The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
August 15, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this week’s edition:
- Mapping the scars
- A parent, twice met
- Paradise in peril
- Hallucinating war
- Wriggly business
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1. Fortunate Son
Tony Ho Tran | Slate | August 13, 2025 | 5,565 words
In April, as the US marked 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War and a flood of anniversary projects rolled across the journalism plains, Tony Ho Tran was on the Vietnam coast with his parents and brother. This wasn’t a voyage of commemoration, but a long-delayed trip that just happened to coincide with the milestone. Still, coincidence means little when you return to the place that made you and then blew apart. The backdrop of the celebration heightens the usual tensions of a family vacation: Tran’s father goes full Dad Mode by telling everyone he meets in Hanoi that he’d served in the South Vietnamese army; Tran’s mother insists on repeating everything Tran and his brother say to locals, as though their Vietnamese is indecipherable. Ultimately, though, the enormity of the occasion snuffs out any internecine squabbles. Sharing a beer with his dad on Hạ Long Bay, Tran fills in gaps of the man’s life he’d never even known were there, and the travelogue gives way to something altogether more lyrical, something that Tran has been moving toward all along. “Returning, I realize now, was never going to answer any questions or heal us,” he writes. “Returning gives shape to memory. It allows us to feel the ragged trenches of its scars, map the landscape it creates—and that, in turn, changes us. But the past will always be with us: in the stories we tell strangers, the old enemies we welcome back, and the fights we have with those we love.” We are the strangers here, and Tran’s family story—and, particularly, its arresting final image—will stay with you for some time. —PR
2. Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t.
Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker | July 21, 2025 | 8,226 words
I could tell you that this is a story about emerging science troubling the definition of schizophrenia, chipping away at a diagnostic monolith. I could tell you it is about the possibility that some people on anti-psychotic medications actually need to be treated for autoimmune disorders. I could tell you it is about a woman, Mary, who after decades living with schizophrenia recovered her sanity—a side effect of chemotherapy she underwent as treatment for lymphoma. Those things are all true. But what I want to tell you is that this is a story about compassion. Mary has two daughters. As children, they suffered under the weight of their mother’s delusions, her accusations that they were lying to her, hurting her. (One of the daughters was so distraught and confused that, in the fifth grade, she asked Santa Claus for a polygraph machine.) Yet they cared for their mother, kept meticulous records about their experiences, and when chemotherapy left Mary with a clear head, they rallied to find out why. Now, as Aviv documents with startling intimacy, the daughters are learning to live with a bifurcated parent: the mother they once knew, and the one they’re getting to know. Which would be hard enough, but Mary has muddled knowledge of her former self. “There is almost no medical literature about the afterlife of madness,” Aviv writes. “Autoimmune psychosis raises the possibility of a swift, full recovery—a trajectory not typically seen in schizophrenia—and in doing so supplies a new category of witness: a person who can describe what it feels like to look back on a self that is, in some sense, defunct.” The daughters are marshaling their memories to help Mary reconcile her current reality with her past one. It requires patience, fortitude, and self-sacrifice. It is a profound expression of forgiveness. Consider this passage: “One of Christine’s fears was that, in talking with her mother about what she and Angie had been through, she would ‘rob her [mother] of the human capacity for denial.’” What a remarkable way to say I love you. —SD
3. The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius
Ariel Saramandi | The Dial | July 29, 2025 | 4,572 words
Mauritius is beautiful: its skies “postcard-perfect,” its waters “crystal-clear.” At least, that’s what many tourists, wasteful and oblivious, experience on the island. The real Mauritius is fragile, a place of limited resources and rotting infrastructure. “I think of the carbon emissions of each plane that lands here. The emissions of each of our 106 hotels,” writes Mauritian writer Ariel Saramandi. “Tourists pouring themselves a bath, cleansing themselves of their 12-hour flight. Ignorant that the rest of us have to live on only four to eight hours of water flowing through our taps most days in high summer.” In this essay at The Dial, Saramandi captures a place, and its people and wildlife, struggling to survive the island’s extreme conditions: oppressive heat; sudden flash floods; freak tornadoes; and all the jellyfish, “manifestations of a sick ocean,” that have smothered its coastline. You can feel the raw power of nature in Saramandi’s words. Her voice is reflective yet urgent, articulating what her body feels in this climate dystopia right now. “I read books written mostly by white men in supremely rich countries on how to think about climate disaster,” she writes. “Some concepts I understand in my body: global warming as a hyperobject, heat like honey glistening all over my skin, so viscous that showering won’t remove the stickiness.” The Dial often introduces me to writers around the world I’ve never read before, and Saramandi joins this list. Her piece is a moving introduction to her essay collection, Portrait of an Island on Fire, and a passionate call for a more habitable future for Mauritius. —CLR
