Today, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the police can collect a DNA swab from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime. The justices were unusually divided—conservative Justice Antonin Scalia joined liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on the dissenting opinion. For some deeper context, read Harry […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Unspeakable Gift
A woman with Turner syndrome decides to participate in a study at the National Institutes of Health: “I arrived at the NIH Clinical Center alone, early, and unprepared. The nurse responsible for checking me in wasn’t even on duty yet. I had packed my suitcase as if for a four-day business conference, not a hospital […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year
Every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
3 Stories from Young Journalists Honored at the Livingston Awards
The Livingston Awards are handed out every year to celebrate outstanding work from journalists under 35. Here are this year’s winning stories, honored this week in New York: “Slavery’s Last Stronghold” (John D. Sutter & Edythe McNamee, CNN.com) International Reporting winner: A trip to Mauritania, where an estimated 10% to 20% of the population lives in slavery. […]
Posted inUncategorized
An oral history of the Beltway sniper attacks that occurred during three weeks in October 2002. Ten people were killed, three people were injured, and many people were too afraid to leave their homes: Iran Brown, victim, now 23: ‘I remember every detail, down to what I ate for breakfast: chocolate-chip waffles. My aunt drove […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Racist Redskins
As the 1950s arrived, more teams starting signing African-Americans. A turning point came when the great Jim Brown, from Syracuse, joined the Cleveland Browns in 1957. Brown’s domination on the field was so thorough that all questions about the skills of black players were erased—except in the nation’s capital, whose team, Marshall said, would “start […]
Posted inUncategorized
Unauthorized, but Not Untrue: The real story of a biographer in a celebrity culture of public denials, media timidity, and legal threats
Unauthorized, but Not Untrue: The real story of a biographer in a celebrity culture of public denials, media timidity, and legal threats Presidential wrath has its niggling little consequences. After almost 30 years as a contributing editor for Washingtonian magazine, I was suddenly removed from the masthead. The editor said he disapproved of my Bush […]
Posted inUncategorized
As the 1950s arrived, more teams starting signing African-Americans. A turning point came when the great Jim Brown, from Syracuse, joined the Cleveland Browns in 1957. Brown’s domination on the field was so thorough that all questions about the skills of black players were erased—except in the nation’s capital, whose team, Marshall said, would “start […]
Posted inUncategorized
As the 1950s arrived, more teams starting signing African-Americans. A turning point came when the great Jim Brown, from Syracuse, joined the Cleveland Browns in 1957. Brown’s domination on the field was so thorough that all questions about the skills of black players were erased—except in the nation’s capital, whose team, Marshall said, would “start […]
Posted inUncategorized
You might wonder why the best writer in American journalism would have fake poop as his Twitter icon. Or spend an inordinate amount of time making prank phone calls. Or concern himself with monkey sex, fake sneezes, or bacon taped to cats. As he once put it in a column, “I mostly write about underpants.” […]
