The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
February 14, 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.
In this edition:
- Nature’s timekeepers, disrupted
- A fatal fairy-tale marriage
- Gen Z’s new normal
- First moments, fleeting memories
- When Knocked Up becomes This Is 40
1. Wild Clocks
David Farrier | Emergence Magazine | January 23, 2025 | 4,916 words
Spring melts seem to happen earlier, and warmer fall months stretch out, shortening the winter season. To a human who abhors the cold, this might seem like a good thing, but for animals and plants, it can alter and perhaps even endanger their life cycles. Consider mammals that emerge from hibernation earlier than usual, before their preferred foods proliferate. Consider plants that may flower too early, before critical pollinators are out and about. As David Farrier explains in this lyrical piece, such mistiming is called a chronoclasm: “a collision of different orders of time.” What’s behind these somewhat scary developments? You guessed it: climate change due to global warming. But this essay is not all doom and gloom—far from it. Farrier’s poetic look at wild intervals is accessible and thoughtful. He gives equal (ahem) time to reasons we can be hopeful about evolving ecological dependencies and partnerships, such as how new tree species might flourish in forests where conditions were once too cold for them. “Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood,” he writes. “It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. . . . As wild clocks fall out of measure, can we recalibrate our sense of time and foster a rhythm by which all life can flourish?” We know we can’t rewind the clock and reset Earth’s climate. It’s refreshing, however, to read a piece that predicts what the future might hold while planting the seeds of hope. —KS
2. Murder in the Blue Mountains
Luc Rinaldi | Toronto Life | February 10, 2025 | 6,575 words
I know it is Valentine’s Day. I know this may not be the couple story that you were hoping for. I apologize. But in this piece, Luc Rinaldi points out a horrific statistic about homicide in Canada: If the victim is a woman, there’s a 44 percent chance she was murdered by her spouse or romantic partner. Rinaldi relays the story of Ashley and James Schwalm, a seemingly fairy-tale, outdoorsy couple. (Rinaldi effectively sums up James and his lifestyle in a single sentence, describing him as “the kind of guy to own a lighter monogrammed with his initials.”) But beneath the monograms, things are falling apart, with both partners embarking on affairs. Instead of filing for a bothersome divorce, James chooses another route—murdering his wife. His plan for getting rid of Ashley is devastatingly well-planned and meticulous, with Rinaldi recounting the day of her death in a quick fire. At times, this reads like a detective story, Rinaldi riffing on “a few dozen footprints in the snow, stretching from the driver’s door up to the road. Whoever died that morning had not been alone.” But Rinaldi does not oversensationalize, and the writing quickly becomes matter of fact. While there is little analysis here—just a straightforward retelling of the Schwalms’s story—you will still be gripped until the very last word. A stark reminder that not all love stories are what they seem. —CW
3. Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home
Claire Gagné | Maclean’s | February 11, 2025 | 4,141 words
“For Canadians coming of age in 2025,” writes Claire Gagné, “economic independence is a pipe dream.” As Gagné notes in this Maclean’s story, 46 percent of twentysomethings in Canada lived with a parent in 2021. The stage of “emerging adulthood,” a phrase coined by American psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, now lasts until age 29. Young adults have moved back in with their parents because of the high costs of living, especially in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. But there’s also a growing openness to multigenerational living. Here in the US, my relatives have lived in a variety of multifamily configurations across the San Francisco Bay Area ever since my grandparents emigrated from the Philippines in the ’60s. I myself lived with my parents off and on until I was 30. Throughout my 20s, I traveled abroad for months at a time, or rented apartments in San Francisco while I juggled freelance writing jobs. But in between these periods of independence, I returned to my parents’ nest, where I was always welcome. These living arrangements make even more sense today, given the current real estate market. What surprised me in this piece is how many families Gagné spoke to that seemed happy. (“It’s great having my kids around,” one mom said. “They can stay here as long as they want.”) In decades past, a “boomerang kid”—a young adult that has moved back home—might have been considered a failure of sorts. But Gagné paints a very different picture for Gen Z Canadians trying to find their feet—even those who aren’t part of immigrant families. There are hiccups, of course. I know how easy (and frustrating!) it is for parents and adult children to revert to old roles when under the same roof. Who’s doing the dishes? Is there still a curfew? And for those older parents who have saved for retirement, the extra roommate, staying for an indefinite period of time, may force them to audit their finances. While there are a few descriptions of contemporary parenting that I don’t align with, I ultimately relate to this piece, both as a mother and as an adult kid. (I’m 45 and think I will always consider myself a child.) We live in a world where forces bigger than us are trying to dictate how we live our lives, so I found this story, and the families embracing interdependence, refreshing. —CLR
