The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
June 20, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this week’s edition:
- Documenting Israel
- Detective Google
- Parade pondering
- Thoughtful foraging
- Bowling forward
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1. Crimes of the Century
Suzy Hansen | New York | June 16, 2025 | 10,071 words
Finally. That was my first thought when I finished reading Suzy Hansen’s damning cover story detailing Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza. These violations have been repeated and flagrant, and they have been documented by brave Palestinian journalists and civilians, as well as NGOs, UN agencies, and visiting medical providers. Indeed, Hansen’s feature isn’t an investigation, because an investigation wasn’t necessary—mountains of evidence of Israel’s crimes were readily available. What took so long for a writer at a legacy media publication in the West to muster that evidence and say what is so plainly true? Hansen has an answer, because her essential piece is also about the international complicity that has allowed Israel to kill, terrorize, and humiliate its targets unchecked. Chief among Israel’s aiders and abettors was the Biden administration, building on a post-9/11 legacy of normalizing humanitarian abuses; its successor is no better. “As the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, in a free society, ‘few are guilty, all are responsible.’ This includes many institutions outside government, like the mainstream media,” Hansen writes. “[W]estern newspapers and networks still faithfully print Israeli talking points, excuses, and outright lies.” The cumulative effect of this rampant cruelty and complicity is, of course, mass suffering, but it also signals the ultimate failure of a body of law established over the last century to prevent exactly that. This failure was not inevitable. Power and prejudice are to blame. Hansen hopes there is something to salvage here, a shared standard of human decency. But I’m doubtful, and I’m not alone. “Elite impunity is the sole remaining area of bipartisan consensus,” Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s former foreign-policy chief and the executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy, tells Hansen. “They understand that whatever they do, it’s not going to really hurt them because, you know, Donald Rumsfeld died in his bed.” —SD
2. 3 Teens Almost Got Away With Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches
Raksha Vasudevan | Wired | May 21, 2025 | 4,668 words
Raksha Vasudevan highlights a heinous crime and the investigative technique used to solve it, one that could risk everyone’s privacy. In 2020, Kevin Bui, a 16-year-old from Lakewood, Colorado, made a tragic mistake. Seeking revenge on the people who robbed him, he used his iPad’s “Find My” feature to try to locate them. But, unaware that Apple’s location-tracking technology isn’t exact, Bui misidentified the address. He and his two friends set fire to a completely unrelated house at 5312 Truckee Street in Denver’s Green Valley Ranch neighborhood, killing Djibril Diol and four other members of his family. At first, the detectives on the case, Neil Baker and Ernest Sandoval, had no clear leads. They sifted through the usual evidence, including Ring camera footage that showed the suspects’s car driving erratically in and out of the neighborhood. They reviewed thousands of phone numbers, primarily of T-Mobile subscribers who, according to a digital forensics expert, made up a “‘high percentage’ of suspects in previous cases.” The detectives then tried something new: They served a reverse keyword-search warrant to Google, requesting information on anyone who had searched for the house address. As digital evidence poured in, they were able to identify Bui and his accomplices. But one of the teens’ lawyers filed a motion to suppress all evidence from the warrant, calling this method unconstitutional. “It was, they said, the equivalent of police ransacking every home in America,” writes Vasudevan. “Baker and Sandoval’s investigation had now been dragged into a legal process that could reshape Americans’ right to search and learn online without fear of retribution.” Vasudevan weaves a compelling account of a horrific crime and raises urgent questions about privacy, surveillance, and the digital trails we all leave behind. —CLR
3. Phorm Energy Screamin’ Freedom
Linda Kinstler | The New York Review of Books | June 17, 2025 | 1,687 words
On a Monday afternoon in 1991, my parents drove me the few short miles to Tampa Stadium, where 28,000 people crowded into the stands to behold General Norman Schwarzkopf, recently returned from the Gulf War. There were appearances by Mickey Mouse and George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees. There were doves and fireworks. At some point, the Jumbotron showed a question: “What’s next to conquer?” At the time, I was 7 years old and thoroughly confused, unable to connect the Yankees and Disney World and our local football stadium to the military leader who had brought us together. What, exactly, was the day for? “Whatever else it might be, a military parade is always a reminder of how readily the armed forces can be deployed both at home and abroad,” Linda Kinstler writes in her superb dispatch from the US Army Birthday Celebration in Washington, DC. Faced with the rarity of a military parade in America, news outlets risk merely recreating the spectacle