The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
June 27, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 13,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
• High school after losing everything
• Gaming the system
• On the trail of a lost Beat poet
• Our bodies, our science labs
• Another version of evolution
A Note on Paywalls
In order to publish compelling original work and pay writers a living wage, publications sometimes have paywalls. Because some paywalls are determined by a person’s browsing history, we’re unable to know with certainty whether you’ll encounter one when you follow one of our links. If you’re able to, please consider supporting these outlets.
1. At Jackie Robinson’s High School, Altadena Rebuilds After Fire
Alyssa Roenigk | ESPN | June 20, 2025 | 4,016 words
My husband’s cousin and her family lost their home in the Eaton Fire. Nothing was salvageable. While I was putting together a care package for them, I would look at an item in a store and wonder, “Do they already have this?” Then I’d remember: They don’t have anything. This happened again and again, as my brain struggled to grasp the fact and meaning of total loss. Here, Alyssa Roenigk spends time with students at Altadena’s John Muir High School, where unthinkable loss is nearly endemic: One in four kids at Muir lost their homes or were displaced by the fire. Roenigk gracefully timestamps sections of her piece with the number of days since the fire began, echoing the way many Altadenans now think: “Dates are no longer defined by a calendar but instead by how much time has passed since that fateful Tuesday.” Nine days after the fire, Muir senior Jasmine Collins is living in a motel with her mother and siblings; all of their worldly possessions now fit into their truck. Fifty days after the fire, someone breaks into the truck and steals everything. This is one of many details Roenigk musters to remind her readers that disaster has a long, painful, and unpredictable tail. “Money from online fundraisers is drying up,” she writes. “Donation centers are packing up and closing. The rebuilding process is slow.” People are leaving Altadena, too, including some whose families have been there for generations. Those who remain must adjust to a new normal. “If we’re choosing to stay,” one of Roenigk’s subjects says, “then we’re going to have to embrace that it’s never going to be the same again.” There is beauty, of course, in rising from the ashes. But Roenigk’s story shows that there is also beauty in making space for grief. In a memorable scene, Jasmine’s water polo coach asks how she’s doing after a game that takes place just 16 days after the fire: “Jasmine looks up. ‘I . . . ’ She stops. Her eyes fill with tears. She smiles and forms a heart with her hands.” —SD
2. The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery
Rachel Monroe | The New Yorker | June 19, 2025 | 2,657 words
Dawn Nettles loved going to bingo with her grandma as a child. She once considered Las Vegas her “home away from home.” As Rachel Monroe reports for The New Yorker, Nettles is an avid player—and critic— of Lotto Texas, and has written the Lotto Report since 1992, turning the paper newsletter into a website whose design hasn’t changed much since it was launched in 1998. If you can get past what Monroe terms “crank-adjacent” aesthetics and editorial hyperbole (“If you have high blood pressure, don’t read any further!”), you’ll find a woman who just wants the Texas Lottery to be transparent and fair to those who play. When the April 22 jackpot grew to $95 million, Nettles knew trouble was brewing. With 26 million combinations for a winning ticket, a gambler or “purchasing group” could pool some big coin and buy up all the possible combinations, ensuring a win. And, as Nettles predicted, that’s exactly what happened. A London-based gambling syndicate took the jackpot; their win was deemed unfair but not illegal because the Texas Lottery does not regulate couriers, which are services that allow players to buy tickets from anywhere, via an app on their phone. Maybe, in the interest of keeping Texas Lotto winnings in Texas, couriers should be regulated. Couriers want regulation, but Gary Grief, the executive director of the lottery at the time, claimed to have no authority over them. Coincidentally, Grief retired abruptly last year. I loved this story for Monroe’s original detail and the ongoing scandal. Most of all, I loved reading about Dawn Nettles, a woman who holds power to account so that average Texans can participate in the dream of a lottery win in the true spirit of the game: purely by the luck of the draw. —KS
3. “I Went Southwest”
Brad Rassler | Alta | June 23, 2025 | 12,712 words
