The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
July 11, 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.
In this week’s edition:
- Beyond the human clock
- Trampled tranquility
- Exotic Middle America
- The end is the beginning
- Hope on four legs
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1. The Geological Sublime
Lewis Hyde | Harper’s Magazine | June 18, 2025 | 6,655 words
Frequent readers of our curation have probably sussed out that different editors have different pet topics. Every Friday, one Longreads spouse tries to match each Top 5 pick to an editor, just from reading the headlines. (Results vary.) I have my own, but reading Lewis Hyde’s piece this week added another to the list: deep time. The fact that change happens on a scale that humans simply can’t register continues to light up the wonder center in my brain. In the past, this has happened with a 2023 Lachlan Summers Aeon story about how Mexico City residents are “stranded” in time; now, it’s Hyde’s exploration of how Charles Lyell first envisioned deep time, and how Charles Darwin rested his most famous theory on it. Species evolve, as Carolyn reminded us recently, in fits and starts, in a way that’s nearly impossible for humans to witness. Increasingly, though, that work is being undone on a scale that’s tragically perceptible. “Eleven thousand years of survival versus a few decades of decline: it may not be clear how we are to reckon with spans of time so utterly out of proportion with one another,” Hyde writes, “but that is now the task at hand as more species decline or go extinct.” Frankly, I wrestled with whether to include any quote from the piece in this blurb, since it just makes me want to share a half-dozen others. I read this story with my jaw half-open, as I always do when a writer manages to communicate science’s most incomprehensible truths. It’s the kind of writing that sends me to the bookstore, that gets my note-taking hand twitching, that makes my brain feel hungry for more. It might just do the same for you. —PR
2. Zero Zen
Reeves Wiedeman | New York | July 1, 2025 | 6,082 words
My memories of Kyoto from a solo trip 20 years ago are sparse, which mirrors the December landscape that I remember: cold, quiet, and peaceful. I enjoyed lavish breakfasts at my small ryokan, strolled Gion’s lovely streets, and spent hours taking photos of the Golden Pavilion, which was mostly empty. Spending just a week there, I could never claim to know the city. But when I left, and stared out of the window of the Shinkansen bullet train that whisked me back to Tokyo, I felt as if I’d encountered a more traditional Japan. I tucked the idyllic experience away, placing that quaint and delicate version of Kyoto in a glass box. This image shattered while reading Reeves Wiedeman’s dispatch from the city, which has experienced an explosive number of travelers in recent years; in 2024, more tourists visited Kyoto than Barcelona, Amsterdam, or Paris. Geisha-hunting, polyester-kimono-wearing tourists have taken over the streets, seeking “all the TikTok stuff.” I won’t spoil the great (and disheartening) lines in this piece—there are too many—but Wiedeman effectively describes an amusement park, where tourists Uber around to tick off landmarks and influencer hotspots. In this pursuit, geisha are harassed. Elderly residents, sitting in their living rooms, are surprised when clueless foreigners slide open their doors and walk inside their homes, thinking they’ve entered some kind of shop. Even the deer in nearby Nara, which have peacefully mingled with humans for centuries, are fed up with selfie-stick-wielding tourists and have become violent. Wiedeman asks: Is it still possible to be a “good tourist” here? To enjoy a place that has become tourist hell? While good tourists may be respectful and tread lightly, there will always be some level of intrusion and foreignness, which I see in my own romanticization. In the end, Wiedeman sets off to seek his own moment of zen. Ultimately, he finds it, away from the crowds. If we decide to travel, I suppose that’s the best way we can hope for: to do so mindfully, to recognize what’s been lost, to appreciate what still remains. —CLR
3. The Menagerie Lurking in Rural America
Sam Myers | Slate | July 8, 2025 | 4,098 words
I didn’t want to read this piece. I nearly didn’t. There was no way a reported story about Americans keeping exotic pets was going to leave me anything but upset. I was right. I grimaced my way through Sam Myers’s descriptions of an exotic animal sale in Nebraska, where creatures were kept in “plastic laundry baskets, buckets, cat litter containers, milk crates,” and some cages were full of animal feces. I first learned about the exotic animal trade in the US from Louis Theroux’s 2011 documentary America’s Most Dangerous Pets, watching clench-fisted as a younger Joe Exotic (aka the Tiger King) paraded big cats for the camera. That same year, Myers watched news coverage of police in Zanesville, Ohio, shooting and killing 18 tigers, six black bears, 17 lions, two grizzlies, a baboon, three wolves, and three mountain lions—animals set loose from terrible conditions by exotic animal enthusiast Terry Thompson. What I didn’t expect was that, 14 years later, the exotic pet trade would still be booming across America’s heartland. Every year, millions of exotic animals are bred, raised, and sold. While regulations have increased (particularly for big cats), they vary from state to state, and