The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
April 25, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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This week’s recommendations:
- Conspiracy or coincidence?
- A warning from the water
- Rot as resistance
- Equine dynamics
- A short history of creativity
1. Radioactive Man
Maddy Crowell | Harper’s Magazine | April 21, 2025 | 5,486 words
Last year, Harper’s ran a feature about people grappling with systemic, sometimes incapacitating maladies. The afflicted blame the invisible toxins of modernity—electromagnetic frequencies, chemicals, additives—but society sees them as hypochondriacs or crackpots. Maddy Crowell’s piece in the newest issue of Harper’s acts as a bookend of sorts to that story: another case of hardship compounded by dismissal. Frank Vera III worked at George Air Force Base in the 1970s, where he interacted with what we now know are carcinogenic substances; he also claims to have been exposed to radioactive waste, and began exhibiting symptoms that ended his military career. Yet no one would validate his tale, or his suffering. Decades later, Vera began posting on Facebook, where he attracted a tribe of others who worked at the same base and claimed similar health troubles. Enter Crowell—a curious reporter who, to Vera, represented something more like a savior. As Crowell begins to investigate the alleged phenomenon, she finds herself examining the meta-phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking. Vera’s medical troubles are undeniable; so is the fact that the US military has worked with toxic materials. However, Vera’s crusade had also led him onto shakier ground, and his passion was now mixed with paranoia. “The more we spoke, the more confused I became,” Crowell writes. “Many of his most impassioned beliefs seemed wildly incoherent. But Frank’s emotional and physical pain was undeniable. He cried several times. And even if he lacked a smoking gun, he had enough evidence to indicate that the Air Force wasn’t being totally forthright about whatever had been going on at George.” There are no easy answers here. There’s plenty of stonewalling, though, and bureaucracy that seems designed to thwart accountability. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Crowell is unable to bring her investigation to a satisfying end. But that’s also the only possible outcome here, if you think about it. After all, it’s only wrong if you get caught. And the more power you have, the unlikelier that is. —PR
2. Anatomy of an Extinction
Jackie Flynn Mogensen | Mother Jones | April 21, 2025 | 3,393 words
This week, I recommended a story on mothering, mutual aid, and survival in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene, and a piece about a de-extinction company’s plan to genetically engineer a northern white rhino, of which there are only two left on Earth. In a way, this Mother Jones story blends the two, examining what happens when a climate disaster intensifies the extinction risk of a species. Science reporter Jackie Flynn Mogensen writes about eco-grief, the rippling effects of the Trump Administration’s environmental policies, and the slow, often invisible process of extinction through the lens of America’s largest salamander. The Eastern hellbender, an “endearingly ugly” creature that breathes through its skin, relies on clean and clear rivers in Appalachia to survive. Mogensen spends time with Wally Smith, a biologist devoted to protecting at-risk salamanders, to see firsthand how Helene devastated the hellbender’s habitat and pushed it closer to extinction. “For years, Smith had mapped out every boulder, riffle, and run in this stretch of stream,” she writes. “Hellbenders typically nest in cavities underneath river boulders. But now, many of those boulders were gone—either launched downstream or buried, the riverbank widened by erosion, like the face of an old friend ravaged by age.” As in her past work, Mogensen uses immersive on-the-ground storytelling (or in this case, in-the-river) and spotlights compassionate people doing vital research in a time of ecological loss. Helene killed 250 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. In the face of such devastation, some might wonder: Why care about a slimy, wrinkly salamander? But the hellbender is more than what locals call a “mud devil” or “snot otter”—it’s a sentinel. With its sensitive skin, it reflects the health of our waterways and wider ecosystems. “As Smith sees it, hellbenders and humans are different chapters of the same story,” Mogensen writes. In saving the salamander, we might learn how to save ourselves. —CLR
3. On Compost
Fraser MacDonald | The London Review of Books | April 17, 2025 | 2,576 words
