors. Radley Balko investigates, in a long and damning feature that embodies exactly why local journalism is […]
“What Price Was My Father’s Life Worth?”
“Right-wing doctors are still peddling dubious COVID drugs.”
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.”
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.”

