For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from Next City’s Forefront magazine, by journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz. Aronowitz looks at the story behind the minimum wage increase in San Jose, which jumped to $10 per hour from $8 per hour after the city’s residents voted for the increase last November—”the […]
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Reading List: Stories From the Working Class
Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy. These are stories about […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
In the Footsteps of a Killer
A crime writer digs into the decades-long investigation of a serial killer in California, and finds a growing online community of amateur sleuths trying to solve the case: “The Golden State Killer, though, has consumed me the most. In addition to 50 sexual assaults in Northern California, he was responsible for ten sadistic murders in […]
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The Damage Done
George Visger played for the San Francisco 49ers in 1980. Now, he’s diagnosed with chronic traumatic brain injury, frontal and temporal lobe disorders, generalized seizure disorder and cognitive impairment—and he’s trying to make sense of his life: “On a postcard-perfect Southern California morning, George Visger is pissing blood. This comes as a relief. For me, […]
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Diary: Google Invades
Making sense of San Francisco through Google and Apple’s commuter buses to Silicon Valley: “The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they […]
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A Miami Clinic Supplies Drugs to Sports’ Biggest Names
An investigation reveals that Major League Baseball stars including the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez and the Giants’ Melky Cabrera allegedly received banned substances: “Open the neat spreadsheet and scroll past the listing of local developers, prominent attorneys, and personal trainers. You’ll find a lengthy list of nicknames: Mostro, Al Capone, El Cacique, Samurai, Yukon, Mohamad, Felix […]
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Public Influence: The Immortalization of an Anonymous Death
A crowd watches a suicide in San Francisco: “Some people look on silently, hands over mouths. A teenage girl in a sundress wipes tears from her eyes. A circle of high school-age kids debate whether a fall from that height would be fatal. A woman in a pantsuit talks into her phone, excitedly describing the […]
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The Long Shot
Following news of the discovery of a new planet in Alpha Centauri, a look at how scientists discover new planets: “I’d come to meet Debra Fischer, a professor at San Francisco State University. As a co-discoverer of more than 150 planets, nearly half the known total outside our solar system, she is a prominent figure […]
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My Son is Schizophrenic. The ‘Reforms’ That I Worked for Have Worsened His Life
A former state legislator considers how the laws he helped pass ultimately harmed his mentally ill son: “If you were to encounter my son, Tim, a tall, gaunt man in ragged clothes, on a San Francisco street, you might step away from him. His clothes, his dark unshaven face and his wild curly hair stamp […]
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How Much Tech Can One City Take?
The takeover of San Francisco by tech companies prompts some soul-searching by Talbot, a longtime resident and veteran of the first dotcom boom as founder of Salon.com: “One recent Friday evening, a single mother named Fufkin Vollmayer found herself at a Shabbat service started by two young Jews who work in the tech sector. The […]
