Harper Reed went from running a T-shirt community to running digital operations for Obama’s reelection campaign. Inside the team’s top-secret efforts to refine voter targeting to a granular (or: “creepy”) level: By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn’t just […]
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The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”: The cell I am standing in is one of eight in a ‘pod,’ a large concrete room with cells along one side and only one exit, which leads […]
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“Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies.” — Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens More by Mother Jones
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Los Angeles Magazine, Smithsonian, fiction from The American Scholar and a guest pick from Marissa Evans.
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5 Stories on What Happens to Whistleblowers After They Speak Out
Above: Mark Felt Julia Wick is a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC. With Chelsea Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison and Edward Snowden’s future still uncertain, it seems a pertinent time to look at what becomes of our whistleblowers after […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Summer I Tried To Save Memphis
Saeed Jones on a painful memory of visiting his grandmother when he was a teenager—and what then happened at her church: “My grandmother and I still haven’t spoken about what happened during the summer of 1999, or why it was the last time I visited her by myself, and how it came to be that […]
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The Cruelest Show on Earth
Feld Entertainment portrays its population of some 50 endangered Asian elephants as “pampered performers” who “are trained through positive reinforcement, a system of repetition and reward that encourages an animal to show off its innate athletic abilities.” But a yearlong Mother Jones investigation shows that Ringling elephants spend most of their long lives either in […]
Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
The Good Girls Revolt
In 1970, Lynn Povich and 45 other women sued Newsweek for discrimination. Here is what the workplace was like for them.
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Abusive Afghan Husbands Want This Woman Dead
Abusive Afghan Husbands Want This Woman Dead For Afghan women, self-immolation has become a way to externalize private injustice, to push hidden pain into the public square. They are expressing a demand for human rights in a culture that does not allow them to articulate that wish. As chief prosecutor, Maria Bashir has sought to […]
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Longreads Best of 2012: Reyhan Harmanci
Reyhan Harmanci is deputy editor of Modern Farmer, a not-yet-launched publication devoted to issues of farming and food (and animals!). Picking these stories activated an obsessive part of my brain and I’m already regretting throwing the “best” around without spending a few months reading all of the Longreads of 2012. But there’s always 2013! Best […]
