The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
May 23, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In today’s edition:
- Seeking salvation, finding darkness
- AI’s college years
- What’s keeping you alive today?
- A million crushing ways to write
- A blueprint for experience
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1. Pirates of the Ayahuasca
Sarah Miller | n+1 | May 20, 2025 | 8,216 words
Not so long ago, Sarah Miller was Not Doing Well. Like, Not Doing Well at an existential, nearly cellular level. She despaired about the world and its fate, about her own pessimisim, about her role in the world. She also had no idea how to navigate her despair, let alone resolve it, until she decided—with no small amount of misgiving—that ayahuasca was worth a shot. So: off to Peru! In the 1,500 words it takes for Miller to reach the center where she’ll journey to her own center, you get a very clear sense that you are in very good hands. Not only does she wield a gratifyingly caustic sense of humor, but she has the rare gift of bidirectional analysis; she is both intensely self-aware and intensely judgmental, leveling the same withering gaze inward and outward. (Let me be clear: This is a compliment. No one likes everybody. The least you can do is own your reasoning.) And when she arrives, all these traits combine to create a psychedelia of their own. There’s the pre-trip purgation, of course. The seven (seven!) ayahuasca experiences, each of which manages to disappoint or even re-traumatize Miller in some novel way. The other people, who she renders with a keen meanness, or possibly a mean keenness. Yet, none of this feels like punching down, or self-absorption, or any of the other pitfalls that lurk in a piece like this. It’s not that she hates, it’s that she hurts. Does the ayahuasca care? It does not. Instead, it pushes her through the darkness, again and again. “My life was a selfish joke,” she writes of the reality that consumed her during her sixth trip. “My desire to express myself was risible. I had come here to find hope but what I found instead was the definitive end of it.” The theme of the latest issue of n+1 is Harsh Realm, and this very unfunny realization in the midst of a very funny piece makes clear that, for most of us, the harshest realm of all is the doubt that lurks inside us. —PR
2. Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
James D. Walsh | New York | May 7, 2025 | 5,342 words
“ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project,” the dek declares in this New York story, but the ideal of college as a fulfilling place of deep intellectual curiosity and growth faded long before AI entered our daily lives. Cheating in college is nothing new. What’s changed, as one student tells Intelligencer writer James D. Walsh, is that “the ceiling has been blown off.” Two years after OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT, most undergraduates rely on AI for all aspects of their education. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” another student admits. For many educators, this shift is so demoralizing that some now dream of just one thing: retirement. “When can I get out of this?” one humanities professor asks. “This is not what we signed up for.” They tell Walsh that their field, especially writing, is “quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving.” Walsh’s snapshot of higher education is bleak, and I’m challenged to find any glimmers of hope within it. Are students at least learning to harness new technology? With ChatGPT helping them write their essay in two hours instead of 12, are they at least gaining more time to socialize and enjoy being young? Or, having grown up in a world where we drill into them that perfect test scores and GPAs matter, have they at least adapted to a broken and transactional system where “success” has long felt like a strategic game? I’ll leave you with a quote from Chungin Lee, a coder suspended from Columbia University for building a tool to cheat on job interviews. When Walsh asks him why he worked so hard to get into an Ivy League school only to outsource the learning to a bot, Lee says, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” Sadly, the pursuit of knowledge has devolved into a prompt-response loop. —CLR
3. In Defense of Despair
Hanif Abdurraqib | The New Yorker | May 16, 2025 | 2,675 words
This piece deals with suicide. If you’re in the US and are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org.
