This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. This week we have stories on: The people who love the “pests” of New York. The racism that exploded a high school baseball team. The forces behind a cult that starved themselves to death. The mentality of a champion...

Just over a year ago, the players and coaches of a high school baseball team walked off the field soon after the game began while the parents applauded. They weren’t protesting an umpire or the other team’s behavior, though; instead, they were abandoning their own team’s only two Black players. Over the course of 8,000 words, Howard Bryant tells the...

Sally Jenkins gives us a searing portrait of the life of the bull-riding cowboy J.B. Mauney—a life filled with pain after sustaining multiple horrific injuries flung from bulls. Breaking his neck in his last ride was career-ending, and in this piece, he reflects on a his different future.  Mauney, too, cuts a black outline. From under a black...

In this deeply thoughtful essay for The Common Reader, Jeannette Cooperman considers silences both healing and harmful. This layered and nuanced piece will give you a much-needed pause; you may not think of the absence of sound quite the same again. Most days, life’s demands come at me like flung Frisbees, but here, they cannot reach me. Here,...

Pigeons. Rats. Opossums. Raccoons. Most people consider these critters as pests—they don’t belong in our homes and neighborhoods and should be exterminated instead. But there’s a group of people across New York City’s boroughs who rehabilitate these injured creatures, and their compassion makes you wonder: Why have humans become so disconnected from...

As COVID-19 swept across the world, a preacher in Kenya lured thousands of people into a remote forest, promising them safety and salvation. Then he told them to stop eating. In this feature*, Carey Baraka details the terrifying rise and fall of a cult: On April 14th 2023—after weeks of bureaucratic delays—a group of police officers, pathologists,...