The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
May 16, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In today’s edition:
- Recriminalizing fentanyl
- Communal parenting
- Listing longings
- Contentment over happiness
- Pygmy nuthatch hunting
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1. ‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl
Jason Motlagh | Rolling Stone | April 27, 2025 | 6,716 words
In a bid to emulate Portugal and France, where “nuanced approaches prioritizing health care over punishment have curtailed overdoses and public drug use,” Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs like fentanyl and meth in 2020. The state redirected hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for enforcement and incarceration toward treatment and harm reduction. It all seemed reasonable in theory, but Mexican drug cartels took full advantage. They flooded the US with fentanyl, which forced the price down, making it accessible for as little as $1 per pill. Then came the pandemic, where isolation, despair, and the cheap, plentiful supply became a horrific combination. “Portland became a honeypot for local and out-of-state addicts to score cheap dope and use it freely,” writes Jason Motlagh for Rolling Stone. After the state repealed decriminalization in 2024, Motlagh visited Portland to witness the aftermath. His careful reporting puts him face to face with people on all sides of the drug crisis: He talks to a hotel owner and the local district attorney; he shadows treatment workers and harm reduction volunteers on their rounds; he witnesses a man brought back from the brink of overdose with four naloxone injections; he gets to know addicts as they cycle through rock bottom and relapse. So how’s it going? Today, naloxone is more readily available on the street. Overdoses are down slightly with a less potent supply. (Some say the cartels are trying to keep their customers alive longer.) While at times this was a very difficult read, it was plain to see that in Portland, there is something other than fentanyl available in large supply—hope. —KS
2. A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship
Rhaina Cohen | The Atlantic | May 11, 2025 | 2,799 words
My daughter suddenly fell ill this week, and with my husband away for work, I hit a low point. After coming down with a fever as well, I broke down in tears—exhausted, overwhelmed, alone. Moments like these, which happen more often than I’d like, leave me wondering how I might redesign our lives so our little family of three could feel . . . bigger. I’m lucky to have a large extended family, but I’ve long dreamed of raising my daughter alongside my close friends and their kids—aging together, supporting one another from day to day. Most of these friends are scattered across the US, making that dream feel out of reach. And even if we did end up in the same place, building this kind of communal life wouldn’t be easy. For The Atlantic, Rhaina Cohen writes about families who have done just that, uprooting their lives to live near friends and raise children together, creating villages of their own. “[A]s hard as it can be for people to see their friends when they have kids,” she writes, “parenthood might actually be the stage of life when they need their friends the most.” I still think about her story from 2020 that asked whether friendship, not marriage, might be the true center of life; it resonated deeply when my husband and I were struggling through the early months of the pandemic, raising a 2-year-old without a social safety net. Cohen’s new piece stirs the same longing in me: for a friend living next door to swing by with a beer while our daughters play, and another across the street to step in when I’m having a tough moment like the one this week. It all sounds ideal in my head, but Cohen doesn’t romanticize it. She notes real challenges, from shared parenting decisions to the vulnerability of exposing family imperfections. Still, the payoff—the built-in child care, the immediate sense of community—feels worth dreaming about. —CLR
3. I Can Never Own My Perfect Home
Lydia C. Buchanan | Electric Literature | May 8, 2025 | 3, 103 words
I love real estate listings. Many an evening, I find myself trawling realtor sites, perusing country cottages in England, sleek coastal mansions on remote islands, or cabins tucked deep in the woods. (My geographical range is nothing if not broad.) I have imagined a hundred different lives while inspecting pictures of other people’s kitchen tile and toilet choices. My parents were the same. As a child, I would be driven around neighborhood after neighborhood, staring out the window at “For Sale” signs, only to come home in time to catch an episode of Location, Location, Location. I am lucky: After a few decades of research, I finally did manage to buy a place. But, as Lydia C. Buchanan reminds us in this piece for Electric Literature, this dream is increasingly out of reach. Buchanan begins by taking us to “her house,” a coveted home near where she rents with “taupe-painted shingles and white trim and wide windows and bright plants in the yard.” You can stand on the curb and stare at this longed-for house alongside her—she paints it beautifully. Buchanan was dismissive when her friends first started buying property, shocked at their confidence at a time when she only craved freedom. She never longed for “lawns to mow and driveways to shovel and insurance to buy.” (I can confirm the tedious side of ownership—gutters now dominate my thoughts.) The desire for a home crept up on Buchanan. Quietly. Steadily. Now it is a longing she is unsure she will ever fulfill. The ache pulses beneath her elegant, restrained prose. Generations have changed: Buchanan’s parents had both a house and children by her age. Today, with different economics and expectations, people settle later, if at all. And yet, the desire for “a plot of land with my name and clothesline on it, neighbors I can wave to,” as Buchanan writes, is perhaps as innate as always. This piece will make you think about old wooden doors, colorful shutters, and green lawns. But also about permanence. About belonging. About wanting a home in a world where that has become a radical expectation. —CW
