The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
January 24, 2025 at 02:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this edition:
- Dying to seek asylum in Canada
- The rise of UFC
- Hoarding at the British Museum
- A mystery at Lake Tahoe
- Dog dialogue
1. The Death of an Asylum Seeker and the Shelter Crisis in Peel
Fatima Syed | The Local | January 14, 2025 | 4,359 words
When I read news articles about Trump’s moves to end asylum and suspend the refugee resettlement program in the US, it’s often hard to see what that looks like on an individual and human level. Many stories on migration and immigration feel abstract, full of numbers and figures, describing people en masse. “It’s easy to forget that every single person migrating has a story,” Longreads writer Caitlin Dwyer once told me. For The Local, Fatima Syed offers a wide view of the shelter crisis in Peel, a suburban municipality in the greater Toronto area. But at the center of this feature is a powerful story of one woman, Delphina Ngigi. Shunned and attacked for being bisexual, she left Kenya—and her four children—and made the journey to Canada. For decades, the Peel region had a “no turn away” policy, but that approach has become unsustainable. Since 2023, Peel’s shelters have been unable to keep up with the surge of asylum seekers such as Delphina, a situation made worse by a severe housing crisis. (One Ontario organization providing transitional shelters saw a 700-percent increase in requests during the pandemic, almost half of whom were asylum seekers.) Delphina arrived in Canada in February 2024, hoping to declare asylum and find a bed at a shelter in Mississauga—only to die waiting for one, on just her fourth day in the country. The Peel municipality’s response to the influx of asylum seekers has saved lives, turning hotels into crisis shelters and providing social work, health care, and community support. It wants to help. But, as Delphina’s death shows, this Band-Aid approach isn’t enough. Syed writes a heartbreaking, necessary read of one woman seeking refuge, while deftly reporting on the compassionate people and organizations on the ground who want to create a real system, and real solutions, to help those like Delphina who land on their doorsteps. —CLR
2. Empire of Blood: How Dana White’s UFC Conquered America
Jack Crosbie | Rolling Stone | January 14 | 7,498 words
A few blocks from my house, across from the grocery store, is a sports bar whose marquee has, for years, billed it as the local “Ultimate Fighting Championship Capital.” I’ve never gone inside, and so had no reason to doubt the claim until recently, when I passed a different bar, mere miles away, whose signage declared the same. A search turned up several other local bars vying for the title. “The Octagon is heating up,” reads a Facebook post from one, referencing the UFC’s eight-sided ring, in which mixed-martial-arts fighters square off. “There’s no better place to watch the chaos unfold than right here.” Jack Crosbie spent much of the past year watching the chaos unfold, rippling across American culture. In a reported feature for Rolling Stone, he charts the spread of MMA fights, the growth of UFC, and the political ascent of Dana White, its president and CEO. “The UFC’s rise and current dominance have paralleled that of a new political movement centered, similarly, on one man,” Crosbie writes. “It should come as little surprise, then, that White and Trump are close friends, their lives intertwined for decades by politics and business, their outlooks on the world united by a fixation on loyalty and a ruthless intolerance of opposition.” Crosbie’s writing is most vivid as he engages with the fighters—mostly male—who have made their bodies into arsenals to seek success in a “blunt, ruthless system” that “asks everything of its athletes” but guarantees them nothing. This week, White, now a member of Meta’s board of directors, stood behind George W. Bush and Barack Obama as Trump was sworn into office. It looks as though we’ll all watch the chaos unfold together, whether we want it to or not. —BF
3. ‘The Ghosts are Everywhere’: Can the British Museum Survive its Omni-Crisis?
