In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a […]
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Posted inNonfiction
The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion
Eighty years ago, in Berlin, Stella Walsh won her second Olympic medal. Decades later, Walsh’s murder and subsequent autopsy threw the legacy of track’s first female superstar into turmoil.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Hospital Chaplain Reflects on Poetry and Dying
A few weeks later, my friend sends me a copy of Dunn’s poem “A Coldness.” The speaker says about his sick brother, “From then on he was delusional, / the cancer making him / stupid, insistently so, and lost. / I wanted him to die. / And I wished his wife / would say A […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Friend
Matthew Teague’s wife, Nicole, was only 34 years old and dying of cancer. This is the story of how a friendship, deep, true, and strong, became prophylactic against the dizzying litany of indignities involved in a slow, painful death.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Author Porochista Khakpour on New Age Treatments for Lyme Disease, and ‘Mind Over Matter’
As someone who’s twice been diagnosed with Lyme Disease, I’ve read an awful lot about it. The more I read, the more confused I am; for every long, boring article about antibiotic treatments, there are two or three about widely varying alternative cures. The Last Illusion author Porochista Khakpour has been living with Lyme for […]
Posted inNonfiction
STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer
Is there a dietary treatment for multiple sclerosis? And if so, why is the medical establishment ignoring published academic research that started in the 1950s proving it?
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Rivers We Destroy: A Reading List
Here are four stories on how humans have changed local and regional river systems, and the disastrous and sometimes deadly consequences.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Letter to an Ex, on the Occasion of His Suicide
In the wake of a troubled ex-lover’s suicide, novelist Masha Hamilton tries to make sense of it in a correspondence to his ghost.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Home Is Where the Fraud Is
At the height of the housing crisis, one woman’s bureaucratic odyssey to discover who really owns her home leads her to startling revelations about the housing market.
