The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
August 22, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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- The legend of the levee boss
- Identity in the age of AI
- The rules of Rave Club
- Studying philosophy in prison
- French fry why
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1. Who Killed the Mercy Man?
Eric McHenry | The American Scholar | August 14, 2025 | 3,122 words
On one hand, the word “folklore” will never lose its ability to make me feel like a bored, fidgety kid. It sounds like field trips to one-room schoolhouses. But on the other hand, the word also thrums with enormous power—the same power that makes the blues the most potent artform born on American soil. The Mississippi Delta isn’t terminus in this case, but origin: The stories and tropes that made their way into the music proliferated through this country’s very sensibility, and through every other mode of expression that it spawned. And with that much embedded folklore, there’s always another discovery lurking, another path to tread from song to song, another history to uncover. Eric McHenry’s investigation for The American Scholar exercises that sonic sleuthing in journalistic form, following the character of “the Mercy Man” back through the decades all the way to its seeming genesis. It’s a fascinating investigation, whether or not you’re familiar with Alan Lomax’s famed field recordings or even the blues at all. McHenry dives into the levee camp holler, a plaintive song form born when Black men of the late 19th and early 20th century joined work crews controlled by viciously racist contractors and featuring conditions that seemed nearly indistinguishable from slavery itself. After tracing various renditions of a story in which a contractor known as Mr. Charlie kills an animal welfare officer, McHenry finally finds a 1909 incident that seems to explain everything; from there, he re-expands his search, adding vital texture to the event and sketching a stunning depiction of what inequality really looked like at the time. (Spoiler: It looks like a whole lot of Mr. Charlies.) This is a story about American history, but it’s also a story about how we cope with the unspeakable, and about how art can grow from the abject. And if you’re anything like me, it’ll remind you that the word “folklore” isn’t so boring after all. —PR
2. Your Face Tomorrow
Michael W. Clune | Harper’s Magazine | July 16, 2025 | 6,413 words
Novelty has a way of sharpening our relationship with the past. The latest Harper’s sent me back a month to an earlier issue, where Michael W. Clune’s “Your Face Tomorrow” awaited me with a better version of the same thought. “The emergence of an alternative gives a new perspective on the old thing, and not always a flattering one,” Clune writes. “Think of the invention of indoor plumbing.” For Clune, the arrival of AI-powered facial recognition technologies prompts a reconsideration of his own face—specifically, the ways in which it is used by himself and by others. He navigates a holiday party, attuned to his own minor facial adjustments and their intended meanings. He also visits a lab where he sits for a “faceprint,” staring into a screen as it stares back, observing the “digestion of my human features into a code, a set of coordinates.” Clune has a knack for revealing the depths of our more subterranean concerns—a talent he previously showcased in a nimble, entertaining study of his own panic attacks. Here, Clune digs beneath his technological anxieties to explore more foundational questions of privacy and control. “Who am I?” he asks near his essay’s perfect conclusion. “A real person, watched by artificial eyes? Or an artificial person, watched by real eyes?” There are times when we might be both. —BF
3. Another Rave Review
Patrick Galbraith | The Fence | August 11, 2025 | 3,676 words
The rules of the UK’s outdoor rave scene are simple: Keep the secret. Arrive in darkness. Don’t post on socials. Leave before the police arrive. Patrick Galbraith learns this early on from an elusive figure known as DJ Fu, who explains that if you follow the rules, “Bish bosh, we’re drinking tea, munching on our bacon sandwiches.” But Galbraith isn’t content just to hear about raves, he wants to live them. That’s easier said than done. After all, everyone knows the first rule. Only after dead ends and false leads—including a brief stint in a Telegram group run by someone “shifting industrial quantities of ketamine”—does Galbraith finally secure a party line for a two-day free party in the West Country. What follows is a kind of treasure hunt, where the prize is two days in a damp forest. Information trickles out in cryptic bursts. First, a vague direction toward Bristol. Fresh-faced, Galbraith and his emotional support friend Jack set out. Along the way, they stop to pick brambles at a Roman amphitheater in the sun, watching “a small