Brad Rassler first learned of Lew Welch in 2018, via an essay titled “The Poet Who Wanted to Be Eaten by Vultures.” Welch had been a fixture among the best minds of the Beat generation—a friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, a kindred California spirit whose writing never achieved the same profile. In 1971, Welch, who had been building a cabin on the San Juan Ridge, on land Ginsberg had left him, walked away from the property with a .22-caliber revolver and was never seen again. “I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality,” he wrote in a note found after he vanished. Filtered through his poetry, Welch’s disappearance blurred into legend. “The entire conceit was ridiculous,” Rassler writes. “Myths had accumulated around Welch like lichen on granite. Even Welch’s own accounts proved unreliable—his letters and interviews filled with exaggerations, omissions, and outright lies.” Disappearance stories hold a perfect tension, a potential for surprise resolution. They can also exploit, reducing their subjects to vessels for metaphor. Rassler’s thorough account of Welch’s life and legend is a gentle critique of the genre. It’s also a genuine pleasure: Rassler evokes the intimacy of Welch’s community and the majesty of the land they inhabited, then insinuates himself into both, tracing Welch’s paths in the mountains above the South Yuba River and pressing a 94-year-old Snyder for details over potato chips and beer. It’s hard work to know another person well; Rassler says as much to Snyder, before asking the Pulitzer Prize winner for his thoughts on Welch’s poetry. “If I’d venture to say that, and you put it in print, I’ll be stuck with that forever,” Snyder replies, wryly adding, “And I don’t even know myself.” —BF
4. Snake Venom, Urine, and a Quest to Live Forever: Inside a Biohacking Conference Emboldened by MAHA
Will Bahr | Wired | June 25, 2025 | 2,294 words
If you’ve ever tried putting butter in your coffee, you have Dave Asprey to thank. (Sure, it was your annoying coworker who finally convinced you, but that’s where your annoying coworker got the idea.) Asprey is arguably the man who popularized the brew of smart drugs, supplements, and self-experimentation we now know as biohacking. As part of his multi-million-dollar empire—which also involves the company Bulletproof Labs and dressing increasingly like a magician who does on-the-street Netflix specials—he hosts an annual conference that’s part trade show, part tent revival. It’s this environment that Will Bahr visited, in the process delivering one of my favorite opening sentences of the year: “I have been to the undying convention.” The lede’s bravura gives way to an entertaining tour of biohacking’s past and present, with conference attendees giving Bahr more color than a bowl of Lucky Charms. Looming behind all of this, of course, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who oversees public health policy in the US while also exhibiting a selective trust in science. For biohacking proponents, Kennedy’s anointment feels like long-overdue redemption; for others, well, their mileage may vary. Bahr himself has been plagued by health issues his entire life, and he acknowledges the appeal of a world where wellness is just a snake venom injection or carnivore diet away. “Part of me really wants to endorse a grand arsenal of magic bullets,” he writes. “I am sick, and I am tired, and I want answers.” We all do. The real question, and one that even a room full of biohackers can’t seem to agree on, is how we arrive at those answers. —PR
5. Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes
Zachary B. Hancock | Nautilus | June 12, 2025 | 3,483 words
It was the title that first pulled me in; who doesn’t want to know more about guinea pig toes? What followed was a surprisingly elegant introduction to a lesser-known evolutionary theory, wrapped in the curious biography of Sewall Wright, a geneticist with a lifelong fixation on guinea pigs. I’ve occasionally wondered: Why don’t we see fish wandering around on little legs, on their way to becoming something grander? Wright put it more scientifically: How do organisms evolve beneficial traits when the steps in between might be maladaptive? In the early 1900s, guinea pigs were the lab animal of choice, and Wright—then a graduate student at Harvard’s Bussey Institute—found himself managing a colony housed in a gothic mansion in Boston. (Yes, it’s hard not to picture them in cloaks and top hats.) It was there that he encountered guinea pigs with an extra toe and began to formulate his answer. Hancock walks us through Wright’s “shifting balance theory,” which suggests that in small populations, genetic drift can help species leap across valleys of lower fitness toward new adaptive peaks. It’s a complex idea, but Hancock is a skilled guide, helping us through with a clever Lego-brick metaphor and a timely parallel to the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. This thoughtful and fast-paced read is both accessible and delightful—an invitation to think differently about how change happens (and feel a touch smarter while doing it). —CW
Audience Award
It Was Already One of Texas’s Strangest Cold Cases. Then a Secretive Figure Appeared.
Peter Holley | Texas Monthly | June 24, 2025 | 13,526 words
In this piece, Peter Holley provides an exhaustive account of the disappearance of Texas student Jason Landry. But this is more than just a narrative of the event—Holley also explores the fanaticism of the online sleuths who have spent years trying to solve this case. In doing so, Holley edges into the fanatical himself. A study of both a tragedy and a true crime obsession. —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/27/longreads-top-5-569/
via IFTTT
Watch