The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
September 12, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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This week:
• A Banksy restoration
• A bank investigation
• Alaskan importation
• A soupy dissertation
• A bayou pest vexation
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1. Saving a New Orleans Banksy
Ivy Knight | Oxford American | August 6, 2025 | 3,266 words
Earlier this week, I watched a video of people on a street outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice, moving barriers away from a wall to uncover a Banksy mural. The artwork—depicting a judge using a gavel to strike a protester who holds a blood-spattered sign—is likely a commentary on the recent mass arrests at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. There’s been a lot of online chatter about it: the court’s swift cover-up, the legal implications for altering a listed building, and whether the artwork was genuine, which Banksy confirmed on Instagram. This question of authenticity was fresh in my mind after reading Ivy Knight’s Oxford American piece about Boy on a Life Preserver Swing, one of the murals Banksy left behind in New Orleans in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Knight tells a delightful story about an unlikely trio—a dump truck driver, a real estate developer, and an art conservator—who come together to save the piece. Originally painted on the exterior wall of a biker bar, the mural was defaced with red spray paint, then reduced to rubble when the building was demolished. Ronnie Fredericks, the truck driver, salvaged the cinderblocks and stored them for years until he stumbled upon an opportunity with Sean Cummings, an art-loving hotelier, to bring the work back to life. “Joy” is not a word I usually associate with Banksy, but I felt it while reading Knight’s account of the restoration effort, and the science behind the careful process. (“She tried every removal method in her arsenal,” Knight writes of Elise Grenier, the art conservator challenged with the task, “but she could find no way to remove spray paint from spray paint.”) The trio’s shared curiosity and appreciation for the art is palpable, and as I watched the clip of Londoners removing security barriers to glimpse Banksy’s latest critique, I felt a similar sense of collective awe and empowerment. Together, these interactions with both murals speak to Banksy’s enduring role as a chronicler of human struggle and resilience, and the power of public art, even—or, perhaps, especially—in the face of erasure and suppression. —CLR
2. How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein
David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg | The New York Times Magazine | September 8, 2025 | 7,278 words
On Monday, the world was introduced to the creepiest birthday gift of all time, which included the image of Donald Trump’s signature scrawled beneath a female silhouette such that it appears to be pubic hair. Somehow, this wasn’t the most infuriating Jeffrey Epstein story of the week. That title I have to bestow on this New York Times Magazine piece. A trio of reporters dug into reams of internal communications, court documents, and financial data to show how JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, greased the wheels of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation for years. Even after he became a convicted sex offender, even when his financial activity repeatedly raised red flags, even when concerns about him were sent up the chain of command and basically everyone agreed he was doing bad stuff, JPMorgan kept him as a client. In one instance, the bank “agreed to open accounts for two young women without actually speaking to either of them . . . missing a well-known hallmark of human traffickers: that they control victims’ interactions with the outside world.” Only after Epstein’s death in 2019 did the bank retroactively alert federal investigators to some 4,700—you read that number right—suspicious financial transactions, “including hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European women who were brought to the United States.” Reading this stellar investigation, I kept thinking about the nature of greed. Culturally, we tend to associate greed with force and authority because, after all, money is power. But really, greed is just a form of cowardice. A spineless failure to do what’s right because you don’t want to rock the yacht you’ve docked next to your friend’s private island. —SD
3. The Messy Reality of Feeding Alaska
Eva Holland | High Country News | 2,726 words | September 4, 2025
If you want to ship kale to Alaska over land, you have to go through Canada. No railroad connects the state to the lower 48. Trade tensions still simmer, and David Eby, the Premier of British Columbia, has threatenied to add tolls to the already high cost of food trucked in to Northern communities. Shipping food by air is expensive. Intermodal transport can be cumbersome, but as Eva Holland* reports for High Country News, this is the way. As a reporter and resident of neighboring Whitehorse, Yukon, Holland set out to understand the precarity of the Alaskan food supply and probe its weak points. “I had visions of digging up delightful trivia,” she writes. “How many thousands of gallons of milk bounced over potholes to Alaska each year? How many loaves of bread?” As it turns out, she discovers hard data elusive or nonexistent. Holland contacted the US and Canadian governments. She called the grocery chains for information. This is a story about the food supply, but it is also the story of the story itself: How the hunt for data about precisely how much food Alaska imports revealed gaping holes in the record-keeping. I’m a big fan of Holland’s writing and she shows her work in this piece, a meaty exploration of the barriers Alaskans face in putting food on the table. —KS
*If you’d like to read a little more from Eva Holland on food and the North, check out her Longreads feature, “Born to Be Eaten.”
