The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
January 17, 2025 at 02:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 13,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
In this edition:
- Trader No’s?
- Carnivorous curiosity
- A meditation on power
- The overlooked sense of smell
- Riding bulls in Manhattan
1. Inside ‘Teflon Joe’s’: Why Your Favorite Grocery Store Is Not What You Think
Clint Rainey | Fast Company | January 7, 2025 | 2,530 words
A few months ago, I took my daughter to Pretend City, a children’s museum in Southern California that’s laid out like a miniature town. You can imagine the chaos inside such a space, with children running around pretending to be adults that have things to do and places to be. The grocery store is such a place, and in this kid-sized city, it manifests as a big and boldly branded Trader Joe’s, with colorful wall ads and adorably packaged products. As my daughter enthusiastically selected fake food off the shelves, I had a realization. While I haven’t shopped at Trader Joe’s in ages, I’ve continued to view the brand fondly and positively, ever since shopping there in my 20s. Lured by the inexpensive prices, convenient options, and “exotic” food aisle, Trader Joe’s made shopping and cooking accessible, even fun, when I was a young adult living on my own in San Francisco for the first time. But as Clint Rainey reports, the company has faced a lot of bad press recently: a series of product recalls, low rankings by environmental and animal welfare watchdog groups, and reports of intellectual property theft and workplace misconduct. In this Fast Company read—the first in a three–part series about the company’s brand identity and business practices—Rainey digs into why Trader Joe’s remains one of America’s favorite supermarkets despite the negative press. I apologize in advance if this story shatters the eco-friendly, good-vibes image of your beloved neighborhood Trader Joe’s. But I won’t hold it against you if you decide to pop in one last time to stock up on those sweet and salty umami rice crunchies—they’re ridiculously irresistible. —CLR
2. The Vegan Hunter
Blythe Roberson | Alta | December 27, 2024 | 4,765 words
I once went grouse hunting. It was before I stopped eating meat, but it still felt like an odd choice for an ardent animal lover. I remember traipsing up a barren rocky hillside and then through a tall green forest dappled with light, but it was only when we were back at the truck that we finally spotted one, thinking its grouse thoughts on the side of the road. It was my friend who shot it, but it still felt raw: One second a beautiful bird with glistening plumage, the next a ruffled pile of feathers, the shine gone in an instant. I was shown how to remove the meat by pulling on the wings and putting pressure on the back so the breast popped out, supermarket-ready. The transformation to a familiar food felt shockingly easy. I never hunted again, but I am still friends with hunters. Although I wrestle with the concept, I respect eating what you kill and the understanding that comes with that. I found similar thoughts in Blythe Roberson’s engrossing piece, in which she—a vegan of 14 years—decides to try hunting “to connect with nature.” It’s a boyfriend who first gets Roberson interested in hunting for food, but she isn’t trying to impress anyone; he is long gone by the time Roberson picks up a gun (a good thing by the sounds of it). Roberson decides to start with grouse—the newbie prey of choice. Her first kill is not clean; prepare yourself to cringe. But this is the reality of shooting another animal, and you feel for Roberson as she wrestles with causing pain. While I feared a condescending tone would creep into this piece (a vegan! talking about hunting!), it never appears. Roberson is reflective, self-effacing, and amusing. In the end, she shares her grouse meat with a friend. That’s exactly what I did, too. —CW
3. Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment
Mya Frazier | Switchyard | December 21, 2024 | 4,575 words
Power is often discreet—a thin, dark line that crosses overhead, spanning the land and slowly reshaping it, humming imperceptibly all the while. Mya Frazier is sensitive to its frequencies. Standing beneath transmission lines that carry power throughout central Ohio, Frazier’s home state, now host to more than one hundred data centers, she detects “the crackle and the hum,” then feels herself momentarily enveloped, “as if some inescapable force had surrounded me.” Frazier “later learned that I was likely standing in a corona discharge,” a complex event whose significance she swiftly delivers. “The crackle and hum are a symptom of a failure,” she writes. “Not all power makes it to its destination.” In a travelogue granted rich texture by her reporting, Frazier details the secrecy, billion-dollar deals, and disingenuous rhetoric that have made Ohio a hub for data centers, then surveys the destruction that tech industry leaders repeatedly and unflinchingly characterize as progress. “Data centers,” she observes, “are landscapes onto themselves . . . useless for anything but the empty act of simulacrum.” The power demand for Ohio’s data centers is on track to soon eclipse that of New York City; when Frazier asks an energy researcher to make the sheer scale of that demand relatable, he replies, “Unfortunately, we don’t have an easy way for you to conceptualize it.” Frazier does that work—vividly, distressingly—for us. —BF