4. Fear and Trembling in the Garrison
Theo Lipsky | The Point | August 11, 2025 | 3,167 words
I grew up a few miles from Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. The base was a training hub for military and law enforcement; the FBI and DEA have academies there, too. Some days, the impacts of mortars, missiles, and rockets rattled the silverware on the kitchen table and made the overhead lights swing. In the summer, I worked on the base, stopping each morning at the security gate to show my ID to a man about my age, who held the largest semiautomatic rifle I’d ever seen. He always looked bored. False violence surrounded us. Real violence remained far away, elsewhere. It would be easy for either of us to put it out of mind. “To forget that our guards exist, and for those guards to forget why they do, so abstract is the purpose of their post: that is what we want,” writes Theo Lipsky. In his challenging essay for The Point, Lipsky, a US Army captain, considers the soldiers who guard ammunition during peacetime. Such soldiers “must hallucinate a war for want of one at hand or else live with the absurdity of playing war when there’s none to be had.” Lipsky’s philosophical dive draws on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, who considered the same soldiers centuries earlier, seeking existential wisdom from the “strange thoughts” that must arise from such divisive, anxious work. Those thoughts, Lipsky argues, “are prelude to virtue, if not faith, in a world desirous of both but uncertain of how to arrive at either.” Lipsky doesn’t idealize the armed forces in his essay; I wouldn’t recommend this if he did. Instead, he seems to be challenging himself to look directly at those figures placed on a precipice by violence—real and not—and consider the broader consequences. It’s a challenge we might do well to take up. —BF
5. The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario
Inori Roy | The Local | July 23, 2025 | 3,243 words
If you use nightcrawlers as fishing bait, chances are they came from a field somewhere between Toronto and Windsor, Ontario. For The Local, Inori Roy literally gets down and dirty to learn what it’s like to be a worm picker, someone who harvests nightcrawlers as they emerge from the soil in the wee hours of the morning. What started as a side hustle for young boys trying to earn a few extra dollars in the 1900s is now a C$200 million industry run by generational family businesses who employ mostly immigrants and refugees trying to make their way in Canada. This piece hooked me for a few reasons. Roy was patient; she fished around and was rejected by several worm operations for weak reasons, until she landed a chance to pick for Nick Alafogiannis, owner of A1 Bait. As a reporter, though, she is no fish out of water. She quickly develops a rapport with Alafogiannis and his crew to learn the business from the ground up, an industry threatened by a lack of temporary workers, trade tensions with the US, a downturn in recreational fishing, and of course, climate change. “And in truth, as much as I now have an intense, perhaps overly-romanticized fondness for it, worm harvesting is not an essential industry,” she writes. “The world would move on without it, and it would become a subject of nostalgic memory, a quaint eccentricity from a different time, when people had the luxury of fishing with massive, lively worms hand-selected by workers flown in from the other side of the world.” The next time I go fishing, I’ll be sure to remember Roy and the legion of workers toiling through the night, angling to keep a dying industry afloat. —KS
Audience Award
The Cult of “Kill Tony”
Luke Winkie | Slate | August 7, 2025 | 4,765 words
The world of comedy is in a weird place right now. A distinct strain of gleefully transgressive comics have embraced taboo-busting (read: bigoted) jokes to become arena-packing headliners and podcast luminaries. That shift has placed the epicenter of the form in Austin—and specifically in Tony Hinchliffe’s pressure cooker of an open mic night known as Kill Tony, where comics look to launch their careers in front of crowds who mock them mercilessly. For Slate, Luke Winkie unpacks the many discomfiting layers of the crucible. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/15/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-575/
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