“It’s more than fifty years on from our declaration of a war on narcotics, and people are getting higher on more destructive shit than ever.”
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Posted inNewsletter
A Dangerous Solo Hike, the Vanishing of Aging Parents, and Our Top 5
“I came to a shack with a small, white-haired man inside. I assumed he had been guarding Devil’s Bridge for centuries. I answered his riddles three and he gestured for me to sign in. At the end of his hand was a damp pile of papers and a pen on a gray string. Like most […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
She Never Hurt Her Kids. So Why Is a Mother Serving More Time Than the Man Who Abused Her Daughter?
Oklahoma incarcerates more women than almost any other state. Under its punishing, under-the-radar “failure to protect” law, mothers — even those who are victims of domestic violence — can be sent to prison because of their supposed failure to keep their children out of harm’s way. In this devastating read, Samantha Michaels tells the story […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The State of Maine v. Parole
Maine was the first state to eliminate the possibility of parole. Now, a hard-nosed state legislator and a once-incarcerated PhD student are making the case that parole deserves a second chance: Talk of bringing back parole has intermittently stirred up in Augusta. In the early ’90s, with the corrections department facing overcrowded prisons, the head […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State
“Survivors of China’s campaign of persecution reveal the scope of the devastation.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
How We Survived Covid-19 in Prison
“At the start of the pandemic, we asked four incarcerated people to chronicle daily life with the coronavirus.” Bruce Bryant, Jennifer Graves, James Ellis, and Christopher Walker “reveal what they witnessed and how they coped with the chaos, fear, isolation and deaths.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Corporations Buy—and Sell—Food Made with Prison Labor
“The notion of work as punishment has enabled prison administrators to compel incarcerated people to work on farms and in dairies for low or no pay and without basic labor protections, sometimes in service of secretive billionaires they’ll never meet.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Alice Hines, Maggie Harrison Dupré, Katie Engelhart, Pooja Bhatia, and Tom Lamont.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Seven Stowaways and a Hijacked Oil Tanker: The Strange Case of The Nave Andromeda
Samira Shackle’s reporting in this piece for The Guardian is both impressive and moving. Investigating the full-scale commando raid that took place after a distress call from the Nave Andromeda, Shackle finds the seven confused, and innocent, stowaways at the heart of it. Almost three weeks after they had climbed on to the rudder in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Corky Lee and the Work of Seeing
“Corky Lee’s images do something we do not usually imagine photographs can do. Rather than merely showing the visible, they are portraits of structural forces.”
