The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
October 10, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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- When to die
- When the dart players come to town
- When to fight
- When valley fever rises
- When to reenact a Revolutionary War battle
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1. The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace
Robert Sanchez | 5280 | October 2, 2025 | 4,765 words
I recently attended the funeral of my uncle, who suffered a severe cervical fracture after a fall. His health had rapidly deteriorated over the years. After being admitted to the hospital, he was awake and alert, but by the next morning, he was gone. On the day of his burial, I was struck by the orderliness of the military ceremony: the precise folding of the American flag handed to his wife; the Army vets in silent procession, lifting and firing their rifles in unison; the swift, almost ritualistic way a bulldozer covered his casket and smoothed the earth. This planned, meditative efficiency was a stark contrast to the suddenness of his death. It left me thinking about how we die, and what—if anything—we can control when our time comes. Nearly 10 years ago, Colorado voters passed the End of Life Options Act, legalizing medical aid in dying for terminally ill adults who meet specific criteria. Since then, about 1,100 people in the state have chosen this path. For 5280, Robert Sanchez spent the summer learning about this option through Denver Health’s Medical Aid in Dying clinic. Who is eligible? (A person of “sound mind” with six months or less to live.) Where can an “ingestion” take place? (Either a family’s home or the home of someone volunteering their property, since hospitals and hospices don’t permit the practice.) Sanchez was invited to witness families in their most intimate and vulnerable moments. There’s Alan, a man with aggressive lung cancer, who posed for a final family photo before taking his last drink. And there’s Astrid, a woman with ALS who requested to expedite the process to end her suffering. Sanchez captures tough scenes, including a moment when Astrid uses all her strength to reach for the doctor’s syringe to initiate the procedure (a patient must administer the dose themself). Sanchez writes with compassion and curiosity, observing without intrusion, and letting the moments unravel. Through these stories, he invites us to wrestle with this question: “How much control should we have over the terms of our own deaths?” The clinic’s director, a former ER doctor, tells him that “[a]ll stories need to have an ending, and we want our stories to matter.” I keep thinking about my uncle—and how, if given the chance, he would have shaped his own ending. —CLR
2. Queen of Darts
Amos Barshad | Victory Journal | October 3, 2025 | 3,475 words
Long a thriving and boisterous spectator sport in Europe, darts has hopped the pond in recent years, in large part due to wunderkind Luke Littler (who’s 18 years old but looks for all the world like a late-30s machinist). While fans might throng Madison Square Garden for tournaments, though, the sport retains its wild heart—as evidenced by Amos Barshad’s visit to Assen, Netherlands, for the Dutch Open. By entry numbers alone, the Dutch Open is the largest on the planet, and that scale carries over the seemingly constant celebration, which sounds both hilarious and utterly overwhelming. (“There are light-up fedoras,” Barshad writes of the themed bars inside the tournament hotel. “Yellow cowboy hats. Lots of faux-animal print. . . . Fortysomething men fashion leftover cardboard Grolsch beer trays into hats; this is just a thing that happens here.”) All that’s just scenery. Barshad’s not here for the revelry, but for two of the greats in the women’s field. Where Luke Littler brings youth to the sport, Deta Hedman and Mikuru Suzuki pose a fascinating counterpoint to darts’ usual demographic patterns. Hedman, a Brit by way of Jamaica, has been winning for decades, keeping a day job the entire way; Suzuki emerged from Japan nine years ago and is nearly undefeated in tournaments since. This is the side of darts that’s unseen outside of enthusiast circles: the 20-minute practice session snuck in during a night shift at a postal facility, the mother with unshakeable poise who celebrates to “Baby Shark.” Other individual sports may be as tense as darts, but nothing else has so little margin for error, or forces you to perform in front of an exuberant (and often exuberantly drunk) audience, with your opponent standing directly behind you. In that kind of environment, success only comes to those who are able to transcend the chaos that surrounds them. I won’t spoil how Hedman and Suzuki fare this time around, but it’s enough to make you want to step up to the oche yourself. Just don’t forget your yellow cowboy hat. —PR