For the past eight years, Hanif Abdurraqib has attended a support group for people who have gone through periods of wanting to die. In his New Yorker essay, he recounts the question that opens each meeting: What is keeping you alive today? For Abdurraqib, that will to continue has come from a beam of sunlight through torn curtains, the love he has for his dog, and Black elders who still work toward the collective good, investing “some of whatever time they have left stitching together small pieces that, eventually, might make something big enough to be meaningful.” These are all beautiful things. What stopped me short, though, was how Abdurraqib finds communion by teaching a high school poetry workshop. They’ve studied “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” by Ross Gay, and “You Are Who I Love,” by Aracelis Girmay. Both are “poems of joyful accumulation—poems that begin with some small affection, which leads to a sort of snowballing of pleasure, of happy revelation, even if the revelation begins with a slight ache, a memory of someone who is no longer here, or a place that is not what it once was,” he writes. It’s the intense, communal experience of spoken language, “in the silence of a room when the only sounds are small gasps and sniffles,” that fills his tank. While experiencing poetry in a group setting and observing the responses of others does not offer what Abdurraqib calls the “mythological concept of ‘hope,’” it does provide a small, shared space in which he can ask his students and himself “to imagine a heart that feels a connection to the hearts of others,” a simple yet powerful request to hold empathy for others, and maybe most importantly, for ourselves. —KS
4. How to Make a Living as a Writer
Gabrielle Drolet | The Walrus | May 20, 2025 | 3,880 words
Gabrielle Drolet had the same reason for pursuing a Master’s degree as I once did: “[she] didn’t want to face what life would look like once I was no longer a student.” A well-founded procrastination, especially when your post-grad plan is to become a writer. Drolet knew it would be tough. But adult life comes crashing in early when a chronic nerve condition forces her to quit the program, pushing her straight into the harsh world of turning words into rent money. Perhaps some of you still harbor lofty illusions about the writer’s life—penning best-selling novels in a Parisian coffee shop or a charming lakeside cottage, maybe even playfully fishing out wayward pages blown into said lake with a housekeeper you rather fancy (yes, looking at you, Colin Firth in Love Actually). If so, Drolet will firmly drag you back to the shores of reality. Her way of surviving? A “million little jobs” that include writing Horse News (a horse racing newsletter), content for a bank, recaps of The Bachelorette, and “over 70,000 words of smut” for an erotic story app. It’s relentless, absurd, and sometimes hilarious. And while the work may be grueling, this essay is anything but. By the end, Drolet’s sharp, engaging voice will have you rooting for her to keep finding even more new ways to write “they had sex.” As technology makes the future of professional writing ever more precarious, I’m glad people like Drolet are still in the fight. This essay is an excerpt from her first book, Look Ma, No Hands. I hope it’s a roaring success. Maybe she will be writing from that cottage for her next book. —CW
5. The Hobo Handbook
Jeremiah David | The Paris Review | May 9, 2025 | 2,233 words
When I was in my 20s, someone passed me a map to the steam tunnels that run beneath the University of Virginia, complete with “anecdotal demonstration” of how to access locked buildings. The map had come under scrutiny from the school; a student had recently fallen from the top of the Physics Building to his death. In most respects, I was, and still am, a cautious person. Still, I felt a pull. I never used the map, but I took some satisfaction from exploring its contents and nursing the idea that I might quietly transport myself somewhere rarely traveled. Jeremiah David knows of what I speak, having frequently tested the limits of a similar, albeit more storied, desire: hopping trains. In New Orleans, he briefly takes hold of a freight car and, keeping pace, considers “what it would feel like to pull myself up on the fly.” In Oregon, he climbs aboard a stopped car one night. “I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light,” David writes. “The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.” A friend finally hands David a copy of the Crew Change Guide, an underground text that promises “best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada” and whose extremely pre-Internet history David relays with the care of a true devotee. “The Guide signified more than information to me; it signified the courage to act on it,” he writes. “I knew that no guide, no matter how detailed or digestible, could substitute for experience. But I returned to it again and again over the following days, craving some conclusive invitation.” David’s fascinating literary history is a thoughtful evaluation of his own longings, and a reminder that the most enchanting reads often feel like invitations. —BF
Audience Award
Thomas Keller Asked Me to Leave The French Laundry. It Turned Into My Most Extraordinary Night as a Critic.
MacKenzie Chung Fegan | The San Francisco Chronicle | May 19, 2025 | 3,381 words
On at least two occasions, Thomas Keller, the exhaustively acclaimed chef of the French Laundry and Per Se, has served mushroom soup to restaurant critics via a glass bong—an allusion to a negative review published nearly 10 years ago. MacKenzie Chung Fegan, restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, encounters a decidedly less playful Keller during a recent visit to the French Laundry, where she is separated from her table, made to wait in a courtyard for Keller, and ultimately informed by the chef that he would like the critic gone from his restaurant. Fegan manages to stay at the French Laundry for another three hours; throughout, Keller’s power intrudes in ways subtle (“apology truffles”) and not. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/23/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-564/
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