When a promising student left a neighborhood full of heroin for the University of Pennsylvania, it should have been a moving story. But what does an at-risk student actually need to thrive — or even just to survive?
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Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun
Before he founded High Times, Tom Forcade was a renegade journalist willing to throw a pie—or a lawsuit—in the face of anyone restricting his constitutional freedoms.
Anyone’s Son
Cody Dalton Eyre, a 20-year-old Alaskan Native, was having a mental health crisis on Christmas Eve, 2017 when his mother called 911 for help. So why did police officers end up shooting and killing him?
A Company Built on a Bluff
Vice Media grew from a free alternative magazine into a company with 3,000 employees and a multi-billion-dollar valuation. It’s also been investigated for sexual misconduct and has struggled to deliver on its promise of bringing millennials back to television, raising questions about its future.
Longreads Best of 2018: Crime Reporting
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in crime reporting.
‘I’m Incredulous That People Do This Repeatedly. The Second Book Thing Is So Real.’
Mary H.K. Choi discusses her latest novel, which examines how “holograms and digital envoys” represent us online, and why it feels like her “second book signals the death of my first.”
The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix, Arizona
To understand this sprawling desert city, you have to understand its canals, whose routes Indigenous people dug as far back as A.D. 200.
How the Toronto Raptors and the Vancouver Grizzlies Revived the NBA
Both franchises led the NBA’s international expansion, and to stand out in the hockey-crazed country, the teams would need impressive logos and colorways to break through, but no one expected a red raptor or a grizzly bear outlined in Haida trim.
Pages You Can Dance To: A Book List
Either Martin Mull or Frank Zappa or Elvis Costello once said writing about music is as pointless as dancing about architecture. Which doesn’t account for how I’ve danced to all these books.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re sharing stories by Jason Fagone, Betty Ann Adam, Christian H. Cooper, Clarissa Wei, and Robert Kolker.

