These essays and reported features are our most-read stories of the year.
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The Journalist Who the Nazis Could Not Silence
No one has ever received more nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize than Carl von Ossietzky. This is his story.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories by Michael Lewis, Patricia Wen, Ted Chiang, Katie Thornton, and Sarah Smarsh.
H-Town United: An Unlikely Soccer Power Rises in Texas
It’s hard to call Elsik High School’s soccer team an underdog — the squad from Southwest Houston has become a national powerhouse — but it’s also hard to call them anything but. A long, engrossing portrait of a program marked by love, second chances, and a ceaselessly nurtured sense of newfound family. About half of this […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending excellent stories from Lewis Hyde, Reeves Wiedeman, Sam Myers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and David W. Brown.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Highlighting stories from Alex Morris, Gordy Megroz, Patricia Marx, Leigh Claire La Berge, and Anne Casselman.
The Bullet and the Ballplayer
In 2019, beloved baseball player David Ortiz was shot at a bar in the Dominican Republic. The shooting swiftly unraveled the two very different lives the Boston Red Sox star had been living, in Boston and in his home country. Mike Damiano masterfully tells Ortiz’s story for Boston magazine. That frenzied quest for answers has […]
We’ve Underestimated Sprinkles
I love sprinkles. Always have. And somehow, as Cathy Erway shows in this delightful piece for Taste, the world has caught up to my juvenile palate. Thankfully, she phrases the appeal more artfully: “the nutritionless, mostly flavorless, tiny doodads that mimic absolutely nothing found in nature provide outsize comfort with egalitarian underpinnings. And they aren’t […]
Belting out Songs and Our Top 5
“There’s something about losing yourself in a communal experience that’s immensely appealing in this age of virtual meetings and not-so-social media. We want to see the artists we love in person. We want to believe they’re singing directly to us.” Elizabeth Blackwell, a regular commentator on cultural phenomena (check out her Reality TV and Pivotal […]
Life Goals: Power Couple Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird
“When two people are on the same page, and they love each other, and they’re working towards something better, you can do a lot of good things.”


