“I’m going to say a blasphemous thing, which is we are so fucking done with the hero’s journey. It has been to our peril.”
Search results
Posted inNonfiction
My Grandmother’s Dark Secret
The music emanating from a storefront church in Brooklyn was a death knell: Once my grandmother heard it, her childhood was over.
Posted inStory
Deconstructing Disney: The Princess Problem of ‘Frozen II’
Audiences wanted Disney to give Elsa a girlfriend. But the Frozen franchise is at the center of the corporation’s latest princess project, whose nationalist concerns are decidedly here for the gay agenda.
Posted inNonfiction
Infatuation
Deena ElGenaidi considers the ways in which adoring Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine from afar in her teens and early 20s provided a safe outlet for expressing desire.
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2020: Arts and Culture
Our top editors’ picks in arts and culture writing this year.
Posted inNonfiction
The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes
Leigh Hopkins faces the hidden truth about the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon and the irresistible desire to find ‘the cure.’
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Was Being Used in Slivers and Slices’: On Feminism at Odds With Evangelical Faith
“I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table,” says Cameron Dezen Hammon about her life as a worship leader for an evangelical megachurch.
Posted inNonfiction
The 19th Century Lesbian Made for 21st Century Consumption
Jeanna Kadlec considers Anne Lister, the historical figure at the center of HBO’s Gentleman Jack, and the influence of other queer women who preceded her.
Posted inStory
‘I Don’t Think Those Feelings of Self-Doubt Ever Go Away.’
Susan Choi talks about feeling unsure of oneself, as a writer, as a performer — or as a victim — and about how her latest novel evolved in uncanny tandem with the real world.
Posted inNonfiction
Borrowed Babies
Five months into her first pregnancy, one writer pursues a research project about the history of home economics, as she struggles with her own concerns about motherhood.
