Search Results for: wired

25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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Don’t Pretend Like You Don’t Love Wikipedia

Wikipedia: it’s the best trash fire on the internet. It’s sexist. There’s rampant trolling. You can lose hours of your life falling down a rabbit hole looking for information on that one guy from that movie. And you can learn about anything at all in recorded history, and it’ll probably be mostly true. At Wired, Richard Cooke penned a loving paean to the playground for pedants that’s the closest thing the internet has to a public square.

The site’s innovations have always been cultural rather than computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on love. Editors’ passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David’s “Pretty, pretty good!” is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. At these moments, it can feel like one of the few parts of the internet that is improving.

And because I know it’s the thing you seized on while reading, here is Khanzir’s entry, and here is Khanzir:

In this photograph taken on July 12, 2016, an Afghan veterinarian administers an injection to a pig inside an enclosure at Kabul Zoo in Kabul. (WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)

You’re welcome.

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Soli/dairy/ty

The Image Bank / Getty Images Plus, Luis Villasmil / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Liza Monroy | Longreads | February 2020 | 15 minutes (3,637 words)

On the verge of turning 40, all my habits felt ingrained. So I was surprised when, late last February, I became vegan one morning, following an intuitive stab out of the ether. It made no sense, not yet, and Joaquin Phoenix’s viral Oscar speech was still a year into the future, but I’d promised myself to always follow my instincts after, 10 years prior, that little voice within had attempted to warn me to hide my laptop before leaving my apartment. Perplexed by the absurdity of this non-thought, I’d ignored it only to return to find the laptop submerged in the bathtub, fallen victim to a vengeful ex-boyfriend’s rage. Life had since quieted and so had the little voice, until it resurfaced whispering, be vegan for the month of March.

As a 20-year ovo-lacto vegetarian-with-a-sushi-exemption, I found the hunch puzzling. Still, the voice had spoken, so I didn’t question it, though I did start searching for reasons. As a second-time mother to an infant, then seven months old, I felt lacking in structure, focus, and goals, and veganism gave me a way to try and put some version of that back into my life. Or perhaps, like a culinary Oulipian, further constraints would spike creativity, breaking my egg-and-cheese-bagel,-salmon-nigiri routine with more colorful vegetables. What I definitely wasn’t thinking: dairy cows, other than to joke that, hooked up to my mechanical breast pump, I felt like one.

Though I couldn’t pinpoint a rationale for my non-choice, I knew what I wasn’t and would never become: one of those unpleasant extremists who espoused “radical vegan propaganda,” who harass you with pamphlets depicting horrifying conditions of factory farms.

And then I went to VegFest. The pamphlet was lying on a table with others containing recipe ideas and shopping lists. But this one, about the practices of the dairy industry, caught my nursing-mama attention in a new way: “A cow must regularly give birth to produce profitable amounts of milk,” it read. Though I was against killing animals, I’d believed dairy was only a matter of taking something that was already there. I’d operated under the assumption that milking a cow was taking a nutritionally beneficial substance that would otherwise go to waste, as if all dairy cows were overproducers like me, milk running in streams. I’d never encountered this simple information about their pregnancy. “Similar to humans,” the pamphlet continued, “a cow’s gestation period is about nine months. In that time she develops a strong desire to nurture her baby calf — a calf that will be taken from her hours or days after birth. Cows can live more than 20 years, however they’re usually slaughtered once lactation decreases at about 5 years of age.”

At first it was the babies being taken away that got me. Motherhood had instilled in me an understanding of the deep, cellular-level, biological attachment to the calf. It must not be entirely true, I insisted to myself. This pamphlet was the dreaded “militant vegan propaganda.” I went online in search of contradictory information, but even meat-industry trade publications indicated this process is but simple fact-of-the-matter, nothing to get worked up about.

An article by rancher Heather Smith Thomas in Beef Magazine states that, “There’s a complex hormone system involved in causing birth and initiating lactation.” Pregnancy and birth for a cow entails a physiological process nearly identical to humans’. The mother’s body produces oxytocin during labor, bonding her to her calf and bringing on a strong desire to nurse. Exactly like the pamphlet said. Exactly like my own experience.

