The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
May 02, 2025 at 04:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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• Life’s joy, remembered
• Separating truth from spin
• A whale of a dilemma
• Unexpected Twists
• The taste of your roots
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1. Losing My Dad in Installments
Mariana Serapicos | Electric Literature | April 24, 2025 | 3,935 words
My parents, who are in their mid-70s, are preparing to sell the house they’ve lived in for nearly 50 years. I’ve been scanning my mind for the memories we’ve made in that home. In many of them, my dad is tinkering with something—up a ladder, barefoot, hammering on the siding; searching for a tool in the garage; changing the oil in his car. He is a fixer for life, eternally excited about a piece of wood, but these days, I see him resting on the couch a lot more. Reading Mariana Serapicos’s tribute to her own father, it’s hard not to think about my dad getting older. Serapicos’s father got sick when she was a child, diagnosed with ALS at a time when not many people were aware of the disease. Her descriptions of watching his health deteriorate are tough. But her descriptions of his love for his family, and a life of joy despite hardship, are ultimately what I take away from this piece. The first (and last) time she sees her dad in the hospital, they communicate through letters and sentences on a piece of cardboard. “We talked about plain things because everything else was too big, because plainness is the fabric of life,” she writes. This line encapsulates what I love about this essay. She captures everyday details—his Birkenstocks, their days at the pool, the way she danced on his feet and combed his oily hair—that celebrate a hardworking and joyful man who lived fully. Serapicos leaves us with a moving portrait not of decline, but of presence. —CLR
2. Out of the Fog
Camille Bromley | The Verge | April 21, 2025 | 3,354 words
A few years ago, Camille Bromley, then my colleague at Columbia Journalism Review, wrote a short blog post titled “What it looks like to decenter the official story.” She had been watching live coverage of the criminal trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who was ultimately found guilty of murdering George Floyd. Awaiting the verdict, Bromley switched between The New York Times and Unicorn Riot, a nonprofit media collective whose coverage resisted legal theatrics and police statements to provide a panoramic view of the scene outside the courthouse. “This is what it looks like,” she concluded, “to treat coverage of the ‘official’ story as just one story among many.” The observation is characteristic of Bromley, whose work as a writer and editor frequently reveals the ways in which popular narratives simplify the world to our detriment. “Out of the Fog,” her feature for The Verge’s excellent series on the complex legacies of the Vietnam War, quickly unsettles the story of Operation Babylift, which removed thousands of children from Vietnam orphanages and placed them with adoptive families, primarily in the US. “In 1975, to hear the Americans tell it, the mass adoption of Vietnamese children was a story of rescue and redemption,” Bromley writes—a story that also served the US as “a deflection from military defeat and abandonment.” A half-century later, Bromley gathers stories from the children of Operation Babylift, compiling a “counternarrative of adoption that acknowledges the reality of grief, loss, and anger.” Many have been denied US citizenship; “the beneficent embrace of the American family,” Bromley writes, “was always conditional.” So many “beneficent” American stories are also conditional. Bromley’s story is a reminder that there are better, more complicated versions to tell, just outside the official frame. —BF
3. To Steal a Whale Bone
Devon Fredericksen | Switchyard | December 12, 2024 | 6,459 words
I love to scan the Salish Sea shore for treasure left behind by the receding tide. So far I’ve found nothing of value, though, other than a few pebbles pocketed for their unusual color, pattern, or shape. When Devon Fredericksen discovers a humpback whale carcass on the Long Beach Peninsula, along the southern coast of Washington state, she confesses her desire to steal one of its vertebrae. “I wondered: Could I take such a thing? I worried that if I didn’t, someone else would pry it, without ceremony, from the corpse. Someone who hadn’t come to know the whale like I had,” she writes, attempting to justify a theft she plans carefully. Fredericksen’s proprietary feeling over the peninsula is half devotion, half dis-ease. It’s palpable as she recalls a childhood spent in