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“Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone?” Happy Friday! We’ve got a compelling, thought-provoking feature for you this week. In […]
Kenneth Watkins’s son, Kenny, was 6 days old when he was taken away by ACS, New York City’s child-welfare agency. Kenny was then placed with an affluent foster family. To regain custody, Watkins had to prove that being poor didn’t make him a bad father. Despite Watkins’ constant efforts, it took years to get Kenny […]
“I would never give my son back, for anything, but I would certainly give him a different mother.”
You’ve heard from the Longreads’ editors, now it’s the turn of our readers.
“The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?”
The profiles we loved in 2023 cover a Uvalde mom turned gun-control advocate, Ginni and Clarence Thomas, a love letter to Louisiana and two unrelated women born there in 1953, the man behind the Twitter persona “Dril,” and an underdog surfer nicknamed “Casual Luke.”
“It would take years before Molly and Heaven would learn that neither of them was ever in the foster system. Instead, caseworkers had diverted them to what some scholars call ‘hidden foster care’ or ‘shadow foster care,’ in which the legal protections of the formal system disappear.”
This week, we’re sharing stories from Skip Hollandsworth, Kory Grow and Jason Newman, Jordan Kisner, Clare Fieseler, and Jessica Klein.
“His books dance — with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact — all over the line between the mythic and the mundane.”
“Give me the weird tics, the turns of phrase, the strange beginnings. Give me the writer in their natural habitat.”
