The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
May 30, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this week’s edition:
- Dark-web dealing
- A cruel tradition
- Revisiting Twain
- Flushing in flux
- An unlikely reunion
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1. The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin
Andy Greenberg | Wired | May 22, 2025 | 12,182 words
Over the past week, I shared so many stories about psychedelics in a group chat that a friend asked me if I had a new hobby she should know about. I only get high on narrative journalism, maaaaan, and Andy Greenberg’s piece about Akasha Song’s DMT empire is a trip. (It also lasts longer than the average DMT experience, and causes little to no ego death.) Song fell in love with LSD in high school, back when he was named Joseph Clements; 20 years later, he discovered the mind-altering joys of dimethyltryptamine. First he learned to make the drug, extracting it from a tree bark that’s legal to buy. Then he started selling it to friends. Then he found the dark web and started selling more. A lot more. His operation grew. He laundered the money through crypto. He moved from Colorado to Texas to Northern California, expanding all the while—until, inevitably, it all came crashing down. Greenberg specializes in this sort of story, having profiled McDonald’s ice-cream machine hackers, swatting teenagers, white-hat hackers, and more, and he’s in characteristically fine form here. It helps that Song landed on his feet, and shared a trove of the detail (and proof) that’s so crucial to that cinematic feel. You’re reading Greenberg’s words, but you’re in Song’s world, from the first tab to the last chat. —PR
2. The Tangled Past and Unsettled Future of Greyhound Racing in West Virginia
Michelle Orange | Oxford American | May 23, 2025 | 9,434 words
In the Longreads story “Shades of Grey,” Ashley Stimpson covered the aftermath of Florida’s 2018 decision to ban greyhound racing. She opens her reported essay with the origin story of her dog, Vesper, formerly known as “Smokin’ Josy,” a greyhound who had won four of her 70 starts before retiring at age 4. Stimpson’s essay is never far from my mind, so I was excited to see Michelle Orange’s Oxford American piece. Here, she profiles the humans orbiting the Wheeling Island Hotel, Casino & Racetrack in Wheeling, West Virginia, one of only two active greyhound racing facilities in the US. Orange talks with people at every turn on the track, including facility management, a longtime better, a dog breeder, a state senator, and the cofounder of GREY2K, a group that has successfully lobbied several other states to end dog racing. Proponents say it creates jobs and puts money into the local economy; critics say it’s a cruel sport that endangers the dogs. All races at Wheeling Island are recorded. Orange discovers, though, that the most grievous video replays, the ones that capture a dog’s death, are deleted from the track’s website. “As with horseracing, the risk of catastrophe is part of the rush,” she writes. “Much of the arguing about greyhound racing is bound by this cognitive gap, with one side describing a win-win in which dogs—clearly and specifically built to haul ass—do so for our enjoyment and economic gain, and the other citing the many problems, perversions, and cruelties involved in forcing one variety of a favored species to do our esoteric bidding—under the banner, no less, of honoring their natural instincts.” It took GREY2K 10 years to ban racing in Florida, and now they’re chasing their next target: West Virginia. If the past is any predictor of the future, the end of racing in the state is just a matter of time. —KS
3. Twain Dreams
John Jeremiah Sullivan | Harper’s | May 21, 2025 | 8,979 words
I have no memory of reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My parents’ bookshelves were all Stephen King and Tom Clancy, plus a large section of Irish history and a smaller section of Danielle Steel. As a kid, I jumped from Louis Sachar to Gary Paulsen, made a brief detour through the Steel, and then let a decade of teachers build my reading list for me. This week, however, held some astonishment: As I read Percival Everett’s James, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that centers the life of the enslaved Black man from Twain’s classic, whole scenes from Huckleberry Finn surfaced in powerful new detail. I held the novel in me, somehow; it feels as though it were miraculously deposited, gratis, for me to sort out over a lifetime. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s own path to Huck and James is clear: His father was a fanatical fan and something of a Twain doppelgänger, complete with bushy ’stache and white suit. During his own childhood, Sullivan writes, Twain novels arrived on the regular, “given in love, but with a certain expectation or pressure, as well . . . and somehow I never felt that I read or loved them well enough.” For Harper’s, Sullivan wades into our recent “Twain revival,” returning, as he so often does, with archival fragments that throw light into new corners of his subject. Discussed: Ernest Hemingway’s semi-absurd book endorsements, simultaneous dreaming, disastrous middle-school theater productions, the reasons for Samuel Clemens’s pen name, and a previously unpublished account of Twain by a family friend. “We go on suspecting he hides some meaning,” Sullivan writes of Twain, “some message that we could probably use, behind the bushy eyebrows and mustache, but are less and less able to name or remember.” This essay, as with Everett’s James, grants access to new words—and, critically, new access to old stories. —BF
