The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
September 05, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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- The doctor is always in
- The good boy
- The pathway of pigment
- The shame of Mary Oliver
- The wealthy on water
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1. My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek
Viola Zhou | Rest of World | September 2, 2025 | 4,472 words
Something happened to me last year that I’ve yet to fully unpack. I was doing sit-ups when, suddenly, the left side of my body was overtaken by tingling. A colorful corona bloomed in my left eye. I found it hard to speak. My wife drove me to the emergency room. There was a cardiology investigation. Then there were others. I got a neurologist, and then a gastroenterologist. I started getting monthly blood tests. Doctors scanned my brain and tested my nerves. Each test showed me to be in good health. And yet symptoms of something have persisted. Where I live, family doctors are hard to come by, so I’ve been required to piece together my own care. My wife provides tremendous emotional support, but we’re not all so fortunate. Where, then, should we look for solace? Viola Zhou’s mother has lived with chronic kidney problems for two decades. As China’s aging population puts increased pressure on the nation’s healthcare infrastructure, Zhou’s mother has seen her marriage fracture and her daughter leave the country. In her isolation, she has turned to DeepSeek, an AI-powered chatbot, for medical guidance, tasking it with interpreting her medical records, changing her diet, and reducing her immunosuppressant dose. She warmly thanks the chatbot, and it responds in kind. Zhou brings her mother’s chat records to specialists, who point out the errors in Dr. DeepSeek’s responses. And yet Zhou’s mother dismisses the shortcomings. “DeepSeek is more humane,” she tells Zhou. “Doctors are more like machines.” These days, there is no shortage of stories about people in crisis who turn to AI for support, sometimes to perilous ends. Zhou’s feature reminds us that such stories are symptoms—of technological limits, isolation, and dysfunctional healthcare systems. —BF
2. God Dog
Mina Tavakoli | n+1 | September 2, 2025 | 3,089 words
Late last year, n+1 published a Mina Tavakoli piece about a ventriloquism convention. At the time, I called it “one of those stories you wish you’d written but are all too happy to read.” Man, I remember thinking to myself, I hope she writes more about people united by obsession. At least, I think I thought it to myself. I suspect I might have yelled it very loudly outside n+1’s office window, or maybe emailed it to the editors, because now we have this story, the start of “a new column of hyperoccasional reportage” by Tavakoli. (Frankly, all of journalism should operate on the model of publishing only things I personally find enjoyable.) This time, she visits the Westminster Dog Show. I’m sure you’ve read a dispatch from the Westminster Dog Show. I’m also sure this is better than that one. There’s a poetry to Tavakoli’s wit; she makes you laugh not just with her scenework and her perspective, but with the chaotic matchmaking of her language. “Kevin was basically a small brown melon with a huge pair of nuts,” she writes of one pug. “Spectacular, velveteen, radiant nuts, suctioned to his groin like a little desert animal. In fact, as John cupped his hands to better illustrate, the meaty joggle of canine genitalia was all around us.” I defy you to find me a more pleasingly surprising phrase than meaty joggle. Trust, though, that this piece is more than low-hanging fruit. Amid the mayhem of helicopter dogparents and every possible zoological aroma, Tavakoli cuts to the heart of the human-dog relationship, or at least the version of it that seems to exist among the show-breeding set, in which affection sits side-by-side with pride of authorship. This isn’t punching down, but skewering up. Best in show, indeed. —PR
3. Museum of Color
Stephanie Krzywonos | Emergence Magazine | August 28, 2025 | 5,896 words
My daughter often schools me on color. Her Crocs, she insists, are turquoise, not green; her swimsuit is lilac, not lavender. Recently, when I referred to black as a color, she corrected me with a brief science lesson: “Black absorbs light,” she told me. “It’s the absence of color.” I thought of this exchange while reading Stephanie Krzywonos’s wonderfully strange essay “Museum of Color,” and realized there’s so much more I want to teach her. Krzywonos reveals the fascinating yet unsettling histories of various pigments. The first black pigments, for example, came from charred animal bones, and were later mass-produced in North America from millions of slaughtered bison, their skeletons milled into a fine powder. “Bone black is the presence of an absence,” Krzywonos writes. Other hues carry equally violent origins: Tyrian purple, harvested from boiled and crushed Mediterranean murex snails; vibrant red shades like scarlet and crimson, made from pulverized cochineal insects; a rich and warm “mummy brown,” created from ground human and feline remains; Venetian ceruse, a skin whitener that Queen Elizabeth I used to hide her scars, made with poisonous lead. Krzywonos arranges these vignettes like placards at a museum, but she also traces each pigment into the present, weaving in surprising details. (“Cinnabar is mercury sulfide, and highly toxic. To make cinnabar pixels on a computer screen, also called #E34234, mix 89% red, 25.9% green, and 20.4% blue.”) This essay is part history, part cautionary tale, reminding us that extractive and toxic practices still linger in the colors we use, eat, and wear every day. For now, I’ll let my daughter revel in turquoise and lilac, and will save the bone black lesson for another day. —CLR
4. Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?
