The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
October 31, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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- Media mistrust
- Hunting identity
- Meat and pota-woes
- Celebrating cinephilia
- Knightley news
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1. Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?
Jelani Cobb, Taylor Lorenz, Jack Shafer, and Max Tani | Harper’s Magazine | October 22, 2025 | 6,693 words
There’s a video production company in Chicago called Mainstream Media, whose mission is to “help companies nationwide connect to their community with crisp and clear live video.” Mainstream Media is not a news organization, a point its founders have tried to make clear over the years, even adding a disclaimer to their website that reads, “We are not the actual ‘mainstream media.’” And yet, every so often—following bad-faith partisan attacks, for instance—the company receives messages from people angry at swaths of the American press. Misguided though they might be, these critics aren’t alone: Trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in half a century, according to one popular poll. And yet the mere existence of those annual polls reveals something about our perennial anxiety over the press. “Americans have never trusted large national institutions,” Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, remarks in this lively Harper’s forum with press critic Jack Shafer and reporters Max Tani and Taylor Lorenz. “In the nineteenth century, we didn’t trust the railroad monopolies; in the early twentieth century, we didn’t trust the newly corporatized banks. Today, when people think of a large, faceless, national institution, it’s more often than not the news media.” Is our loss in trust driven primarily by failures in coverage of Gaza or COVID-19, or about our collective distance from remote institutions that fail to reflect the communities they serve? The four journalists here differ in how they apportion responsibility, as well as how they interpret threats against press freedom in the US and what AI will do to entry-level journalism positions. They also complicate each other’s arguments productively, reminding each other, and us, that the mission of the media is, per Tani, to “meet people where they are.” You mean connect to our communities? Looks like Mainstream Media has the right idea. —BF
2. An Optimistic Quest in Apocalyptic Times
Nylah Iqbal Muhammad | The Bitter Southerner | October 28, 2025 | 6,333 words
Reading Nylah Iqbal Muhammad’s fierce, luminous essay on reconnecting to her roots and ancestral land in a time of social and ecological collapse feels like standing at the edge of the world, seeing the past and future at once. “As this world continues ending, it will not do so gently, and I am not sure if I will survive it,” she writes. “Many already have not. But I know that we will survive.” Muhammad confronts a history of stolen land and Black displacement and reclaims what’s been lost by learning how to hunt. “During my first hunting season, all my mentors had been white. I had to use their land, their weapons, their ammunition. . . . ” she writes. “I felt like I was entreating white people to let me into an inheritance that was already mine. I needed to learn from Black people, on Black land.” Across hunts in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Georgia, Muhammad writes with reverence and rage, tenderness and power. I’m moved by how she reframes hunting not as conquest but as communion. How she encounters a freshly killed elk with deep gratitude, determined to waste nothing—a sharp contrast to the white family who views kills as trophies. By the piece’s end, when she returns to her family’s home in Alabama, the fear she once felt has transformed into knowledge and acceptance. “Everywhere on this Earth, the land says that it will not carry us any longer if we keep at it like this,” she writes. “But I don’t believe it wants to move on without us. So I will learn.” This essay both guts and grounds me: It’s a reminder that ending and becoming can exist in the same moment. Even as this world burns, there are people learning how to build the next one. —CLR
3. The Kid Is All Right: In Defense of Picky Eating
Irina Dumitrescu | Serious Eats | October 18, 2025 | 2,905 words
We were a meat and potatoes family. I remember limp string beans, mushy peas and carrots, and creamed corn—all from cans. My brother was a picky eater. Can you blame him? My parents did the best they could with a budget as limited as their culinary imaginations. Mealtimes were often a standoff: my brother refusing, oh, probably electric-red canned beets; dad insisting Ryan clear his plate. Often, long after the dishes were done, Ryan would push his plate away and put his head down on his arms, eventually falling asleep at the table. Those mealtime conflicts planted the seeds of an adversarial relationship that lasted a lifetime. Irina Dumitrescu’s* recent piece for Serious Eats brought all these memories flooding back. In sharp and lively prose, she recounts her own discerning childhood palate and the creativity her elders employed in trying to get her to eat. Now, as an adult, she understands that in rejecting nourishment, she lost out on experiencing Romanian culture and precious time with her grandparents. Dumitrescu considers her son, who is choosy at mealtimes, too. Flush with empathy as someone who understands the cost she paid for being food-averse, Dumitrescu chooses a different tack at her table, refusing to allow her son to be defined by the food he will not eat. “I know the frustration of being browbeaten into eating something with a texture or smell I couldn’t bear, of staring down a plate of unfinished food for hours,” she writes. “I resent that his eating habits so often overshadow his many good qualities, as though this one flaw weighed heavier in the balance than his curiosity, empathy, or devilish grin.” Eating, after all, is more about power and control, about the right to make your own choices than it is about nutrition. If you, too, were made to eat as a child or love someone who was, you’ll find Dumitrescu’s incisive piece a refreshing and satisfying palate cleanser. —KS
* Irina has written several pieces for Longreads. Be sure to check out her full archive.
