The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
August 01, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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- Mining mortality
- Coach AI
- Saving Sacagawea
- Fighting time
- Honoring hoarding
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1. Dying for Gold: Who Killed the Miners of Buffelsfontein?
Liam Taylor | 1843 Magazine | July 24, 2025 | 6,235 words
At the risk of sounding idiotically obvious, mining is an extractive process—for those doing the mining as well as the resources being mined. Workers can meet their doom suddenly (collapse, fall, explosion), or after many years (lung disease), but to escape unscathed feels almost miraculous. No such miracles awaited many of the men who flocked to South Africa’s Buffelsfontein mine after it closed in 2013. This was mining minus any illusion of safety; any gold left was deeper underground and farther from entry shafts than ever before, requiring “zama-zamas,” or illegal miners, to live hundreds of meters below the surface for months at a time. And while some zama-zamas came on their own, others arrived under false pretenses or even duress, forced by gangs who controlled the access points. What was already difficult and dangerous became even more so last year, when the South African police began blocking both food supplies going into Buffels and the rope crews who helped zama-zamas get out. Many starved. Many died. Even when people were allowed to leave, they were arrested, with migrants from neighboring countries being held without bail. Liam Taylor’s feature about the tragedy doesn’t shy away from the horrific conditions that led to illegal mining, nor from the fact that blame lay at multiple feet: police, famo gangs, mine owners, the government, and the long shadows of colonialism and apartheid. It’s always sobering to learn of a human-rights disaster. All the more reason that journalism like this—nimble reporting, unaffected prose, and the sole purpose of making sure the world knows—is so crucial. —PR
2. What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom
Piers Gelly | Literary Hub | July 28, 2025 | 5,911 words
I’m a curious-yet-skeptical optimist when it comes to AI. I’m excited about advances in health and science that could improve life for all humans. But as someone who earns their living as a reader, writer, and editor, I worry that I’ll eventually be replaced by a bot. (A former colleague, who shall remain nameless, predicted that foreboding future for me back in 2017. And yet, here I am.) Call me old-fashioned, but I maintain that reading and writing are critical, necessary skills that humans need. That’s why I was drawn to Piers Gelly’s essay at Literary Hub. Gelly, an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, decided that instead of banning AI in the classroom, he would allow his students to vote on whether he should be replaced by ChatGPT. I won’t spoil the design or results of his experiment for you. I loved how Gelly approaches difficult AI questions with nuance and care. I appreciated that his students used AI as a coach to help them enhance their learning vs. a tool to do their work for them. By studying AI output and discovering its quirks (overusing em dashes, precisely three examples in sentences), the students learned to read more carefully. “These tics quickly became running jokes, which made class fun: flexing their powers of discernment proved to be a form of entertainment,” writes Gelly. “Without realizing it, my students had become close readers.” I’m 100% here for stories that question AI thoughtfully, and in doing so, reveal how it can improve human skill and knowledge. Maybe the kids, and the bots, are alright. —KS
3. What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong?
Christopher Cox | The New York Times Magazine | July 23 2025 | 7,389 words
For a century, my Sacagawea crouched atop a plinth in the center of Charlottesville, Virginia, a tertiary figure in a monumental sculpture to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. An inscription in the granite base heaped praise on the two men, whose expedition purportedly “revealed an unknown empire to the uses of mankind.” Sacagawea went unnamed and unmentioned at the site until 2009, when protests prompted the addition of a plaque. Later, after the statue was removed, a local artist ascended the plinth with two friends, and the three held each other there as police looked on—a reclamatory act recounted by Erika Howsare in a recent Longreads essay. Christopher Cox’s latest for The New York Times Magazine documents a deeper act of reclamation: an effort by the Hidatsa, Arikara, and Mandan tribes to expand Sacagawea’s biography, restoring a half-century of life to a woman whose story often concludes in 1812. In Our Story of Eagle Woman, a team of Hidatsa elders draws on oral history, critical analysis, and DNA evidence to advance a story of Sacagawea to 1869, the year she was shot and killed. Their work enables Cox, who scrutinizes Sacagawea’s unreliable husband, Clark’s inconsistent prose, and Lewis’s temper—all variables that shape and misshape our meager understandings of her life. Historiography is an imperfect art; even the stories we think we know best sometimes hide holes big enough for a person to fall through. (Lewis’s own violent death, Cox notes, is a “stubborn mystery,” despite the man’s visibility.) Through the Hidatsa’s histories, Sacagawea becomes more vivid, “both grander and humbler—more like a person, less like a symbol—than the one taught in schools.” By the end of Cox’s story, nothing seems incontrovertible, and certainly not immovable. —BF