Maggie Millner | The Yale Review | September 2, 2025 | 3,420 words
Where have you encountered a Mary Oliver poem? Perhaps a refrigerator magnet, a journal cover, a travel blog, or a yoga class? Oliver’s verse about the beauty of nature and our “one wild and precious life” has found legions of fans in the era of memes, merch, and living your truth. This popularity, and the reasons for it, relegate Oliver to cringe status in many literary circles. I’ve long been baffled by all of this: both the embrace of her work as a body of inspirational quotes, and the dismissal of her oeuvre as shallow and sentimental. I stan Oliver—so much so that I have a line from her poem “A Pretty Song” tattooed on my left forearm. I’m not a poet or a critic, but as a reader, I find her work arresting, lonely, and even mournful. Beneath her appreciation of the natural world, I sense the simmering frustration of someone who can never find what she seeks. So I was intrigued—thrilled, really—to read Maggie Millner’s analysis of Oliver through the lens of shame. “What seems truly singular,” Millner writes, “is her alertness to the way feelings of shame and social inadequacy attend even our most seemingly private and ecstatic moments, and her belief in the lyric poem as an arena for exploring that contradiction.” Millner posits that recognizing Oliver as the bard of embarrassment helps situate her among fellow poets, and in the present political moment. “A page of poetry, in some sense, is no place at all, and it is fitting that we feel a little shame when we attempt to leave society to visit it,” Millner concludes. “Ideally, as in Oliver’s case, shame can be generative rather than debilitating; by facing it head-on, I might find in it an occasion for a poem, or a humbling reminder to take to the streets.” —SD
5. Ocean of Influence: Inside the Celebrity Boat Trip That Was All Over Your Feeds
Joe Hagan | Vanity Fair | August 6, 2025 | 4,214 words
I must have the wrong algorithm working on my feeds, because I somehow missed “the mother of all influencer trips” that unfolded aboard the Luminara, a floating behemoth in The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection. Luckily, Joe Hagan did not. His Vanity Fair dispatch drops us onto a cruise designed to make superyachting feel more accessible (for those who are merely very rich, not astronomically rich). Spending 48 hours alongside a hundred A-listers, Hagan quickly finds himself in a fever dream: Kate Hudson and Dakota Johnson sip daiquiris in the pool, Shaun White stretches on a lounger, and Leonardo DiCaprio wanders about in the background, vaping. Meanwhile, the conversation meanders from Martha Stewart’s frustration at it no longer being acceptable to drive her top-of-the-range, self-driving Tesla, to a defense of the Sánchez-Bezos wedding as “a normal, plain-Jane affair.” As someone whose own boating pinnacle tops out at precariously balancing a dog and a hamper of curling sandwiches on an aluminum dinghy, I found the sheer level of pampering fascinating—like Below Deck on steroids. But what Hagan captures is not just the luxury, but the unfiltered absurdity of it all: a forgotten vial of LSD, 3 a.m. light shows no one watches, drunk entourages. The access Vanity Fair is granted is shocking, and it’s no surprise the cruise organizer later tries (unsuccessfully) to smother the story. But beneath the spectacle runs a sharp portrait of wealth so insulated it verges on parody. (Yes, some of The White Lotus cast are there.) Part guilty pleasure, part sly cultural critique. You, like Hagan, will step off this ship a little dazed. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
The Salacious Middle Ages
Katherine Harvey | Aeon | January 23, 2018 | 3,000 words
Resurfacing from the Aeon archive, Katherine Harvey’s 2018 essay marked her first in-depth exploration of medieval sex—a journey that later blossomed into her book, The Fires of Lust. This upfront piece studies medieval Europe’s startlingly frank approach to the dangers of sex. Too much sex was dangerous, and too little sex could outright kill you. Quite the ride! —CW
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/05/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-577/
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