The people of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember a longtime sheriff as a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask.
Search results
A Pact of Love (and Our Top 5)
“The soaring vermilion bridge is one of the first sights that most transplants tick off their must-see list, and Ashwini’s work took her all around San Francisco. Avoiding even a glimpse of it took effort. But Ashwini had made a promise to another woman 7,500 miles away: She would not see the bridge until they […]
Chrishona Hodges’s Life Sentence
“At a crossroads when Chicago profiled him nine years ago, Jerryon Stevens is now in jail, awaiting trial on a murder charge. At home, his mother reckons with her son’s path — and tries to hold her fractured family together.”
On Different Kinds of Love (and Our Top 5)
“Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love.” Yes, today is that day. Dreadful for some of us, but delightful for others. (Especially all the excited school-age kids exchanging “Be My Valentine” messages—which, these days, are no longer […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we recommend stories from Sophia Panych, Brian Payton, Jeannette Cooperman, Joshua Hunt, and Sophie Elmhirst.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this edition: ICE fighter, tectonic researcher, prairie preserver, regal grandmother, wild timekeeper.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we are featuring stories from Fletcher Reveley, Susan Freinkel, Nick Paumgarten, Dana Salvador, and Kathryn Hughes.
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 […]
A Year in Reading: Inward Journeys
Navigating a world in flux demands some understanding of who you really are, and some of my favorite pieces from this year speak to that need.
A Knife Forged in Fire
“All of human history would thereby be embodied in a single work of art.”


