Two recent suicide clusters by high school students have rocked a community in Palo Alto, a San Francisco Bay area city. Diane Kapp talks to students, family members, psychiatrists, and community leaders to get a sense of why the suicides occurred and what’s being done to prevent them.
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The Power of Reddit as a Public Health Advocacy Tool
Writing for Backchannel, Andrew McMillen recently profiled a woman named Tracey Helton. Helton—a former heroin addict who now works as a public health advocate—has taken to Reddit to advocate harm reduction strategies among addicts and to distribute the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Dubbed the “mother of r/opiates,” Helton’s program “illustrates the unexpected good that can emerge from darker corners of […]
Exile of the Bohemians
A brief history of the Bohemian, and whether artists in San Francisco have a future.
What Ever Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’?
Barbara Williamson co-founded one of the most famous radical sex experiments in America. Then she got wild.
The Dim Sum Revolution
How a group of immigrant Chinese kitchen workers successfully fought San Francisco’s premiere dim sum palace for $4 million in stolen wages.
The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett
The stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler once wrote, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”
Six Years of Longreads
April 17 marks six years since we started this community—growing from just a few readers to over a million, with people now sharing stories in dozens of different languages from hundreds of publishers. Christian Jørgensen put together a really nice Storify timeline of how the Twitter hashtag #longreads first evolved. This community also has grown […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, The New Yorker, Toronto Life, The AV CLub, The Atlantic, and Radio Silence.
Diane Arbus, Uncropped: A Reading List
Diane Arbus was renowned for photographing people on the margins, such as the mentally challenged, dwarves, giants, sideshow performers, crossdressers, and transsexuals. Was she merely a privileged voyeur of the vulnerable or an unsung champion of sexual and societal minorities? Here are five stories that will help you cut through the controversy.