Suddenly, I felt a little, well, militant in spite of myself. The timing of having recently become a small-scale milk producer again made it obvious in retrospect: milk wasn’t just there, in mammals’ mammary glands. You had to have a baby to get it there. I didn’t just happen to have milk in my udders either — I had to get pregnant and give birth before it came and turned my breasts into hot, painful footballs only my baby or a horrible breast-pump could relieve. I’d had no idea my beloved ice cream and pizza were the cause of suffering. But dairy cows with lower production rates are not economically viable. They are sent sooner to slaughter.

Sailesh Rao, a Stanford PhD and former systems engineer who founded Climate Healers, a nonprofit fighting climate change, told me: “During a visit to the Kumbalgarh Wildlife sanctuary in India I observed how the forest was being destroyed by cows eating anything new growing out of the ground while old-growth trees were being cut down. I realized it was even better to eat some beef to finish off the cows after I had exploited them for milk. I resolved to go vegan on the spot.”

Environmental reasons were obvious, but on the compassion front, for years I’d taken imagery on dairy-milk cartons literally: peaceful cows standing in fields beside gentle farmers seated on stools, red barn in the background under a vast open sky. Was that the real propaganda? In YouTube videos of the routine dairy-farm practice of taking newborn calves from their mothers, the distress cries sound chillingly like daycare drop-off, except the afternoon reunion will never come.

I grabbed a couple of magnets and affixed the pamphlet to the fridge.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Mary Ann Mobley of Mississippi is crowned Miss America 1959 in Atlantic City. (Slim Aarons / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lyz Lenz, Molly Young, Hannah Dreier, Maddie Stone, and Richard Cooke.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Love and look forward to the weekly Top 5? We’ve been hand-picking the week’s best reading for over 10 years and we need your help to continue to curate the best of the web and to publish new original investigative journalism, essays, and commentary.

Please chip in with a one-time or — even better — a monthly or annual contribution. We’re grateful for your support!

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1. The End of Miss America

Lyz Lenz | Jezebel | February 20, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,814 words)

If only the actual Miss America were as gorgeous and erudite as this essay about the decrepitude of a stagnant pageant in a changing world.

2. Garbage Language: Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?

Molly Young | New York magazine | February 20, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,188 words)

Let’s drop a pin in this and take it off-line so we can futureproof the intiative with these key learnings and co-create innovative win-wins that require an omni-channel push but no critical ask. Actually, let’s not.

3. Trust and Consequences

Hannah Dreier | The Washington Post | February 20, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,600 words)

The government required him to see a therapist. He thought his words would be confidential. Now, the traumatized migrant may be deported.

4. The High-Stakes Fight Over Bolivia’s Lithium

Maddie Stone | Protocol | February 16, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,296 words)

“Bolivia has the largest known resources of lithium. Can it build an industry to supply the world’s growing demand?”

5. Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet

Richard Cooke | Wired | February 17, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,445 words)

What happens when you give thousands of pedants a place online to let loose the full force of their passions? Something flawed, but beautiful.

Who was Behind the First State-Sponsored Computer Attack? The Russians, Quelle Surprise

Getty Images

At Wired, Andy Greenberg visits with Clifford Stoll, 30 years after he wrote the original book on computer hacking, The Cuckoo’s Egg. Stoll discovered what is believed to be the very first state-sponsored computer hacker.

He starts reminiscing, telling a story about his hacker hunting that isn’t in the book.

After Stoll helped German police trace the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s hacker to an address in Hanover, they arrested the intruder—a young man named Markus Hess. The police found that Hess, along with four other hackers, had together decided to sell their stolen secrets to the Soviets.

What he didn’t mention in the book is that he later met Hess in person. When Stoll was called to the German town of Celle near Hanover to serve as an expert witness in the case, as he tells it, he ran into Hess in the courthouse bathroom, coming face to face with the hacker he’d chased online for a year. Hess recognized Stoll, and began asking him in English why he had so doggedly pursued him. “Do you know what you’re doing to me?” Hess asked, according to Stoll’s 30-year-old memories. “You’re going to get me sent to prison!”

Stoll says he simply told Hess, “You don’t understand,” walked out of the bathroom, and testified against him.

