Tag Archives: long-reads

T onia Haddix is nearly in tears. It’s been only a few days since officials showed up to the exotic-animal broker’s Missouri home on June 2, after PETA received a tip that Tonka, a Hollywood movie-star chimp in his thirties that Haddix claimed had died in May 2021, was, in …

Most of the people at the Halloween party at the Valley View Apartments didn’t remember Emanuel Fair’s name. In witness statements in his police file, a couple of people knew him by his first initial; a few people described him by his costume – a borrowed “construction worker” outfit. But …

A meenah Sawwan was up late on Aug. 21, 2013, scrolling through Facebook on her phone, when she saw the first report that a town not far from hers had been hit by a chemical attack. She watched footage from Eastern Ghouta, then saw another post that said that her …

O ne of the hardest things to grasp about the climate crisis is the connectedness of all things. One recent drizzly afternoon, I drove from Charleston, West Virginia, to the John Amos coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Kanawha River, near the town of Nitro. In the rain, …

I n 2001, DMX went to Arizona to record his fourth album. By then, he had already become an unlikely superstar, a barking battle rapper turned crossover sensation. He had channeled all the pain of his first three decades on Earth, all the rhymes that had been filling up the …

Writing the biography of the man best known for marrying traditional Irish music with British punk — a sound once described by concertina player Noel Hill of the band Planxty as a “terrible abortion” of Irish music — was never going to be easy. To further complicate the matter, Shane …

T his is how Helen Hastings, 18, would have spent the past year: they would have been a sophomore at Oberlin College, a small liberal-arts school about an hour outside Cleveland, playing Dungeons and Dragons every Saturday in the dank basement of Burton Hall on North Quad, trying to sidetrack …

I n the fall of 1990, the Louisville band Slint found itself at a crossroads. They’d just finished recording their second album over the course of a rushed weekend in Chicago. They knew that one of their favorite labels, the esteemed indie Touch and Go, would be putting it out, …

O n the morning of October 12th, Hevrin Khalaf, a rising young Kurdish political leader, rode along the M4 highway in northern Syria. Seated in the back of a bulletproof Toyota SUV, she rushed past the battle-scarred villages of her homeland, now three days into a brutal military assault from …

T here he was, the actor Martin Scorsese would later describe as “one of the finest, if not the finest of his generation,” dressed up like an intergalactic scarecrow, stalking his way onto what would’ve been the biggest set he’d ever seen — if only he could see it through …