The descendants of lynching victim Elwood Higginbotham learn the circumstances of his 1935 murder in Oxford, Mississippi.
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The Amateur Sleuth Who Can’t Let One Case Rest
One civilian is obsessed with investigating the eight student deaths in a 1967 fire at Cornell University.
Privatizing Poverty
Two new books on poverty, Not a Crime to Be Poor (Peter Edelman) and The Poverty of Privacy Rights (Khiara M. Bridges), suggest that poor people are disproportionately surveilled, imprisoned, and monitored — “treated presumptively as lawbreakers” — so that the state can “redress its budget shortfalls” by imposing exploitative fines on anyone without ready access to hundreds or […]
How ‘Cops’ Became the Most Polarizing Reality TV Show in America
What one of TV’s longest-running reality shows says about race and our relationship with the police.
To Catch a Predator
The New York City Police Department’s Special Victims Division attempted to bust Harvey Weinstein in 2015, but the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office put a stop to the case.
Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk
The posthumous Buckley industry began with this problematic album, proof that the people who control a musician’s estate don’t always have his music in mind.
Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks
Our top picks of the year, all in one place.
‘Black Flight’ out of Chicago
By 2030, Chicago’s Black population will have decreased by half a million people in 50 years.
The Classroom Origins of Toxic Masculinity
It’s a relatively new term for a concept as old as time.
‘Nobody in This Book Is Going to Catch a Break’: Téa Obreht on “Inland”
‘The history of the West is a deeply turbulent one… that kept the living population in a constant state of unrest. I thought this constant state of unrest must be true for the dead as well.’

