Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Best Innocence Story “The Innocent Man” (Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly) What if you were convicted of murdering your wife, and you didn’t do it? What if, after decades in prison, you learned that the prosecution had held proof of […]
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Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s
Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words) ‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’ When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the […]
Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.”
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Gangrey All-Stars: Top 5 Longreads of 2010
Gangrey All-Stars: Top 5 Longreads of 2010 Gangrey.com, btw, is the heart and soul of long-form journalism. Click for Top 5 lists from writers including Thomas Lake (Sports Illustrated), Ben Montgomery (St. Petersburg Times), Wright Thompson (ESPN), Michael Kruse (St. Petersburg Times), and Justin Heckert (ESPN).
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The Boy Who Died of Football
The Boy Who Died of Football Three days after he collapsed from heatstroke at practice in 2008, 15-year-old Max Gilpin became one of at least 665 boys since 1931 to die as a result of high school football. Here’s what made his case different: The Commonwealth of Kentucky tried to prove Max’s coach had a […]
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Gangrey: Our Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Gangrey.com is a site dedicated to the practice of great newspaper and magazine storytelling. Some of these picks make it seem like we like each other. We do, most of the time. But we’re also intense critics. We get together in the woods in Georgia one weekend each year to tear one another apart. Physical […]
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The search for Clifton (Pop) Herring, Jordan’s high school coach, and the truth about the NBA legend’s early days: And so, over the next four years, as Michael Jordan became an Olympic gold medalist, a rookie NBA All-Star and the scorer of 37 points per game, Pop Herring went from suspended to unemployed to unemployable. […]
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A Michigan high school basketball player hits the game-winning shot. Moments later he collapses from cardiac arrest and dies: After the autopsy, when the doctor found white blossoms of scar tissue on Wes Leonard’s heart, he guessed they had been secretly building there for several months. That would mean Wes’s heart was slowly breaking throughout […]
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Longreads Best of 2012: Howard Riefs
Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago. Best Series This Land, Dan Barry, The New York Times “The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here. A place buffeted by time and the economy, a place […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Caught Up in the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher
Susan J. Palmer | University of Toronto Press | 2001 | 38 minutes (9,328 words) The below article comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, and we’d like to thank the author, Susan J. Palmer, for allowing us to share it with the Longreads community.
