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Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending. For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently […]

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, #fiction from The New York Review of Books, plus a guest pick from Eva Holland.

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The blue-collar temp industry is booming, which doesn’t bode well for people searching for long-term, full-time jobs. A look at Labor Ready, which wants to be “the McDonalds of the temp industry”: In the two weeks that I spend working out of Oakland’s Labor Ready branch, my ‘honest pay’ tops out at $8.75 an hour. […]

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The story of an immigrant student, Maria, and how one “failing” San Francisco high school is helping her get ahead:  Maria’s middle-school experience all but ensured she’d join the 52 percent of foreign-born Latinos who drop out of high school. She graduated from eighth grade without learning to speak English. She had a hard time […]

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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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The Top 10 Longreads of 2012

About This List Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Longreads community this year, and to all of our guests who shared their favorite stories of 2012. The below list represents our editors’ favorite stories of the year, for both nonfiction and fiction. Longreads is edited by Mark Armstrong and Mike Dang, with Kjell Reigstad, […]

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