The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
June 06, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this week’s edition:
- Wildfire: too close and personal
- Running from demons
- Experiments in microdosing
- Reading is hard
- Jackass as a love language
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1. Escape from Los Angeles
Katya Apekina | Alta Journal | June 3, 2025 | 1,561 words
A mile from our home marks the burn line from a wildfire that ignited on a scorching day in May and consumed 4,000 hectares within hours, urged on by gusting south winds. Pines, poplars, and skinny ash trees are dead standing in that eerie, blackened landscape. The trees and the brush will grow back. Two people on our small peninsula did not make it out in time. This is the worst wildfire season in my province’s history and it’s only the beginning of June. I’ve read and heard many wildfire stories over the years; a US colleague used to live through the summers with a “go” bag packed with essentials and family treasures, should the worst come to pass and threaten their home. I never really understood what that meant until I read The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle, in which he reports on climate change-induced migration, wildfire being one cause. (It’s a terrific, eye-opening book, full of personal stories. You should check it out.) Ever since, I’ve been compelled to read every wildfire story I find. That’s why Katya Apekina’s account of the Palisades and Eaton Fires for Alta Journal caught my attention. The morning of January 7, 2025, dawns like an ordinary Tuesday. The Santa Ana winds feel a little spooky, a little exciting for Apekina, the “L.A. version of a snowstorm.” But then the wind shifts. The fire, which had started 20 miles away, roars closer. The tension in this essay grows and develops like a fully-fledged character as she recounts a surreal scene: her husband reading “a biography of J. Edgar Hoover by candlelight as the fire rages in the windows behind him.” Soon, the air turns acrid with dense smoke. It tastes toxic. People are losing their houses as the fire advances. They are dying. Paper artifacts of lives lived float to earth the following day, having escaped the flames. “Pages from the Bible, or Alcoholics Anonymous literature, or old encyclopedias—thin pages that traveled downwind for several miles—drifted into people’s yards,” she writes in the aftermath, a period in which she questions her future in Los Angeles and how to live, moment to moment, while processing the catastrophe. “I’m in a state of hysterical terror. I want to go home. This is not my home.” As Apekina suggests, it may be time for many of us to reconsider what home really means. If you can make a space for home in your heart, at least you can take it with you when you have to flee. —KS
2. The Curse of Kenya’s Long-Distance Runners
Jonathan W. Rosen | 1843 Magazine | May 30, 2025 | 5,874 words
Just a few short years ago, it was hard to imagine that any marathoner could outdo Eliud Kipchoge, now or in the future. Then his Kenyan countryman Kelvin Kiptum arrived. Kiptum won in London in 2023, setting a course record. He won in Chicago months later, setting a new world record. Everyone thought he’d be the first human being to break the two-hour barrier in a sanctioned race. We’ll never know, because he lost control of his car while driving home one night, crashed into a tree, and was killed. An unquestionable tragedy—but, as Jonathan W. Rosen makes clear, by no means the first to befall the Kenyan running community. Much has been made of East African racing supremacy over the past few decades, and in recent years much money has been made as well. Rosen traces how young amateur runners from Kenya’s Rift Valley feed into the increasingly lucrative professional ranks, while also setting out how material success can breed other woes. Violent boyfriends; financial scams; personal excess: These demons, and others, have put a premature end to promising careers. This is a sobering read, one that punctures the almost mythical aura surrounding Kenyan running culture to reveal the very human lives contained within. Rosen may be an outsider, but he reports like an insider. Not a corner is cut or an interview missed, from mourning father to emergent phenom running on borrowed shoes. The result is something far more incisive and insightful than its sensational headline might suggest. —PR
3. I Tried Magic Mushrooms for My Mental Health. Here’s What Happened.
Robert Sanchez | 5280 | June 1, 2025 | 5,980 words
Come back in time with me, to the fall of 1997. I’m in my bedroom, quietly playing Björk’s Homogenic at four in the morning. My sophomore-year roommates are fast asleep. I’m coming down from my first mushroom trip, feeling calm and safe. As I stare at myself in the mirror, I discover that if I tilt my head to the left, I begin to transform into a tiger—black streaks appearing across my cheeks and forehead as I shift my face subtly at different angles. If I tilt my head back to the right, my human face returns. It’s a strange and thrilling sight, and I gaze at myself for what seems like hours. This is just one of the hundreds of experiences I’ve had on psychedelics and other drugs over the years. Most have been communal; some, like this one, have been private. But all of them have been transformative and mind-shifting, shaping me into who I am today. I try to read as much as I can about the current psychedelic renaissance, and this week I was especially drawn to this story in 5280 because of the personal turn Robert Sanchez takes. It’s not unexpected—the headline makes it clear that he’s going to take mushrooms—but I was caught off guard by Sanchez’s vulnerability when he writes about how hard this past year has been. In an era of curated and performative online-ness, I’m moved when a journalist I read and respect peels away a layer and says, look, I’m struggling, and I tried this thing, and it changed me. In short, reading this made me feel less alone. Sanchez doesn’t just write about his mushroom-assisted mental reset. His reporting takes him to fascinating corners of Colorado’s psilocybin movement, from the University of Colorado Denver team researching psilocybin’s palliative potential in cancer patients, to the state’s first psilocybin healing center, and finally to the home of a holistic wellness coach who orients him before his own psychedelic journey. (Which, I should clarify, does not include any full-dose animal transformations; here, Sanchez experiments with microdosing.) He may not have seen a tiger in the mirror, but in his observations I recognize the same quiet awe I felt that night long ago—and how a new experience can also feel like coming home to yourself. —CLR