4. My Miserable Week in the “Happiest Country on Earth”
Molly Young | The New York Times Magazine | May 2, 2025 | 4,112 words
Where I live, in southern Ontario, the groundhogs are back, thin and bedraggled but spirited after their six-month hibernation. They emerge from beneath our shed around this time each year, the same time our neighbors emerge from their own winter burrows. It’s short-sleeve season, trampoline season, Slush Puppie season. An easy time to be happy. My wife and I linger on the porch while the groundhogs eat the dandelions in the yard. They lift my spirits, the groundhogs; still, I know that a clock has started. Six months from now, the sidewalks and bike paths will be empty, and we’ll all have returned to our burrows. How happy will we all be then? Perhaps not as happy as folks in Finland, which, for eight consecutive years, has earned top marks from the World Happiness Report, a boldly titled and fundamentally flawed project. “There are obvious problems with measuring happiness,” Molly Young writes for The New York Times Magazine. “Is it a quantum of pleasure? The absence of pain?” While my city was still in hibernation mode, Young traveled to Helsinki, a place of tiny coffee cups, exemplary public libraries, and an astonishing number of saunas per capita, to try her hand at happiness tourism. “The ‘happiest country in the world’ label seems to imprint on the American mind as a never-ending carousel of delights,” Young observes, “but in Finland’s February chill, the reality is more modest.” The World Happiness Report favors contentment over self-indulgence and joyrides. “If Americans are exceptional in our approach to happiness, it may have to do with an insistence on treating the matter as a glittering mystery,” Young writes. She courts the mystery anyway, in a piece that is both deftly critical and gratifyingly sensory. Though she finds herself “exceedingly glum,” Young’s gloom is a portal, a tunnel through the happiness trap. Don’t get me wrong: I like Slush Puppies fine. But maybe all I really need is a burrow. —BF
5. The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch
Forrest Wickman | Slate | May 11, 2025 | 6,365 words
As far as opening sentences go, it’s hard to beat “There is nothing quite like becoming birdpilled.” I don’t even care about birds!* Yet, Forrest Wickman grabbed me immediately. Maybe I’m a sucker for obsessions. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good hook. Probably both. Thankfully, the other 6,358 words in the story pay off the promise of those first seven. See, in becoming the kind of person who listens to birds basically all the time, Forrest Wickman has also become the kind of person who gets irritated when a bird sound in a movie or TV show doesn’t match the bird shown on screen, or is otherwise impossible. This happens a lot. But nothing is quite as irritating to Forrest Wickman as the bird who proves pivotal to the plot of 2000’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s called a pygmy nuthatch, which it is not; it’s described as being indigenous to a single city in California, which it is also not; and it makes a sound that is neither that of a pygmy nuthatch or the bird it actually is. I’m not even Forrest Wickman, and this bothers me. So Forrest Wickman (whose name I am doomed to write in full) sets off to figure out what the hell happened to create this sorry state of affairs. He talks to the original screenwriter. He talks to one of the script doctors. He talks to the animal trainer who helped cast the imposter. He talks to the sound editor. He talks to a naturalist and journalist who seems to specialize in how Hollywood screws up anything ornithological. He talks to a man who is even crazier about birds than he is. He talks to the developer of a popular birdsong app. Each of these conversations is more entertaining than it has any right to be. Ultimately, he talks to the movie’s director, McG—who, I have to say, destroyed everything I’d ever assumed about McG. McG should be interviewed about weird things more often. Yes, Forrest Wickman discovers exactly what happened with the bird on Charlie’s Angels, and why. And in the process, he writes** one of the most pleasurable stories I’ve read this year. Maybe I’ve been birdpilled too. —PR
* Clarification: I care about birds in the dignity-of-living-things sense. I don’t care inordinately about birds. No angry emails, please.
** The story was originally an episode of Slate’s podcast Decoder Ring that came out last October. As much as I enjoy Decoder Ring, though, I have to tell you: This is even better as a written feature.
Audience Award
Cringe! How Millennials Became Uncool
Chloë Hamilton | The Guardian | May 8, 2025 | 1.957 words
I read this while wearing ankle socks and felt very seen. (Gen Z is firmly crew socks only.) If you are a millennial, like me (just), you will be sure to identify with several things we are now being called out on. And yes, you will cringe. It is disconcerting to realize we have moved from “OK Boomer” to millennial bashing, but this is still a fascinating look into generational trends. Who decides what socks we should wear anyway? —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/16/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-563/
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