Sabine Heinlein grew up in a family where everyone was treated as equals. It didn’t work out like they hoped.
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Tony Judt’s Life with ALS: A Reading List
The Ice Bucket challenge raised millions for ALS research, not to mention awareness about the disease: the motor neuron disorder, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, affects thousands of Americans. It’s also served as a reminder about the work that Tony Judt did to convey what it was like to live with ALS, in his […]
Food For Thought: A Reading List
This week, we return to your regularly scheduled Longreads programming. The theme? Food: queering food, eating Pokemon, the potential of Soylent, tasting curly fries for a living, and Canadian food trucks. 1. “America, Your Food is So Gay.” (John Birdsall, Lucky Peach, June 2013) “It’s food that takes pleasure seriously, as an end in itself, an […]
Gold in the Mud
The Twisted Saga of Jailhouse Boxer James Scott’s Battle for Redemption: Prison inmate No. 57735, accused of murder and serving a 30-40 year stretch inside Rahway State Prison for armed robbery, introduced himself in a letter to reporter Beth Schenerman at The New York Times on Dec. 17, 1978, writing, in a rare moment of […]
The Peacemaker: A New Story by Eva Holland and Pacific Standard
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to a new story by journalist Eva Holland, to be published next week by Pacific Standard. “The Peacemaker” tells the story of Schaeffer Cox, the 30-year-old activist and founder of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia who was sentenced last year to 26 years in […]
What It's Like to Be in Solitary Confinement
“I place a stack of 18 postcards in front of me and write on each of them a question that has been on my mind since I left Pelican Bay: ‘Do you think prolonged SHU confinement is torture?’ I send them to prisoners across the state and 14 write back, all with the same answer: […]
Inside the Kafkaesque World of the US’s “Little Guantánamos”
Communication Management Units, or CMUs, are cloaked in secrecy. They segregate prisoners accused of terrorism, stripped of rights and held in isolation: We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref. “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the […]
Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. * * * I Smoked Pot with […]
Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye
“I want to introduce white America to people who they might never have met, and I want them to fall in love too.”
Is There Hope for the Survivors of the Drug Wars?
Men from Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods are turning to a family and job training center to keep themselves off the street dealing drugs and rebuild their lives after spending time in jail: The men are what policymakers euphemistically call a challenging population: Lacking high-school education or formal work experience, they’re the most likely of any group […]

