These are some of the best longreads I’ve read. Some have been taken down over time, so I’m preserving them here.
- “The Clock Is Ticking”: Inside the Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in DecadesA recording salvaged from three miles deep tells the story of the doomed El Faro, a cargo ship engulfed by a hurricane.
- Can a French Friar End the 21st-Century Slave Trade?More than 20 million people are still held in some form of slavery. Traveling deep into the Amazon, Langewiesche discovers why an unspeakable degradation is proving so hard to combat.
- How Marine Salvage Master Nick Sloane Refloated Costa ConcordiaWhy Sloane may be the most valuable man on the seas.
- Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves?The 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 killed 228 people. Langewiesche explores how a series of small errors turned a state-of-the-art cockpit into a death trap.
- Meet G4S, the Contractors Who Go Where Governments and Armies Can’t—or Won’tContractors from the security behemoth clean up after an explosion in a crowded souk in South Sudan.
- New York UndergroundA centuries-old underworld of caverns, squatters, and unmarked doors. Langewiesche follows three men who navigate the dangers of what lies beneath New York.
- The Dark Romance and Grim Reality of Life in the French Foreign LegionLegionnaires need war, and Afghanistan is winding down. But there’s always the hopeless battle against rogue gold miners in French Guiana.
- The Neapolitan Mob’s Most Dangerous FamilyPaolo Di Lauro was invisible to the Italian police for most of his career. Since his capture, some wonder if he was the only man capable of controlling Naples’s meanest streets.
- The Wave-MakerKen Bradshaw, 58, may be the greatest big-wave surfer ever, but he’s not interested in money or fame. Just don’t steal his waves.
- US Airways Flight 1549: Anatomy of a MiracleLess has been revealed about the other players in the drama: those enigmatic geese, the engines they struck, a pioneering French engineer, and an unsung hero—the Airbus A320 itself.
- The Devil at 37,000 FeetHigh above the Amazon, a long, thin thread of acts and omissions brought a Legacy 600 private jet and a Boeing 737 together. A fatal intersection between high-performance technology and human fallibility.
- The World in Its ExtremeIt is the hottest place in the world, and the driest. It is home to thriving commerce and to desperate, hopeless poverty. It is the Sahara, an eternal source of fascination and terror.
- Upon This RockSent to report on the biggest Christian rock festival in the world, Sullivan rents a twenty-nine-foot RV, falls in with five men from West Virginia, and confronts his own teenage faith.
- Knives OutbackA man vanishes from an Australian Outback town of twelve people, along with his dog. Everyone left is a possible suspect, and nearly all of them had a reason.
- The Innocent ManMichael Morton came home from work to find his wife murdered in their bed. Six weeks later he was arrested for it, and spent twenty-five years in prison for a crime another man committed.
- Desperately Seeking SebaldSent to the Allgäu to find the roots of W. G. Sebald, Oyler drives his hometown asking everyone she meets whether they have heard of him, and works out why his admirers and his doubters keep talking past each other.
- Secrets of the MagusRicky Jay could throw a playing card hard enough to pierce a watermelon and deal himself four aces from a deck you shuffled. Singer spent two years trying, and failing, to catch him doing it.
- Mystic Nights: The Making of Blonde on Blonde in NashvilleDylan abandoned New York mid-album and finished Blonde on Blonde with Nashville session players who waited through the night while he wrote. Wilentz reconstructs the sessions from the tapes.
- Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation?Hyden walked 1990 to 1999 one year at a time, from the first time he heard Smells Like Teen Spirit to the fires at Woodstock 99. All ten installments of the series collected in order.
- Angels & DemonsIn 1989 a mother and her two daughters, visiting Florida on vacation, were found drowned in Tampa Bay. French's Pulitzer-winning serial follows the three-year investigation and the detective who would not let the case go.
- Secrets of the Little Blue BoxThe 1971 article that introduced phone phreaking to a mass audience. Rosenbaum meets the engineers and blind teenagers who learned to control the telephone network by whistling at it, and the piece that sent Wozniak and Jobs into the blue-box business.
- The Ballad of Johnny FranceA Montana sheriff and a manhunt in the mountains.