From peak to trough, the United States lost almost nine million jobs in the most recent economic downturn. What was completely unprecedented about the most recent recession, however, was the explosion in long-term unemployment. This report proposes rethinking our understanding of long-term unemployment in two ways. First, the authors encourage shifting from a narrow focus on long-term unemployment toward a broader concept of “long-term hardship” in the labor market. Second, they suggest complementing the standard measure of long-term unemployment, which reports the share of the unemployed who have been out of work for 6 months or more, with an alternative measure, which reports the share of the total labor force that has been unemployed for 6 months or more.