The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
April 11, 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:
- Rediscovery without reckoning
- How an icon becomes a man
- The instant that takes its time
- Life lessons from the hive
- The wicked wit of Withnail
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1. The Murder, the Museum, and the Monument
Kori Suzuki | High Country News | April 1, 2025 | 6,075 words
In April 1943, 63-year-old James Wakasa was walking his dog near the edge of the Topaz Relocation Center, a Japanese American incarceration camp in the Utah desert, when he was shot and killed by a soldier in a guard tower. Fellow prisoners erected a stone and concrete monument in Wakasa’s honor. Decades later, Nancy Ukai, a researcher in Berkeley whose parents had also been incarcerated at Topaz, began to learn more about Wakasa’s story, and that the Roosevelt administration had ordered the monument to be destroyed. Two archaeologists read Ukai’s research, visited Topaz, and—to their surprise—stumbled upon the monument, buried in the ground. But what followed wasn’t a triumphant rediscovery, as Kori Suzuki reports, but an example of how heritage and historical memory can be mishandled. The museum entrusted with preserving Topaz excavated the monument without involving any descendants of those imprisoned there. “In the museum’s actions, [Ukai] saw the same patterns of violence emerging,” writes Suzuki, violence in the form of silence and erasure. Suzuki’s storytelling is quiet and clear-eyed, letting the weight of history press through each sentence. More than 80 years later, Topaz descendants still seek answers about the discovery and excavation of the monument, and still fight for dignity and remembrance. This story isn’t just about an unearthed piece of stone—it’s a mirror and a warning, reminding us that the powerful are more often interested in rewriting history than reckoning with it. —CLR
2. The Making of Dwyane Wade
D. Watkins | The Atlantic | April 10, 2025 | 6,308 words
Some sports profiles are about the person the athlete is when the uniform comes off. D. Watkins’ profile of basketball icon Dwyane Wade is about the person who became the athlete, and the person the athlete became. Wade was a fearsome competitor from the moment he reached the college stage, and went on to have a Hall of Fame career in the NBA, first as a young phenom who threw his team on his shoulders and then as a pillar of the Heat’s “Big Three” dynasty alongside LeBron James. He also came out of unimaginably difficult circumstances, circumstances that Watkins chronicles while also recognizing them. That commonality is exactly what makes this piece so special. At first Watkins runs into what he calls the “Black Wall.” “It might sound strange,” he writes, “but I’ve found that Black people from poverty are often more cagey, more on guard, when talking with a Black writer from poverty.” In time, that wall crumbles, and Watkins and Wade find the sort of intimacy that every journalist strives for. Wade has long embodied an evolved masculinity that’s all more wholesome for the scrutiny it has received; he’s a committed partner to his wife, actor Gabrielle Union, and has been a vocal and public advocate for his daughter Zaya, who came out as trans right around the time Wade retired. For those who don’t follow basketball or have been blessedly unaware of the various firestorms that have engulfed father and daughter, Watkins’ story is a revelation. For those of us who watched it all, it’s a revelation for entirely different reasons. Whether accompanying Wade and his sister on a visit to their childhood Chicago home or using a barbershop conversation to illuminate the difficulty of Wade’s journey, Watkins sews together something more important than a good scene or a great quote—he creates a deep, knowing, complicated sense of how Wade became the man he is today. —PR
3. Polaroid Death Machine
Mike Scalise | The Georgia Review | April 3, 2025 | 3,497 words
My oldest friend began documenting our lives when we were 16, taking photographs of our high school crew and developing them in his mother’s darkroom. He photographed sleepovers, band practices, aimless drives through central Virginia farmland. When my wife and I got married, in a quiet civil ceremony in Brooklyn, he was one of our witnesses, and wore his camera around his neck. More than once, I’ve outsourced my recall to him, asking him to substantiate some distant memory, and he’s sent me a photograph to fill in the blanks. Ahead of a road trip from western Montana to New York, he ordered two boxes of instant film to my apartment, to be used along the way. He left portraits of the people we stayed with; one, a farmer in South Dakota, received his gift, then told us to “drive it real pretty, boys, and keep it between the ditches.” In an essay for The Georgia Review, Mike Scalise comes closer than any writer I’ve encountered to explaining the singular power of instant film. “Each frame of integral film is a small, square machine with an even smaller chemistry set inside of it, working at a pace of any time but now,” he writes. “It can take up to fifteen minutes for an image to appear, but the chemicals at work in one Polaroid frame can take up to a month to develop that image in full.” Scalise’s essay charts his relationship with instant film, from his grandmother’s use of it as a memory aid through his own “mania” taking pictures in New York during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I knew my photos were, artistically speaking, bad,” he writes. “I also didn’t care. For this one film type—part impulse, part artifact—the passage of time felt like the far truer composition.” As with his format of choice, his essay develops with a patience all its own, gathering details that hit differently over time. We return to the same photographs transformed—an “inevitable alchemy,” as Scalise calls it—and to feel the weight of that transformation. —BF
