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.
Search results
The Woes of the Corporate Anthropologist
In classical anthropology, there’s a rigid distinction between “field” and “home.” Field’s where you go to do your research, immersing yourself, sometimes at great personal risk, in a maelstrom of raw, unsorted happening. Home’s where you go to sort and tame it: catalogue it, analyze it, transform it in to something meaningful. But when the […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. The Disappeared Spencer Ackerman | Guardian US | February 24, 2015 | 11 minutes (2,753 words) A Guardian investigation reveals that Chicago […]
The Inner Workings of an ID Theft Ring
The charade involved theater-major panache. Cashers dressed up in wigs, dyed their hair, and donned makeup to pull off the scam. “I even played a black lady and a Chinese lady,” New bragged to cops in her interrogation. “The wigs make it.”
To Consider Myself a Human Being
How China remembers the Cultural Revolution.
The Rise of Joan of Arc: How a Visionary Peasant Girl Defied a Dress Code and Challenged the Patriarchy
Following the guidance of the voices only she could hear, Joan, a peasant girl living in a world dominated by aristocrats and men, left her home to convince the dauphin—and many men along the way—that only she could save France and make him king.
Budd & Leni
The story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
Interview with a Torturer
Documentary filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh spent hundreds of hours interviewing Duch, the commandant of the Cambodia “killing fields” and one of the most notorious torturers of the 20th century. This is his haunting memoir of those interviews.

