Longreads, founded in 2009 by Mark Armstrong, is dedicated to finding and sharing the best longform nonfiction storytelling on the web. We publish personal and reported essays, criticism, reading lists, and occasional book excerpts, interviews, and more in-depth features. Longreads has been nominated for four National Magazine Awards (and won a 2020 ASME for Best Digital […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Innovation That Helped 'El Chapo' Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Drug Trafficking Empire
But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be […]
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 inUncategorized
A young man becomes paralyzed in a shooting near his church, and struggles with identifying the shooter, whom he recognizes as a former classmate (link includes parts one and two): Surgeons had labored for five hours to patch his left lung, remove his left kidney and his spleen. They could do nothing to repair his […]
Posted inUncategorized
Longreads Guest Pick: Baxter Holmes on 'The Prophets of Oak Ridge'
Baxter covers the Celtics for The Boston Globe, which he joined in 2013 after spending three and a half years as a sports reporter at the Los Angeles Times. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. He’s a proud Oklahoman from a no-stoplight town where humans are outnumbered by cow and buffalo: “A […]
Posted inUncategorized
College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Freefall Into Madness,' from Students at Fresno State
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s her inaugural pick: There’s a lot of great writing on the Internet, but not as much great reporting. And that’s what we mean when we talk about “the death of newspapers.” It’s less about the end of […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Tip of the Spear
A journalist reexamines what happened to him more than 20 years ago during his five-year investigation of the Church of Scientology for The Los Angeles Times: “One morning my wife, a kindergarten teacher, was leaving for work when a process server sent by the church’s lawyers jumped out from behind a hedge with a subpoena […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Branded for Life
What it’s like for an actor to become a TV commercial megastar—forever associated with a brand, for better and worse: “On the day of the audition, roughly 30 actors showed up. When it was Olcott’s turn, he flashed his big, ecstatic smile. The director loved it, and Olcott got the job. In February, on a […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
South L.A., Twenty Years Later
On riots and race. What has changed, and what’s still bubbling under the surface, 20 years after the riots in South Central Los Angeles: “The L.A. Riots (or uprising, civil unrest, or rebellion, depending) are often considered the first ‘multiethnic’ riots. As a pivot point of race and urban relations, they constitute a resonant moment […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze
A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy? “I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few […]
