The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
March 21, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this edition:
- Long COVID camaraderie
- Breeding terrorists on Telegram
- 737 Max coverup
- Petrusich profiles Dacus
- The Irish pub as export
1. The Doctor, the Biohacker, and the Quest to Treat Their Long COVID
Erika Hayasaki | Men’s Health | March 12, 2025 | 7,584 words
Five years after COVID-19 first upended the world, as many as 20 million Americans and at least 400 million people worldwide are battling long COVID, a debilitating and misunderstood condition with few answers and no cure. Erika Hayasaki follows two men—Matthew Light, a pulmonologist, and Levi Henry, a CrossFit enthusiast—who, despite their different approaches to medicine, find themselves in the same boat. They continue to search for something, anything, that might make them feel like themselves again. Light’s shortness of breath persisted for months after getting COVID. “To be a pulmonologist struggling to breathe,” writes Hayasaki, “felt like a special kind of hell.” He developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and after a year of living with his symptoms, he asked himself: “Who is supposed to take care of long COVID patients?” He decided to be that doctor. He now leads a support group at UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Colorado, where a growing community meets to commiserate and learn about potential new treatments without judgment. “They turn to each other,” writes Hayasaki, “because who better to turn to? Science does not yet have the answers.” Levi Henry, the former CrossFitter, had tried a number of experimental therapies—hyperbaric oxygen therapy, red light panels, lymphatic drainage massage, ice baths—before finding Light’s support group. Some treatments seem promising; a low dose of naltrexone has helped Light, for example, but others are risky and unproven. For both men, the search for relief is a kind of survival. In a world that’s moved on from the pandemic, and a new Trump administration decimating everything in its path, their support group is a space to share knowledge, and a lifeline. Hayasaki captures their frustration and resilience with nuance, showing what it’s really like to navigate an illness that remains a mystery. —CLR
2. How a Global Online Network of White Supremacists Groomed a Teen to Kill
A.C. Thompson, James Bandler, and Lukáš Diko | ProPublica and Frontline | March 8, 2025 | 2,937 words
It’s easy to look at platforms like 8chan—or, increasingly, X—and assume their very structure breeds toxicity, that they’re simply the substrate for opportunistic infection. That may be true, but in some truly chilling cases people actively nurture hate. Such is the case with the sprawling “Terrorgram” movement, a collection of neo-Nazi chats and channels on Telegram. ProPublica and Frontline have partnered on a multistory, multiplatform project centering on Terrorgram; Frontline’s docuseries begins next week, and ProPublica’s written series began in early March with this piece, which investigates how Terrorgram pushed a Slovakian teen on a path from edgelord to murderer. It’s hard to ignore the parallels between Terrorgram’s methods and any other extremist crusade, from jihad to . . . well, to the Crusades. Juraj Krajčík was just 16 when he first entered a Terrorgram chat, and three years later would shoot three people outside a LGBTQ+ bar. In between, Terrorgram did its thing. “On 8chan, people posted racist memes and made plenty of vile comments,” write the reporters. “But the Terrorgram scene was different. In the Terrorgram chats people discussed, in detail, the best strategies for carrying out spectacular acts of violence aimed at toppling Western democracies and replacing them with all-white ethno-states.” Thompson, Bandler, and Diko pull off some stunning reportage here, finding tens of thousands of Krajčík’s Telegram posts in order to reconstruct his radicalization. (Another story in the series, also worth your time, dives into the structure of Terrorgram itself, and details how authorities investigated and arrested its leaders.) In one sense, this is a story you’ve heard many times in the years since Gamergate helped give rise to the alt-right. In another, though, it’s something very, very different. It’s a chilling reminder that for every bored angry teen, every dysregulated or disaffected adult, there’s someone waiting to turn them into a weapon. —PR
3. The Worst 7 Years in Boeing’s History—and the Man Who Won’t Stop Fighting for Answers
Lauren Smiley | Wired | March 11, 2025 | 8,177 words
“Stepping on to an airplane is an extraordinary act of trust,” writes Lauren Smiley as she considers the faith we have in the engineers, factory floor workers, pilots, and above all, the processes and systems that ensure our safety as members of the flying public. Smiley profiles Ed Pierson, a former Boeing employee turned whistleblower. He was a senior manager who was relentless about raising quality problems on the 737 Max. Lion Air 610 plunged into the Java Sea on October 29, 2018, killing all 189 aboard; Ethiopian Airlines 302 crashed after takeoff less than six months later, killing 157 passengers and crew. The door of one jet blew off mid-flight over Portland, Oregon in 2024. Even before the first disaster, Pierson had been navigating the Boeing chain of command, looking for anyone in power willing to listen to what he had to say, only to be met with company lawyers. Pierson feels Boeing hasn’t been forthright in examining and communicating evidence. He believes electrical problems with the angle-of-attack sensor caused the nose of the planes to pitch downward with catastrophic results. “Pilots on both flights fought the automatic system in a chaotic tug of war before finally losing control,” Smiley writes. In a never-ending race to best Airbus and dominate the world market for commercial airplanes, has Boeing lost its way, allowing on-time delivery to trump quality? Will Boeing ever come clean about what happened with the 737 Max program? Thankfully for families seeking the truth and for the flying public, Pierson has vowed to keep talking. —KS
