The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
September 26, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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In this edition:
- Illegal Eden
- Marriage malware
- Fading magic
- Fear and lies
- Grime fighter
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1. Frankenstein’s Sheep
Alice Hines | New York | September 24, 2025 | 5,189 words
A couple of stories about cloned animals have made it into our Top 5 in recent memory—specifically, polo ponies and dogs. But ponies and dogs aren’t exactly rare. What happens when someone uses cloning to propagate a species thousands of miles from its natural home? Even weirder, what happens when they use biotech to de-extinct a species—or create one that doesn’t exist? Enter Montana Mountain King, a Marco Polo argali who was born not in Central Asia, where all the spiral-horned ruminants live, but in (duh) Montana, where rancher Jack Schubarth had implanted cloned argali embryos into his pneumonia-prone sheep. That Schubarth managed this feat of husbandry was a miracle unto itself; had he done it legally, rather than sending his son to smuggle a strip of argali hide back from Kyrgyzstan, he’d likely be a hero of the conservation movement. Instead, he got six months in federal prison. The story of Schubarth and MMK is a fascinating one, even before ketamine and rectal probes make an appearance, but it’s also just the beginning. Alice Hines expands the scope from Schubarth’s operation to a thriving, if ethically ambiguous, animal biohacking industry. One company has seemingly revived the dire wolf and has its sight set on the dodo; another wants to breed unicorns and dragons. (All together, now: What could go wrong?) Throughout, Hines melds story and science with a deft touch, and turns what might otherwise be the tale of a single resourceful rancher into a more troubling look at a future that’s roaring toward us. The bleating edge of science, indeed. —PR
2. ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners
Maggie Harrison Dupré | Futurism | September 18, 2025 | 4,486 words
In another time, before any of us knew what ChatGPT was, I probably would have read this headline, laughed, and moved on. But these days, nothing feels far-fetched. We know chatbots can become delusional. They can distort reality and convince people they are real. Turns out, they can also turn your spouse against you. In this bleak story at Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré shares accounts from people who say ChatGPT was a catalyst for their breakups, describing spouses who prompted it to analyze their relationship problems and confirm their partners’ wrongdoings. One husband said his wife leaned on ChatGPT as “a confidante-meets-journal-meets-therapist,” eventually getting trapped in a feedback loop that reinforced her own views and cast him as the villain. In another marriage, which collapsed in a matter of days, the husband said his wife began to communicate in “an unfamiliar blend of spiritual and therapeutic language” that made it sound like she had joined a cult. Dupré notes that these relationships may have already been on the rocks, but that doesn’t make these accounts any less disturbing. Several people described feeling cornered as their partners wielded ChatGPT’s words against them: One wife played its commentaries on speakerphone for her spouse to hear, and even prompted it in Voice Mode during an argument in front of their kids; another husband texted his partner AI slop about his feelings in place of his own messages. (“I would say one thing, and he would send me this barrage of f*cking data,” his now ex-wife said.) I initially thought to recommend another story this week, one that depicts our strange times in a very different way (it’s this week’s Audience Award, below). But this piece hit a nerve. These dynamics can emerge even in “healthy” marriages and between people without serious mental health struggles. And when a tool built to maximize engagement slips into the most intimate corners of our lives—at a time already defined by polarization, isolation, and loneliness—this stops sounding like a tech story and starts revealing just how vulnerable we are. —CLR
3. When Dementia Steals the Imagination of a Children’s Book Writer
Katie Engelhart | The New York Times Magazine | September 14, 2025 | 4,168 words
Before I became a parent, I’d never heard of Robert Munsch. My wife, however, had grown up with him. His books still line the shelves of her childhood home, along with a few cassette tapes of Munsch performing his own stories in bravura screwball style. Reading Munsch’s stories aloud to our family transformed my wife, made her goofy in a way that charmed our kids. I was charmed, too. Munsch, whose 85 titles have sold 87 million copies, refined his stories through live performance at children’s festivals and elementary schools. His best stories grant young people absurd levels of authority, or dramatize the absurdity of the world they inhabit. A mud puddle stalks Jule Ann and jumps on her, again and again. Jonathan tidies his apartment, only for it to become a subway stop, regularly flooded with messy adults. These aren’t correctives masquerading as entertainment; “I