The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
July 25, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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This week:
• Symbiosis steeped in irony
• The hidden lives of rocks
• Journalism’s facts machine
• What’s up, sun?
• Puzzling through problems
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1. Abandoned by Trump, a Farmer and a Migrant Search for a Better Future
John Woodrow Cox, Sarah Blaskey, and Matt McClain | The Washington Post | June 21, 2025 | 5,553 words
There’s a moment in this piece I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. Otto Vargas, a farmhand from Guatemala, asks his new boss, JJ Fricken, whether he has other employees who work his land in Colorado. Fricken hears the question through an earbud that translates in real time—the men don’t speak the same language, so this is how they communicate. Fricken points at himself, then at Vargas. “Just you and me,” he says. The scene, evoking both vulnerability and solidarity, is a succinct illustration of the wider story, which details how the two men’s fates came to be intertwined. The federal government had promised Fricken a $200,000 grant to hire a worker from Latin America, who would be given an H-2A visa. “In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment,” the authors explain. “It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future.” Vargas’s future was on the line too: “He’d prayed that he’d get a job interview, and when he did, he prayed he’d do well, and when he did, he prayed he’d receive an offer, and when he did, he prayed the United States would let him come.” Then the Trump administration, despite boasting about its love for American farmers, froze the grant money. Suddenly, Fricken was in debt, and while Vargas was able to come to Colorado, it wasn’t clear how long his job would last. To survive the administration’s cuts and cruelty, a Trump voter and an immigrant needed each other. What a terrible, beautiful thought. —SD
2. Why One Geologist Thinks We Should All Pay More Attention to Rocks
Daphne Chouliaraki Milner and Marcia Bjornerud | Atmos | June 25, 2025 | 2,930 words
Old Rock (is Not Boring) by Deb Pilutti is one of my daughter’s favorite stories. In this picture book, a rock has been sitting in the same spot, in a pine forest, “for as long as anyone could remember.” The rock’s friends—Tall Pine, Spotted Beetle, and Hummingbird—express how boring it must be to be a rock, but Old Rock explains that its life through the ages has been quite the opposite. It has traveled extensively and experienced much, from erupting out of a volcano to riding inside a glacier until it melted. I understand why my daughter loves the story, and after reading Daphne Chouliaraki Milner’s conversation with geologist Marcia Bjornerud, I can now articulate why I’ve grown to love it as well. It sends a simple yet deep message: Rocks are not lifeless, inert things as some people see them; they are Earth’s ancient storytellers that just happen to move in super slow motion. Each time we read about Old Rock’s journey, it reinforces in my daughter the idea of geological time, and that thinking about the vast history of Earth (and its present and future) requires a longer timescale. Bjornerud talks about the shortsightedness and quick-fix solutions that drive so many of today’s crises, especially the climate crisis. “So often, there’s this tendency to crunch and condense everything that came before us into the category of ‘prehistory,’ which is a ridiculous idea,” she says. “People have no depth of field. It’s a real frustration that, in this time when we know more about the way the Earth’s system works than ever before, our political and economic systems are not designed for long-term thinking.” Bjornerud’s insights make me think about how we frame time, and how we teach it. What started as a sweet bedtime story is now a lesson in time literacy—for both me and my daughter. —CLR
3. When Fact-Checking Meant Something
Susan Choi | The Yale Review | June 9, 2025 | 2,686 words
Recently, I made my way back to “The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker,” Jill Lepore’s history of writer-editor relationships at the century-old magazine. Lepore includes an excerpt from a Cosmopolitan feature: “What passes for The New Yorker’s ultra-simple style, they say, is merely what happens to an article after it is queried in minute detail, checked, rechecked, expanded with additional facts, and rearranged for clarity.” Beyond safeguarding the latest contributions to the historical record, fact-checking has shaped the voice of the magazine itself. And yet checkers go virtually unmentioned in Lepore’s essay. It’s a curious omission; as Susan Choi writes for The Yale Review, fact-checking is “more culturally visible than ever, as well as more politicized, circumstances that are, I think it’s safe to say, related.” That