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.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Bill and Doug Got Married
What a difference 10 years makes: Justin Heckert’s 2005 Atlanta magazine feature about two men in Georgia whose marriage was not recognized by the state.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
A Stranger in the World: The Memoir of a Musician on Tour
The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay on DIY touring in the punk underground of the former Soviet Union.
Posted inNonfiction
A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse
A theory of superhero suffering and death.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Jenny Diski: 1947-2016
Jenny Diski died this morning at the age of 68. Here are nine stories celebrating Diski and her work.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Day My Brother Took a Life and Changed Mine Forever
I grew up idolizing my brother. Then he killed a man.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction
The Mask of Deception: The Ultimate Test to My Recovery From Porn Addiction
Novelist Benjamin Obler was feeling secure in his recovery from porn addiction. Then along came Franny, to test it.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Starring in Japanese Reality TV
Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — […]
Posted inNonfiction
Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin
Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
Honeymooning with Elizabeth Taylor, and Crying All the While: The Fiction of Margot Hentoff
The Harper’s digital archive is a small and unsung national treasure, at least as far as I’m concerned; I’ve spent countless hours sifting through old issues, scanning for early work from familiar names and tracking down forgotten gems from authors whose bylines have largely faded. One such writer is Margot Hentoff, whose short story “Where Do […]
