Sally Montgomery takes us on a fascinating journey of self-discovery as she learns how to free dive. In pushing the limits of her physical abilities, she discovers a new identity and redefines her relationship with the sea. I was anthropologically fascinated by why people might want to do something that seemed so counterintuitive: to hold their...

If you’ve seen any docuseries set in jails or prisons recently, you may have seen incarcerated people holding tablets. As Philip Vance Smith II writes from inside a medium-security prison, these aren’t just telecom devices to handle phone and payment services. They also deliver movies and television—at costs that vary from facility to facility, but...

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. This week, our picks feature: Student protesters in their own words. Dance as freedom from disability. Wealth disparity in Big Sky, Montana. The Anthropocene as earth’s final epoch. Birthing a Cabbage Patch...

Plenty of ski towns run on the labor of year-rounders, the folks who actually live in the places most only visit. But not many ski towns are like Big Sky, Montana, where the average house runs $2.5 million and billionaires flock to private resorts in the mountains. Nick Bowlin reports from the land that time forgot—and private-equity firms bought—to...

Amid a moose hunt on the Yukon’s Ch’izhìn Njik river, Bathsheba Demuth considers the natural beauty of the land and animals, alongside the toll humans have exacted on the earth in the Anthropocene. Will this epoch, the first marked indelibly by human influence, be the end of the earth’s story? ALL MOOSE begin as stone. The taiga’s pulse...

Josuha Rigsby recounts his family visit to Cabbage Patch Kids’ Babyland General Hospital with understated humor. Although bemused by the experience, Rigsby still vividly describes the “birthing” of a Cabbage Patch doll. This is a highly entertaining read.  Along the back wall of the hospital, as in an ancient procession, the ground becomes...