visibility includes a small number of engaging books that dramatize the act, from The Lifespan of a Fact to The Fact Checker, a recent novel by Austin Kelley and the ostensible subject of Choi’s review. But Choi’s piece is a Trojan horse, a book review with a personal essay hidden within, recounting her time at The New Yorker as a checker in the ’90s and the “extramural adventures” that sent her away from her desk and into the city to confirm the truths it held. These weren’t hard-hitting investigations of corrupt regimes or human-rights violations: Choi recalls catching a screening of Showgirls to verify dialogue for a review, and a phone call with David Furnish, then Elton John’s boyfriend, about the squash courts at the singer’s mansion. The work was highly individual, if not isolating, and anxious. “Some of us threw up in the mornings before sitting down at our desks,” she writes. “Some of us smoked too much. All of us worried.” Even so, Choi pinpoints the surprising intimacy of the act. How rare it feels, now, to stand beside someone, look at the same scene, and trust that we share a vision. —BF
4. The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms
Henry Wismayer | June 24, 2025 | Noēma | 6,505 words
A long time ago, I spent six months researching a documentary on solar storms. I visited the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder and toured NASA’s hidden corridors. (Tip: don’t wander off unsupervised looking for a toilet near a spacecraft—they don’t love it.) I can confirm: The science is dense and daunting. Yet in this piece for Noēma, Henry Wismayer manages to make it remarkably relatable. With linguistic flair, he sorts your CME (coronal mass ejection) from your GIC (geomagnetically induced current), unpacking how solar storms can hurl charged particles toward Earth in currents powerful enough to overwhelm the electrical systems we rely on every day. He transforms solar physics into urgent, earthbound stakes. In 1859, powerful auroras lit up the night skies around the world after a massive solar eruption. That event, Wismayer writes, “released energy equivalent to 10 billion megatons of TNT.” In today’s vastly more vulnerable, interconnected technological world, it would spell havoc. It’s easy to forget we’re just a dot in the cosmos—that our life-giving Sun can, with a single shift, become a harbinger of destruction. Easy to forget that the more entangled we become in automation, the more exposed we are to these cosmic tempests. As Wismayer notes, in 2019, FEMA identified just two catastrophes that could cripple the US: a pandemic and a solar storm. His closing line lands with quiet warning: “At the time of writing, the latest American Space Weather Implementation Plan . . . has been removed from the U.S. government’s websites.” —CW
5. Puzzled
Susannah Pratt | The American Scholar | July 18, 2025 | 2,050 words
On the surface, this story is about a jigsaw puzzle, but it’s about much more. For The American Scholar, Susannah Pratt recounts working on a 1,000-piece reproduction of William Morris’s tapestry Tree of Life. Pratt is no puzzle novice. She has a piece-sorting method that has served her well, until she faces the Tree of Life. The puzzle’s patterns and colors are so subtle that they defy quick and easy categorization. When her methodical approach fails, she questions what motivates her to do puzzles in the first place: Are they leisure, or are they productivity cloaked in leisure? Does she enjoy working the puzzle to watch the image appear? Or is it the satisfaction of pieces popping into place, like task boxes getting checked off, that drives her? I love it when a piece stops me short like this one did. Given the topic, that was unexpected. The world is a rough place right now and everything seems to be getting worse by the day. But no matter how bad things get, questioning your motivation is a must. Questioning your approach is a must. Sometimes that introspection might, as in Pratt’s case, reveal the need to pause. “Often, I would simply put the piece back in the pile, realizing that I did not yet understand where it was meant to go,” she writes. This essay is a lovely reminder that when it comes to anything worth doing, it’s often more about the process than the result. —KS
Audience Award
What piece did our audience love most this week?
The Two Lives of William Woods
Charlie McCann | 1843 Magazine | July 17, 2025 | 5,684 words
It sounds like something straight out of Kafka: After having your identity stolen, you try to get justice, only to be arrested and involuntarily hospitalized. That’s what happened to William Woods. Or, rather, that’s what happened to the man who said he was William Woods. Was he the victim or the thief? You’ll have to read this bonkers story from Charlie McCann to find out. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/25/longreads-top-5-572/
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