The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
June 13, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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• A father, a son, a tragedy
• The cost of capital punishment
• Criminal justice, unjustly
• Gaming without sight
• An unvarnished icon
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1. The Boy Who Came Back: The Near-Death, and Changed Life, of My Son Max
Archie Bland | The Guardian | May 24, 2025 | 7,053 words
At seven weeks old, Max stopped breathing. His father, Guardian journalist Archie Bland, recounts what followed with harrowing clarity: performing CPR on his infant son, the frantic ambulance ride, an insect crawling “along a fluorescent light,” each detail etched into his trauma-heightened memory. Two years on, Max lives with cerebral palsy, the result of oxygen deprivation during a likely SIDS event. Bland writes not just to honor his son—“already a thousand times more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met”—but to hold a mirror up to himself. He examines the quiet entitlement of his life before (“As a white man named Archibald, I always suspected I was missing something about the impact of privilege”) and the raw rage he feels parenting a disabled child in a world full of “absolute doughnuts,” people who compare Max’s condition to a child’s squint or ask no questions at all. Bland’s writing is funny, furious, and brutally honest. “I understand things about myself and the world now that I can’t wish I didn’t know,” he writes, no longer a “genial ignoramus.” Max himself brings so much joy, and Bland wants us to know him not for what he lacks but for everything he is. After reading, listen to Bland’s interview on Today in Focus. You’ll hear Max laugh, and it’s beautiful. —CW
2. Inside America’s Death Chambers
Elizabeth Bruenig | The Atlantic | June 9, 2025 | 7,414 words
Elizabeth Bruenig has written extensively on capital punishment for The Atlantic, confronting the complicated emotional fallout of watching men executed for violent crimes. Bruenig has always believed that capital punishment was racist and wrong, a misguided attempt by the state to exact tidy vengeance for injustice. Through meticulous reporting, she learned that some of these executions, especially those carried out by lethal injection, were anything but clean and caused prolonged suffering before death. Some argue that prolonged suffering is exactly what the condemned deserve for the pain they inflicted in life. Bruenig, after getting to know several men on death row and witnessing their deaths firsthand, has come to believe that healing can only come through forgiveness (a personal journey) and mercy (a public process). “Forgiveness . . . involves coming to see a wrongdoer as a moral equal again, and inviting them back into the place reserved in your heart for the rest of the world,” she writes. “But mercy—to refrain from punishing a person to the maximum extent that a transgression might deserve—doesn’t demand half as much. It is hard to imagine forgiveness without mercy, but easy to imagine mercy without forgiveness.” For Bruenig, contemplating capital punishment is deeply personal. Her sister-in-law, Heather, was violently murdered at age 29 in 2016; her killer was sentenced to 40 years. Heather’s father, Marty, never advocated for the ultimate sentence. “I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “I don’t think it helps anybody.” What Marty and Bruenig and many, many other families of victims and perpetrators know from personal experience is that when the state attempts to take eye for an eye, the river of suffering does not end, but only alters course. —KS
3. The Man Who Unsolved a Murder
Anat Rubin | CalMatters | June 5, 2025 | 5,954 words
California pioneered public defense, leading the rest of the country in providing free legal representation to poor people. But today, it lags behind, especially in ensuring a defendant receives a proper investigation into their case. Despite its reputation for criminal justice reform, California is one of just two states that doesn’t contribute funding to trial-level public defense. Each of its 58 counties manages its own public defense services, resulting in a fragmented system: Nearly half don’t have any full-time defense investigators, and 25 of them don’t even have a dedicated public defender’s office. Instead, many counties pay private attorneys a flat fee, leaving defendants with no one to investigate their side of the story. For CalMatters, Anat Rubin recounts the 1976 disappearance and murder of a 6-year-old boy in Siskiyou County—a case that went unsolved for 32 years until a witness came forward claiming to have seen the kidnapping. Lael Kayfetz, the Siskiyou County public defender representing the man charged with the