write amoral stories,” he tells Katie Engelhart. Now, at 80, Munsch has dementia and Parkinson’s disease. His illness and cognitive decline effectively end a half-century collaboration between Munsch and his audience, whose ideas directly informed Munsch’s work. (Jule Ann, according to Munsch’s website, “is now grown up and works for a travel agency in Toronto.”) Engelhart, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a complex feature about dementia, spent time with Munsch at his home in Ontario. Her resulting profile is humane and revealing: Engelhart touches on Munsch’s struggles with depression, addiction, and recovery, and gives a glimpse of the existential winds that blow through many of the best children’s books. And, in a moving finale I won’t spoil here, Munsch delivers a rare performance. An intimate portrait of an influential artist as he loses his process. —BF
4. Home City, USA
Pooja Bhatia | The Baffler | September 4, 2025 | 5,790 words
It’s been just over a year since Donald Trump and JD Vance began spouting vile lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating other residents’ cats and dogs. (Those claims, it’s important to note, were derived from ones made by literal neo-Nazis.) So, how are things going in Springfield today? Pooja Bhatia, a longtime chronicler of Haiti and its diaspora, visits to find out. She finds a place steeped in fear, where extensions of care and welcome—as well as the truth—have been met with doxxing, death threats, and other forms of terror. This predates Trump and Vance talking about Springfield on the national stage, but their words have supercharged the hate, as have their subsequent efforts to deport Haitians. “Local officials have tried to fight disinformation with facts, but that hasn’t worked,” Bhatia writes. “What national Republicans unleashed here was less like an infection than an autoimmune disease, the body politic attacking itself for reasons no one really understands.” Reading this dispatch, I found myself thinking, “more of this, please.” More stories that trace the precise impact of MAGA bigotry, and more stories about the political moment that are written with urgency and razor-sharp moral clarity. One of Bhatia’s sources is a woman with a local charity who, for her efforts helping her Haitian neighbors, has been called a “race traitor” and “n— lover.” She begins to sob during her interview, but not for herself. “What these people have endured,” she says. “I just want to hide them all. Then everybody keeps saying, ‘Stop saying that.’” Bhatia consoles her, and rightly so, because we’re all in this catastrophe together. —SD
5. The Human Stain Remover: What Britain’s Greatest Extreme Cleaner Learned From 25 Years on the Job
Tom Lamont | The Guardian | September 25, 2025 | 4,538 words
For the past couple of months, I have been living with my mother’s ancient dog, Barney. Sadly, what Barney has gained in years, he has lost in personal hygiene. In his fading mind, carpets are now pee zones, and the contents of bins are better off festooned decoratively around the house. Life with Barney has sent me down a rabbit hole of frantic googling, late-night YouTube tutorials on stain removal, and desperate experiments with baking soda and vinegar. It turns out I should have just asked Ben Giles, a.k.a. “the human stain remover.” As Tom Lamont discovers in this piece for The Guardian, Giles is “a self-taught stain savant, a walking database of remedies.” His cleaning business, Ultima, would take on any mess—from dead whales to drug paraphernalia, murder scenes to hoarders. Giles even started a training academy in the 2010s, teaching about 600 cleaners, whom he could then call upon for extra help. It’s a fascinating insight into an industry more often kept firmly under wraps. We all know there must be extreme cleaning jobs, but our collective subconscious chooses not to dwell. The mess our bodies can produce is far too human—or perhaps far too animal-like—to be fully acknowledged. But Lamont does not shy away. Prepare for relentless, visceral descriptions. Prepare for maggots, stench, and every bodily fluid imaginable. Lamont’s lack of squeamishness reflects his subject: a man for whom this has all become commonplace. Yet there are occasional hints at the emotional cost of witnessing so much of “life’s disorderly processes.” Giles has gained an understanding “that is both privileged and discouraging.” A part of a hidden corner of modern life that is extraordinary, gross, and profoundly human. Turns out dog pee is no big deal. —CW
Audience Award 🏆
The Last Resort
Ash Sanders | The Believer | September 18, 2025 | 8,973 words
In this reported essay at The Believer, Ash Sanders recounts her time in Bombay Beach, a community on the edge of the Salton Sea, during its annual Biennale, a multi-day festival during which eclectic artists converge and transform the small town into performance art. Sanders’s account is a study of water in the West, a portrait of environmental ruin, and an exploration of what it looks like to create freely in the face of devastation. —CLR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/26/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-580/
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