black plane above us flying sharply upwards, casting a white plume out behind it against the bright blue.” A new clue pushes them to a supermarket car park in Swansea. Here, the ravers are gathering. Galbraith briefly passes the time learning about raising chickens in Portugal from “a toothless Bristolian in a Hawaiian shirt.” It’s in these surreal, very human moments that the piece shines. The tone shifts when the final location is revealed and the intensity ramps up. Police circle, convoys stream up a mountain, sound systems spark to life in pouring rain. Galbraith’s prose captures both the absurdity and the beauty of the rave: chaotic, primitive, communal. A hidden, rebellious corner of England. As for what happens next? I know the rule—you’ll need to read to find out. —CW
4. Socrates Would Be Pleased
Jay Miller | Aeon | August 15, 2025 | 4,068 words
Like many people, I have recurring nightmares about being back in school. Usually, I forget to show up to a class all semester, so I fail and can’t graduate. In my waking life, I have no desire to be a student again. Unless, that is, I were a student in Jay Miller’s “Introduction to Philosophy” course, which brings attendees at Warren Wilson College into educational communion with people incarcerated at a nearby prison. Where better to study the Allegory of the Cave than a place where freedom is literally, constantly in question? This sounds infinitely better than how I encountered Plato: in a freshman seminar populated by know-it-alls (myself included!) eager to say the smartest thing, to impress the professor the most. “The moment my students stepped into a prison,” Miller writes, “[there was] no flexing of pre-approved talking points. . . . With no more guidance from me than the standard expectations of respectful discourse, the class immediately cultivated, as if by magic, an ethos of listening-not-judging.” Philosophy, Miller argues, isn’t static knowledge that one acquires—it’s forged in the juxtaposition and interface of human experience. “Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights,” he writes. Sign me up. —SD
5. The Great French Fry Mystery
Harley Rustad | Toronto Life | August 11, 2025 | 3,564 words
His name was Rodolphe, or at least that’s what was written on the 10 A&W bags Harley Rustad’s neighbor found on her porch, discarded, over a period of several days. Who was Rodolphe? Why had he left his mostly eaten french fries at her door, night after night? Was it an inviting space to enjoy a late-night snack? A weird political statement? Some sort of scam? Rustad set up an old baby monitor aimed at the porch in an attempt to spot the perpetrator. Together, he and his neighbor taped a skein of thread across the staircase to the porch to determine whether the perpetrator was animal or human; they sprinkled baking soda on the stoop to capture paw pads or footprints. The following morning revealed a set of decidedly human shoes, and of course, another crumpled bag of half-eaten french fries. Late-night babycam notifications confirmed that the fries were being delivered to the front door and then devoured, first by a raccoon, followed by a squirrel munching on the leftovers. After nine days and nine bags of fries, Rustad and his neighbor decided to head to the source: their closest A&W location, only to learn that while the orders originated there, they’d been placed via Uber Eats, which revealed no further information. “Via our tests, we had figured out the how,” writes Rustad. “And we had solved one who: who had been eating the fries. But other questions remained. Who was ordering them? Who was Rodolphe? And why was someone repeatedly sending orders of french fries to my neighbour in the middle of the night?” I won’t spoil this story by delivering the ending to you. In addition to an intriguing whodunit, Rustad’s story of next-door detective work is, at its heart, a lovely testament to good neighbors in our increasingly myopic world, a piece that celebrates the simple joy of being one and having one. —KS
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
She Was a Quiet Bird Expert. Then She Was Called to Investigate a Murder in Maine.
Chris Sweeney | Globe Magazine | June 23, 2025 | 3,182 words
File this one under Fascinating profiles of Extraordinary Women. In an excerpt from The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne, Chris Sweeney tells the story of how Roxie Laybourne, a bird expert at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, pioneered the field of forensic ornithology in the 1970s. Her unique skill—the ability to identify the type of bird from a fragment of a feather—was critical across a range of investigations during her time, from homicides to fatal airplane crashes. (Subscription required.) —CLR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/22/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-576/
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