The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
March 07, 2025 at 03:30PM
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:
- Harm and hope in West Virginia
- The fast-food fight Ali lost
- The day doubt took over
- When fear slithers in
- Kitzbühel’s wild side
1. The Heroines Who Take On The Harm
Adlai Coleman | The Delacorte Review | February 25, 2025 | 6,390 words
When I write editor’s picks and recommendations for our weekly Top 5, I make notes about the piece and collect passages to spark my imagination. I know a story is special when my digital scratchpad fills quickly. This is what happened with Adlai Coleman’s Delacorte Review essay. Coleman goes to West Virginia “looking for harm.” There, he meets Danni Dineen and Donna Coleman, two women working to reduce harm for members of their community. Danni runs the Quick Response Team for the city of Charleston, a group of EMTs and recovery specialists who respond to overdose-related 911 calls, offering life-saving Narcan. Danni has been sober for nearly four years; she was given Narcan 23 times before she got treatment. Both her mother and younger sister died of overdoses. Her older sister overdosed and was placed on life support. Now, life support is exactly what Danni does for a living. When not responding to 911 calls, she’s doing wellness checks and connecting with people while she hands out water, bus passes, and Narcan. She meets people exactly where they are because she’s been there. She doesn’t judge. She keeps trying, knowing that today could be the day that a client quits drugs for good. “Danni spends her days holding doors open and watching people walk by,” writes Coleman. Over in Ripley, a town in Jackson County, Donna is the only employee of the Bo-Mar Drop-In-Center, where help varies widely, but always meets an immediate need. Sometimes it’s a free hot sandwich and a safe place to sit for awhile. Sometimes it’s finding a bed in a treatment facility. Sometimes it’s asking a few questions that show she knows what someone is up to, but that she cares anyway. Donna probes to find out what someone needs now, something that might get them one step closer to recovery. Coleman is a keen observer and clocks his own awkwardness, first at developing rapport with Donna and then at making eye contact with the Bo-Mar clients. “There is quiet appraisal in Donna’s gaze, a gentle detachment, as if she is studying you from a distance. She wears rounded glasses and her eyes are warm without being soft. She speaks deliberately, unafraid of silence,” he writes. Each sentence in this essay is stark, each paragraph pairs devastation with earned optimism. No one in this story is comfortable, especially the reader, but that discomfort is a necessary precursor to change, fueled by what Danni and Donna bring to work every day: hope. —KS
2. The Tale Of The Early-Round KO Of Muhammad Ali’s Champburger
Dan McQuade | Defector | February 28, 2025 | 3,775 words
Include this in the massive file of Things I Never Knew: After McDonald’s and KFC pioneered the franchise model for fast-food chains in the 1950s, a flood of also-rans tried to compete by aligning themselves with celebrities. Joe Namath. Johnny Carson. Minnie Pearl. Mahalia Jackson, whose Glori-Fried Chicken, while not actually owned by her, was by far the best named of the bunch. Not to be left behind, a trio of entrepreneurs went to Muhammad Ali, who agreed to become the face and pitchman of Champburger. What could go wrong? Quite a bit, as Dan McQuade’s Defector piece details. The founders had no restaurant experience. Ali’s argument that Champburger would empower the Black community never really panned out, largely because by then McDonald’s had finally bowed to public pressure and begun recruiting Black franchisees. In the end, fewer than 10 Champburgers ever opened their doors, and the corporation ultimately merged with a movie company in 1973, just five years after its first location had opened. Most of the other celebrity-named fast-food spots suffered similar fates, if they ever opened at all. (James Brown’s planned Golden Platter Restaurant and Convenience Store, we hardly knew ye.) McQuade manages to spin a historical footnote into a fascinating look at celebrity, Black entrepreneurship, and, of course, Ali himself. Fifty years after the death of Champburger, a popular food creator opened a burger spot in West Oakland. It’s called Hyphy Burger, and is exactly the love letter to Bay Area culture that its name suggests. And you know what? It’s a huge success already. The prices are reasonable. The food, by all accounts, is great. Kids love it. There’s a school bus in the parking lot as homage to Mistah F.A.B.’s “Yellow Bus Rydah”! My point, I guess, is that there’s always room for a solid burger joint. It doesn’t need dozens of locations, and it doesn’t need a famous face. It just needs to be a solid burger joint. —PR
3. When I Lost My Intuition
Ronald W. Dworkin | Aeon | March 3, 2025 | 4,280 words
Over the past year, I’ve developed a cordial relationship with the woman who draws my blood. We talk about books, mostly: Kate Atkinson, Miriam Toews, whatever she’s got on the go, whatever I bring to the clinic. Our conversation doesn’t seem to interfere with her work, and her confidence allows me to remain ignorant of the small decisions that guide our time together. How does intuition steer those decisions? For Aeon, Ronald W. Dworkin, an anaesthesiologist, recounts a tense morning in an operating room, supporting an in vitro fertilization procedure. Unlikely complications assert themselves. A surgeon grows impatient; a nurse is incredulous. “When I lost my intuition that morning, it was as if something had hit me, or simply settled on me softly like a bird settling on a tree,” Dworkin writes. “I had grown wooden and inflexible, and lost all feeling, as if I had turned into a tree myself.” The episode prompts a study of intuition, valued for its utility but otherwise held at a distance, “the sole survivor from those primitive days when people credited human behaviour to mystical and spiritual forces, and science was inseparable from divine doctrine.” Despite one reference to “heavenly harmony,” Dworkin doesn’t ask for belief or labor to persuade his readers of something miraculous. Instead, he gently challenges the binary frame we place on how the mind works, and invites us to leave a door open to that which we do not understand. “To accept intuition as revelation, it’s as if the world had not yet undergone division,” he writes. “Belief and knowledge unite, mystery ceases to be anathema, and the science of decision-making, no longer parsed between rational and irrational, acknowledges an element that surpasses human comprehension.” I bet my phlebotomist will like it. Perhaps you will, too. —BF
