Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine, Pacific Standard, a co-investigation by NPR and ProPublica, and The New Yorker.
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The Demolition of Workers’ Comp
A co-investigation by NPR and ProPublica: Workers’ compensation benefits have been decimated over the last few decades, leaving severely injured workers vulnerable at a time when they need the most help.
Longreads Best of 2015: Investigative Reporting
The best in investigative reporting.
A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self
This list is a birthday gift to me and, I hope, of use to you, too.
How To Be, In Silence
The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she […]
A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self
This list is a birthday gift to me and, I hope, of use to you, too.
Who Was the Poet Frank Stanford?
With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, the work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available. Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a […]
Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism
Story picks by Leslie Jamison, Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Tom Scocca, Ann Friedman, Rachel Syme, Francesca Mari, Sari Botton, and Emily Perper.
Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Stories
Stories that deserved more attention in 2015.
David Rakoff on the Downsides of Childhood
I had a beautiful childhood and a lovely childhood. I just didn’t like being a child. I didn’t like the rank injustice of not being listened to. I didn’t like the lack of autonomy. I didn’t like my chubby little hands that couldn’t manipulate the world of objects in the way that I wanted them […]