4. What I Saw at the Movies
Leo Robson | London Review of Books | October 29, 2025 | 4,249 words
In the year 2025, I’ve seen a grand total of two (2) movies in the theater*. Before that, the last time I saw a movie in the theater was late 2019. I do love good movies, though—and even more, I love other people’s love of movies. I love reading conversations with directors. I love the podcast The Big Picture, whether or not I’ve seen the movie they’re talking about. The 2002 documentary Cinemania? Yes, please. Leo Robson’s essay for London Review of Books falls squarely into this category. Robson became consumed with cinema as a teenager in the late ’90s and early ’00s, and saw everything he could get his eyes on, which meant everything from foreign arthouse fare to . . . the types of movies I enjoyed as a teenager, I guess. (Read: Anything with explosions. Or a rap soundtrack. Or both.) But while the piece starts as a travelogue of sorts, shuttling from theater to theater and film to film, Robson quickly expands the scope to interrogate the nature of film criticism, drawing a line from Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael to the reviewers of his adolescence. (“Films were always telling you about other things,” he writes. “From a Daily Express review of The Talented Mr Ripley in February 2000, I learned three new words in the space of a single clause: ‘a conspiracy of patriarchal decorum in which even Dickie’s father colludes.’”) It’s not about specific movies as much as it is about the movies, which is part of what makes it so accessible. The other part is that Robson writes about his obsession (and others’) with agility and ease, while also acknowledging where that obsession can lead: losing yourself in what Kael once called “the sullen art of displaced persons.” Robson may be grumpier now than he was then, but his essay evokes the the joy of cinephilia like few others. Maybe it’s time for me to go back and complete the trifecta. —PR
* Both were well worth it. Neither featured superheroes.
5. Keira Knightley: ‘I Went Mad. I Just Managed to Hide It’
Caitlin Moran | The Times | October 16, 2025 | 3,434 words
I’ve always been doubtful of Keira Knightley. In her early roles, she seemed to rely rather a lot on pouting. To me, she never felt right as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice—loyal as I am to Jennifer Ehle and the 1995 BBC adaptation. In Love Actually, her storyline of a young wife being low-key stalked by her husband’s best friend felt more disturbing than romantic. (In real life, Knightley was only 17.) And I never cared enough for swashbuckling to follow her through the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. But, in recent years, Knightley’s been taking on darker, more interesting work, and I was intrigued to read Caitlin Moran’s profile of an older Knightley. Moran is self-effacing, aware of her own earnestness as she promises Knightley, “I want this interview to be very different from all the other ones.” Knightley laughs and promises in return that she’ll never read it anyway. But this is different. Moran’s wry humor glows through as she admires Knightley’s “certain . . . aura. Cheekbones, clipped tones, an elegant clavicle.” And cheekbones aside, Knightley comes across as pretty normal. Moran notes: “I know you’re supposed to describe what famous Hollywood actresses are wearing and how they look, but it’s, like, some jeans and boots?” Swearing cheerfully, Knightley opens with a story about cleaning up cat shit before heading to the Wimbledon final. Perhaps she’s trying to be relatable, hiding her poise and pouts, but it seems she really is a “sweary, cat-shit-and-Britney-referencing north London mum.” Moran is quick to find out that, regardless of who she is now, the years of those early films were torturous. Early-aughts culture was, as Moran calls it, “an emotional killing field” for young, famous women who were harassed for their weight, partners, haircuts, existence. At one point, Knightley explains how paparazzi moved into the flat opposite hers, rendering the front half of her apartment unusable because they could see in with a telephoto lens. Truly insane. The official reason for this interview is Knightley’s new children’s book, complete with cutesy illustrations, but the deeper focus is her survival—how Knightley emerged from that toxic culture with “the steady gaze of someone who’s been through a lot of therapy.” These days, she doesn’t pout for the lens. She stares it down, unbothered and unbroken. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our readers loved most, this week.
I Tried to Toughen Up My Son. Things Didn’t Go as Planned.
Sam Graham-Felsen | The New York Times Magazine | October 19, 2025 | 5,062 words
Who would win in a fight: Theodore Roosevelt, or Pee-wee Herman? Those are the two models of masculinity competing within 8-year-old Saul, a National Parks enthusiast who carries his own first-aid supplies in the pockets of his Junior Ranger vest. Sam Graham-Felsen sets off for the Badlands with his son to teach him resilience, but ends up navigating the gullies that separate the violence we anticipate from the real deal, and less certain about how to prepare a child for either. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/31/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-585/
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