Charlotte Higgins | The Guardian | January 16, 2025 | 5,128 words
Many years ago, I peered into boxes containing the remains of Black Death victims—not in a display case, but in the Museum of London Archeology’s storage facility. (It wasn’t a skeleton-related breaking-and-entering, I was working on a documentary about the plague under an archaeologist’s beady supervision.) The peculiar residence of these remains struck me: In a stark room with lines of other neatly labeled boxes—removed from their resting place yet not on display—they were left in the in-between. The odd feeling of this limbo land came back when reading Charlotte Higgins’s piece on the endlessly fascinating British Museum, whose hidden underworld is bigger. Much bigger. Higgins writes, “The museum is the grave for 80 complete human bodies from Egypt, nine Peruvian ones, and 6,000 or so partial human remains.” Many of these are not on display. The public galleries are the “thin outer layer,” dotted with locked doors leading to mysterious forbidden rooms. One such room, for example, contains 50 medieval Sudanese corpses, while next to it is the ominous-sounding “human remains workshop.” And then there’s the underground labyrinth of storerooms and laboratories running deep into the bowels of the earth (not to mention the massive new storage warehouses on the outskirts of Reading). As Higgins describes it, in some rather glorious phrasing, it is a “chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years,” demonstrating “a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness.” It is of little wonder that a senior curator from the Greek and Roman department allegedly stole or damaged some 2,000 items: It is easy to steal from someone who does not know what they own. This theft—combined with the fact that Britain should probably just put some of this stuff back where they found it—has damaged the British Museum’s reputation in recent years. The new director, Nicholas Cullinan, is tasked with steering this behemoth into smoother waters. But first, the staff need to look at what actually lies in their in-between world. —CW
4. What Lies Beneath
Sonya Bennett-Brandt | Bay Nature | January 14, 2025 | 4,192 words
In a cinematic opening to a piece that’s rich with original detail, Sonya Bennett-Brandt submerges you next to diver Brandon Berry as he gathers water samples to figure out why algae blooms are plaguing Lake Tahoe. For Bay Nature, Bennett-Brandt profiles a body of water inundated with invasive species intentionally and accidentally over decades with mixed results. The outcome for readers, however, is far from dry: This is science carefully wrapped in a compelling story. It’s fun (and educational!) to follow Bennett-Brandt as she reports on whether Asian clams, climate change, or some combination thereof are befouling the lake and causing the algae blooms. She gets in the water alongside Berry and her keen observations give this piece life: “Berry scoops up a dozen Asian clams and swims them up to me. The tiny invaders clink in my palm like stolen jewels. . . . Suddenly, it occurs to me that I’m holding a dirty bomb. Sprinkled into the wrong waters, these dozen clams could be the vanguard of a new invasion, making me personally responsible for the slime-ification of some pristine inlet.” I can never get enough of nature and climate change reporting—especially work as strong and clever as this. Make time to read this piece. You’ll be glad you took the plunge. —KS
5. Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?
Camille Bromley | The New York Times Magazine | January 6, 2025 | 5,104 words
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of bringing home Bowser. He wasn’t Bowser then; the day my wife and I met him, he had no name at all. Someone from the dog rescue had found him running around a shoreline park in the East Bay, collarless and ID-less, presumably dumped there but still friendly and trusting enough to hop in their car. We waited a month, so he could be reunited with whoever it was, if that was meant to happen, but it didn’t, and he became part of our family. Bowser has changed our lives, as dogs will do. Some of that is just the result of his being a happy, muscly little pug-mutt who walks like a cartoon—when you’re outside with a dog like that, people get happy, and they invariably talk to you—but some of it is just the alchemy of independence and utter dependence of living with a dog. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize them just a little, to map their moods and foibles to human psychology, to love them even while knowing that their bonding behaviors are more evolution than emotion. Even before we got Bowser, I’d seen TikTok videos of dogs using “talking buttons,” and couldn’t decide if it was miraculous or just well-engineered meme fodder. If a dog like Bunny the sheepadoodle really could tell her human that she had a foxtail in her paw, I reasoned, it made that bond all the more mystical. “These pets weren’t just standing by to serve their human owners,” as Camille Bromley writes of the animals she sees using talking buttons on social media. “They were companions with voices of their own.” Bromley’s fascinating feature can’t render a definitive judgment on dogs’ linguistic facility, since science can’t either, but it still plumbs the question with rigor and verve. She detours into the history of animal language experiments, she speaks to proponents and detractors in the research community, and she renders button-based communication in all caps because it’s just far more enjoyable that way. This is a piece for dog lovers, yes, but it’s really for anyone with a sense of wonder and possibility. (The readers in the story’s comment thread do not have a sense of wonder and possibility.) Besides, even if we never get Bowser a set of talking buttons, I know what he’d use it for. BALL. BALL NOW. BALL PLAY NOW. —PR
Audience Award
Here’s the story our audience loved the most this week:
Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”
Susan Morrison | The New Yorker | January 13, 2025 | 10,288 words
A month before the publication of Susan Morrison’s biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, a lengthy excerpt appears in Morrison’s home magazine. (She’s been The New Yorker‘s articles editor for years.) It’s a friendly profile of the show’s creator and leader, but an incisive one; Morrison has seemingly spoken to every living SNL alum, and sketches a portrait of a man who has balanced ego management and emotional withholding on a knife’s edge for 50 years. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/24/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-547/
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