I used to live in a city without a kitchen waste program. Inspired to divert our banana peels and apple cores from the landfill, I took a free Zoom class on composting during the pandemic. I learned the basics and my overarching mission: to maintain the microbes that would break down our scraps into garden fodder. Composting was easy enough. I added alternating layers of browns and greens, kept the pile moist but not too wet, and mixed it occasionally to keep my microbes busy. I loved Fraser MacDonald’s take on composting at The London Review of Books, where he surveys other approaches and shares his own. (MacDonald favors a much broader swath of compostables than I had access to, including shredded manuscript drafts, wool, and seaweed.) There’s something particularly lovely about the way he describes the silent, invisible action underway in the heap: “There’s a eucharistic mystery to the biochemical transformations that follow,” he writes. “Things fall apart. They decompose and recompose. Thermophilic microbes foment anarchy in the pile.” I read that and felt empowered. I wasn’t simply composting, I was fomenting anarchy. And there’s more, just as beautiful: “After just a week or two, a mop of bladderwrack still holds the same shape, like a memory of itself, but has turned white with actinomycetes bacteria. I add cart after cart of seaweed and autumn leaves to the heap, but the volume seems constant, so that what is left is a rich reduction, like stock or gravy.” Thanks to MacDonald, I now look at my potato peels and kale stems differently. Maybe they’re more than kitchen scraps. Maybe they’re resistance. —KS
4. The Horses and Mules That Moved Mountains and Hearts
Shi En Kim | High Country News | April 3, 2025 | 2,010 words
Horses have oodles of character. I know this well, having ridden at the same ranch for several summers. Squirrel, a fat little pony who barely reaches the shoulders of her companions, must be at the front of the pack. She barrels through, little legs pounding, ears pinned back, teeth bared at challengers—only to reach the front and promptly slow to a crawl, refusing to let anyone pass. Fred only likes to trot, hurtling into a furious, ungainly pace while others glide along in a smooth canter. Harmony sneaks mouthfuls of grass whenever her rider isn’t looking; she pines shamelessly for George, a handsome black gelding across the barn, who ignores her. Similar dynamics exist in every herd, so I loved reading about the big personalities of the horses and mules employed by the US Forest Service. In this study of an unsung animal workforce, Shi En Kim shows they’re more than just entertaining characters: They’re essential. After the 1964 Wilderness Act banned mechanized equipment in the backcountry, “horses and mules [became] the next best option to ATVs and power tools,” transporting people and gear on rugged, inaccessible terrain. Their human packers are deeply bonded to them—and now, deeply fearful for their futures. In February, thousands of probationary Forest Service workers were fired. Though courts ordered them reinstated, many haven’t returned, wary of their prospects under the Trump Administration. With handlers disappearing, what will become of the equine teams? Whether delightful, bossy, annoying, quirky, or affectionate, all these animals face uncertainty. By concentrating on their individual personalities, Kim slowly but surely pulls you into caring about the fate of these mules and horses. It’s a powerful reminder of how policy upheaval trickles downward, landing on the backs of those at the bottom. A heavy burden. —CW
5. How Creativity Became the Reigning Value of Our Time
Bryan Gardiner | MIT Technology Review | April 18, 2025 | 1,988 words
Creativity is of the utmost importance in Minecraft, a digital fantasia for would-be architects where my 8-year-old son spends time (though not nearly as much as he would like). He studies blueprints for elaborate, blocky structures, and invents his own idiosyncratic ones. A four-story fortress made entirely from TNT? No one will mess with that, he assures me. “Anything you can dream about, you can create,” Jack Black promises, his voice brimming with awe, in A Minecraft Movie, the highest-grossing film of 2025 so far. In contrast, the Nether, Minecraft’s hellish underworld, is “a place with no joy or creativity at all.” I don’t derive much joy from Minecraft, myself. And yet Bryan Gardiner’s conversation with Samuel Franklin, a cultural historian and author of The Cult of Creativity, has me watching my son a bit more closely, wondering at his impulses to shape the space around him. “Like a lot of kids, I grew up thinking that creativity was this inherently good thing,” Franklin tells Gardiner. “Being creative meant you at least had some future in this world, even if it wasn’t clear what that future would entail.” Later, Franklin realized that “what was being sold as the triumph of the creative class wasn’t actually resulting in a more inclusive or creative world order.” While on the shorter end of a Longreads recommendation, Gardiner’s exchange with Franklin is chock-a-block with curiosities from our recent fixation on creativity as a cure-all. After you read, you’ll find yourself searching for details on the psychologists who first elevated concepts of divergent thinking, on the cognitive tests put to Norman Mailer and Louis Kahn to gather data on creativity. You may find yourself looking at a brick, and thinking more expansively about just how much heart you put in your creations. —BF
Audience Award
The Firefighter With O.C.D. and the Vaccine He Believed Would Kill Him
Joseph Goldstein | The New York Times | April 17, 2025 | 3,844 words
In the interest of not making this about me, I’ll just say that I empathize with anyone who struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, let alone anyone whose life has been completely upended by it the way Timmy Reen’s has. Joseph Goldstein’s feature is no less affecting for its reportorial remove, chronicling how the disease shaped Reen long before the advent of COVID brought things to a breaking point. You’ll be thinking about this story, and particularly its ending, long after you finish reading it. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/25/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-560/
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