4. Neither Here Nor There
Jefferson Mao | Urban Omnibus | May 14, 2025 | 6,076 words
Jefferson Mao’s essay on Flushing, Queens, published in Urban Omnibus—the publication of the Architectural League of New York—brings this vibrant NYC neighborhood at the end of the 7 train vividly to life. “I grew up in the New York of the late ’90s: The days of Robin Ventura’s grand slam single and Street Fighter arcade cabinets in all the laundromats, pre-9/11, pre-financial crises, back when the utopia of a polyglot immigrant city seemed, for a fleeting moment, like it was actually within grasp,” he writes. “For most of my lifetime, Flushing was the humble immigrant enclave that could. . . . There was a triumphant story you could tell along these lines, and as an urban planner and child of the neighborhood, sometimes I told it.” Mao reflects on the last few decades of rapid transformation to understand the neighborhood it is today, tracing a period of high-end property development spurred by Asia’s economic rise to the post-pandemic years of isolation and stasis. “Here, too, was an exuberant story about how developing-world grit met the magic freedom dirt of America and became something greater than the sum of its parts,” he writes. “Flushing was the multipolar world in action.” I’m forever drawn to writing that inhabits the in-between, and Mao floats beautifully in this liminal space: “I think about all the things that Flushing is or was or could have been—Chinese and American, rich and poor, bourgeois and bohemian, erudite and lowbrow—and I can still build something that holds on to all these possibilities, at least in my head.” His reflections pair nicely with Thomas Dai’s recent essays on Chinese American identity and cultural in-betweenness. Blending personal observations with sharp urban analysis, Mao writes not just a portrait of a dynamic city, but a meditation on the (Chinese) American dream. —CLR
5. Haines Man Finds Father
Will Steinfield | Chilkat Valley News | May 15, 2020 | 3,063 words
Being shown a picture in a magazine and being told it’s your long-lost father? That’s the kind of plotline that belongs in a soap opera. But in Mike Thompson’s case, it’s plausible. Thompson’s mother claimed she met his dad at a New York party in the ’60s: a suave, well-dressed model who drove fancy cars. Despite her mailing him a GQ clipping, Thompson remained doubtful. Growing up the “only son of a nurse in Anchorage,” as Will Steinfield writes, makes it hard to imagine your dad as a jet-setting James Bond type. Besides, Thompson was too busy leading his own life to chase down his father. While subtle in his comparisons, Steinfield still shows Thompson to be as impressive—if a touch less glamorous—as the man from the magazine. Entering Thompson’s home, Steinfield notes: “Through the entryway is a wall of certificates and mementos from Thompson’s service, as a park ranger, fighter pilot, and air marshal, all hung plumb and level.” It’s Thompson’s calm, level-headed demeanor that grounds this larger-than-life story. When a relative reaches out through Ancestry.com, Thompson takes months to respond with a phone number. Eventually, he learns of his half-brother. He also learns of Stephen Winn: a former model who had been to New York and drove fancy cars. Thompson then flies across the world from freezing Anchorage to freezing Scotland, where Winn lived. I’ll let you find out what happens next. Steinfield’s writing is accessible and smooth, never weighed down by sentimentality or excessive detail, light with clarity. At a tight 3,000 words, this piece of reporting brings decades-spanning revelations to life and wraps them in the quiet dignity of a man who built his own life, regardless of who his dad was. —CW
Audience Award
The Reenchanted World
Karl Ove Knausgaard | Harper’s | May 21, 2025 | 10,753 words
Whether or not you’ve read his six-volume opus My Struggle (I haven’t), you likely have some expectations when you see Karl Ove Knausgaard’s byline. Here, the Norwegian author doesn’t disappoint: He takes on Technology with a capital T, tracing the arc of alienation from childhood to our current moment in which, he argues, experience itself has vaporized. Hypnotic and plainspoken in exactly the way you hope—and for all its angst, not without hope. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/30/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-565/
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