“Fifteen teams lifted off from Switzerland in gas ballooning’s most audacious race. Three days later, two of them drifted into Belarusian airspace—but only one would survive.”
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: An Explainer
“Responses to common questions on day one of Putin’s war of choice.”
Posted inNewsletter
In Praise of Blurred Edges
Essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert answers the Longreads Questionnaire.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Extraction
“When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Secret Weapons of Ukraine
“A journey through the strange, semiprofessional world of volunteers and foreign fighters who, one year into Russia’s invasion, are risking everything to defeat the invaders.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Collaborators
“As occupied territories are liberated, some residents face accusations that they sided with the enemy.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Russia Has an Opioid Crisis Too – One of Untreated Pain
“While the US and some other Western countries are struggling to contain an opioid crisis caused, in part, by overprescription of narcotic analgesics, Russia has the opposite problem: Hundreds of thousands of cancer and other patients in severe pain are denied adequate pain relief due to a repressive drug control system, a stifling bureaucracy, a […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Long Way Home
Earlier this year, journalist Martin Kuz spent five weeks in Ukraine, both as a reporter covering Russia’s invasion of his late father’s homeland and as a son hoping to better understand the forces that shaped his father’s life. He returned to Sacramento — home to the largest concentration of Ukrainian immigrants in the United States […]
Posted inNonfiction
Perilous Passage
The true story of a Ukrainian father and son who became the first — and only — Soviet defectors to seek freedom in the West by crossing the icy Bering Strait.