4. Double Exposure
Jonathan Weiner | The American Scholar | December 23, 2024 | 4,211 words
During the first year of my life, my mother took a photograph of my father and me. In the photograph, I sit in the motorized baby swing, drool darkening the neck of my shirt. My father sits in front of me, on the rust-colored rug, facing away from the camera. There is a thick brace around his neck—evidence of a recent surgery, one in a series that followed a near-fatal shooting that took place sometime in the dark before I was born. The event was central to the earliest years of my family. In the photo, I look at my father with what might be recognition. But I have no memory of the brace, or the numerous other ways in which the shooting affected my family at that time. “Why are our first memories so brief, so fragmentary, like snapshots without captions?” asks Jonathan Weiner in the current issue of The American Scholar. “And why don’t they go back any further? Why not all the way back to the beginning? In other words, why are we all amnesiacs?” For Weiner, an encounter with a family photo from his own earliest days reveals a pregnancy he had not recalled—evidence of a sibling who nearly was—and recasts other, isolated memories of his childhood in a clarifying light. It also prompts an investigation of infantile amnesia, one that nimbly explores psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. “During our first years, we begin to figure out how to locate our memories in a grid of space and time, a grid like a city’s, a vast invisible structure of here and there, of now and then,” he writes. “Until we do that, we can lay down our memories, so to speak, but we have no clue how to find them again, unless we happen to stumble into the same spot.” For days after reading this, I felt newly sensitive to the world, as though any small piece of it might bring a memory back. —BF
5. Seth Rogen is the Boss Now
Dave Holmes | Esquire | February 11, 2025 | 5,482 words
I’ve written enough celebrity profiles in my life that I’d be happy if I never write another. Judging from how rarely I recommend them here, sometimes I wonder if I’d be happy if I never read another. They rarely feel anything other than transactional; they flatten into the same small arsenal of tropes; it’s always difficult to shake the sense that you’re reading something choreographed, negotiated, artificial. That’s unfair, of course. Curious writers and engaged subjects is never a bad combination, as Dave Holmes’s cover profile of Seth Rogen proves. Rogen’s been a comedy star since he was 16 years old (at least for those of us who fell in love with the short-lived TV series Freaks and Geeks). He’s done this dance a million times. But despite what you may think from his cinematic man-child persona, Seth Rogen is also a thoughtful, decent, deeply creative person who is at home in his skin the way few people are. He cares about what he does. He knows who he is. He lives his life intentionally. He’s made creative and personal choices, all well-chronicled, that I respect. And the time he spends with Holmes makes that clear. There’s no stunty scenework here—no skydiving trips, no “come with me while I get my hands dirty pretending to drive cattle on this massive compound I bought two years ago”—just conversation. Sure, some of that conversation is about weed. (“I feel like [I’m] getting tips on my morning jog from . . . Eliud Kipchoge,” cracks Holmes.) This is Seth Rogen, after all. And in a moment when so much comedy feels like it’s curdling into something belligerent and nasty, we could all use a little bit more of his you-do-you demeanor. —PR
Audience Award
The most-read editor’s pick this week is . . .
My Final Days on the Maine Coast
Joseph Monninger | Down East Magazine | January 23, 2025 | 3,428 words
In this posthumously published piece at Down East, Joseph Monninger recounts his final days at a rustic cabin on the water in Pembroke, Maine, in the wake of stage IV lung cancer. Without a future, he focuses not on his past, but on close attention to the chosen solitude of his fading present. He revels in daily visits from an eagle, watching Red Sox games, reading books, and eating breakfast comfort food at a diner. “I have chosen to live this way, to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty, he writes. “My days have been emptied of all fanfare and complication.” —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/14/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-550/
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