The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
May 09, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this edition of our Top 5:
- The audacious hackers of North Korea
- The immense value of a cake tin
- The veil across a disconnected mind
- The demise of Skype
- The importance of a (very) old tree
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1. North Korea Stole Your Job
Bobbie Johnson | Wired | May 1, 2025 | 3,848 words
I’ve worked remotely for almost 15 years, well before logging in from the kitchen or couch became mainstream. There’s a lot you can glean about your coworkers just by being online with them over time. You build rapport, deep respect, and above all, trust. That’s why Bobbie Johnson’s Wired piece about how North Korea used American shills to put fake workers inside over 300 US companies yanked my neck on a chain. Christina Chapman was a shill. Once a worker landed a job, she housed and maintained the fake’s laptop, received their pay, took a cut, and wired the rest of the money to North Korea. Before the law caught up to her, she ran a laptop farm from her Arizona home with dozens of computers linked to different workers. Several people in the US have been charged, and these cases are winding their way through the courts. But where did it all begin? In North Korea, all roads lead to the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. Kim is a gaming enthusiast secretly educated in Switzerland, and he made investing in IT a top priority after taking over from his father in 2011. Computer science courses now run in schools, and the most promising students are taught hacking techniques and foreign languages. They’re allowed a glimmer of freedom in access to the actual internet so that they can excel as operatives for the state. Johnson surveys the history of North Korean hacking success, and the surprising (and sad) communal conditions under which operatives work today, all to pad Kim’s pocket. This piece puts you on the edge of your seat for the audacity of the cybercrime alone. It takes a hilarious turn when Johnson rides along with a recruiter, coming face to face with more than one North Korean operative applying for, and in one case, spectacularly failing to land a lucrative American job. It’s a scene you won’t want to miss. —KS
2. Death, Divorce, and the Magic of Kitchen Objects: How to Find Hope in Loss
Bee Wilson | The Guardian | April 29, 2025 | 3,742 words
I recently met Raksha Vasudevan for coffee and told her how much I enjoyed her essay about her attachment to the Royal Dansk butter cookie tin—a “hypnotic object,” as she calls it, from her childhood pantry. We always had one of these tins in our kitchen growing up. Once the cookies were gone, a new tin would appear, and my mother repurposed the empty one to store sewing supplies and other odds and ends. I have vivid memories of sitting on the floor and rummaging through these tins, hearing the soft clink of metal as I played with them. This round blue tin reminds me of my childhood—and of my mother. Bee Wilson explores similar themes in this excerpt from her new book, The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects. “Certain kitchen objects become loaded with meaning in a way that we are not fully in control of,” she writes. I find myself especially drawn to this line as I prepare to move; I’m currently packing up my apartment, dividing belongings into “keep” and “clutter” piles. Some kitchen objects “seem to carry with them a kind of magic,” writes Wilson, whether passed down from loved ones or special for reasons that defy logic. I am inexplicably sentimental about a red-and-white striped tea towel, stains and all, and a pink plastic spoon my daughter once used to eat ice cream when we were on vacation. Wilson reflects on a heart-shaped tin that she used to bake her own wedding cake, which became “a clanging metal symbol of rejection” after the end of her 23-year marriage. She speaks with other people about their favorite objects—an herb chopper from a French grandmother, a mother-in-law’s butter dish, and precious china brought out from the attic to serve a new generation. “As children, we may be taught that certain possessions are only for best,” she writes. “But what if today is all we have?” Wilson reminds us of the quiet power of objects to hold memory, meaning, and joy through time. Funny how a tin or a towel can carry so much. —CLR
3. My Brain Finally Broke
Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker | May 3, 2025 | 2,993 words
