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Jalees Rehman, a cell biologist and physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on his grandfather’s surgery, and what he learned about humanity and healing: “Since that time I spent with my grandfather and the other patients on the eye ward, I have associated medicine with narration. All humans want to be narrators, but […]

An investigation into America’s underground market for adopted children. Using online forums like Yahoo and Facebook groups, parents often advertise their unwanted children—who have a tendency to have been adopted abroad and have special needs—and give custody rights to strangers in a practice called “private re-homing,” which has little or no government regulation: “As the […]

For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “The Prophet,” the much-talked-about new story from Luke Dittrich and Esquire magazine investigating the claims made by Dr. Eben Alexander in the best-selling book Proof of Heaven, about Alexander’s own near-death experience. Dittrich, a contributing editor at Esquire since 2008, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past and his work has […]

Tess Vigeland spent 11 years at her dream job at Marketplace. And then she decided to leave for an uncertain future: “You guys — I had fans. Yeah. I had fans. People who would recognize me in elevators just by my voice. Perfect strangers who thought I was awesome and had the coolest job in […]

Novelist Robert Boswell tells the story of how he met his wife, the author Antonya Nelson, and uses the story to explore how fiction is crafted: “Why are we drawn to stories about people falling in love? There are likely a host of reasons, but here’s a good one: marriage, when observed from a place […]

An excerpt from the new book The Magical Stranger. Rodrick was 12 when his pilot father died in a plane crash: “A colleague once nicknamed me – half mocking – the ‘magical stranger’ because I get people to tell me things. But to me, the magical stranger has always been my father. He was brilliant […]

[Fiction, National Magazine Awards finalist] A lapsed Christian Scientist meets a woman escaping her past: “Seamus lived in Wheaton, Maryland, in the last house on a quiet street that dead-ended at a county park. He’d bought the entire property, including a rental unit out back, at a decent price. This was after the housing market […]

[Fiction] Two college friends speculate about a stranger in town: “We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, […]

A man who installs secret compartments in cars—which are used to conceal things like jewelry, handguns, and drugs—finds himself in legal trouble: “On November 18, as Anaya drove his Ford F-350 through a Home Depot parking lot, he noticed a dark sedan that seemed to be shadowing him in an adjacent aisle. He thought the […]