Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force were celebrated for getting firearms off the street, until detectives discovered they were also robbing criminals of guns, drugs and money.
BBC
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
The best stories of the week, as chosen by the editors of Longreads.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our favorite stories of the week.
Ethics on the World’s Highest Peak
The climber’s code of ethics, issued by the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, specifies “helping someone in trouble has absolute priority over reaching goals we set for ourselves in the mountain.” Most take this to heart. “Saving one life is more important than summiting Everest 100 times,” says Serap Jangbu Sherpa, the first person to climb all […]
The Sound of Pavement’s Early Days
Some of the best songs on The Secret History, Vol. 1 come from the summer of ’92, when the band went to London to appear on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show. Songs like the moody ballad “Secret Knowledge of Backroads” (which later appeared on a Silver Jews EP) and the Pixies-esque “Circa 1762” show […]
Hunting for Prince’s Secret Vault of Unreleased Music
Vice: Is there anything, just a taste, that you’d be able to share? Mobeen Azhar: Yeah—OK, I want to know how to put this diplomatically—let me put it like this: One big theme which comes across no matter whom you speak to, in terms of people who have dealt with Prince—everyone respects him hugely, but […]
Looking at Five Generations of a Single Dutch Family to Understand the Genetics of Violence
A short piece published in BBC Magazine explored the science of whether murderers are born or made. A British neurocriminologist named Adrian Raine has made a career out of studying the brains of violent criminals. Raine was the first person to conduct a brain imaging study on murderers, and has since scanned the brains of numerous homicidal individuals, looking for similarities. […]
Calling Their Mothers From the Front Lines
And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures silhouetted against the white glare of the […]
How To Win a Million Dollars Writing Poetry in Abu Dhabi
As poetry readings go, the setting was unique. The Al Raha Beach Theatre in Abu Dhabi boasted light-up floors, backdrop projections and a light show of a kind that would be familiar to fans of Pop Idol, X Factor or America’s Got Talent. Since February, global audiences of up to 70 million have tuned in […]
A brief history of the cruise ship industry—from its early idealism to its evolution into “funships” for “Huggets”: Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast […]