At this point in the story, Stoll becomes silent and his face twists into a pained expression. Slowly, I realize that he’s angry. Then Stoll tells me what he really wanted to tell Hess: “If you’re so smart, if you’re so brilliant, make something that will make the internet a better place! Find out what’s wrong and make it better! Don’t go screwing with information that belongs to innocent people!” Stoll says.

Read the story

Longreads Best of 2019: Investigative Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in investigative reporting.

Alice Driver
Long-form journalist and translator based in Mexico City.

Stories About My Brother (Prachi Gupta, Jezebel)

Gupta investigates her brother’s death with tenderness and intimacy, providing us with a rare glimpse into the way toxic masculinity affects men. She recounts childhood memories of her brother Yush and his evolving views on power and masculinity, which have been shaped by his family and his mostly white classmates and peers. As Gupta grows up, she embraces feminism, which her brother defines as a “female supremacy movement,” and from that point on, their relationship deteriorates. Gupta, haunted by her brother’s death, digs deep to push through the pain of mourning and discover the cause. When she interviews Yush’s friends, they reveal that he had deep-seated insecurities about his height which led him to seek out limb-lengthening surgery. Yush believed that being taller would make him richer and more successful. Instead, he died of a pulmonary embolism, one of the side risks of the limb-lengthening surgery. Gupta’s work is personal, revelatory, shocking and provides insight into an area where we need more work: the ways in which conventional ideas of masculinity and power harm men.

The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid (Valeria Fernández, California Sunday)

I am drawn to investigations that harness the power of one story to illuminate the situation of a whole group — in this case, the lives of young, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Fernández writes poetically about the death and life of Frankie Madrid, an undocumented teen who arrived in the U.S. with his mom when he was either 4 or 6 months old. Fernandéz begins the story with Frankie’s death — he committed suicide after being deported to Mexico — and then works her way back in time, investigating the cause of his suicide, his relationship with his mother and the difficulties of daily life while being undocumented. Via Frankie’s story, we begin to understand the pressures that undocumented kids face and to question the increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies and practices that played a role in his suicide.
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Longreads Best of 2019: Business Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business writing.

Whitney Joiner
Articles editorThe Washington Post Magazine

The State With the Highest Suicide Rate Desperately Needs Shrinks (Monte Reel, Bloomberg Businessweek)

This isn’t a traditional business piece — in the sense that it’s not a profile of a kooky founder or a growing industry, or an investigation into corporate wrongdoing, or a capitalist reckoning. It’s a wrenching read about what happens when a job market/industry (in this case, mental health) slowly folds in on itself while demand for that industry’s services and providers grows dramatically. Monte Reel’s profile of the one psychiatrist in eastern Montana (Joan “Mutt” Dickson, whose grit will stick with you) covers so many other pressing American problems: addiction, guns, depression, anxiety, burnout. Reel’s portrait of Dickson’s work — and his mastery of the background forces at play — is a grim-but-captivating look at what the dearth of mental health resources in the rural and mountain West means.

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They Were Extortionists and the Calls Came from Inside the Prison

Razor wire protects a perimeter of the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina. (AP Photo/Sean Rayford)

Jared Johns, a former soldier and father of two, thought he was swapping text messages with a pretty girl from a dating site. After getting calls from a spoofed police number and texts from outraged “parents” wanting to press charges against him for allegedly communicating with an underage girl, Johns — despite the fact he had done nothing wrong — was terrified that any resulting legal troubles could prevent him from seeing his two young sons. As Vince Beiser reports at Wired, what Johns didn’t realize was that he was the victim of a scam that would cost him everything.

Jared could never have been prosecuted for propositioning Caroline, for the simple reason that she didn’t exist. The pretty teenage girl Jared thought he was flirting with was, according to charges later filed by local authorities, two thickset, middle-aged, male inmates working contraband cell phones. Jared, it turns out, was just one of hundreds of US military service members and veterans suckered by a massive wave of catfishing scams launched from South Carolina correctional facilities over the past few years.

In May, Greenville’s chief of police convened a press conference to announce they had cracked the case: They were charging Dobbins and Smith with the blackmail and extortion of Jared Johns. Those charges could get each of them an additional 10 years behind bars. In a video posted to Facebook later that day, Kathy said through tears, “He may have been holding the gun, but it feels like they were the ones who took his life.”