4. The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus
Amanda Petrusich | The New Yorker | March 17, 2025 | 4,918 words
The Cloisters, a century-old medieval museum built from architectural fragments at the edge of the Hudson River, “feel both unmoored from and tethered to time,” Amanda Petrusich writes in The New Yorker. She hasn’t come for the art, exactly; Petrusich is there to interview the musician Lucy Dacus, a solo artist and member of boygenius, about Dacus’s forthcoming album. And yet, for the first 2,000 words of her feature, Petrusich unfolds their morning together at the museum. Her prose is unrushed, as though her assignment were an afterthought. We eavesdrop as writer and subject discuss Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the questionable celibacy of Thomas Merton, a writer and Trappist monk. Dacus impersonates a great-uncle. Petrusich offers that she had cried in her car earlier that day—a moment brought on by a Dacus song, a flock of geese, a thought about the improbability of love. They wander the Cloisters while we wander silently behind them, stepping between centuries. “As you go through different eras,” Dacus says, “you notice so many of the same themes.” There’s plenty of conventional musician-profile fodder to pick over here, but it all feels gloriously free from the constraints of access journalism, which stifle dialogue and shut out human complexity. “I’ve come to recognize tenderness and vulnerability as things I consistently value and seek out in other people’s work,” Petrusich told an interviewer last year, “and I think that has made it a little easier for me to embrace them in my own writing.” A source tells Petrusich that Dacus “really listens, which is what makes her a great artist.” The same goes for Petrusich. —BF
5. How the Irish Pub Became One of the Emerald Isle’s Greatest Exports
Liza Weisstuch | Smithsonian Magazine | March 17, 2024 | 2,283 words
On Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, our local Irish pub was heaving by 9 a.m., a queue snaking out the door into the drizzle. The pub is called Dubh Linn Gate, and I once went there for the big day myself. To get a spot, you have to be there by breakfast (a pint of Guinness). I vaguely remember a lot of green and fiddles, then needing to go home before lunch for a little lie-down. The crowd was diverse, but with only a few genuine Irish revelers, for the Dubh Linn Gate is not in Dublin but in Canada—one of thousands of Irish pubs dotted around the world. You’ve probably got an Irish pub in your hometown. You’ve probably been. The Irish pub is cozy and inviting: mahogany bars, stained glass, intimate booths. No canteen-style sports bar here. It’s a town staple I took for granted until Liza Weisstuch’s piece enlightened me on the work it takes to replicate this Irish charm. Many of these establishments have one man to thank for their old-world ambiance: Mel McNally, whose Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has designed upward of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the globe. In a genius move, McNally studied Irish pubs for two years as an architecture school student in the ’70s. His “homework” included visiting 200 pubs around Ireland. Once a pub expert, McNally realized that while Ireland may have plenty of them, the rest of the world did not, and he was the man to help. His company takes designing Irish pubs very seriously, as Weisstuch explains: “You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.” McNally tells Weisstuch he “recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub,” which is anchored by the bar, or “altar of service,” as McNally calls it. (The bar being visible from anywhere in the pub is a non-negotiable aspect of the company’s designs.) Up to 80 people are involved in a single project, with everything made in Ireland and shipped abroad. Weisstuch takes her reporting on this detailed Irish export seriously, and both she and McNally turn a lovely phrase in their explanations. They left me with great respect for the effort that goes into creating the Irish “essence.” Next time I am in the Dubh Linn Gate, I will raise my pint to the bar—you can’t miss it, it’s positioned center stage. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week.
Are Men in a Spermpocalypse?
Rosecrans Baldwin | GQ | March 11, 2025 | 5,007 words
In this essay, Rosecrans Baldwin comprehensively covers all things sperm: sperm counts, sperm quality, sperm donors, embryonic selection, and IVF. He even looks to the future with IVG, or in vitro gametogenesis, where non-reproductive cells from a person’s body are reprogrammed into stem cells, and those stem cells are differentiated into eggs and sperm. In theory, you could reproduce with yourself—harrowing stuff. Baldwin is also not afraid to put himself in the test seat, sending his own sperm for analysis, and then, ultimately, deciding to commit to a vasectomy. Truly a deep dive! —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/21/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-555/
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