Michele Filgate reflects on her teen years with an abusive stepfather and a mother whose silence protected him.
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The Slave Who Outwitted George Washington
Ona Judge slipped out of the president’s house one night and didn’t come back. But unlike most runaway slaves, she was never caught.
How Does It Feel? An Alternative American History, Told With Folk Music
On Guthrie, Robeson, Seeger, Lomax, Dylan, the Red Scare, the fall of labor, and what folk music had to do with it.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our top stories of the week, as chosen by the editors at Longreads.
A Witness to Other People’s Lives, Not Living My Own
Unhappiness Cloak: An excerpt from “Weird in a World That’s Not,” by Jennifer Romolini.
The Lost Genocide
Why the United Nations may never be able to prosecute the Rohingya genocide.
How Did HGTV ‘Stars’ Become Celebrities?
Is the rise of HGTV celebrities a window into, or a reprieve from, a “culturally divided America”?
The Many Acts of Keith Gordon
How does a young, successful actor become a relatively unknown director of most of the television you watch? And what’s next?
The Many Acts of Keith Gordon
How does a young, successful actor become a relatively unknown director of most of the television you watch? And what’s next?
My Secondhand Lonely
Raised by a single, independent mother, one young woman struggles with her familial inheritance and the relationship between self-sufficiency and social isolation.