4. Stew Kids on the Block
John DeVore | Taste | September 8, 2025 | 2,370 words
Brotholomew. Stewtheus. Soupina. Some stews have been around long enough to earn first-name status. No ordinary dinners, whipped together to be eaten and forgotten—these are “perpetual stews,” pots that simmer on the hob for days, weeks, sometimes months. Bowlfuls are eaten, ingredients added, and they evolve under the careful stewardship of the “stew god” holding the ladle. As John DeVore puts it, they are “junk drawers in liquid form.” DeVore’s imagery in this piece for Taste is extraordinary: you can almost smell the meats, acids, and hints of parsley and lemon, hear the “soups full of bones gurgling in the dark.” Yet while the perpetual stew itself is deeply sensory, the community DeVore explores exists largely behind a screen. Brotholomew, Stewtheus, and Soupina are creations of TikTok “stewfluencers,” cooks sharing their bubbling experiments with thousands of followers. But this wasn’t always the case. Perpetual stews have brewed over fires for “centuries and across cultures.” DeVore first considered the concept during the pandemic, when his then-girlfriend and family kept a pot of gnawed drumsticks and cartilage gently boiling on the stove; a stew he called “mouthbone soup.” Years later, a bout of COVID-induced fever dreams about that pot led him to lift the lid on the world of the long-lingering broth. The result is comforting, wholesome, and strangely hypnotic. Yet simmering beneath is something else: a reaching for the anchor of the mundane, a quiet need for connection and ritual. —CW
5. Ecological Warfare
Nathaniel Rich | Harper’s Magazine | August 20, 2025 | 5,222 words
Nathaniel Rich’s dispatch from the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo is rich with rewards—unless, of course, you’re the invasive, orange-toothed rodent at its heart. A nutria, per Rich, is “approximately the shape of a football” and “about the same weight as a Jack Russell terrier.” In the past 25 years, nutrias have consumed more than 40 square miles of Louisiana, furthering damage done by a century of pipeline development and efforts to control the course of the Mississippi River. “A citizen is not permitted, in the current legal climate, to explode federal levees and dams, or to hunt oil and gas executives,” Rich writes. “So the nutria must pay.” And, boy, does it pay. Rich briskly unfolds the day’s events: a 40-hour hunt to bag as many “swamp rats” as possible, followed by a rodent cook-off and, finally, the Nutria Toss. He spends a portion of the day aboard a fog-shrouded airboat with the former Miss Louisiana, an avid hunter who warns him that things “can get Western real quick.” He details the nutria’s murky origins—which include a Tabasco scion’s runaway farming operation—and its culinary possibilities, from Paul Prudhomme’s popcorn-chicken approach to brined nutria chops. (He samples, too, of course. Nutria “tastes like roast beef, with an afternote of rust.”) At the Nutria Toss, dead rodents fly into the crowd, smacking onlookers. “This is essentially a conservation event,” a climate activist tells Rich. “But that’s not the appeal. The appeal is throwing nutria.” My folks live in nutria country these days, not far from the site of the rodeo, and I’ve already texted them about the event. I don’t wish the swamp rats any harm. Still, I can’t help but wonder how far I could throw one. —BF
Audience Award
And now, the piece our audience loved most this week.
Arundhati Roy on How to Survive in a “Culture of Fear”
Lulu Garcia-Navarro | The New York Times Magazine | August 30, 2025 | 3,520 words
There is a moment of palpable tension at the center of Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things. Garcia-Navarro asks Roy a series of questions about her persecution in India, including threats of arrest and the banning of her book, Azadi, in Kashmir. Roy grows circumspect; the interview seems, briefly, to teeter. Then the tension breaks, and Roy expands on the value of communication under authoritarian rule. It’s a stirring conclusion, and a terribly timely reminder of the power of a well-told story. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/12/longreads-top-5-578/
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