The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
April 18, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In today’s edition:
- Tracking greed
- Teaching through terminal illness
- Pivoting as a pastor
- Reading poetry, closely
- Breaking bad loading habits
A Note on Paywalls
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1. Diary of a Spreadsheet
Chelsea Kirk | n+1 | April 7, 2025 | 3,990 words
As the Eaton and Palisades wildfires tore through Southern California, destroying neighborhoods and displacing tens of thousands of people, landlords moved swiftly to capitalize on disaster. In this n+1 essay, tenant organizer Chelsea Kirk writes from inside that moment: “A two-bedroom apartment on Montana Avenue was listed for $3,595 on January 7. By the next day, the price had jumped 25 percent to $4,495. By January 9, it climbed another 33 percent, reaching $5,995.” Watching Zillow rental prices surge in real time, Kirk created an open-access Google spreadsheet to track and collect instances of price gouging. The spreadsheet went viral, the number of listings exploded, and what began as one individual’s spontaneous response quickly evolved into a larger act of resistance. Kirk mobilized a network of activists, coders, urban planners, and people who simply wanted to help. “The spreadsheet taps into the anger of people who may never set foot in a tenant union meeting, but who still feel the urgency,” writes Kirk. “This crisis is reaching people who haven’t been part of the fight before.” Despite thousands of documented cases, officials have done almost nothing to protect tenants or hold exploitative landlords and realtors accountable. (Only 14 violators have been charged so far, which is less than 1 percent of total cases.) Meanwhile, the rent gouging continues. But Kirk’s essay is more than an indictment of government inaction and landlord greed; it’s a testament to the power of collective action in a time of layered crises. “What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords,” she writes. This is a vision of what’s possible when ordinary people start to imagine something different—and work together to make it real. —CLR
2. Course of Treatment
Tracie White | Stanford Magazine | March 26, 2025 | 2,407 words
Bryant Lin, a physician and professor, recently finished teaching a semester-long class at Stanford. The first session was filled beyond capacity—not just registered students, but those auditing the class, and others who weren’t even students at all. That’s to be expected when a course is titled “From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle with Cancer.” Just months before, Bryant Lin had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer; instinctually, he turned his fight into an educational experience. Early on in her profile of Lin, Tracie White sketches out the cruel twist of his diagnosis: “The co-founder and co-director of Stanford’s Center for Asian Health Research and Education is well aware of the irony that in the spring of 2024, he went from raising awareness of growing rates of lung cancer in nonsmokers of Asian descent to being a poster boy for the disease.” Lin is clear-eyed about his fate, but as White illustrates, he’s making every moment count, both in and out of the classroom. As a reader, you’re there for his lectures, for his unassuming stature and remarkable aplomb. You’re there for his dream to watch his teen sons graduate college. You’re there as he details his chemotherapy, his spiritual outlook, and his passion for patient-centered medicine. And perhaps most importantly, you’re there to see how a man faces an uncertain road with grace and gratitude. It’s something we all could use a little bit more of. —PR
3. How My Dad Reconciled His God and His Gay Son
Timothy White | The New York Times | February 5, 2025 | 7,298 words
Timothy White came out to his parents when he was 15 years old. At the time, Bill, his father, led a small Evangelical congregation in Long Beach, California, where he hosted Sunday services in his family’s backyard. “I was honored by Timothy’s trust in me. I was encouraged by his sincerity and maturity,” Bill wrote in his journal at the time. He was also “devastated” by the news; privately, he nursed a hatred of homosexuality and feared for himself as deeply as he feared for his son. “It’s actually pretty scary,” Bill wrote in another entry, as he begins to challenge his orthodox beliefs about sexuality. “People are going to judge me, Christians are going to proclaim that I’ve lost my faith, and I will lose certain privileges that I’ve had in the community.” A year on, as members of City Church Long Beach left in opposition to their pastor’s shifting theology, Bill pleaded with his God for strength: “Enlarge my heart with love, create in me a greater capacity to suffer and expand my understanding of your grace for me and for others.” Drawing on years of his father’s journal entries, which are lucidly composed and generously excerpted, White documents his father’s changing mind. Bill’s evolution “is unequivocally a religious journey,” his son writes. “But I don’t think the qualities that allowed for this renewal are exclusive to faith. We live in dogmatic times; every one of us can learn from what it looks like to go through the process of re-evaluating your entire moral foundation.” —BF
