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U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them: The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from […]

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Liberals’ history with regard to gay rights is not as progressive as some would like you to remember: It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American […]

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How did a blackjack player manage to win $15 million from Atlantic City casinos over the course of several months? As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means […]

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Retracing the steps of a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness. Family, friends and fellow Iraq veterans struggle to understand what happened to 30-year-old Noah Pippin: Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry […]

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John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career: Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild […]

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[Fiction] A philandering husband’s next phase in life: Horace and Loneese Perkins—one child, one grandchild—lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Sunset House, a building for senior citizens at 1202 Thirteenth Street NW. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they made […]

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A political reporter desperately searches for a sign of joy in this year’s presidential race: I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about […]

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An Iraq war veteran becomes blind during combat, and learns how to live on: When the doctors told him the blindness was irreversible, he felt a rage and despair that made him feel like his head would explode. Castro began therapy a week after waking up, and he only halfheartedly endured the rehab sessions with […]

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‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience

Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here. “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published […]

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