The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
July 18, 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.
- A first-person flood account
- Californians icing ICE
- Sexually diverse vegetables
- Pokémon: Go!
- Polo clonies
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. “The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.”
Aaron Parsley | Texas Monthly | July 10, 2025 | 4,383 words
Imagine being at your family house on the Guadalupe River in Texas, ready to enjoy some July Fourth summer fun. Now imagine waking in the wee hours to discover that flash flood waters have trapped you in the house. Your elderly dad and your partner are there. Your sister and brother-in-law are there too, along with their two children, a daughter, age 4, and a son, 20 months old. It’s dark. The water is at the deck, which is 20 feet off the ground. The water is moving fast and filled with debris and it’s rising. Window glass shatters as the river invades the house. There is nowhere to evacuate to. You feel the room shift and tilt as the house is lifted off the foundation and seconds later is torn apart. This is the scene Aaron Parsley describes in his harrowing and unforgettable first-person account of the flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas. Parsley’s writing is so taut and tense and immediate that time slowed, and then stopped as I read this piece. This is a story I’ll always remember. It put my heart in my throat as I choked back sobs, bereft for this family and their tragedy. “Alissa managed to keep both kids on the countertop, one hand on each, still trying to reassure them,” he writes. “As the house came undone, she grabbed one in each arm. This is the part that will forever haunt me.” This piece doesn’t concern itself with second-guessing weather forecasts, warnings, or the timeliness of the emergency response. Those facts are important, of course, but here, they’re far beside the point. Given the catastrophic loss Parsley and his family suffered, does anything else really matter? —KS
2. Inside the Grassroots Fight Against Trump’s Deportation Machine
David Peisner | Rolling Stone | July 15, 2025 | 3,048 words
After spending most of my life on the East Coast, I’m moving to California next week. As an anxious person does with any major life decision, I’ve been seeking validation: This isn’t a mistake . . . right? One constant source of reassurance the past few weeks has been Californians’ response to ICE. As masked agents have terrorized immigrant communities, sweeping people off the streets in broad daylight, locals have organized, protested, fought back. This is happening all over the country, of course, but nowhere so visibly and robustly as California. David Peisner maps the national landscape of resistance: the groups and networks warning communities about ICE presence, documenting raids, and educating people about their rights in the face of modern-day Brownshirts. Is their fight working? It’s hard to say when success is measured in normalcy. “There aren’t statistics tallying detentions and deportations that don’t happen,” Peisner writes, “or any real way to count the number of immigrants who feel safe enough to go to work, the supermarket, or their child’s parent-teacher conference because of these programs.” But if the federal government’s response is any indication, the anti-ICE movement is rattling cages: Several lawmakers have launched investigations of NGOs that support immigrants. Activists aren’t daunted. “You’re asking us to voluntarily cease and desist,” one of them tells Peisner. “That’s not happening.” Peisner’s piece is a profile in courage. —SD
3. The Sex Lives Of Common Vegetables
Leah Zani | Noēma | April 24, 2025 | 3,335 words
Ten years ago, when my husband and I bought a sunny half-acre in California’s wine country, we built 10 raised beds and planted half a dozen fruit trees. My life moved more slowly then: I spent hours each day with my hands in the soil, tending seedlings and marveling at how vegetables grow. Those years were a gift—a period when I told time by the height of bush beans and the sprawl of zucchini, and when I came to understand what was truly important to me. In this Noēma essay, Leah Zani recounts their time as a child in their father’s garden, where vegetables became a medium for wonder and inquiry. “The garden fascinated me,” writes Zani. “My father told me to stay out of it if she wasn’t there. But I would sneak out there while she was at work.” It was in the garden—an experimental space of hermaphrodite cucumbers and identity-shifting apples—that Zani looked for answers about their father, “trying to understand her gender by studying the corn and the potatoes and the beans.” Zani contrasts the sexual diversity of fruits and vegetables to the rigidity of Euro-American society, where men and women are typically viewed as binary opposites: “Nature is far more fluid.” Writing as both a curious child and, now, an anthropologist, Zani explores the unruliness and beauty of the natural world, and the human tendency to classify and control it. Like Zani, what I’d found in my own garden was not only fruits and vegetables, but a way of noticing. —CLR