4. Telling the Bees
Emily Polk | Emergence Magazine | April 3, 2025 | 4,595 words
I love how Emergence Magazine publishes pieces that combine science, nature, and memoir. This mix of fact and personal perception makes for the most interesting reading. After all, we can only attempt to understand our habitat—and ourselves—through careful observation. This essay starts in folklore as Emily Polk learns that bees carry messages between the living and the dead. It’s welcome solace for Polk, whose infant daughter passed away at 3 days old. Fifteen years later, grief remains, ever-evolving, but still present. She speaks with beekeepers and scientists to learn what bees can teach us about living in difficult times, about adapting to the challenges that buffet us, about being resilient: “In the tenacity and grace of their daily lives, they survive,” she writes. “This is the miracle that connects me to the bees, the thread that connects all of us wild creatures who are still breathing—it’s not the inevitability of loss and grief, but the astonishing revelation that somehow we’ve managed to survive in the face of it.” Maybe you, too, have been searching lately. I know I relate to Polk’s restlessness. This piece reminds me that my neighborhood is pollinator heaven, festooned with blossoms from flowering trees and plants sprouting up. The bees are incredibly busy, though if they’ve got a little spare time, I have a message or two I’d like to send. —KS
5. Richard E. Grant: ‘Love Again? I’m Not Looking For It’
Vassi Chamberlain | The Times | April 5, 2025 | 2,168 words
In my early 20s, I spent a few months living in France. My French was embarrassingly poor, and in those days before streaming, my media consumption was limited to the handful of English DVDs I had packed. I watched these films so many times that I can still quote huge chunks. My favorite was Withnail and I, in which Richard E. Grant plays Withnail, an out-of-work, alcoholic actor who proclaims such things as, “We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!” Withnail speaks his mind, often disparaging those around him with bitter humor, which is a trait that came to mind as I read Vassi Chamberlain’s interview with an audacious and combative Grant. There is no sycophantic pandering on either side here, which, while a touch uncomfortable, makes for a fascinating read. For every question Chamberlain asks, Grant responds by asking her the same one, including whether she has had therapy. (Chamberlain avoids answering it.) But this is not an avoidance strategy on Grant’s part: He still answers Chamberlain’s questions with searing honesty. When asked about Withnail, he is dismissive: “The last time I saw it was a rough cut in 1987. I offered to return the £20,000 fee because I thought I’d ruined the film.” (A painful blow to this ardent fan.) We also learn that he had an alcoholic, abusive father, and that he was devastated over the death of his wife of 38 years. Grant beautifully speaks about the latter: “The conversation that began in bed in January 1983, ended in bed as we held each other’s hands, still talking, on Thursday the 2nd of September, 2021. . . . Talking is the greatest intimacy of all.” He still writes to his wife every night, telling her about his day and who he has met. Chamberlain bravely, perhaps foolishly, asks him what he will write about her. He replies: “All her girlfriends now look 40 years old but her jawline is hanging around her knees and in ten years she will tie a bow with her dyed hair around her chin in a tight knot and she’ll look like the Queen at Balmoral.” Chamberlain’s response, and her final word: “Ouch.” —CW
Audience Award
The Free-Living Bureaucrat
Michael Lewis | The Washington Post | March 13, 2025 | 7,785 words
We’ve previously featured pieces from “Who Is Government?,” a Washington Post series in which writers search for “the essential public servant”—including Dave Eggers on the members of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Michael Lewis on a US Bureau of Mines employee whose life’s work prevents cave-ins. Here, Lewis works his characteristic magic—raising a rare subject, lacing a breadth of history with critical questions, composing an intimate narrative with sweeping implications—on Heather Stone, a science-policy analyst for the FDA. Stone devoted years to create a clearinghouse for case studies of rare infectious diseases, many of which pharmaceutical giants are disinterested in funding cures for. Lewis leads readers through a family’s harrowing medical mystery whose outcome hinges less on bureaucratic systems than a singularly motivated individual. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/11/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-558/
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