Sabbathday Lake, Maine , is home to the last community of Shakers on earth. Their sect, formally known as the United Society of Shakers, is well over two
Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin* A fter George Floyd was killed, Donald Trump sensed an opportunity. Americans, anguished and angry over Floyd’s death, had erupted in protest—some set fires, broke the
Nicole Walker | Longreads | January 2020 | 21 minutes (5,273 words) Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for
Albert Camus; drawing by David Levine Penguin Books has just published a new translation by Robin Buss of La Peste , by Albert Camus, and the text that follows is my introduction, written some months ago. Many readers will be familiar with its fable of the coming of the plague to the North African…
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 by Richard J. Evans Asiatic cholera, one of humanity’s greatest scourges in the modern period, came to Europe for the first time in the years after 1817, traveling by ship and caravan route from the banks of the Ganges, where it…
It’s early afternoon on Sunday, October 20, in Hong Kong, and the air has not yet filled with gas. No fires yet burn in the streets. No one is running afraid, nor screaming in pain. The city is gorgeous, the sky clear. Cars roll past and music plays from a loudspeaker as the first of a few hundred…
Will Hunt | An excerpt from Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet | Spiegel & Grau | January 2019 | 26 minutes (6,748 words) And I stared through that obscurity, I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers, Whereat I cried, “Master, what is this city?” — Dante, Canto XXXI, The…
RIO DE JANEIRO — The tanks began to roll into Rio de Janeiro on the morning of April 1, 1964, some of them from the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, others from São Paulo. The Brazilian capital had moved to Brasília, the new planned city in the country’s interior, a few years prior, but Rio…
Danny Gold | Longreads | December 2018 | 23 minutes (6,393 words) This article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting . We meet the Pastor* in a Pollo Campero, the famous Central American fried chicken restaurant. It is necessary to negotiate with him to enter the…
On the morning of September 15, 2007, station I08BO—an infrasound monitoring post for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty near La Paz, Bolivia—picked up a series of
John Jacobi discovered Ted Kaczynski’s writing at an anarchists camp in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Photo: Colby Katz When John Jacobi stepped to the altar of his Pentecostal church and the gift of tongues seized him, his mother heard prophecies — just a child and already blessed, she said.…
Slavery is thriving in Libya, where thousands of black Africans hoping to get to Europe instead find themselves bought and sold, forced to work for nothing, and
Natalie Keyssar for Rolling Stone Home PoliticsPolitics Features When ICE Comes to Town Families separated, jobs lost and towns in turmoil: How a quiet corner of eastern Tennessee was turned upside down by Trump’s immigration forces December 17, 2018 Alma woke before 6 a.m. She dressed quickly,…
The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country’s government. He told the world the truth about its brutality
In a world with fewer rules, the only truly effective one is knowing what you can get away with. The answer today, it turns out, is: quite a lot. As the era of
Burnett, like Trump, feels like an outsider, an associate says: “In the reality-TV business, you’re never part of the true Hollywood.” Illustration by Christian
I can’t tell you about a specific day as a cable tech. I can’t tell you my first customer was a cat hoarder. I can tell you the details, sure. That I smeared Vicks on my lip to try to cover the stench of rugs and walls and upholstery soaked in cat piss. That I wore booties, not to protect the…
This article was published in partnership with Epic Magazine. Joshua Casteel was 24 years old when he learned he would be sent to Iraq as an interrogator with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion. This was his first deployment. It was June 2004, and the war in Iraq had been going on for a…
Jesse Horne still struggles to talk about the day he was kicked out of the anti-Dakota Access pipeline movement. It had been an intense week. Searching for
Adapted from Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger , by Rebecca Traister, published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission. Copyright
AI terrifies a lot of people. From superintelligent puppet masters taking over the world , to fiery self-driving car crashes , to the coming age of killer
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. buckled himself into a coach seat on a packed plane—just like any nameless fellow might—and flew west to Utah. There, for a few blissful spring days at a hunting retreat far from his myriad worries in New York and Washington, Donald Trump Jr., eldest…
A writer with aphantasia on visual memory and imagination So you can’t picture me? There is this slight disappointment in their eyes when they ask it, a quick shift to disbelief. A shuttering. I have felt in my life a wide berth between what I and another person are saying — the shuttering, as I…
J oachim Neander was a 17th-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood
Image via YouTube and Shutterstock Originally published as “The Gospel According to Hicks” in the September, 1994 issue of GQ , this profile appears here with
The call to the White House comes after ten o’clock most weeknights, when Hannity is over. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Sean Hannity broadcasts live at 9 p.m. on Fox News, usually from Studio J in midtown, where the network is headquartered, but sometimes from a remote studio on Long…
Sitting beside the church, drinking from a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, he thought he had to go in and shoot them. They were a small prayer group—a rising-star
Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird – to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ – and their
One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks. His message
The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold by Tim Wu Atlantic, 416 pp, £20.00, January,
NOV. 16, 2017 An on-the-ground investigation reveals that the U.S.-led battle against ISIS — hailed as the most precise air campaign in history — is killing far more Iraqi civilians than the coalition has acknowledged. In Iraq, an on-the-ground investigation suggests that coalition airstrikes have…
JULY 19, 2017 In October, Iraqi forces set out to retake Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities and ISIS’s biggest stronghold in the country. It would take them nine months and cost thousands of lives. Panoramic view of Mosul's Old City. Gabriel Chaim I. Eastern Mosul In a film, on the news, you watch…
When the boys of Baga think back to home on the shores of Lake Chad in northeastern Nigeria, they remember a life that was not hard on any human. At dusk,
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S arah was four years old when her spirit guide first appeared. One day, she woke up from a nap and saw him there beside her bed. He was short, with longish
The first shot hits the cliff at 6:15 a.m. The sun is rising over Central Asia, sending shafts of daylight through the gaps in a ridgeline of craggy summits, brightening the steep, shadowy Kara Su valley of Kyrgyzstan's Pamir Alai range. Deep in sleep, their two portaledges dangling 1,000 feet off…