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We Are All We Have

Lisa Valder / Getty

Megan Stielstra | Longreads | December 2019 | 22 minutes (5,562 words)

I spent last December taking care of my 70-year-old mother after surgery. She doesn’t like being taken care of. She takes care of herself. She lives happily alone in an impeccably decorated condo near Ann Arbor full of art and books and a fireplace that turns on with a remote control. She does Pilates every morning. She visits my 93-year-old grandmother every afternoon. She wears vegan “leather” and doesn’t eat dairy and goes to her doctors’ appointments and canvasses for the Democratic party and Facetimes her grandson in Chicago on Sundays so I can have a merciful extra hour of sleep. We have the same last name; sometimes her former students read my stuff and email through my website to ask if I am related to the Ms. Stielstra who taught fourth grade and totally changed their lives. I’m her daughter, I say. She’s wonderful, they say, and I say, I know.

“I need surgery,” she told me in September. We were on speakerphone, me stuck in traffic trying to get from the university where I teach to my son’s elementary school. In my head was every movie ever made of a child sitting sad and alone because their mother is late to pick them up. The word surgery hit like a baseball bat: I thought of the inoperable tumor in my best friend’s daughter’s brain, my father’s heart attack on a mountain in Alaska, my friend Randy’s emergency quadruple bypass, the cancers that took both my grandfathers, the hip replacement my grandmother had never recovered from, and the tumor they peeled years ago off my ovary. Please don’t let it spread, I thought.

“Not that kind of surgery,” my mother said, responding audibly to my inner monologue. We talk three or four times a week and she knows how I think. Or maybe it’s a mother-daughter thing, our bodies tied together across miles and molecules. Maybe she’s really a witch. “It’s foot surgery,” she said. “Again.”

Five years before she’d had a cyst removed from the bone in her foot and something hadn’t healed right. The pain was constant. She used a cane. She couldn’t drive long distances. She’d been to countless podiatrists, orthopedists, physical therapists. “Looks okay,” they said after X-Rays. “Try this exercise, this ice pack, this orthotic.” She bought special shoes. She bought a stationary bike. Nothing got better and no one could say why. “These things happen as we get older,” they told her, another way of saying It’s all in your head. “I know my body,” she told them, another way of saying Fuck that noise. Of course my elegant mother doesn’t use the word fuck. “Ladies can say shit, damn, and hell,” she always told me, reciting the sentence like it was gospel, like she’d read it in Emily Post. “But they can never say — ” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Foot surgery is good, right?” I said into the speakerphone. My relief was near-tangible, a thing I could hold to my heart. “Maybe they’ll find out what’s wrong.”

“That’s the plan,” she said. “But I won’t be able to walk for a month and — ” She hates asking me for help. I have a kid and a job and she doesn’t want to bother me even though I tell her repeatedly that it’s the furthest thing from. Of course I’ll be there. This is how we take care of each other.
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Longreads Best of 2019: Crime Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in crime reporting.

Pamela Colloff
ProPublica senior reporter and New York Times Magazine staff writer.

Show of Force (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker)

Every Rachel Aviv story is a marvel, and “Show of Force” — which looks at the intersection of domestic violence and law enforcement — is no exception. In language that is both spare and foreboding, Aviv builds detail upon detail as she sketches the contours of a troubled new marriage in Spalding County, Georgia. She notes that Jessica and Matthew Boynton, the protagonists of her story, left their wedding reception “after less than an hour” and that “Matthew wore a titanium wedding ring with a blue stripe, to signify that he was in law enforcement.” As these small but revelatory details accumulate, so, too, does a growing sense of dread. Aviv illuminates the real human cost behind the chilling statistics that suggest law enforcement officers are more likely to abuse their spouses, making it clear that Jessica, despite being in grave harm, has nowhere to turn. By the time I reached the story’s denouement, my heart was in my throat.


Susan Chira
Editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project. Chira worked for The New York Times for nearly 40 years as a reporter and editor, and shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of sexual harassment.

