longreads

The Man Who Saw Too Much Fellow Aspen first responders were momentarily shocked by Ferrara’s news. PTSD was supposed to happen to soldiers, a malady incurred on jittery battlefields far from home, not in a Xanadu dedicated to strenuous good fun. But Ferrara had long suspected he had PTSD and wasn’t surprised. “Of course he […]

Ballad for a Plain Man: Singer Jeff Finlin Thought He’d Hit the Big-Time—Until He Didn’t I loaded his songs into my iPod and while living on the road, while sitting on planes and trains, while lying in strange motel rooms, I closed my eyes and focused on his lyrics and thought: This guy’s channeling the […]

Game of Her Life: On 14-Year-Old Ugandan Chess Player Phiona Mutesi News eventually spread around Katwe that Katende was part of an organization run by white people, known in Uganda as mzungu, and Harriet began hearing disturbing rumors. “My neighbors told me that chess was a white man’s game and that if I let Phiona […]

Program Note: Welcoming Rolling Stone to the #Longreads Community Taibbi, Bob Marley, Captain Beefheart and Obama: All of our previous Rolling Stone story picks are on their Longreads page.

The Constitution and Its Worshippers Crying constitution is a minor American art form. “This is my copy of the Constitution,” John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. “And I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in […]

Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun I asked a ton of people, and while there were a few in favor of singular “they,” this exchange with my old friend Michael, a San Francisco musician, composer and poet (and executive, by day) is representative: Me: Do you write “she” for indeterminate pronoun? What do […]

The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers “Some man, 60 years old, that couldn’t take the business and went and killed himself. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with that when you’ve got a 16-year-old daughter who gets the call? Huh? And I’ll tell you how you deal with that. You go […]

Jim Joyce Still Haunted By Blown Perfect-Game Call gq: “I think about it still, almost every day,” Joyce says. “I don’t want to be known as Jim Joyce, the guy that blew the perfect game. But I think that’s inevitable.” Why? “Because I’m Jim Joyce,” he says, “the umpire who blew the perfect game.” From […]