The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
February 07, 2025 at 04:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this week’s edition:
• The hidden ubiquity of asbestos
• Parable of the Sower’s online resurgence
• Indigenous pride in the mosh pit
• Thirteen ways of listening to a zorza
• A Japanese sword’s historical reunion
1. Asbestos: A Corporate Coverup, a Public Health Catastrophe
Charlotte Bailey | Prospect | January 29, 2025 | 5,457 words
Asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999. While the number of asbestos-related deaths—at least 5,000 annually—is expected to fall over time, activists are still sounding the alarm about the asbestos that remains in schools, hospitals, homes, and other older buildings in the UK. For Prospect, Charlotte Bailey traces the history and use of asbestos over the decades. Indispensable during World War II, it was hailed as a “mineral of victory and safety” and a crucial building material for the future. After the war, however, big businesses discovered (and buried) the truth: Asbestos exposure was a health risk for everyone, not just factory workers. One woman who studied patients diagnosed with mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer affecting the lining of organs, discovered they had all been exposed to asbestos, yet none of them had worked in the industry. (“They’d been plumbers, housewives and mechanics, a school building inspector and a teacher.”) For Bailey, these facts hit close to home: Her father also died from mesothelioma, likely a result of his time as an apprentice accountant, during which he also did a lot of manual labor in the building. “I had only the haziest understanding of asbestos as some dangerous substance used in decades past,” she writes. “But as I cared for my father, I learned how it came to be ubiquitous in our infrastructure.” Bailey’s reporting on the industry is thorough and vital, while her retelling of her father’s rapid decline, interwoven in the piece, is heartfelt and powerful. “My father was a character in the epilogue of an old story,” she writes. Asbestos may be considered a problem of the past in the UK, but as Bailey shows, this “killer dust” lingers and continues to impact thousands of lives each year. —CLR
2. Lessons for the End of the World
Hanif Abdurraqib | The New Yorker | February 2, 2025 | 3,727 words
In recent weeks, a rush of publications—Axios, the Associated Press, Teen Vogue, Rolling Stone, Gizmodo, Smithsonian Magazine, and The New York Times among them—have taken up Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to marvel at its prescience. (Published three decades ago, Parable envisions the early days of 2025 as “a time of fires, violence, racism, addiction, climate change, social inequality, and an authoritarian ‘President Donner,’” Russell Contreras writes for Axios.) As the California wildfires displaced thousands of people and destroyed thousands of homes—as flames erupted in the Altadena cemetery where Butler herself is buried—Hanif Abdurraqib watched Parable go viral. “People expressed awe at the coincidences between the book’s narrative and current events, and I cannot blame them,” Abdurraqib writes for The New Yorker. “On the surface, the parallels are awe-inspiring, as surface coincidences can be.” But awe can have a stultifying, narcotic effect; the most accurate mirrors can still distract, immobilize, and isolate us. Butler’s novel, Abdurraqib reminds us, speaks beyond its parallels: “What Sower imagines . . . is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs. This is the starting point of mutual aid.” Our crises are multiple and overlapping, though not for the first time in our history and not for the last. “The world as we know it has ended several times over, in ways small and large, whether we want to acknowledge it or not,” he writes. “Yes, we are doomed—doomed to adapt, to define our comforts and part with them when we must.” In this essay, which doubles as a moving tribute to the late poet Nikki Giovanni, Abdurraqib is a cartographer of grief and hope, charting his peaks and valleys with care so we might learn to better navigate our own together.—BF
3. Loud, Angry, and Indigenous: Heavy Metal Takes on Colonialism and Climate Change
Taylar Dawn Stagner | Grist | December 23, 2024 | 2,554 words
I missed this piece when it came out at the end of last year, but I’m so glad I stumbled on it. Journalist Taylar Dawn Stagner is the 2024-2025 Indigenous Affairs reporting fellow at Grist, and after reading this piece, I’ll be following her work closely. This story engages your mind, heart, and all your senses as you follow Stagner, who is Arapahoe and Shoshone, into the center of the mosh pit for a heavy metal show. Tension is a central character here, but it goes far beyond guttural vocals and distorted guitars, beyond feelings released in the push and pull of the pit. Stagner surveys Indigenous contributions to heavy metal over the past several decades. The genre is known for communicating rage and frustration, and Indigenous people have plenty to be angry about. They’ve suffered horrific abuse at the hands of organized religion and white colonists. Colonial overconsumption has fueled global warming and climate change, compromising the land, water, and animals Indigenous people have carefully protected since time immemorial. Generations of trauma and daily microaggressions exact a toll that’s impossible to measure. “The pit is one of the few places where being aggressive doesn’t make me seem like an angry Indian,” Stagner writes. “I am angry, but metal concerts are about more than aggression. They’re about being able to express yourself, release frustration, and feel something akin to power.” Music may not be able to heal all wounds, but unlike colonialism and capitalism, it can’t hurt. —KS
