Our favorite stories of the week, featuring The Big Roundtable, Down East, The Believer, Pacific Standard, and The Atlantic.
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When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman
On the rise and fall of American utopia.
Longreads Best of 2014: Our 10 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year
This year, Longreads worked with a group of outstanding writers and publishers to produce original stories and exclusives that hadn’t been previously published online. It was all funded with support from our Longreads Members. You can read them all here. Here’s a list of the 10 most popular stories we published this year. Join us to […]
Johnny Cash’s dark California days
Johnny Cash biographer Robert Hilburn on the musician’s life in California during the 1960’s, a dark decade “fueled by drugs and guilt over the breakup of his marriage.”
In the Grand Scheme of Things
What one mother learned after she discovered her daughter had albinism.
A Charles D’Ambrosio Reading List
Recently, we published “This is Living,” an exclusive excerpt from Charles D’Ambrosio’s most recent essay collection, Loitering: New & Collected Essays (Tin House). Because we just can’t get enough D’Ambrosio, here’s a reading list featuring interviews old and new, another essay featured in Loitering (“Seattle, 1974”), and more. * * * 1. “Seattle, 1974” (Charles D’Ambrosio, Front […]
The Secret Mikvah Society
An ex-Orthodox Jewish woman takes a dip in the ancient ritual bath to see if it really will make her—and her marriage—pure.
Falling in Love, 30 Years Later
At Vogue, Mira Jacob writes about watching her parents love 30 years after being paired up in an arranged marriage: The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The […]
The Arranged Marriage That Ended Happily Ever After: How My Parents Fell In Love, 30 Years Later
The writer on watching her parents fall in love three decades after their arranged marriage and what she learned from it: I was 24, and deeply absorbed in my own dramas. I barely noticed how close my mother was sitting to my father at dinner at our favorite restaurant. They watched me with giddy smiles. […]
In the Grand Scheme of Things
What one mother learned after she discovered her daughter had albinism.