4. Is the Decline of Reading Poisoning Our Politics?
Eric Levitz | Vox | June 3, 2025 | 3,831 words
Last month, I joined a local book club. Things started well: We all read the book. This month, the excuses trickled in. No one had finished it; we needed to reschedule. I had good intentions. I lugged the book from the depths of the woods (camping) to the edge of the sea (colder camping), but still it remained firmly shut. As a child, I was a voracious reader, zealously guarding my free time to disappear into whatever literary world I was living in. My concentration levels, it seems, peaked around age 12—a trait, according to Eric Levitz, I share with many. In his essay for Vox, Levitz notes that in 2021, American adults read fewer books than in any other year on record. And yet, we still manage to spend over two hours a day scrolling through the likes of TikTok. “After a brief dalliance with literacy,” he writes, “humanity is returning to its oral roots.” Drawing on the work of philosopher Walter Ong, Levitz traces the divide between oral and literate modes of thought. For roughly 98 percent of human history, we communicated only through speech. Then came writing, which Ong argued “radically restructured thought,” ushering in abstraction, self-consciousness, and the rise of the individual. But reading is hard. Our brains are wired to process speech and images far more readily than written symbols. And in the age of the smartphone—and its endless stream of video reels—slipping back into a second oral age is all too easy. Some critics argue this shift signals intellectual regression, even a threat to democracy itself. Levitz, to his credit, resists panic. He reminds us that more than two millennia ago, Socrates railed against the new media of his time: the written word. Levitz admits it feels true that “technology is coarsening America’s culture” (and his own brain), but also wonders if he’s simply “a Twitter-obsessed, millennial writer who’s starting to get old.” It’s a sharp, self-aware take. Still, I’m putting that book club meeting back on the calendar. —CW
5. Laughing With the Pain
Natalie Marlin | Bright Wall / Dark Room | May 30, 2025 | 3,121 words
I never set out to watch Jackass, the unlikely media franchise born from the self-inflicted humiliation and ding-dong daredevilry of Johnny Knoxville and his crew of goons. Still, was there a teenager in the early aughts who managed to dodge it entirely? Clips resurfaced at odd hours on MTV; I was never quite sure when I might encounter footage of Steve-O, wild-eyed and jockstrapped, walking a low tightrope over an alligator pit, surrounded by his band of brothers, who were few but always seemed happy. The Jackass cast members have “an abrasive way of expressing their love for one another, but it’s a love language regardless,” writes Natalie Marlin. “To be cared for, in the world of Jackass, is to subject your friends to outlandish feats of human endurance, blows that knock the wind out, staredowns with deadly wildlife, and blunt genital trauma.” Marlin started watching Jackass after she began transitioning, joining a population “more statistically prone to pain than most people who appear in a Jackass film.” In her essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, she winces and laughs her way through two decades of Jackass content, watching the cast suffer together as they grow older. As she does, she details the pain she has invited into her own life, as well as the comfort she takes from those who have shared a version of it. Between the groin shots and hospital trips, Marlin identifies acts of “community-building, of getting closer to those you love by partaking in the stupidest, most humiliating, most dangerous acts imaginable. You wouldn’t do the kinds of things that happen in a Jackass film in front of just anyone. The most ideal way to endure those kinds of pain is with those you feel the closest to.” For years, a disclaimer ran ahead of Jackass, warning away imitators and declaring that the stunts to follow were “performed by professionals.” The joke, of course, was that they weren’t—at least not at first. But we all become veterans of pain, don’t we? May we all find a small crew of friends to soothe us. —BF
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
Poison Pill
Michael Solomon | Truly Adventurous | May 27, 2025 | 8,521 words
In September 1982, people were collapsing, falling into a coma, and dying in Chicago, Illinois, for reasons unknown. Two members of Janus family had died. A third member of the family was in a coma. Dr. Thomas Kim, Chief of Critical Care in the emergency room at Northwest Community Hospital, couldn’t understand why young, seemingly healthy people were becoming catastrophically ill so suddenly. Was it botulism? Carbon monoxide poisoning? Kim soon discovered that the rash of sudden illnesses affecting citizens across Chicago had a common link: They’d all taken Tylenol laced with cyanide. For Truly Adventurous, Michael Solomon recounts the drug tampering case that cost seven lives and remains open to this day. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/06/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-566/
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