4. Here Be Serpents
Rebecca Burns | The Bitter Southerner | November 12, 2024 | 3,549 words
I’ve been afraid of snakes since I was a child. In elementary school, I stapled blank pieces of paper over photos of snakes in my textbooks so I couldn’t see them. I never dangled my legs over my bed because of the coiled reptiles underneath, ready to strike. And to this day, I still get nervous sitting in cars with open sunroofs. What if you drive on a tree-lined street and, well, a snake falls through? In this essay, Rebecca Burns writes about confronting this phobia. She spent part of her childhood in India, home to more than 300 species. Encounters with these slithery creatures were a part of daily life. Once, when she was sent to retrieve eggs from the pantry, she couldn’t bring herself to open the straw basket, fearing what else might lurk inside: “I stared for what seemed like an hour, chest clenched, skin clammy, envisioning the cobra that would rise from the basket as soon as I touched the lid, its hood flared, its tongue flickering.” When she described this moment, the image of the basket paralyzed me, too. I covered my face with my hands and shut my eyes, only to force them open again. Because when you fear snakes, sometimes closing your eyes makes it worse. “A trick of the mind that transforms everyday objects into snakes is one hallmark of ophidiophobia,” Burns writes. She now lives in Georgia, where her fear has dictated what she does and where she walks, even in her own garden: “Avoiding snakes — by avoiding the outdoors — guided my behavior for most of my life.” But during the COVID lockdown, she spent more time in her yard, pruning overgrowth, walking through dense ivy, and exposing herself more to the possibility of encountering one. In the process, she slowly reclaimed her garden and a sense of control. And when her husband was diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer, a new, real, and rational fear eclipsed the one that had once ruled her life: “You can see a snake. You can identify its markings. Cancer cells are invisible.” This essay made me anxious, but it also encouraged me. I thought if I could get through it and then write about it, that would be a big step. Maybe the next one is pulling the guidebook of California snakes off my shelf, and actually turning the page. —CLR
5. I Survived Downhill Skiing’s Rowdiest Party
Devon O’Neil | Outside | February 27, 2025 | 2,432 words
Outside seems to be on a run of stories about getting worse for wear in a European ski resort. (A much more raucous and free experience than most lawsuit-happy North American resorts.) A few weeks ago, Kassondra Cloos reported on the debauchery of a singles ski trip to Val Thorens, France, and now it’s Devon O’Neil’s turn to slap on some skis (briefly) and down some shots (many). O’Neil is nothing if not committed. There is no fly-in-fly-out reporting here; he is in Kitzbühel, Austria, for six whole days and nights. Six nights spent in a six-bunk room at the SnowBunnys Hostel with snoring Josh, who sounds like “a semi-truck using its engine brake,” and puking Rupert, who loses a battle with some peach schnapps. SnowBunnys may be grim, but O’Neil’s descriptions of sleep deprivation and urine on the toilet floor still gave me twinges of nostalgia: I stayed in many such ski hostels in my early 20s, and damn, it was fun. Nowadays, such a trip would result in a hospital stay, or at best, tears. So big respect for O’Neil, a middle-aged dad who manages to complete this challenge while keeping the moaning to a minimum. One perk of the SnowBunnys Hostel is its location close to the finish line of the Hahnenkamm downhill ski race, or as O’Neil writes, “alpine schussing’s holy grail, where skiers become legends on a twisting elevator shaft of ice called the Streif.” While feigning to cover this event, this piece is more about the sport found off the slopes. From the camaraderie of locals drinking in a tiny mountaintop bar to the legendary post-race shenanigans in the Londoner pub, this is an homage to having a good time. It is also a dissection of a tiny mountain hamlet and the vast array of very different people who descend upon it each year. At one point, O’Neil watches “a young man dig a beer bottle out of the snow, hoping it was full, then toss it back when it wasn’t, next to a mother nursing her baby on the ground.” While the subject matter is unashamedly trivial, this is the humorous cavort I needed this week. So, cheers to European après. I do miss it. —CW
Audience Award
Who Killed the Footless Goose?
Owen Long | Intelligencer | February 26, 2025 | 4,575 words
While some may consider it a wild goose chase, Owen Long still wants to solve the mystery of who killed Andy, a footless goose who became a celebrity after his owner, Gene Fleming, gave him baby shoes to enable him to walk. (The photographs of the goose in boots are remarkable.) There are no clear answers, but Long’s list of suspects is a fascinating one. As is the fact that Fleming’s granddaughter Jessica Korgie puts on a “one-woman show about the goose’s life and death — Andy Interrupted.” It’s worth taking the time to also read the comments on this piece; my favorite one simply states: “Rest in Power Andy, you magnificent stumpy bastard.” —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/07/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-553/
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