Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel — biomedical companies bleed 500,000 of them every year. Can this creature that’s been around since the dinosaurs be saved?
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Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks
Our top picks of the year, all in one place.
Posted inNonfiction
How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
Posted inBooks, Current Events, Member Pick, Story
Putin’s Rasputin
Journalist Amos Barshad meets with “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin to try to understand how a shadowy advisor exerts influence.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story
In the Age of the Psychonauts
Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.
Posted inNonfiction
Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia
History may have pigeonholed her as Renaissance Italy’s most notorious seductress, but it’s high time we give the Duchess of Ferrara a closer look.
Posted inStory
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids
Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, Story
Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Campbell, and the Origins of Scientology
Read an excerpt adapted from Alec Nevala-Lee’s book, Astounding.
Posted inNonfiction
Baring the Bones of the Lost Country: The Last Paleontologist in Venezuela
In light of recent events in crisis-ridden Venezuela, its last vertebrate paleontologist puts together key pieces of the baffling puzzle that the country has become in the past couple of decades.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”
In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s fantastical short story collection, the strangest fantasy of all is that people try to act morally in a corrupt world.
