Through her work on clone-thriller Orphan Black, science consultant Cosima Herter has helped open our eyes to the possibilities and perils of synthetic biology and the pursuit of genetic perfection.
Search results
The Most Haunted Road in America
Ghost boy, cannibals, disappearing trucks: A journey into the darkness of New Jersey to uncover the mysteries of Clinton Road.
Is W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ the Most Pillaged Piece of Literature in the English Language?
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
The Art of Escape
What do we gain from giving inmates access to video games?
When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman
On the rise and fall of American utopia.
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
Romance, Relationships and Religion: A Reading List
1. “Breaking Up is Hard to Do – Especially in the Orthodox World.” (Jewcy, Rachel Delia Benaim, July 2014) I recently finished reading Cut Me Loose, Leah Vincent’s memoir of her time in the ultra-Orthodox community, her subsequent shunning and eventual breakout. Benaim, the author of this piece comes from a Modern Orthodox background, but many of the […]
The Walkable Multiverse According to Charles Jencks
On an abandoned mining site in Scotland, an architectural theorist attempts to bring the mysteries of the cosmos to life on Earth.
Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo
The story of how pigs became the world’s most divisive meal.

