For 50 years, Enthusiastic Sobriety programs have offered to help teenagers kick drugs and alcohol. But former followers say ES doesn’t save lives—it destroys them.
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Posted inUncategorized
A New Series, An Unknown History, and the Week’s top 5
“Minstrelsy shows you one hand, convinces you of one thing—the thing you can see most vividly—while something else works behind the scenes. That something is something only those who are tapped into a specific kind of pain, a specific kind of quest for freedom that has failed before but is not worth abandoning, might understand.” […]
Posted inNewsletter
Ice Cream Panic, Airship Catastrophe, and our Top 5
“But, for me, the classic is an oyster: a scalloped, hinged wafer dipped in mallow and chocolate, with desiccated coconut at the edges, piped full of vanilla soft serve and squiggled madly with monkey’s blood (OK, raspberry sauce).” This summer, I have spent a lot of time in England, and a particular vehicle has been […]
Posted inUncategorized
A Boozy Buddy Comedy and This Week’s Top 5
“I wanted to write stories. Mark wanted to live them. I’ve never stopped seeking achievement and he’s never stopped seeking places to go, the Peter Pan to my Wendy. He even married a flight attendant, mostly for love, but also for the free plane tickets that allow him to join me for book festivals, readings, […]
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week’s edition highlights stories by Peter Flax, Abigail Edge, Jesús A. Rodríguez, Henry Wismayer, and Elif Batuman.
Posted inNewsletter
Detectives at Work and the Week’s Top 5
“Ronald was my mother’s uncle, a fashion designer who fled Texas for New York at 19. I met him only once. In my memory, we are sitting on the front porch, the hairs standing up on my arms as the sun wanes. His head is bent over a piece of paper, sketching my 7-year-old face. […]
Posted inNewsletter
Hoops, Double Helices, and Our Top 5
“I’m not just crying, I’m truly wailing. I’m one of Homer’s grieving women, I’m Alice in Wonderland crying an actual ocean between hiccups, I’m Diane Keaton weeping then whooping in her Something’s Gotta Give breakup montage. My team, the Lakers, has lost.” I confess: I did not know much about basketball until I worked with Rachel Dlugatch […]
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The Plot Thickens (and the Week’s Top 5)
“Accommodating the dead, like accommodating the living, has always entailed a head-on collision with the awkward reality that we have a finite amount of physical space.” Okay, yes, sure, maybe you weren’t expecting a quote about dead bodies to kick off your Friday morning. But I assure you that our new feature, “Disneyland of the […]
Posted inNonfiction
How to Save True Crime: A Reading List of Wrongful Conviction Stories
Stories about wrongful convictions open our eyes to systemic injustices in the U.S. court system. Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, compiles his recommended longreads within the genre.
Posted inUncategorized
Found Poetry, Marital Musings, and our Top 5
“I peeled the list off the windshield and held it like an artifact: evidence of a life I didn’t know but suddenly cared about. It read like a poem. A confession. What was the story behind this list, I wondered—and what would come for this stranger after the checkout aisle?” I love making lists. They […]
