It’s hard to call Elsik High School’s soccer team an underdog — the squad from Southwest Houston has become a national powerhouse — but it’s also hard to call them anything but. A long, engrossing portrait of a program marked by love, second chances, and a ceaselessly nurtured sense of newfound family. About half of this […]
Search results
Posted inFeature
Chaos and Cosmic Order: The Year of the Dragon
Grace Loh Prasad on trying to make it home in time for Lunar New Year.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Woman Who Killed Roe
Marjorie Dannenfelser has dedicated her entire career to banning legal abortion in America. She’s now on the verge of winning. The tactics it took to get here were ugly, and often vengeful. What’s more, they were — and are — based in no small part on a visual lie: An 18-week-old fetus does not, in […]
Posted inTop 5
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we are sharing stories from Lana Hall, Benjamin Hale, Sarah Bird, Rachel Browne, and Tom Lamont.
Posted inUncategorized
10 Short Stories, The Power of Music, and Our Top 5
“I always admired how my father could play so delicately with such brutal hands. They were rough, mired with patches of psoriasis, calloused from playing the charango and the guitar, and scarred, scarred all over.” I have fond memories of playing the violin when I was a child, and over the years I’ve considered returning […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Extraordinary Circumstances
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 […]
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 inUncategorized
A Triumphant Solo Trip and Our Weekly Top 5
“Milan raised me to believe I could do and be anything. To have had that and to have lost it might be worse than never having had it at all.” Welcome to the weekend, friends! To kickstart your reading, let Kristina Kasparian’s fierce new essay whisk you away to Italy. In “Flying Solo,” she returns […]
Posted inNewsletter
Out on the Trail, Deep Online, and the Week’s Top 5
“Eating, even eating junk food—sometimes especially eating junk food—is not just a good idea but potentially the difference between life and death, or at the very least the difference between an enjoyable experience and a grueling one. No one has ever opened up a packet of Oreos on a mountaintop and said, ‘I’m being so bad.’” […]
