The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
September 19, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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This week:
• Purple mountains’ math-esty
• The nightmare of labor trafficking
• Fanning the flames of conspiracy
• After the flood . . . goblins?
• Some like it hot—like, really hot
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1. Have We Been Measuring Mountains All Wrong?
Gordy Megroz | National Geographic | September 16, 2025 | 2,432 words*
Nature has left me awestruck time and time again: whether gazing at the Big Sur coastline from a mountaintop monastery, watching the Colorado River carve a sharp U-turn at Dead Horse Point in Utah, or standing where Kīlauea’s lava meets the sea on Hawaii’s Big Island. A few years ago, Henry Wismayer’s essay on the science of awe made me wonder what, exactly, stirs such emotion. This question reemerged for me as I read Gordy Megroz’s National Geographic profile of Kai Xu, a 23-year-old mountain-loving mathematician who set out to measure this feeling. On a visit to California’s Eastern Sierra region, Xu was wowed by the sight of Mount Tom. At 13,652 feet, it’s far shorter than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak at 29,032 feet, but Xu found Mount Tom’s presence just as extraordinary. Are there attributes other than height that make a mountain great? Could awe be quantified? “He had never laid eyes on the Himalaya or the Andes or any of the world’s largest mountains,” writes Megroz, “but he couldn’t have been more impressed if he had.” Xu invented a new formula to calculate grandeur, factoring in a mountain’s height above its surroundings and the steepness of its rise to produce a single number called “jut”—a measure of how dramatically a peak thrusts into the sky. Math lovers will enjoy the story’s nerdy bent, but what stays with me most is Megroz’s ability to balance technical detail with emotional resonance. He never loses sight of the human story—of a bright, curious young man who sees the world in a new way, and challenges us to do the same. —CLR
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2. The H-2A Visa Trap
Max Blau and Zaydee Sanchez | ProPublica | September 13, 2025 | 5,149 words
Many stories run through Operation Blooming Onion, a multi-year, multi-agency investigation into a labor trafficking conspiracy that brought hundreds of farm workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras to inhumane conditions in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a more harrowing account than that of Sofi, the single mother at the heart of Max Blau and Zaydee Sanchez’s feature for ProPublica. Sofi, like many other workers, acquired an H-2A visa through a broker and then traveled by bus from Mexico to Georgia in order to work the state’s blueberry farms. Once she arrived, the broker isolated her from the other workers, taking Sofi’s passport and coercing her into an abusive relationship. For more than a year, Sofi witnessed the exploitative practices and ruthless behaviors of her broker and his business partners. She endured beatings, and threats against her son. She survived, but just barely, and through sheer happenstance—a haunting, climactic moment in a tightly drawn narrative. Blau and Sanchez draw on a pile of court and police documents to tell Sofi’s story, but the outcome feels much more closely observed. Much of that is attributable to Dadu Shin, whose illustrations vivify moments of dread and yearning. Plenty more is courtesy of Blau and Sanchez, whose scenework gives this investigation the pace and mood of a literary thriller. But all of it owes to Sofi, who has since used her voice to expose the violence of her abuser and the risks of the system he exploited. —BF
3. One Vigilante, 22 Cell Tower Fires, and a World of Conspiracies
Brendan I. Koerner | Wired | September 16, 2025 | 5,934 words
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing last week, it’s been difficult to find a feature story that didn’t somehow feel implicitly connected to the events. Granted, this sort of thing happens whenever a single tragedy dominates the information ecosystem the way the shooting in Utah did. But the conversation around Kirk’s murder—the whodunit/whydunit/theydunit finger-pointing, the rabid tribalism, the speculation dressed up as analysis—has become a microcosm of just how venally broken our digital society is. Feelings bulldoze facts. Ideology, rather than evidence, drives conclusions. I promise I’m not playing Cassandra for fun here. I’m just trying to explain why this drumbeat was so loud in my head as I read Brendan Koerner’s piece about Sean Smith, a Texas man who took it upon himself in the early days of the pandemic to save humanity from 5G telecom technology. Smith, like so many people over the past 15 years, seized onto a conspiratorial worldview, and followed a now-familiar path of online-content radicalization to get there. (Yes, it started with a Joe Rogan podcast clip.) As a piece of journalism, it’s hard to criticize: Koerner deftly weaves Smith’s arson spree together with the criminal investigation that ultimately ends it, all while taking you inside the man’s head with measured empathy. But as a reminder of the informational crisis that currently grips us, it’s deeply discomfiting. Even if Smith has found something like peace in the years since his fire-setting days, he’s also found a new target for his ire. After all, in our moment of fever-swampitude, there’s always something or someone to demonize. Just be careful not to think too critically. —PR
