“When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.”
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Posted inNewsletter
This Week: Rituals, Emoji, and a Cold Case
“Ritual is an urge and an act; it’s an aesthetic gesture. As an adult I established the habit of turning my attention to those subtle seasonal details and recording them. I was loving and honoring the land, but this practice still left something undone. A certain clarity, maybe formality. Something like a frame around a […]
Posted inFeature
The Art of the Steal
The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?
“What exactly was happening inside patients to make their sense of smell disappear in such an unusual way? Could Covid-related smell loss teach us anything new about how the virus worked? Or about how we did?”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Last Two Northern White Rhinos On Earth
“What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die?”
Posted inUncategorized
Fit to Be Tied (and the Week’s Top 5)
“When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade. In the past sixty years, ten of these frequent events have turned into all-consuming firestorms.” Welcome to 2025, friends. Peter here. As it does all too often, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted
“The culture of negation inspires a taste for nothingness and glorifies numbness.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Guatemala’s Baby Brokers: How Thousands of Children Were Stolen for Adoption
“From the 1960s, baby brokers persuaded often Indigenous Mayan women to give up newborns while kidnappers ‘disappeared’ babies.”
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Aymann Ismail
The Slate writer and Becoming Baba author reflects on Newark and mosques as home, making sense of Egypt on long flights, and becoming a father.
Posted inHighlight, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
On Trees as Social Creatures and Fungi as the ‘Fabric of the Forest’
Trees were previously seen as individual and solitary organisms. But the research of Suzanne Simard shows otherwise.
