A Minor Figure By Longreads Feature While searching for photographs that depict black young women and girls living free in the second and third generations born after slavery, Saidiya Hartman finds a disturbing image.
A Once and Future Beef By Will Meyer Feature Beef is a major culprit of the climate crisis, but if you want to consider beef’s future, then look to its past. The industry’s tactics have not changed as much as you might think.
This Month In Books: ‘You Talk a Lot Don’t You?’ By Dana Snitzky Commentary This month’s books newsletter is pretty chatty for a topic that’s supposedly the pastime of introverts!
A Woman In Love Is a Woman Alone By Francesca Giacco Feature On the profound loneliness of female desire in Lisa Taddeo’s “Three Women.”
Putin’s Rasputin By Longreads Feature Journalist Amos Barshad meets with “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin to try to understand how a shadowy advisor exerts influence.
What Is Elizabeth Rush Reading? : Books on Antarctic Adventure, Ice, Motherhood By Dana Snitzky Commentary “I sometimes wonder if this continent of ice is begging for a different kind of story to be told about it.”
‘If an Animal Talks, I’m Sold’: An Interview with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer By Alan Scherstuhl Feature Ann and Jeff Vandermeer discuss talking animals, the weird/fantasy divide, and the ‘rate of fey’ as an organizing principle in their new anthology of classic fantasy.
Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect By Jessica Gross Feature Fruit flies helped us win six Nobel prizes in medicine. Architects have been inspired by termite hills. Ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson explains why bugs are so essential to the world we live in.
Two Clocks, Running Down By Colin Dickey Feature In “Time Is a Thing the Body Moves Through,” T Fleischmann resists metaphor, even as they reflect on the metaphor-saturated work of Félix González-Torres.
A Manson Murder Investigation 20 Years In the Making: ‘There Are Still Secrets’ By Zan Romanoff Feature ‘Everything that Manson did with his women was exactly what the CIA was trying to do with people without their knowledge, in the exact same time, at the exact same place.’
‘TV Has This Really Fraught Relationship with the Audience.’ By Jonny Auping Feature Emily Nussbaum talks about why TV’s relationship with its audience has become more intimate, whether we can blame Trump on True Detective, and how a TV critic’s biggest challenge is just figuring out what to watch.
‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’ By Sam Jaffe Goldstein Feature The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.
Yentl Syndrome: A Deadly Data Bias Against Women By Longreads Feature The science of medicine is based on male bodies, but researchers are beginning to realize how vastly the symptoms of disease differ between the sexes — and how much danger women are in.
This Month In Books: ‘Look at the World, and Not at the Mirror.’ By Dana Snitzky Commentary This month’s books newsletter is about seeing the big picture.
‘The Underland Is a Deeply Human Realm’: Getting Down with Robert Macfarlane By Tobias Carroll Feature “I thought the underland would be — of all the landscape forms that have drawn me to explore them — the most uninhabited. This proved wildly incorrect.”
‘Brokenness and Holiness Really Go Together’: Darcey Steinke on Menopause By Jane Ratcliffe Feature Darcey Steinke says that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.”
Time To Kill the Rabbit? By Lily Meyer Feature In two new novels, the bunnies are anything but cute. (Unless … you use magic to turn one of them into a pre-TB Keats, or a talky Tim Riggins.)
We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning By Longreads Feature Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do.
‘They Happen To Be Our Neighbors Across the Span of a Century, But They’re Our Neighbors.’ By Adam Morgan Feature One hundred summers ago, black Chicagoans were terrorized by whites during the Red Summer. Poet Eve Ewing talks about reaching out to her neighbors across time in “1919.”
‘If Any of My Old Friends Are Reading This, It Is Okay Out Here.’ By Jacqueline Alnes Feature Amber Scorah talks about committing the one unforgiveable sin: believing, then not believing.
How the Cosby Story Finally Went Viral — And Why It Took So Long By Longreads Feature A journalist who reported on the accusations long before they went viral wonders, “What kind of profession am I in, where stories have no logical reason for unfolding?”
Kristen Arnett on Taxidermy, Memory, and “Mostly Dead Things” By Tobias Carroll Feature “What’s considered high art? What’s lowbrow? What are those things? That’s something that, as a person who like, lives at 7-Eleven, I’m extremely interested in.”
I’ve Done a Lot of Forgetting By Jordan Michael Smith Feature When I was a kid, I wanted my antisemitic tormentors to accept me. I wanted to be their friend.
America Is Still Hard To Find By Lily Meyer Feature Kathleen Alcott’s latest novel is a dramatic reenactment of the ethical dilemmas posed in antiwar activist Father Daniel Berrigan’s ’60s manifesto.
Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare By Longreads Feature In an excerpt from his essay collection, Australian journalist Richard Cooke reports on the American opioid crisis through the astonished eyes of a foreigner visiting steel and coal country.
Odetta Holmes’ Album One Grain of Sand By Longreads Feature The singular singer released her groundbreaking album in 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, and used her art and appearance as weapons in the Civil Rights struggle.
Reimagining Harper Lee’s Lost True Crime Novel: An Interview with Casey Cep By Adam Morgan Feature “Somewhere along the way it became very clear to me that I was writing the book she never would.”
There Is No Other Way To Say This By Melissa Batchelor Warnke Feature “Tell them on the outside,” Carolyn Forché’s Salvadoran mentor instructed her. Her memoir is her latest attempt. Its elliptical lyricism, like that of her poetry, runs circles around censorship.
This Month In Books: ‘What Creates That Need To Leap?’ By Dana Snitzky Commentary This month’s books newsletter has one foot out the door.
Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers By Longreads Feature From exploding Ford Pintos to racist algorithms, all harmful technologies are a product of unethical design. Yet, like car companies in the ’70s, today’s tech companies would rather blame the user.
