The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
January 31, 2025 at 04:30PM
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.
A Note on Paywalls
In order to publish compelling original work and pay writers a living wage, publications sometimes have paywalls. Because some paywalls are determined by a person’s browsing history, we’re unable to know with certainty whether you’ll encounter one when you follow one of our links. If you’re able to, please consider supporting these outlets.
- Monetizing humanity
- Tracking a fake terrorist
- Identity at an intersection
- Noodling a catfish
- The power of children’s books
1. The Future Is Too Easy
David Roth | Defector | 3,438 words | January 28, 2025
Dispatches from the Consumer Electronics Show have been a mainstay of the tech media for more than 25 years. Given the lurching evolution of the technology industry, those dispatches have diversified just a bit. All the way back in 2013, John Gruber wrote that “[t]here’s a nihilistic streak in tech journalism that I just don’t see in other fields.” But that streak is also increasingly warranted. What other industry has generated so much money from our attention, emotions, and data? All of this to say that Defector sending David Roth to CES is likely the apotheosis of Nihilistic CES Dispatch—and you’ll devour it gleefully. Once upon a time, Roth’s brand of polemic might have been dismissed as “snark.” It is anything but. Roth is deeply unsettled by the tech industry, and he’s deeply unsettled by CES, but what unsettles him the most about both is their insistence on the inevitability of AI. “The technology currently lavishly fucking up your grocery order in a supervised setting,” he writes, “will soon make you breakfast and drive you to work and help raise your child and manage both your glucose levels and those of your pet. It will know everything about you, and it will also care about you.” That’s just the backdrop. Roth navigates the Las Vegas Convention Center with something like awe. Or horror. Or something in between. CES is a zombie show of sorts: there are products from Kodak and Memorex and Radio Shack, all of which are no longer the original companies but rather conglomerates that now own their trademarks. “‘I once loved Memorex’s VHS tapes, so I will now buy this Memorex e-scooter,’ is on the merits an absurd value proposition, but not much more or less absurd than anything else in that space,” he writes. There are gadgets, obviously, many of which seem to be internet-connected sex toys. But what Roth is really interested in is the mounting evidence that our humanity is being extracted, reproduced, and monetized: “The fantasy and utility of AI, for the unconscionably wealthy and relentlessly wary masters of this space, converge in a high and lonesome abstraction—technology designed less to do every human thing for you than to replace all those human things with itself, and then sell that function back to you as a monthly subscription.” Roth has long been a gifted critic of greed—greed in sports, greed in entertainment, greed in politics. But in this specific moment, when we’ve watched a cadre of Big Tech CEOs paying fealty to a demonstratedly corrupt president, that greed has never felt so threatening. At least someone’s on the ramparts trying to help you see it. —PR
2. The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real
Dhruv Mehrotra, Andy Greenberg | Wired | January 9, 2025 | 10,029 words
Over 24 hours in May 2023, a person known as “Torswats” called emergency services across Washington state dozens of times, targeting different schools, insisting a mass shooting was imminent. Each time, law enforcement descended, sirens blaring and guns drawn, only to discover the call was a hoax—one that terrorized students, school staff, law enforcement, and emergency dispatchers alike. For Wired, Dhruv Mehrotra and Andy Greenberg spend 10,000 words to recount Torswats’ tale and ultimate takedown; it’s cinematic, tense, and gripping from the first word until the last. Quirky computer hacker and private detective Brad Dennis is both the main character and underdog hero in this mystery story. Dennis’ detective work takes him into some of the internet’s darkest corners, where some brag about committing heinous crimes. Dennis watched Torswats at work in real time and made it his mission to end the chaos. Mehrotra and Greenberg meticulously chronicle Dennis’ smart detective work in unraveling Torswats’ many identities, only to watch the FBI wait to capture a perpetrator bent on creating havoc. To reveal Torswats’ true identity now would spoil the story Mehrotra and Greenberg put such care into telling. Not to make time for this terrific read would be a true crime. —KS
3. Being an Asian Southerner Means Being an Anomaly, Squared
Thomas Dai | Electric Literature | January 23, 2025 | 5,937 words