“Jia Tolentino Makes Sense Out of This Nonsense Moment.” That headline topped a 2019 Elle profile of Tolentino, a staff writer for The New Yorker. How startling, then, to see Tolentino’s latest essay arrive under a darker banner, one that perhaps signals the triumph of nonsense—no longer just a moment, but the reigning logic of “the endlessly resupplied now.” Her subject is “a troubling kind of opacity” that has settled in her mind, dropping like a thick curtain between her senses and the world they might perceive. Sensitive to the porousness between the digital and corporeal worlds, Tolentino now observes a disturbing fusion of the two. She recounts the orders and claims of America’s chaotic executive branch, events that “materialize in headlines and then are swiftly carried to the purgatorial cognitive landfill of things that have not been fully absorbed or processed or fought against but have been pressed into reality.” She also confronts one of those tests we now routinely complete online to verify our humanity. Shown a grid of fruit and asked to select the type that “appears most frequently,” Tolentino is briefly baffled: “Appears most frequently in . . . the grocery store?” Real images have become impossible to explain; fake images have become impossible to avoid. Tolentino’s essay reaches its worrisome peak as she considers the ways in which her children might navigate this world: “Will I be able to convince them that the only worthwhile parts of my mind are those which have resisted or eluded the incentives of the internet?” Her gift is to place the same question in your mind, and leave you within your own dark curtain, searching for an answer. —BF
4. When the World Connected on Skype
Isra Fejzullaj, Rina Chandran, and Michael Zelenko | Rest of World | April 22, 2025 | 2,544 words
It’s the end of an era: On Monday, the world bid farewell to Skype, the video-calling service that connected people for more than two decades. “For those of a certain generation,” write Isra Fejzullaj, Rina Chandran, and Michael Zelenko, “Skype changed everything.” For many around the globe, it was the go-to way to stay in touch—free of charge—with loved ones overseas. ” I couldn’t feel the time difference between London and Kashmir, or spending my first Eid away from home,” recalls a Skype customer in India. But it wasn’t just a personal tool—it became essential for business in some parts of the world. “I went to Tallinn in 2018 for work. During my time there, it was apparent that Skype was the foundation of much of modern Estonia,” one US customer writes. “Many of the next generation of entrepreneurs in the country cut their teeth at Skype and learned how to scale a company.” This nostalgic, playfully designed Rest of World feature captures how the app became a global lifeline for millions—and why, even as it disappears, that chirpy dial tone still rings in our ears. —CLR
5. How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree
Matthew Ponsford | Noēma | March 6, 2025 | 4,227 words
I recently hugged a thousand-year-old yew tree. Part of The Yew Tree Project in England, this tree had a sign next to it that read “Hugging a tree increases the levels of the hormone oxytocin.” (I imagine this tree gets a lot of hugs, so I hugged the sign-bereft neighbor too.) These trees are not conventionally beautiful. Their huge limbs are knotted and furled, curling awkwardly to the ground, as if to prop up their heavy, rotting trunks. Seeing a thousand winters come and go takes its toll, and the air felt heavy with their sighs of age. Trees such as these (over 400 years old) are classified as “ancients.” The UK has more ancient trees than the rest of Europe combined. This isn’t because Brits have been particularly protective of their elderly vegetation. Rather, as Matthew Ponsford explains in this piece for Noēma, it is, at least partly, because kings and queens shut people out from vast swaths of land so they could hunt without having to clap eyes on any bothersome commoners. Sherwood Forest, William the Conqueror’s hunting ground in the 11th century, has about 380 ancient trees. Ponsford visits its most famous: an oak tree named the Major, another potentially thousand-year-old behemoth. Like the yews, this old man is past his prime. As Ponsford contemplates the wizened boughs held up by metal columns like walking sticks, he wonders if he should feel “saddened by the decline of this long-lived beast.” But arborist Rob Harris is quick to reframe Ponsford’s thoughts of the Major as a “withering geriatric.” Ancients have a fundamental role in the forest, one so important that arborists have even begun “veteranization.” This is the process of hitting and cutting holes in young trees to promote the aging seen in their elders. It seems brutal—but rot-filled caverns are fundamental ecosystems for birds and insects, and, as the ancients diminish, ones that are becoming lost. The young, beautiful trees are just not as valuable to the forest without a few life scars. As someone who has always loved trees, I devoured Ponsford’s fascinating insights, but you will be gripped regardless of your forestry inclinations. A solid reminder to always hug the ugly old ones. They are important. —CW
Audience Award
Does Anyone Still Hitchhike?
Andrew Fedorov | The Atlantic | April 27, 2025 | 2,127 words
Nowadays, it is rare for me to engage in conversation with a stranger. Long gone are the days of talking to random people in bars—or even taking up a new hobby. It all seems far too exhausting. But am I missing something? Andrew Fedorov thinks so. In this essay, Fedorov extols one of the main advantages of hitchhiking: meeting new people. Enclosed in a political echo chamber, Fedorov sees hitchhiking as a way to “encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined.” A piece that will make you think as much about your closed-off world as the way you travel.—CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/09/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-562/
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