The King of Dreams (Christie Thompson, The Marshall Project)

This grippingly-written and deeply-reported story exposed the scams of a Texas con artist who made millions promising prisoners’ families their most cherished dream: bringing their children home. Thompson, a staff reporter for The Marshall Project, describes how this conman falsely promised them he could obtain reduced sentences and led them on to exhaust their life savings, in many cases. It’s a window into the desperation and vulnerability of the millions of Americans who love someone who is incarcerated.

Taken: How police departments make millions by seizing property (Anna Lee, Nathaniel Cary, and Mike Ellis, The Greenville News)

One of the great truisms about criminal justice is that it’s local. At a time when local journalism is increasingly endangered — along with the prospect of accountability for local wrongs — here’s an example of a compellingly reported and written investigation by the intrepid staff of this Greenville, S.C., newspaper. They examined statewide civil asset forfeitures over three years and found that not only did the state seize more than $17 million in property, but also that black men were disproportionately the targets.


Aura Bogado
Investigative immigration reporter at Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting

Bound by Statute (Ko Bragg and Melissa Lewis, Reveal)

When reporter Ko Bragg spotted a story about a 13-year-old who was being tried as an adult in Mississippi, she wondered if there were others like him. Her investigation, meticulously examined with data reporter Melissa Lewis, uncovered that nearly 5,000 children were charged as adults in the state in the last 25 years. They found that racial discrepancies abound: three in every four of the children are black; sentences for black minors tried as adults average twice as long as sentences for white minors charged as adults; and even when white kids are handed longer sentences, they’re released much sooner than black kids.

Bragg’s elegant writing follows the devastating story of a child named Isaiah who spent nine months in pretrial detention — sometimes in solitary confinement, other times with adults — before being dragged into court shackled at the waist and ankles. Photographer Imani Khayyam captures intimate moments between a son and mother who illustrate the toll that the state’s laws have taken on their family. But perhaps most compelling is the way the work seemlessly reaches into history to find the origins of this inequity in chattle slavery. The writing explains how the practice of robbing black children of their childhood was upheld through Reconstruction, then made a feature of white mob violence, and finally codified into law — the same law that prosecutors and judges say bind them to perpetuate the inequity today.


Josie Duffy Rice
President of The Appeal, a news publication that publishes original journalism about the criminal justice system. Co-host of the podcast Justice in America.

False Witness (Pamela Colloff, ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine)

Pam Colloff’s story on jailhouse informants is one of the best stories I’ve read this year. It’s a topic that sounds like it could get technical — Pam’s reporting drew on thousands of pages of public records, covering half a century of criminal cases in Texas and Florida — but in true Pam fashion, this piece is completely and totally fascinating. It’s also enraging. The main character is a real piece of work, manipulative and charming and unrepentant. The ways in which he’s charmed women, cops, and juries, destroying peoples lives in the process, must be read to be believed. Incredible reporting, remarkable storytelling. I remain in awe.

Sign up to get email updates from Pamela Colloff about her investigation into jailhouse informants and how she reported the story.


Sarah Weinman
Author of The Real Lolita and editor of crime anthologies, including the forthcoming Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsessions

The Minnesota Murderess (Christine Seifert, The Atavist)

Seifert’s historical yarn starts out as a true crime tale but looks more broadly at the ways in which media has always incited panic about women exercising any form of independence in their lives.

He Cyberstalked Teen Girls For Years — Then They Fought Back (Stephanie Clifford, WIRED)

Stephanie Clifford’s story of repeated and sustained harassment of high school girls in a small New Hampshire town is infuriating and enraging and impossible to stop reading.

Catherine Cusick
Longreads Head of Audience and host of The Longreads Podcast

How judicial conflicts of interest are denying poor Texans their right to an effective lawyer / How the Unchecked Power of Judges Is Hurting Poor Texans (Neena Satija, Texas Tribune and Texas Monthly)

In 1963, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states are required, under the Sixth Amendment, to provide an attorney to defendants in criminal cases who are unable to afford their own counsel. How states should pay for this defense, crucially, is left up to the states. For Texas Monthly and the Texas Tribune, Neena Satija exposes the undeniable structural flaws that prohibit funding indigent defense properly in Texas. Satija has done readers an incredible service by recreating the bewilderment of encountering these judicial paywalls from both sides of the bench, bringing much needed humanity to straightening out so many convoluted conflicts of interest.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.