The adventures of superheroes reveal a lot about the people who created them — and the marginalized communities they represent. | Continue reading
After giving birth to her second child, half of Pam Moore’s face became paralyzed. | Continue reading
A hundred years on from its birth, the music continues to speak to the heart — an art form that also serves as social commentary, communal history, and cathartic release. | Continue reading
Ferments are found in every culture and cuisine on earth, and the history of their production is deeply interwoven with our own. | Continue reading
“In the great halls of Costco, two of our greatest fears are assuaged — that of not having enough, and that of not being enough.” | Continue reading
If the most financially and critically successful artists don’t feel successful, maybe there’s something wrong with how we think about success. | Continue reading
Life gets busy when you have empires to build and marriages to annul. | Continue reading
Against the commodification of community. | Continue reading
How ’90s webzines heralded the best — and worst — of today’s online media landscape. | Continue reading
How the pandemic made us confront what it means to be alone. | Continue reading
In my native New York, I don’t feel the need to perfume the air around me with the sweet scent of challah. But here in Iowa, there is a void I need to fill. | Continue reading
A kidnapping deemed a hoax, the newbie detective who cracked the case, and the Harvard-trained lawyer whose mental unraveling set the whole story in motion. | Continue reading
Ten favorite Longreads originals, as selected by the editors. | Continue reading
“Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Other times, the solution requires retooling your perspective.” | Continue reading
Consider this your reading list for the next few weeks. | Continue reading
“I have sat inside her rib cage. And yet I know nothing about her.” | Continue reading
Another beauty of endurance is that it is happening at all times. It is everywhere we look. To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance. | Continue reading
A reading list on the weird and wonderful culture of Great Britain. | Continue reading
“The future that debt chose for me — indeed the future it chooses for many people — included a lot of shame, confusion, and pain.” | Continue reading
“Maybe the most powerful person is the one who dares to refuse the gift.” | Continue reading
For eight years, a man with amnesia lived at a hospital in Mississippi. Who was he — and why had no one come looking for him? | Continue reading
Five longreads on the culture and creativity that games have spawned. | Continue reading
Here’s a reading list exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act. | Continue reading
Faith and cosplay at the Hill Cumorah Pageant. | Continue reading
Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pu… | Continue reading
How CSNY fumbled a chance to record their best album. | Continue reading
“When I moved to Billtown, I worried most about whether fracking tainted groundwater. By the time I left the area, my biggest concern was whether the liberty granted to citizens to lease thei… | Continue reading
On vaccine privilege in America and COVID-19 inequities in India. | Continue reading
If you underestimate a woman determined to avenge violence against her daughters, prepare yourself to get sacked. On repeat. | Continue reading
On the wonders and benefits of natural relationships and what happens when humans meddle with the delicate balance between species. | Continue reading
Duff McDonald | The Firm, Simon & Schuster | 2013 | 12 minutes (3,000 words) The American Century In 1941 Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce coined the term “American Century” in a Life maga… | Continue reading
We’ve mapped Mars, the Moon, the solar system, even our own galaxy. Which means there is only one thing left to understand in this symbolic way and that is the entirety of the cosmos. | Continue reading
If traumatic brain injuries can impact the parts of the brain responsible for personality, judgment, and impulse control, maybe injury should be a mitigating factor in criminal trials — but o… | Continue reading
Gabriel Thompson takes us into San Francisco Immigration Court and the labyrinthine system that asylum seekers—and attorneys and judges—are up against. | Continue reading
What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? | Continue reading
On Syd Barrett’s time with Pink Floyd and making an album with household objects and found sounds. | Continue reading
“There’s no Dropbox plan that will let us upload body and soul to the cloud. We are still here on the ground, with the same people and on the same planet we are being encouraged to leave behi… | Continue reading
A professor embarks on a six-month binge of celebrity-led online courses. | Continue reading
Captain Scott took jars to the Antarctic with him, and Edmund Hillary took one up Everest. Marmalade is part of the British national myth. Livvy Potts wants to know why. | Continue reading
What if the Olympic Games never come back? | Continue reading
“Five dollar now five gidibid five dollar now ten gidibid ten, ten now fifteen digibigit now fifteen now fifteen gidibid, now twenty?” | Continue reading
In Victorian London, a gang of U.S. hustlers attempts a ten-million-dollar heist on the safest bank in the world. Can the detective who inspired Sherlock Holmes catch them? | Continue reading
“With the right hashtag, anyone can view thousands of potential destinations — and choose which to visit based on aesthetics alone.” | Continue reading
‘“People are disposable to them,” Rachel says. “They don’t care.”’ | Continue reading
In her quest to become truly American, Jakki Kerubo discovers what it means to belong in a place. | Continue reading
Armchair travel is more important than ever, now that pandemic has forced us to stay indoors. Reading can take you across the ocean. | Continue reading
Robin Antalek considers the legacy of the man who abandoned her for another family and never looked back. | Continue reading
Dementia is a kind of erasure, a death before death, where the living discount the infirmed long before they’re gone. | Continue reading