Europe is “experiencing a maritime refugee crisis of historic proportions,” the United Nations warns. Thousands of refugees escaping conflict in Africa and the Middle East are trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.
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Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2015: Investigative Reporting
The best in investigative reporting.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Sirte and Misrata, Libya’s Last Battle
Clare Morgana Gillis recalls her days reporting in Libya with James Foley.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Is W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ the Most Pillaged Piece of Literature in the English Language?
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Gaddafi’s Point Guard
When US basketball player Alex Owumi signed a contract to play for a team in Benghazi, Libya, he had no idea that his employer was the the most feared man in the country. Nor did he guess the country was about to descend into war. A lot of the players had scratches and banged-up bruises […]
Posted inUncategorized
Our Longreads Member Pick: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis
This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains: I first arrived in Libya at the end of February 2011, less than ten days after the uprising began when […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Longreads Member Exclusive: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis
This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much
On the work of Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old French writer whose pulpy S.A.S. books have turned out to be eerily accurate: “The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Murder of an Idealist
The life and last days of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed during a Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya: “It’s curious that a kid from California who grew up knowing nothing about the Arab world would come to devote his career to the Middle East and North Africa—as opposed to, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Obama’s Way
Lewis follows the president for six months—joining him for basketball pickup games, a trip on Air Force One, and inside a decision on how to handle Libya: “Before big meetings the president is given a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on […]
