The following story comes recommended by Ben Marks, senior editor for Collectors Weekly: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most recent history, The Bully Pulpit, chronicles the intertwined lives of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, often in excruciating detail, from Roosevelt’s struggles with the bosses of his Republican party to the fungal infections that plagued Taft’s groin. […]
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Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year
Every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year.
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“Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It.” — David Kaiser, Lovisa Stannow, New York Review of Books More from NYRB
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The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”: The cell I am standing in is one of eight in a ‘pod,’ a large concrete room with cells along one side and only one exit, which leads […]
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Our Longreads Member Pick: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis
This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains: I first arrived in Libya at the end of February 2011, less than ten days after the uprising began when […]
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5 Stories on What Happens to Whistleblowers After They Speak Out
Above: Mark Felt Julia Wick is a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC. With Chelsea Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison and Edward Snowden’s future still uncertain, it seems a pertinent time to look at what becomes of our whistleblowers after […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Flynt Family Values
Jimmy Flynt has had a falling out with his infamous brother Larry, and is now striking out on his own: “Jimmy doesn’t sugarcoat his time with Larry. His brother is narcissistic, a micromanager, and a publicity hound, he says. Does he feel liberated to no longer have to deal with such a difficult personality? He […]
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The Longest Hunger Strike
A prisoner in Connecticut who is protesting his conviction by refusing food is now being force-fed. Is it torture? “Staff turned off the video camera typically used to record medical procedures. They strapped Coleman down at ‘four points’ with seatbelt-like ‘therapeutic’ restraints. Edward Blanchette, the internist and prison medical director at the time, pushed a […]
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North Korea Won’t Be Liberated in a Day
The writer, an idealist, discovers how difficult it is to figure out how to help with human rights issues in North Korea: “Blaine Harden, author of the book about escaped prisoner Shin Dong-hyuk, has said before that North Korea’s diplomats ‘”go nuts” and leave the room’ when the subject of the camps in broached in […]
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Lizards’ Colony
[Fiction] An Iraqi-born American woman works as an interpreter inside a prison camp: “She opened the door of the trailer, the rising sunlight submerging her. The still air was saturated with extreme humidity, making it feel like Basra, and the temperature was close to thirty-five degrees Celsius. The heat might have been tolerable but not […]