3. This Amarillo Woman Devoted Years to Maintaining America’s Nuclear Arsenal. She’s Paid a Hefty Price.
Mark Dent | Texas Monthly | September 25, 2025 | 3,042 words
It’s a story as old as industry: An important company sets up shop in small-town America, offering good pay and stability in a place with few job opportunities. At first, there’s prosperity and pride, even a sense of patriotism among the employees. But toxic exposure eventually sickens and kills workers, while also poisoning the environment. Unwilling to bear the full cost of the carnage, the employer puts investigations on the slow roll. They bury, misinterpret, or mischaracterize reports. They delay and deny compensation claims. The government may wring its hands, but takes little, if any, effective action. Enter a tireless person who fights for workers, because no matter how much a company is worth to the local economy, no one should have to trade their health or their life to earn a steady paycheck. This is the story of many places, but it also belongs to Pantex, the facility just outside Amarillo, Texas, where “nearly all of America’s nuclear weapons are assembled, dismantled, and maintained.” Reporter Mark Dent centers his narrative on Sarah Dworzack Ray, who has dedicated her life to helping Pantex employees navigate a labyrinthine compensation claims process after her husband Michael Dworzack died of work-related cancer at age 54 in 1998. Pantex is cloaked in secrecy, given its importance to US national security; work is also ramping up with the US “under pressure to keep up with China and Russia.” Dent does a remarkable job of reporting among a reticent population. Silence is considered a duty and a virtue among workers, though, and the culture of secrecy is perhaps the most dangerous part of employment. As Dent writes: “One worker noticed health issues shortly after retiring in 1984, ‘but because I was sworn to secrecy, I could tell no one. I was told I could tell no one.’” This is a tough read, but perhaps the saddest part about it is that Pantex is hiring. —KS
4. In Arizona, a Fight Against a Deadly Fungus Is Under Threat From Trump’s Health Policies
Zoya Teirstein | Grist | October 2, 2025 | 4,800 words
Two years ago, Zoya Teirstein published a brilliant series of articles about how climate change is making us sick. Teirstein described how, as the planet warms, the risk profiles of various diseases are changing. As mosquitos move to higher elevations, malaria follows; as milder winters allow ticks to feed on human hosts for longer, encephalitis rates rise. Fast forward to 2025, and this has all been made worse by a wholly unforced error: the election of Donald Trump. His gutting of the federal bureaucracy and installation of anti-science figures in key government roles threatens efforts to stem climate change’s impact on disease. To illuminate this emergency, Teirstein revisits the theme of her 2023 series, this time focusing on valley fever. The fungus that causes this nasty disease occurs naturally in the soil of the American West. “Any disturbance of the topsoil—a foot kicking up earth, a bulldozer digging a foundation, an earthquake shaking loose clouds of dust—sends infinitesimal spores swirling into the air,” Teirstein writes. Valley fever, then, is “a disease that people contract simply by breathing in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Teirstein introduces readers to the network of researchers who’ve dedicated their careers to eradicating valley fever, all of whom are now holding their breath, crossing their fingers, and hoping the Trump administration doesn’t set their work back—or put an end to it altogether. In one scene, Teirstein describes a monthly conference call of valley fever experts. The CDC, which would normally be on the line, isn’t there. “They were sent the updates and the meeting link,” one of the people on the call says. “It’s up to them, really.” And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? This frightening reality: that our collective health, in the age of climate change, is up to them. —SD
5. You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor
Caity Weaver | The Atlantic | October 8, 2025 | 7,197 words
I once participated in a reenactment of the Battle of Waynesboro, a Civil War skirmish, for a story about the ways in which people make history visible in the present. The verisimilitude was all over the place; the past assailed the present, and vice versa, in odd ways. I saw a father tell his child, “I don’t want to hear anything about Hooters,” while, nearby, a teenager played “John Brown’s Body” on a fife. Throughout, I felt my distance from the most committed performers, and wondered whether I could glean anything meaningful from their historical theater. It’s not easy: Reenactments are a natural draw for participatory journalists, and the genre can feel well-worn. (This year has already seen thoughtful pieces on a performance of the Scopes Monkey Trial and the gamification of the US Capitol insurrection.) Of course, not all participatory journalists are Caity Weaver, survivor of TGI Friday’s “Endless Appetizers” promo and undaunted seeker of Tom Cruise’s secret lair. For “The Unfinished Revolution,” a new Atlantic series, Weaver embeds with reenactors for two early Revolutionary War battles, and savors every detail. A handsome Benedict Arnold is hoisted by his men, who bathe his leg in olive oil and struggle to remove his boots. A “Patriot civilian” whispers to Weaver that “a lot of the Brits are swingers.” It’s easy to admire Weaver’s eye for the absurd, and it’s a pleasure to share her gaze, which she gamely trains on herself, cataloguing potential musket mishaps and assessing her elaborate outfit as “a shapeless mound of fabrics crowned by my plain stupid face.” But what I most admire is her deep affection for the messiness of humanity. Here, she reveals its place at the heart of history’s slow progress. —BF
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
“Jason Lives” in Rutledge, Georgia
Pat Cassels | Oxford American | September 30, 2025 | 2,823 words
Every film franchise has devoted fans. But it takes a special kind of horror aficionado to spend Labor Day weekend where a Friday the 13th movie was filmed—and where a man dressed as slasher icon Jason Voorhees roams the grounds with a machete. Pat Cassels is one of those aficionados. For Oxford American, he unpacks his pilgrimage to the darker corner of the psyche. —PR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/10/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-582/
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