“We need a new language for talking about poverty. ‘Nobody who works should be poor,’ we say. That’s not good enough. Nobody in America should be poor, period.”

In the ’50s and ’60s, the Reverend Will Campbell marched with MLK Jr. and worked to desegregate the University of Mississippi. Later, broke, he took a job as Waylon Jennings’ roadie and occasional spiritual guru. Afterward, his ministry grew even stranger and more itinerant.

After Moneyball became a best-seller, Michael Lewis learned that many of the ideas it presented to the general public had actually been introduced decades earlier by a pair of Israeli psychologists.

Adapted from The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.

On affirmative action at the University of Texas, the essence of privilege, and getting what you deserve.

This job—writing college essays for Abigail Fishers—was the only job I have ever been truly ashamed of, and I am so ashamed of it now that it hurts.

We stopped at a service station where there were old truck drivers, their vehicles festooned with red banners: “All-out war against the virus, weather hard times together.” The drivers wore their masks down around their chins as they smoked. I asked for water at the only open shop, and the assistant pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth before saying “over there.”

How Robert Gottlieb quelled a rebellion and saved The New Yorker.

Note: Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

“Some of the best lines — and I’ve been lucky to hear really nutso lines over the years — are not in response to any kind of question. It’s in response to, ‘I don’t know.’”

How junk arson science convicted a mother of killing her own daughters.

Patrick Bryne’s tenure at Overstock.com was already on the rocks, due to an all in bet on blockchain technology, before he admitted that he had an affair with the Russian operative Maria Butina.

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

A profile of Andrej Pejic, a model who walks the runway in both men and women’s clothing.

For even a moderately vain female, spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: If he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh—which, in his case, is flawless and poreless and has an English-rose luster.

Another look at a popular myth.

For the longest time blues fans didn’t even know what their hero looked like—in 1971, a music magazine even hired a forensic artist to make a composite sketch based on various first-hand accounts—until two photos of Robert Johnson finally came to light.  The dapper young man pictured in the most famous photo, dressed in a stylish suit and smiling affably at the camera, hardly looks like a man who has sold his soul to Lucifer.

The Mexican novelist and activist talks about the role that the US plays in the hemisphere, and a joint future for North and South America.

We need your memory and your imagination or ours shall never be complete. You need our memory to redeem your past, and our imagination to complete your future. We may be here on this hemisphere for a long time. Let us remember one another. Let us respect one another. Let us walk together outside the night of repression and hunger and intervention, even if for you the sun is at high noon and for us at a quarter to twelve.

Known abroad primarily for its stunning Pacific Coast setting and athletic lifestyle, the city [Vancouver] has since become one of the world’s largest sluices for questionable funds moving from Asia into Western economies.

Life, death, and last year’s Auburn-Alabama game.

“They played a game of chess with our lives and we lost.”

The real-life events that inspired the new Richard Linklater dark comedy Bernie:

It’s a story about people believing what they want to believe, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. It’s a story about people not being what they seem. And it’s a story, as the movie poster says, “so unbelievable it must be true.” Which it is. I know this because the widow in the freezer was, in real life, my Aunt Marge, Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, my mother’s sister and, depending on whom you ask, the meanest woman in East Texas. She was 81 when she was murdered, and Bernie Tiede, her constant companion and rumored paramour, was 38. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2027, when he’ll be 69.

On a little-known statistic that tracks the movement of America’s population by searching for its balance point.

Sexism and harassment in the freethought community and its implications for atheism’s future.

Posing for family survival in a society that values boys over girls.

How Bernardo Provenzano, “boss of all bosses of the Sicilian Mafia” and fugitive for more than 40 years, got caught.

Meggett was an All-Pro running back for the New York Giants. He was also a serial rapist.

The story of a small Latvian counterfeiting business that got far too big for its own good.

Noah Lennox—better known as Panda Bear—has lived in Lisbon for a decade. How has the Portuguese capital shaped his life and work?