4. A.O. Scott’s Poetry Lessons
Jonathan Farmer, A.O. Scott | Slate | April 13, 2025 | 2,408 words
I love to read, but my reading involves mostly novels and nonfiction. Ask me to recite poetry and you’ll get “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” by William Butler Yeats, a poem I studied in grade 11 English. Suffice to say that was a very long time ago, and I’ve added no verse to my sad repertoire since. (Sorry, Mr. Taggart!) I’ve been poetry-curious* over the years but I regret never making a more serious attempt with verse. That’s why Jonathan Farmer’s interview with critic A.O. Scott caught my eye. Scott discusses what started out as an experiment for The New York Times, a monthly column where he shares and analyzes a poem in an interactive format that shows his work as the reader scrolls. So far he’s tackled poems by Adrienne Rich, George Oppen, Diane Seuss, and more. I expected to—and did—learn more about how to approach poetry in reading this interview. Scott talks about analyzing word choice, meter, punctuation, and more. I did not expect the life lesson in becoming a better writer, though, when Scott describes the emotion he strives to embed in his craft as a reviewer: “I always thought, when I was reviewing movies, that it wasn’t sufficient just to acknowledge or to describe the emotion. It was important to convey it,” he says. “So I would try to write criticism that would move people in some way, that would make them laugh. Or, you know, choke up. And I worked hard at that, and I felt like, well, this is another chance to do something like that.” Now that’s an approach to poetry I can appreciate. —KS
*My poetry reading includes a terrific weekly newsletter by Devin Kelly. Ordinary Plots has an expansive, inclusive approach that allows poetry neophytes like me to feel like verse is for them, too. Give it a read. It’s well worth your time.
5. There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People
Ellen Cushing | The Atlantic | April 14, 2025 | 2,402 words
A few years ago, I replaced my trusty old black Bosch dishwasher, seduced by a newer, sleeker silver model. I hate it. The new dishwasher may look pretty, but the damn dishes never seem to come out clean. A dishwasher without substance, I thought. But after reading Ellen Cushing’s delightfully sardonic piece on how to load a dishwasher, I’m forced to admit: Maybe I’m part of the problem. A chaotic dish-dumper by nature, I’ve long been the source of sharp intakes of breath from friends brave enough to crack the door and peer into the abyss. And according to fellow dish-dumper Cushing, we may need to refine our systems (or start one). Or maybe we’ve been misled: As she notes, the internet is clogged with dishwasher-loading advice, commentary, and anxiety. This humble source of domestic angst was clearly crying out for an investigation, and in Cushing’s hands, the quest for dishwasher-loading truth becomes highly entertaining. It turns out I had absolutely no idea how dishwashers actually work. I’ve also been wasting time faffing about pre-rinsing plates, when, as Cushing explains, today’s “enzymatic detergent” is “like a little Pac-Man, eating dirt and making room for the soap to do its job.” Life-changing. Maybe you, too, will read Cushing’s piece and quietly make a few tweaks to your own dishwasher game. Or, maybe, you’ll quickly forward this on to your partner. Whether household harmony or continued dishwasher wars lie in your future, may your glasses always come out spot-free. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
Did Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Really Tell Me I Gave My Son Cancer?
Ryan D’Agostino | Esquire | January 28, 2025 | 2,208 words
Weeks before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Ryan D’Agostino revisited an exchange he’d had with Kennedy years earlier. D’Agostino had been reporting on “the views of perhaps America’s foremost vaccine skeptic as the development of a Covid-19 vaccine was progressing quickly.” He mentioned to Kennedy that his son, at 6 years old, had been diagnosed with leukemia; Kennedy replied that, since the advent of the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella, “there’s been an explosion in leukemia in children.” After the call, D’Agostino does the work that, he notes, most parents aren’t able to do, interviewing experts in infectious diseases and public health before calling Kennedy back to confront him. Their exchange, and what D’Agostino takes from it, has stayed with me since, surfacing with each new headline about the health secretary. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/18/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-559/
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