In “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity,” a striking essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Carmen Maria Machado explores an adolescence steeped in “purity culture”: sexual assault, conservative youth groups, purity rings, curbed fantasies and an unusually close relationship with her youth pastor.
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Interview: Maya Rao on Spending a Month Working as a Cashier in the Bakken
On “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil”
Escape from Jonestown
15-year-old Tommy Bogue was sent to a promising new church settlement in Guyana—run by a charismatic leader named Jim Jones.
For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.
“I never figured out why they did that to me.”
What It's Like to Be in Solitary Confinement
“I place a stack of 18 postcards in front of me and write on each of them a question that has been on my mind since I left Pelican Bay: ‘Do you think prolonged SHU confinement is torture?’ I send them to prisoners across the state and 14 write back, all with the same answer: […]
Reading List: What Happens to Whistleblowers After They Speak Out
From Deep Throat to Thomas Drake: Julia Wick selects five classic stories from The New York Times, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair and more.
A Mother Jones Reading List: Fashion #Longreads
A collection of stories from Salon, Jane, The New Yorker, New York Times and more.
Video Pick: The Detroit Bus Company
A mini-documentary on one resident who took matters into his own hands after the city killed its light-rail plans. Plus: Detroit stories from the Longreads archive, from Mother Jones, GQ, Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica.
Inside The Detroit Bus Company
The city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy, but there’s some good news from residents like Andy Didorosi, who responded to the death of the city’s light-rail plans by building his own private bus service, The Detroit Bus Company. Dark Rye, which devoted its June issue to Detroit, took a closer look inside Didorosi’s company […]