4. Zorzal’s Song
Patrick Madden | Orion | February 4, 2025 | 1,796 words
Writing is beautiful in its own right, but I always appreciate being reminded that it’s also an abstraction. Patrick Madden’s short but sweet piece in Orion this week provides such a reminder. “[W]ords are only shadows of the wider reality,” he writes early in his essay, “and, as tidbits of reality themselves, they tend to pull and shape and inevitably distort the nonverbal things they are pointing toward.” After all, he’s setting out to describe a birdcall. That’s it. That’s the piece. He sews in some other threads, of course—etymology, taxonomy, anecdote—but at heart he commits to the folly of communicating the whistling trill of the South American zorza. He tries to transcribe it, then draw it; he asks a clarinetist friend to notate it as sheet music. All go some way toward capturing the ineffable, but they only get one hand on the proverbial elephant. Which is the entire point: Even if language is an imperfect tool, there is still joy to be found in wielding it. This is writing for writing’s sake, writing for the feeling it invokes and evokes, writing that is, just as he describes the zorza’s call, “joyful, gleeful, proud.” And the reading, in turn, feels that way as well. —PR
5. My Quest to Find the Owner of a Mysterious WWII Japanese Sword
Kevin Chroust | Outside | February 5, 2025 | 9,866 words
This piece on returning a Japanese military sword is a passion project. Born out of love for the author’s grandfather, curiosity, and just plain lockdown boredom, it was years in the making—500 years, if you count from when the sword was crafted. Kevin Chroust’s family came into the picture a mere 80 years ago: His grandfather found the sword on an Okinawa beach in the final days of World War II and mailed it back to America. (The competence of the postal service is one of the more shocking elements of this story.) Chroust remembers the sword being brought out as a child, a prop for war stories, but it was only as an adult that he considered the wooden label attached to it, which asked, in part, “your favour to send my sword to my home,” with a name and a town on the other side. Drawn to the plea, Chroust began an internet search to track down the sword’s original owner. It was not a simple process, but after finding relatives of the owner, Chroust started to plan a trip to Japan. He has a delightfully wry tone when discussing the reality of this adventure: “[F]antasy is simple. The imagination can’t be bothered with unromantic minutiae. With weapons laws. Consulates. Viruses. Visas. Visa sponsorships.” But he perseveres until he and the sword are finally on the way to Japan. (Again, great trust is given to the postal system.) I won’t spoil the ending, but there are some beautiful moments. This is a fun detective piece and a fascinating history lesson, but, above all, it is a personal story. A tale of two families, on two sides of a war, then two sides of the world, who are brought together “with acts of kindness on both sides.” —CW
Audience Award
And for the story our readers loved most this week:
A Flooded Quarry, a Mysterious Millionaire and the Dream of a New Atlantis
Lisa Bachelor | The Guardian | February 3, 2025 | 2,653 words
Outside the Welsh town of Chepstow, near the England-Wales border, an underwater human habitat is being built. This ambitious project—called Deep—is being funded by a single anonymous investor, creating the technology and infrastructure necessary to “increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity.” The deep sea, after all, has yet to be conquered: “Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out,” Deep’s chief operating officer tells Lisa Bachelor. For The Guardian, Bachelor goes behind the scenes of the project, which its founders say will “enable them to establish a ‘permanent human presence’ under the sea from 2027.”
Who will stay here? What will they eat? And most importantly, is it safe? Browsing the photographs in the piece, it’s impossible not to recall the Titan tragedy in 2023, when an OceanGate submersible imploded during an expedition. Bachelor describes an undertaking that’s daring, visionary, but also unsettling. —CLR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/07/longreads-top-5-549/
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