crime, had no defense investigator on staff, while the prosecutors had five. She hires a private investigator, Rob Shelton, who uncovers troubling details and inconsistencies in the case—evidence that would have been flagged the first time around had someone taken the time to look. “Shelton felt as though they were pulling a string and unraveling the district attorney’s case,” Rubin writes. Her investigation is full of twists and turns, and lays bare the deep cracks in California’s criminal justice system. “There’s perception, and then there’s reality,” the executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center tells Rubin. “When will the state look in the mirror and see what it really is?” Rubin’s gripping story makes it clear: When defense investigations are underfunded, the cost isn’t just legal—it’s human. —CLR
4. The Blind Leading the Gamers
Dexter Thomas | Wired | June 11, 2025 | 4,368 words
Great reporting about culture tends to focus on creation over consumption. Making a movie is interesting; watching a movie, arguably less so. That rule falls apart with video games, where consumption is itself an act. Some people play competitively. Some play faster. Some, like Ross Minor, play in ways that almost defy belief. Minor was blinded in a childhood tragedy, but it hasn’t dulled his love for life, or his love for games. A lesser profile of Minor might be exactly the uplifting schmaltz that Minor would hate. Dexter Thomas’s version isn’t that. Instead, he chronicles Minor’s struggle to break into the game industry—an industry that professes to care about accessibility while also offering consultants gift cards as payment. There’s also, as Thomas points out, a secondary burden: “To keep convincing game studios that accessibility is a worthwhile investment, one also has to be an ‘advocate,’ and this means being a public figure. Or, in more relevant terms, an influencer.” So Minor streams his own remarkable gaming prowess almost as a necessity, dispatching zombies and navigating levels by sound cues alone. Does he want subscribers? Not nearly as much as he wants a job. You’ll be rooting for the affable Minor from the very beginning; by the end, you’ll be ready to hire the guy yourself. —PR
5. The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Elena Gosalvez Blanco | The Yale Review | June 9, 2025 | 6,281 words
My wife and I lived, for a summer, in the home of a writer I admire. He told us jokes while he made us dinner, a recipe an ex taught him, tossing pieces of rotisserie chicken with arugula, olives, and goat cheese. I drove his pickup to the dump for him, his Public Enemy cassette in the deck, a garbage can filled with his empty bourbon bottles rattling in the back. When he was away, I read his story collections. There were the same pieces of his life, dispersed among his characters: the truck, the Public Enemy, the salad. The distinctions between our life and his stories blurred, sharpening the remainder of our summer together. Another couple moved in after us; later, I saw pieces of their life in a New Yorker story. Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, wielded a singular intensity in her life and work. (One critic who resisted her novels feared that “spending too much time in Highsmith’s brain might alter mine irrevocably.”) In 1994, during the final months of Highsmith’s life, Elena Gosalvez Blanco moves to Switzerland to become her live-in assistant. Highsmith controls Blanco’s access to the phone and to friends, and scolds her for using electricity. “I was trapped in her world with her, trembling,” Blanco writes. “I fantasized that she might try to kill me.” From one wing of the U-shaped house, Blanco gazes across a courtyard into Highsmith’s bedroom, aware that Highsmith might just as easily observe her when she chooses. An acquaintance tells Blanco that Highsmith “is just in love with you,” deepening Blanco’s worry: “Like Ripley, Pat could be charming but also dark, possessive, irrational, and impatient.” Blanco’s account of her weeks with Highsmith is suspenseful and precise, a dark portrait of a complex relationship that explores the scrim between life and art. —BF
Audience Award
‘Do You Have a Family?’: Midlife With No Kids, Ageing Parents—and No Crisis
E. Tammy Kim | The Guardian | June 5, 2025 | 3,930 words
In this piece, E. Tammy Kim navigates her encroaching middle age while dealing with anxieties over her aging parents. Childless herself, Kim also reflects on non-traditional life paths amid shifting cultural norms. Worrying about aging may not be a new topic, but by weaving in three generations, along with different cultures, Kim manages to take her thinking to a deeper level. —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/13/longreads-top-567/
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