Our Picks
The White Flight of Derek Black
How the 27-year-old son of white nationalist leaders quit following his parents' footsteps and began building bridges with the communities he previously worked to eliminate.
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Source: Washington Post
Published: Oct. 15, 2016
Length: 25 minutes (6254 words)
Mystic Nights
After Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize win, it's worth revisiting some of the early artistic efforts that got him there. Here's a detailed account of the recording of his masterful 1966 album Blonde on Blonde, with all that record’s first scrapped attempts and captured 3AM magic.
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Source: Oxford American
Published: Oct. 1, 2007
Length: 26 minutes (6606 words)
Present-Day Witchcraft: Seven Stories About Witches
Seven stories about the modern rituals of witchcraft and how they inform our past.
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Source: Longreads
Published: Oct. 17, 2016
A Stranger in the World: The Memoir of a Musician on Tour
The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay on DIY touring in the punk underground of the former Soviet Union.
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Source: The New Press
Published: Oct. 17, 2016
Length: 27 minutes (6916 words)
Van Doren And The In Vogue
After 50 years, Vans shoes are going stronger than ever. Here's how a hunk of canvas became and stayed an international icon of cool.
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Source: Mpora
Published: Oct. 7, 2016
Length: 7 minutes (1978 words)
The String Theory
What happens when all of a man's intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry (with footnotes), into the physics and metaphysics of tennis.
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Source: Esquire
Published: July 1, 1996
Length: 58 minutes (14729 words)
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our top stories of the week, as chosen by the editors at Longreads.
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Source: Longreads
Published: Oct. 14, 2016
The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity — Then Lost Her Job
A graduate of evangelical Wheaton College herself, journalist Ruth Graham writes about the ousting of its first tenure-track black professor, Larycia Hawkins, after she wore a hijab during Advent in solidarity with Muslim students.
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Source: New York Times
Published: Oct. 13, 2016
Length: 25 minutes (6256 words)
My Friend Sam
A beautiful story about a friendship.
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Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct. 12, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2274 words)
How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds
So much for assurances that harsh interrogation techniques used by the United States at Guantanamo Bay and in secret CIA prisons around the world wouldn’t cause lasting harm. New York Times reporters interviewed over 100 former detainees for this article on the never-ending psychological torment many of them live with years later.
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Source: New York Times
Published: Oct. 9, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6085 words)