in many places it’s still perfectly legal to keep a bobcat in your basement, as one of Myers’s childhood friends once did. To his credit, Myers avoids outright moralizing. But his discomfort is unmistakable, visible in the details: the “sad and defeated” look in an Arctic fox’s eyes; the awkwardness of helping a family load a porcupine into their car, “the pet carrier as stretched out as I could to keep the quills from stabbing my right leg.” The father, a regular at exotic auctions, tells him porcupines make great pets, “friendly like kittens.” But there’s a reason I’m currently sitting next to a (small) cat, not a porcupine. There’s a reason Myers didn’t stop with his own family when passing a sign in Utah that invited them to “hand-feed exotic deer.” There’s a reason this should all have ended long ago. We need to remember it didn’t. —CW
4. Becoming Earth
Robin Wall Kimmerer | Emergence Magazine | June 26, 2025 | 3,075 words
I recently visited Cathedral Grove, a provincial park on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. It’s home to massive Douglas Fir, Grand Fir, Western Hemlock, and Western Red Cedar trees, some of which are 800 years old. This day, it was moist and verdant and nearly silent, an awe-inspiring experience. I tried to imagine what the trees had witnessed over time. I tried to imagine the interdependent flora and fauna and the sheer diversity of the ecosystem. All I could offer to the giants in return for their beauty was to be fully present among them. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s piece for Emergence Magazine, published in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, brought back the magic of Cathedral Grove. Kimmerer’s reverence for Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest lends the piece a spiritual bent. She gives us a close look at what happens to a cedar tree after it dies and the importance of studying its slow decay on the forest floor. Her prose is more like poetry—part litany, part meditation. The cedars provide a fertile habitat for the algae, bacteria, insects, and animals that will colonize them. They are also an evocative record of the past. “The whole history of each tree is written in the rings,” she writes. “Fires, windstorms, times of plenty, and times of poor are written here, from the wide rings of youth to the slowing growth of old age.” Kimmerer considers the journey of a single molecule of carbon dioxide at one point. She wonders about how and when it became part of the tree and where it will go after bacteria and bugs help release it, asking, “Is that how the spirit leaves the body?” This is one of those pieces that will stick with me. It inspired me to think a little differently the next time I enter a forest. It’s a wonderful and necessary reminder that the end is sometimes just the beginning. —KS
5. How to Save a Dog
David W. Brown | The New Yorker | July 5, 2025 | 3,974 words
I love a story about an animal on the loose. Rusty the red panda, Betsy the cow, the Bronx zoo cobra—these are just a few of my favorite entries in the genre. Now I can add Scrim the dog to the list. I didn’t experience Scrim’s journey in real time—my preferred way to consume this kind of fare—because I’d just had a baby, but I was thrilled to learn about it in David W. Brown’s sweet, funny, captivating essay. Scrim is a scruffy white rescue terrier in New Orleans who ran away from home not once, but twice. Both times it took an army of do-gooders to track him down. Among them was Brown, who became a Scrim seeker one night while doomscrolling and feeling down. “I don’t know why I went out,” he writes of the moment he decided to act on social media posts reporting Scrim sightings near his home. “I’m not even a dog person. But it was that or reflect on every mistake I’d ever made.” (I laughed out loud at this wholly relatable line.) Alongside other dedicated volunteers, Brown soon found himself more a part of New Orleans, his adopted home, than ever before. “We engaged freely and deeply with anyone, anywhere, because that was the best way to gain intel,” he writes. “Looking for Scrim meant immersing ourselves in the place where we lived, street by street and night after night.” One volunteer gave sanitation kits to unhoused people she met. Brown helped a woman he came across who’d overdosed. Collectively, Scrim’s supporters rescued 300 other animals during their months-long search for the escape artist. I mean it when I say that I needed this piece. The world is a raging dumpster fire, but for a few thousand words, Brown dims the flames. —SD
Audience Award
My Best Friend’s Murder Was a Tabloid Circus. Now, I’m Looking for the Truth.
Mary Jane Gibson | Rolling Stone | June 29, 2025 | 5,461 words
Mary Jane Gibson’s account of Nicole DuFresne’s murder is a sharp critique of the ways in which media coverage can expand the blast radius of violent crime. In her memoir for Rolling Stone, Gibson spends little time on the murder itself; she is clear about the limits of her “scattershot version” of the night, in which she and DuFresne were ambushed by seven young people, most of them teenagers. Instead, she tallies the complex dynamics that shaped a fatal encounter, then notes how her best friend’s actions were weaponized against her in reactive, fearmongering news coverage. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/11/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-570/
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