4. Notes on Bed Rest
Anna Russell | The New Yorker | July 26, 2025 | 5,825 words
There was a period in Anna Russell’s life when, as she puts it, everything was “about wombs.” During her pregnancy, she was diagnosed with a condition rather rudely named “incompetent cervix,” where the cervix struggles to hold a baby to full term. Advised to rest as much as possible to prevent premature labor, Russell’s world shrank to the confines of her London flat, where she “shuffled between the bed, the bathroom, and the sofa in our living room.” The claustrophobia is palpable, evoking the strange, suspended days of early COVID, when banana bread and freshly painted millennial-gray walls couldn’t stop your mind from spiraling. Bed rest today feels almost anachronistic, more suited to Victorian women lacking potent smelling salts. Yet despite growing evidence of its limited benefits, some still find themselves living in this strange, still world. As a child, if I counted down the days to something, my mother would warn me not to “wish my life away.” But when movement carries risk, time itself becomes the enemy—“like a vast, inhospitable landscape,” as Russell writes. Her prose is circular and obsessive, mirroring the disorienting fog of fear she inhabits. This isn’t a plea for pity but an invitation: to step inside Russell’s apartment, feel the boredom, sit with the tension. And yet, amid the anxiety, she offers flashes of dry wit: “I was told to avoid stress,” she writes, “as if stress were a Martini, or unpasteurized French cheese, and it would be selfish of me to indulge during pregnancy.” With honesty and humor, Russell captures what it means to live in stasis—when the most important thing you can do is nothing at all. —CW
5. Maximalisma
Lisa Russ Spaar | The American Scholar | May 16, 2025 | 3,007 words
My parents are purging their home of nearly 50 years as they prepare to downsize. Last week, my mom asked me if I wanted her dinnerware; this week, she gifted me her collection of massive terracotta planters. (How could I say no? My dad had already loaded them onto his truck.) I get it: It’s hard to let go of stuff, even things that lack sentimental value. In her essay for The American Scholar, Lisa Russ Spaar reflects on the accumulation of objects, both trash and treasure, and how they’ve helped shape her identity: “I have to admit, at 68, that all of these ‘things’ comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be.” Her words inspired me to reflect on my own curated spaces over the years, from my freshman dorm room—walls plastered with underground rave flyers that I’ve since stored in shoeboxes—to my current sun-filled office in my new home, filled with houseplants, miniatures, and art. Spaar shares her great-aunts’ compulsion to hold onto stuff, while also acknowledging a responsibility to pare down so her loved ones won’t have to later. The essay then evolves into a playful exploration of language and collecting. She compares her poems—”short, sonnet-haunted lyrics that juxtapose high and low diction, arcane or gnomish syntax, and contemporary slang”—to cabinets of curiosities: “My little poems—both tidy and lush at once—are perhaps, like Aunt Ruth’s grocery bags or Warhol’s boxes, a way for me to collect disparate things in one place, to create a kind of order or meaning out of what I notice and feel.” Poetry may offer Spaar a kind of balance, a way to know when to hold on and when to let go. While hoarding can feel oppressive, Spaar’s reflections reframe it as something tender and artful: a means of noticing, honoring, and building a life. Reading her piece made me see those planters, and all the things I’ve carried with me, not as clutter, but as parts of a story that I’m still shaping. —CLR
Audience Award
What piece did our audience love most this week?
Confessions of the Working Poor
Jeni Gunn | Maclean’s | July 18, 2025 | 4,442 words
Jeni Gunn is 51 and lives in a rented basement suite on Canada’s Vancouver Island. She’s worked gigs for three decades and, after raising two children as a single parent, her retirement savings fits in a piggy bank on her dresser. Gunn makes enough doing private investigative and crisis planning work most months to cover her basics, but very little more. She’s got to chase her gig employers down to get paid, often for work that’s physically arduous. She often turns down social time with friends, and most other extras because she just can’t afford it as a member of a growing class of Canadian society called the Secretly Poor. —KS
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/01/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-573/
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