The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
February 28, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this edition:
- Propagate language, preserve culture
- Hip-hop hooch hustles
- Grieving a landscape lost
- A gutsy take on indigestion
- All the feels for the forums
1. The Languages Lost To Climate Change
Julia Webster Ayuso | Noēma | January 28, 2025 | 4,354 words
Imagine a language so beautiful and precise that there’s a word to describe “a female reindeer that has lost its calf of the same year but is accompanied by the previous year’s calf.” For the Sámi, Europe’s only recognized Indigenous community, that word is čearpmat-eadni. As Webster Ayuso says, the Sámi also have terms for specific types of snow, “everything from åppås, untouched winter snow without tracks; to habllek, a light, airy dust-like snow; and tjaevi, flakes that stick together and are hard to dig.” Given a warming planet under climate change, will habllek still occur? If that term is used less and less, could it possibly disappear from the Sámi lexicon, and with it, a richer experience of the world? Could preserving languages be one way to help fight climate change and encourage conservation? I learned a lot reading Julia Webster Ayuso’s piece for Noēma. Here, language and science intertwine like twin strands of DNA, and like DNA, they hold the key to preserving life on this planet. The number of languages spoken in the world is dwindling due to shrinking populations, climate change migration, and of course, colonization. “More than half of the world’s 8 billion people speak one of just 25 languages,” she writes. “Most of the remaining 7,139 languages have only a few speakers.” But Webster Ayuso suggests that the environment benefits when language and culture propagate. She cites as one example Hawaiian, which by 1980 was spoken by only 1,500 people. (Colonizers had routinely shamed and punished Hawaiian speakers, and the language languished.) Education programs for young people helped pull that back from the brink; by 2016, the number of Hawaiian speakers had grown by a factor of 10. This revival parallels the lot of the honu, or green sea turtle, “a powerful symbol of Hawaiian culture”: As the Hawaiian language found a new foothold, honu nesting populations grew by five percent annually. Now if only the whole planet wasn’t at such a steep, ongoing, collective loss for words. —KS
2. Rappers Used to Sell the Booze. Now They Own It.
Abe Beame | Taste | February 25, 2025 | 3,872 words
As you might expect for an artform that grew out of mid-’70s New York, hip-hop has always been an entrepreneur’s game. Consider the necessary traits. A silver-tongued patter, an ability to read the room, a nose for opportunity. Emceeing is salesmanship. These days, in fact, it’s more like a startup: Name a rapper, and odds are they’ve got a wine or spirits brand. But where musicians hawking liquor used to be a punchline (see: The Lonely Island’s “Santana DVX”), artists like Jay-Z and Ja Rule have been seeing big business from big bottles. Thankfully, Abe Beame’s feature for Taste goes well beyond a mere trend piece; in both reporting and his analysis, he situates this shift as a meaningful step toward autonomy and empowerment. From shilling malt liquor and low-equity licensing deals 30 years ago to fully owned S-corps today, Beame makes the point that it “speaks to the education rap writ large has gone through, developing networks and acquiring resources, both financial and structural.” And when Bay Area rap legend E-40—who launched his own wine company not long after he appeared on on the aforementioned “Santana DVX”—starts rattling off logistical headaches “like a persnickety, detail-oriented patent clerk,” it’s hard not to applaud at least this aspect of the corporatization of hip-hop. —PR
3. Solastalgia
Tracy Thompson | Salvation South | February 15, 2025 | 7,029 words
Sometimes loss in a landscape is sudden and obvious: an earthquake, an imploded building. Other times, as described by Tracy Thompson in this Salvation South essay, it seeps and settles, almost imperceptibly, until one day you realize the land you grew up on no longer exists. Drawing on vivid memories of her grandfather Paw Paw’s farm, Thompson reflects on the concept of solastalgia, a term that describes a deep, place-based longing caused by environmental degradation. She grew up on land near Atlanta, “in a strange little rural bubble” close to “what would become the main terminal of the world’s busiest airport.” Land that came alive in all seasons, especially hot Georgia summers. Land with hundreds of towering red oaks, none of which stand today. Land to which her family was deeply rooted and connected, in ways that many of us have never experienced. Thompson takes the time to paint the landscape of her childhood—before the airport noise, the highway traffic, and the commercial and industrial development. The erasure of this farmland happens in slow motion, over time; as you read, you know it’s coming, and yet the changes are no less devastating. This piece sinks into you. It’s a meditation on ecological loss and the grief of outliving a physical landscape you once belonged to and loved. —CLR
