In a new memoir, novelist Bridgett M. Davis reveals that her mother was a Numbers operator in Detroit from the 1960s through the 1980s.
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Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Story
A Song for the River
In the mountains of southwestern New Mexico, a seasoned fire lookout watches as his beloved forest and his personal life burn, and he tries to imagine what will arise from their ashes.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
The Backcountry Prescription Experiment
Mathina Calliope goes off her antidepressant and into the woods.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Eight Things You Need to Know About Me and the Beach
A white woman came up to my mother, leaned in close and said, “We whites have to stick together against the Asian invasion.” My mother was ecstatic. “She liked me! They like me here!”
Posted inReading List
Tangled Up in Bob Stories: A Dylan Reading List
Few musicians have generated as much music and as much study as this Nobel Prize winning singer-songwriter. Dylanology will last hundreds of years.
Posted inCommentary, Current Events, Discussions, Podcasts
Editor’s Roundtable: Shorthand, Looking Away, Getting It Wrong (Podcast)
Longreads editors discuss stories in The Cut, The New Yorker, and The California Sunday Magazine.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
The Indignities of Poverty, Compounded by the Requirement to Prove It
In an excerpt from her debut memoir, Stephanie Land recalls being poor, and moving with her young daughter from a homeless shelter to transitional housing.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Culture, Essays & Criticism, Story
Frenzied Woman
Cinelle Barnes considers how the chaos and discipline of dance kept the disparate parts of her being stitched together.
Posted inNonfiction
Those Limits Were Not Hindrances: An Interview with Megan Pugh
How a writer worked hard to understand one of American music’s most mysterious performers while protecting his past, and art.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Not Quite Not White
Sharmila Sen grew up understanding distinctions between castes and religions, between the educated and the illiterate. Race was a distinction she didn’t understand until she came to America.