I’m so drawn to the way Thomas Dai writes about place. I recently worked with Dai on another excerpt from his new essay collection about a formative year he spent in Chengdu, and the peculiarities of expat life, especially for those born between cultures. His observations on identity and belonging are also present in this essay, in which he examines his connection to the American South. Dai grew up in East Tennessee, in a suburb of Knoxville. He pulled me into this piece with his compelling descriptions of the cicadas in his parents’ backyard—their cyclical lives and comings and goings not unlike the migrations of Chinese Americans between two countries. Later, he explores the idea of Asian Southernness, and whether this even exists. (“Most of the scholars I’ve consulted on the topic tell me that ‘Asian America’ and ‘the South’ rarely, if ever, converge,” he writes.) Dai lingers in the overlapping space of this Venn diagram, which I love. Even though he grapples with his relationship to the South as a whole—“an enduring fidelity I feel for a space I could never, fully own,” he writes—Tennessee remains an anchor in his life, his mind constantly drifting south even when he is away. “This is also how I know that an Asian South does exist,” Dai writes. “I miss it. It’s as simple as that.” —CLR
4. The Outlaw Tradition of Noodling for Catfish
Cameron Maynard | Texas Highways | January 21, 2025 | 3,198 words
I don’t fish. I have no interest in ever fishing. Yet, somehow, a few years ago I found myself obsessed with a fishing program called River Monsters. In this show, Jeremy Wade, a rather posh British man—or “adventurer and extreme angler,” as Wikipedia puts it—travels the world to find the giant fish behind local folklore. (“Fish” is a broad term; in one episode, Wade tries to discover the Loch Ness monster. No spoilers!) During those heady months of binge-watching River Monsters, I learned that legends of the deep often turn out to be flathead catfish. The gigantic size of some of these things makes them the stuff of local mythology. And one of the best ways to catch these 100-pound monsters? Stick your hand in an underwater hole and then wrestle out what bites down on it. Yes, that’s the innocuous-sounding sport of “noodling.” In this delightful essay, Cameron Maynard informs us—to no great shock—that Texas is a noodling hot spot, with legends including the “East Texas Toe-Biter” from the 1980s. Maynard explains: “A man at Lake Tyler got into some legal trouble for supposedly throwing a 122-pound flathead out of the water because it bit him in the foot.” Fast forward to a Saturday morning in July and Maynard is at Lake Tawakoni’s 3rd Annual Big Cat Tournament, “a 24-hour noodling bonanza where upwards of 20 participants are scouring roughly 37,000 acres for Texas’ biggest flathead catfish.” Maynard participates with four guys who are “the noodling equivalent of Murderers’ Row.” (I stalked their Instagrams to watch noodling firsthand; it’s intense.) Noodling competitions seem to be a raucous affair and, in this instance, a disagreement over rules leads to everyone shouting at tournament director Mikey Kline, despite him sporting a jaunty rubber catfish mask. Maynard seems a little flabbergasted by both noodling and the characters involved, which, along with some excellent descriptions, makes this a fun ride to join him on. I won’t ever be noodling, but it’s time to see if River Monsters has a recent episode. —CW
5. Why Children’s Books?
Katherine Rundell | London Review of Books | January 29, 2025 | 5,753 words
Shortly after parenthood recalibrated my life, I visited the children’s section of our local library for the first time. My initial confusion—Who hid all the modern art books in the kids’ section?—quickly gave way to giddiness as I pulled more picture books from the shelves. There was subversion here, both sly and overt! There was economy of emotion! Conceptual rigor! The library’s most accessible section, I realized, was also its most powerful. “Children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning,” Katherine Rundell writes for The London Review of Books. It also holds the promise of an egalitarian space: “We can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida.” Rundell offers a brisk and entertaining history of English-language children’s books, from “conduct manuals focused on nose-picking” through Tolstoy’s stories for younger readers. (“There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain,’ a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird.”) As labor and suffrage movements gained strength, however, children’s books became less concerned with simplistic manner lessons; instead, Rundell observes, “they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be.” She draws on the mighty Ursula Le Guin for urgency: “In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power and to offer moral alternatives.” And there are so many alternatives to consider, if one only looks. —BF
Audience Award
Here’s the story our audience loved the most this week:
The Private Firefighters On Call for the Californians Who Can Afford Them
Joseph Bien-Kahn | Rolling Stone | January 24, 2025 | 3,249 words
Over the past few weeks, city and county firefighters have battled the L.A. fires in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Brentwood. Private firefighters were also present, keeping vigil over properties they were paid to protect. For Rolling Stone, Joseph Bien-Kahn profiles former stuntman and private firefighter Andrew Sarvis, whose company, West Coast Water Tenders, protected 25 of the 27 homes they’d been hired to save. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/31/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-548/
via IFTTT
Watch