wonder exploring the shore juxtaposed with how her parents altered the landscape, cutting trees to build a small cabin, and how her grandfather found and kept a 40-pound fishing sinker, an Indigenous artifact thought to be made by a Coast Salish fisherman. Asked whether she’d like to inherit the sinker, Fredericksen makes a pivotal decision to donate it to a museum, mulling the many costs of possessing something that doesn’t belong to you. Her desire to pilfer a piece of the whale diminishes along with the animal as, exposed to the sun, tides, insects, and scavengers, the carcass is consumed, bit by bit. Fredericksen’s careful gaze—leveled both inward and on the ever-changing shoreline—makes this piece one you’ll savor. Maybe it’s time I returned my pebbles to the shore. —KS
4. Borstal Boys
Georgia Brown | The Fence | April 28, 2025 | 3,257 words
Last week, I went to the theater to see Oliver!, the musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s tale of an orphaned boy in Victorian England. Beginning life in a workhouse, Oliver joins a gang of pickpockets in London. The revelation that he has a wealthy grandfather conveniently ends Oliver’s foray into criminality, though the other children remain in the street gang—a detail largely ignored, and one that felt eerily familiar after reading Georgia Brown’s essay on the history of incarcerated children in Britain. Borstals, juvenile detention centers operating from 1902 to 1982, do not sound vastly different from the horrors of Victorian workhouses, with a similarly grim path toward career criminality. Brown’s views on the effects of borstals and the institutions that followed them are strong, but well-earned: Her grandfather, father, and half-brother were all incarcerated at a young age. “What were you doing when you were 14?” she writes. “My grandad was running away from borstal.” She remembers testifying during one of her father’s trials, and mourns her half-brother’s early death in a car accident: “He died young, but his death could have perhaps been avoided if we didn’t live in one of the most punitive countries in the world.” Brown brings these three generations of her family to life as vividly as any Dickens character. In doing so, she gives a soul to the history of these institutions—and to the bleak statistics. Her honest writing will linger in your mind and leave you wanting more. —CW
5. Fried Fish & Family Affairs
Sarah Golibart Gorman | The Bitter Southerner | April 30, 2025 | 3,489 words
No matter how many states you’ve lived in, no matter how much of the country you’ve seen, the United States is so vast and varied as to remain stubbornly unknowable. (Sorry, Alexis de Tocqueville.) Case in point: the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where Sarah Golibart Gorman spent her adolescence. It’s a place that feels distinct even from the other two states that share its peninsula—linguistically, culinarily, culturally. (The “from here” vs. “come here” divide is so strong that one transplant who had a child on the Shore is told “just because the cat has kittens in an oven, you don’t call them biscuits.”) When Golibart Gorman and her brothers come back to the Shore to help pack up their parents’ house, she tries black drum fish ribs for the first time in her life, at which point the piece shifts from a bucolic remembrance to something more viscerally satisfying. “Perfectly salty, reflective of the bay and the ocean from which it came, the drum was a taste of home I tried to memorize,” she writes, “allowing its briny flakiness to anchor me.” She unpacks drum’s importance to the region, its unappetizing exterior and its unforgettable interior, its unerring ability to bring a family together. You don’t just read this piece; you feel it. You wonder how it is that you’ve never been to this place, tasted its bounty, felt that particular satiety that comes from sharing such a meal with loved ones. And you add one more name to the list of places you want to visit. —PR
Audience Award
The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing
Emily McCrary | Oxford American | April 23, 2025 | 2,085 words
When the James E. Foy desk opened at Auburn University in 1953, they used the Farmers’ Almanac and the Guinness Book of World Records to answer the public’s burning questions, which run from “Who is the most famous person in the world?” to “What is watercress?” The desk is staffed by university students and provides a vital service and source of genuine human connection to people who, for whatever reason, have to decided to stay off or do not have access to the internet. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/02/longreads-top-5-561/
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