On a sultry July morning, Cao, the first-term Republican congressman from New Orleans, walks out of his house in the Venetian Isles neighborhood in the easternmost part of the city, a low tentacle of land rising, just barely, above the waters of Bayou Sauvage. A dawn fog sits heavily over the adjacent swamp; a dead […]
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Longreads Best of 2012: Michael Hobbes
Michael Hobbes lives in Berlin. His essays from his blog, Rottin’ in Denmark, were featured on Longreads this year. I read news when I want to be entertained. I read features when I want to learn something. Here’s nine articles I read this year that changed the way I look at the world, and made […]
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‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist
“If you survive me, tell them this: I never gave up.”
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Don't Look Back: Republican Congressman Darrell Issa Can Explain His Past
Don’t Look Back: Republican Congressman Darrell Issa Can Explain His Past Many politicians have committed indiscretions in earlier years: maybe they had an affair or hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, it turned out, had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, […]
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Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicaidprescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk […]
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Halloran was no garden-variety pagan. He was the “First Atheling,” or prince, of his own Theodish tribe, called New Normandy. He had “thralls” who swore their allegiance to him. He didn’t just spend weekends reconstructing the religious activities of the pre-Christian Norse and Germanic gods—he led his flock, about 100 people at its height, in […]
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Writer Andrew Rice: My Top Longreads of 2011
Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. (See recent longreads by Rice.) *** Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and […]
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How the 2012 GOP primary became such a mess—and what it means for the future of the party: That Mitt Romney finds himself so imperiled by Rick Santorum—Rick Santorum!—is just the latest in a series of jaw-dropping developments in what has been the most volatile, unpredictable, and just plain wackadoodle Republican-nomination contest ever. Part of […]
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The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass: To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and […]
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A blow-by-blow account of a political negotiation gone wrong. President Obama and Republican House speaker John Boehner came close to a deal last July that would cut federal spending and bring in billions in new revenue. But a series of missteps led to its demise: From Boehner’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why he […]