4. Gobsmacked! Supernatural Sightings After a Flood
Lora Eli Smith | Oxford American | August 21, 2025 | 4,677 words
This story is about the exhausting aftermath of the floods that struck Eastern Kentucky in 2022 and 2023, but that‘s only the beginning. Lora Eli Smith worked crisis response at the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky after the first flood in 2022, and heard the kinds of stories you’d expect from survivors. There was property destruction as far as the eye could see. Forty-five people lost their lives. What Smith did not expect were the goblins, spectral beings that appeared to several residents in the flood-ravaged community. “On Highway 15, the couple saw what they thought were two toddlers,” she writes. “Not at all surprised that two small children could be stranded, separated from their parents, they slowed down their pickup truck. When they came to a slow roll, they discovered two small, gray creatures instead.” Smith begins to collect sightings, recording goblin encounters in a region that, as home to Mothman and the tommy-knockers, is no stranger to the supernatural. The emotion builds throughout the piece as Smith recounts the floods and their heavy toll on the community. At first she’s a skeptic, wondering whether the strikingly similar stories are a trauma-induced mass hallucination or even PTSD. Are they, as a folklorist notes, “a way of reclaiming and controlling the narrative” after a natural disaster? Could the goblins, as one resident suggests, have come as a distraction to help people heal? Regardless of whether they’re real or not, one thing is sure: I want to believe. —KS
5. The New Hotness
Pat Cassels | Slate | September 14, 2025 | 3,531 words
Eurovision, a gentle homage to the real-life music competition, is one of my favorite movies. It’s glitzy, exuberant, and (as one might expect of a Will Ferrell vehicle) delightfully bonkers. Clearly, this movie was on Pat Cassels’s mind as he dove headfirst into the world of aufguss, or competitive sauna-ing. He describes the scene as “Eurovision with linens”; one character even invokes Will Ferrell. I was powerless to resist. Aufguss is basically ballet with towels. Sauna masters waft hot air around, adding dramatic flourishes as they shepherd the drafts. The practice first became a competition in Germany, but now Americans are ready to throw their towels into the ring. This is how Cassels finds himself sweating and semi-naked in a trendy Williamsburg bathhouse—or as he puts it, “a great place for an average guy to visit if he wants to feel like a gnarled tree”—for the Aufguss USA Nationals, America’s first Aufguss World Masters event. The winners earn the ultimate prize: facing the Europeans at the world championships in Italy. First up in the lineup, “Fire and Ice,” a brother-and-sister duo “dressed head to toe in dazzling spandex unitards decorated with crystals.” I was thrilled to realize I had a connection to this act—not a deeply personal one, admittedly, but I had seen the sister perform in a jaw-dropping dance-and-puppet show in Las Vegas. And here she was in front of Cassels, flipping and twirling with her brother in a 200-degree sauna. (I was lucky to have seen her at a reasonable temperature, while fully clothed.) Cassels’s spa day only grows stranger, yet he proves an excellent guide to this sense-overloading subculture of sweat and spandex, capturing the spectacle in all its glory while letting his bemusement shine through. Stories like this restore my faith in humanity. I am so glad to have learned that, as a species, we decided to make furiously dancing with towels a competition. Triumphant absurdity. —CW
Audience Award
What story did our readers love most this week?
The Artwork that Spawned 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Mystery
Kyle MacNeill | Rolling Stone | September 10, 2025 | 5,732 words
Twenty-five years ago, on the first day of spring, the members of Gelitin, an Austrian art collective, removed a window from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, extended a narrow balcony, and then emerged, 91 stories above the city. Hardly anyone noticed; the Times didn’t report on the incident until more than a year after, and a friend of the group denied it had taken place. The headline here hardly does justice to Kyle MacNeill’s feature, which is by turns a gripping procedural and a consideration of the fate of an artistic act—a messy, ambitious, controversial one—overwhelmed, a year later, by an atrocity committed at the same site. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/19/longreads-top-5-579/
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