for their audience. (Too many did just that.) Kinstler, however, is attuned to the dissonance of it all. The event—“an arms expo combined with a military recruitment fair”—lands squarely on Donald Trump’s birthday, and comes days after the president sent thousands of members of the US Marine Corps and the National Guard to confront protesters in Los Angeles. Exploring the National Mall, Kinstler encounters beauty queens and military drones and robot dogs and her titular energy drink, the name of which now doubles as my favorite headline of the year. A woman in a “Happy Birthday” shirt tells Kinstler she’s there to celebrate the Army, “but also, you know, all of it.” A short read, Kinstler’s piece is dense with detail, admirable for the precision of her observations. If you have to watch the parade, then you couldn’t have better company. —BF
4. Intuitive Eating
Erica Berry | Orion | May 29, 2025 | 4,662 words
Erica Berry’s Orion essay, “Intuitive Eating,” urges us to be mindful about what it is we search for and consume. She writes about looking for mushrooms and the joy and pleasure in eating her grandmother’s handpicked huckleberries. She recounts poisoning herself in Italy, mistaking mandrake for wild chard. This piece centers on wild food, but it goes so much deeper than that, exploring how humans forage and the unexpected ways that harm can find us. Not only do we forage for food, but we also forage for a life partner. And we forage on social media for information, to find distraction, and sometimes solace. These are just a few examples. There are many. While on the hunt for mushrooms with a friend, Berry encounters a sign erected by the Oregon Department of Forestry: your safety is your responsibility. be prepared and know your limits. For me, in having recently picked and shared a few thoughtful and necessary pieces about the death penalty and gun violence, this was exactly what I needed to hear. Reading and writing about those topics carries a toll, one that I’m very willing to pay. Education doesn’t come cheaply or easily, after all, and my dis-ease is nothing compared to what the protagonists experience in these stories. Sometimes, though, you need a change and not a rest, a chance to shift your perspective to better make sense of things, as Berry suggests: “But the very act of looking had tuned my gaze, rearranging the hierarchy of my attention.” Berry’s piece reminded me that my reading is mycelial by nature; despite seemingly disparate topics, connections can be unearthed with careful attention. I loved this essay for its heart and beauty and because of what it taught me through food and longing: that sometimes the advice you need most comes from somewhere you least expect. —KS
5. Changing Lanes
Dave Denison | The Baffler | June 2, 2025 | 5,812 words
That I haven’t bowled a single time in the past 15 years* doesn’t change the fact that a bowling alley’s sounds and smells remain one of the most vivid sense memories still knocking around my temporal lobe. Besides, this isn’t really a piece about bowling. It’s a piece through the eyes of a bowler about how bowling has changed as a social sport, and particularly how it’s changed since the arrival of private equity and its well-documented playbook. We know that league bowling is down nearly 90% from its peak in the late 1970s. We know that neighborhood lanes have closed with ominous regularity. However, bowling’s renaissance, as envisioned by large PE-backed global chains like Bowlero, is loud, luxe, and decidedly anti-league. It’s bowling as an occasional night out rather than the “third place” that it used to be—which means it’s somehow both more expensive and cheaper-feeling. (Learning that pins are increasingly reset by attached cords, dragged back into position like bottom-heavy marionettes, was surprisingly disappointing.) Dave Denison takes us through the landscape as a bowler should: visiting as many New England alleys as he could drive to, and talking to the owners and enthusiasts who have kept the sport alive. There’s some nostalgia here for a bygone era, sure, but Denison also praises the places that are threading the needle, creating a community while also avoiding the cost-cutting of conglomerates. Mostly, though, bowling has been cleaved by profit motive just as so many other industries have, forcing bowlers and lane owners alike into a difficult choice. You can drown while clinging to a fading ideal, or you can jump into a lifeboat that you know is heading somewhere worse. Just make sure that 15-pound ball doesn’t make the decision for you. —PR
*I’m assuming that multiple rewatches of the Documentary Now episode “Any Given Saturday Afternoon” doesn’t count as actual bowling.
Audience Award
The Death of a CrossFit Athlete
Calum Marsh | Rolling Stone | June 14, 2025 | 6,047 words
A 2013 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research reported that CrossFit, while intense, is not particularly dangerous and is considered to be as risky as weight training or preparing for a triathlon. Lazar Ðukić was a 28-year-old CrossFit athlete from Serbia who was a particularly strong swimmer. So why, then, did he drown during an 800-meter swim as part of the 2024 CrossFit Games in Fort Worth, Texas? For Rolling Stone, Calum Marsh reports on what went wrong, and CrossFit’s ham-fisted response. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/20/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-568/
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