4. Scent Makes a Place
Katy Kelleher | Nautilus | January 3, 2025 | 2,751 words
Gingerbread cake, the briny ocean, cedar trees after rain, and my little dog’s taco-chip toes. I love all these smells. They mean home to me in a different way. Katy Kelleher’s piece is an ode to the olfactory, celebrating a sense I’ve mostly taken for granted. Kelleher, a writer I’ve followed for years, has written for Longreads in the past: Her series, “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things,” is a satisfying dive into the surprising and sometimes sinister history behind common objects of beauty. (It subsequently became a book.) For Nautilus, Kelleher turns her keen attention to smell, suggesting that the odors and aromas around us offer a richer experience of the world—if only we take time to notice them. After moving to New Mexico from Vermont, she explores the scents of her new environment. “In the late spring, the desert smells like chocolate. . . . it suddenly hits: a sweetness shimmering through the air. At first, I didn’t know how to read this olfactory information, but now I can look for the source: yellow-petaled flowers with dark centers—chocolate daisies—blooming in the sun.” While we’ve been mostly conditioned by puritanical morals to seek out sweet, artificial smells—sometimes to cover up offending odors—Kelleher says we’re missing out when we ignore scents. “Yet it’s a wildly worthwhile thing, to immerse oneself in a landscape, and savoring the scents of place is a crucial element of this process,” she writes. “Sniffing, searching, naming: These actions enable us to more thoughtfully engage with our environment.” I nose I’ll be paying much more attention to the perfumes of a place (both good and bad) going forward. To ignore them would really stink. —KS
5. The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden
Jasper Nathaniel | The Paris Review | January 13, 2025 | 2,775 words
New York City has always felt immune to certain cultural forces, particularly those that require wide-open spaces. As beautiful as its public parks are, they’re not exactly suited to activities beyond running or the odd pedal-boat rental. Hiking requires driving an hour or more. Skiing, the same. The very concept of rodeo sports in the five boroughs—let alone Manhattan—seems as unlikely as putting pineapple on pizza. This impossibility animates Jasper Nathaniel’s visit to a three-day bull-riding event held in Madison Square Garden, elevating it from what might be a gawking safari to an exercise in curiosity. How does this all work? Where do the bulls stay? Who attends the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden? (Who sponsors the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden does not invite such curiosity.) The result is incredibly entertaining, if not surprising. While the piece can skew toward glib at times, Nathaniel avoids the dreaded Coastal Writer Observes America™ trope by foregrounding his own ignorance. He’s chastened by wranglers; he comes out on the losing end of a handshake with a bull rider. So what if he dutifully recounts some conversations that happen to be hilarious? You ride with the bulls, you get the horns. —PR
Audience Award
This week’s most-read pick is . . .
The House on West Clay Street
Ian Frisch | Curbed | January 9, 2025 | 6,878 words
To Tabatha Pope, an apartment in a house outside downtown Houston seemed too good to be true after living in a $35 a night motel for the past nine months. All she and her boyfriend had to do was spruce the place up according to Pamela Merritt, a woman who was also renting in the building. Merritt’s explanation for the horrific stench that wafted out when she was about to show Pope the work to be done on the second floor seemed dubious. And where exactly was Colin, the landlord who lived on the third floor? Little did Pope know she was stepping into a house of horrors. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/17/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-546/
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