4. The Game Is Played With Great Feeling
Joseph Earl Thomas | Virginia Quarterly Review | July 15, 2025 | 5,683 words
If you’re cowed by the idea of 5,000 words about the North American International Pokémon Championships (NAIC), consider that I’ve never played a Pokémon game in my life. Certainly, some of the charm of Joseph Earl Thomas’s piece hinges on his ability to make the monster-vs.-monster game franchise accessible to outsiders. But this is no mere subculture story or travelogue. It’s a journey under the skin, an investigation of why the game has become such a specific kind of phenomenon. Thomas’s articulation of that mission carries both its premise and its poison: “What is it in this gaming community that inspires such obsession, such comfort, such willingness among Black nerds in particular to venture outdoors as we are told in every way, and by everyone, not to?” Play itself can be a political act—a truth that reverberates throughout the piece, from the casual encounters Thomas has outside the convention center to his scenework from the tournament itself. He’s a keen and candid observer, though he has rightfully little interest in pulling punches, or in hand-holding the reader through the piece’s densely layered cultural semiotics. (That Frankie Beverly figures prominently in the lede tells you everything you need to know.) For all the weight in this piece, it’s also a ray of light. There’s something here worth celebrating, even as the conditions that make the Pokémon community special aren’t. As I write these sentences, a group of 30 or so strangers is pacing down the sidewalk beneath my window, on their way to a nearby parking lot that doubles as an arena in the augmented-reality mobile game Pokémon Go. They are of all ages, sizes, and colors. Some of that is because this is Oakland. But a large part, I now realize thanks to Thomas, is because this is Pokémon. —PR
5. Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized
Matt Reynolds | Wired | July 10, 2025 | 5,668 words
Until a week ago, my entire understanding of polo came from reading Jilly Cooper’s Polo—multiple times, no shame. In Cooper’s world, the sport is soaked in glamour, drama, and obscene wealth. Tight jodhpurs, loose morals, and fabulous beasts (both human and equine) abound. I assumed liberties had been taken. Then I read Matt Reynolds’s piece in Wired, and I stand corrected. Not averse to a bit of Cooper-esque flair himself, Reynolds introduces our hero, polo god Adolfo Cambiaso, as “a horse whisperer, a sex symbol, or a marvel of longevity,” with a “handsome face and cleft chin sun-beaten and stubbled, his dark hair matted with sweat.” Along with that chiseled jawline, Cambiaso also happens to own a little bay mare named Cuartetera—possibly the greatest polo pony that ever lived. But Cuartetera can’t play every chukka. Enter Texas oilman Alan Meeker, who struck a deal with Cambiaso to clone his best horses, including Cuartetera, via the pet cloning lab ViaGen. The final plan? To produce and sell foals of the clones. The catch? The golden rule of their agreement was that the clones themselves must never be sold. Her bloodline was just too precious. (Hence the surreal moment at the 2016 Argentine Open, when Cambiaso rode six different Cuarteteras to victory.) All was fine and dandy until, in a dastardly yet predictable plot twist, Meeker sold clones anyway—in a secret deal struck aboard a superyacht, obviously. Legal battles ensued, and Reynolds gleefully guides us through every betrayal, backstab, and bruised ego. The stakes are high, the horses are glorious, the men are brooding, and the science is bonkers. Every player on the field is fascinating, and you’ll be hooked until the last Cuartetera gallops off into the sunset. So saddle up! —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most, this week.
I’ve Seen How the Neo-Nazi Movement Is Escalating. You Should Worry.
Jordan Green | The Assembly | July 14, 2025 | 5,588 words
After he began a project intended to unmask extremist groups in North Carolina and beyond, reporter Jordan Green got a first-hand look at how a movement known as “militant accelerationism” operates. Hate-mongers came to his door and threatened his family, but he refused to quit pursuing the truth about them. —SD
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/18/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-571/
via IFTTT
Watch