4. From the Gut
Will Boast | Virginia Quarterly Review | February 25, 2025 | 3,705 words
I often revisit my copy of Secret Ingredients, an anthology of food writing from The New Yorker, and always with an appetite, to vicariously consume Peconic Bay oysters with Bill Buford or dry martinis with Roger Angell. The collection is light on discomfort; the introduction only briefly touches on editor Harold Ross’s peptic ulcers and the health implications of A.J. Liebling’s “indulgences away from the desk.” And yet an upset stomach is a formidable muse. “The gastrointestinal agonies of writers . . . forms practically its own canon, one that dates back almost to the beginning of Western science’s attempts to understand the digestive tract,” writes Will Boast. In “From the Gut,” an essay from the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, Boast catalogs les maladies des gens de lettres, including his own. For some writers, indigestion confirmed intellectual rigor; for others, it prompted the fervent embrace of dubious cures. (Horace Fletcher’s excessive chewing “solution” won over Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Franz Kafka, among others.) Throughout, Boast is playfully ruminative. “Perhaps the wry twist in Twain’s output came from a similar torque in his guts,” he wonders, before performing his own gut-check: “A friend once called my prose voice ‘acidic.’ With an iron stomach, might I read less bitter?” Though exploring centuries of dyspeptic literature failed to raise a cure for his own ailments, Boast writes, “I did find strange comfort in such company.” And he’s left us with plenty to chew over. Just not excessively, please. —BF
5. Day 1,509 in the Big Brother House
Gary Grimes | The Fence | January 29, 2025 | 1,856 words
For a certain generation, the sound of the MSN Messenger notification is an instant time warp. I am transported back to my dad’s home office, a tiny room dominated by a giant desktop that whirred and groaned as it came to life. In my early teens, I spent hours in that room, playing Lemmings and talking to friends (and crushes) on MSN Messenger. That ding-dong-ding signaling a new message was a pure thrill, and I still feel its echoes today. But when I left the room after being shouted at to free up the phone line, the conversations stayed behind, trapped in a computer now whirring its way through an agonizingly slow shutdown. This was all before smartphones made online conversations perpetual. Gary Grimes knows what I am talking about. A veteran of pre-social media online interactions, Grimes spent his tween years on ThisIsBigBrother.com, or TiBB, “an online forum created in the early 2000s for discussion of the eponymous television phenomenon.” (Big Brother is another nostalgia bomb.) Grimes joyfully brings the disparate groups of the forum to life, explaining its operation “like the lunchroom from Mean Girls.” He is also happy to throw shade at his self-aggrandizing former self, not shying away from any of the cringeworthy teenage memories. The narrative revels in Grimes’s youthful world before bringing you back to the present, where Grimes tracks down his former forum buddies. These online voices from the past now have “jobs, partners, friends, and grown-up responsibilities.” Real things. While that early 2000s forum helped shape them all, it was always something they could leave behind. After all, the computer shut off. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
This is What Happens When You Unleash 500 Singles on an IRL Date
Kassondra Cloos | Outside | February 12, 2025 | 4,156 words
Kassondra Cloos’s piece on a singles ski trip to Val Thorens made me nostalgic for the many European ski trips that I did in my 20s—to a point. Now that I am in my 40s, there is no way I could keep up with the amount of debauchery and skiing she manages to fit into a week. It’s a wild, fun ride, and you will enjoy bouncing along with her in this exuberant essay that superficially looks at dating culture but, really, is all about the après. —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/28/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-552/
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