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...

We are currently witnessing the largest, most consequential student protest movement in a generation. But mainstream media have given remarkably little space and airtime to the young people putting themselves on the line. Here, in their own words, gathered before the brutal crackdowns administrations and police authorized this week, are some of the...

Brian Fairbanks | The Atavist Magazine | April 2024 | 1,395 words (5 minutes) This is an excerpt from issue no. 150, “The Last Shall Be First.” A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself...