The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
October 17, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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• The American Dream, dashed
• Remembering D’Angelo
• DIY DNA
• What media bias really looks like
• Mummy dearest
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1. He Supported the US War in Afghanistan. Now He May Be Deported to the Taliban.
John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | October 14, 2025 | 4,630 words
It’s hard to watch videos of ICE agents snatching people in broad daylight across the US. They surface again and again in all of my feeds, each one blurring into the next. Most of the time, I can’t finish them. It’s easier to look away. Which is exactly why we need more pieces like this one: a thoughtful, deeply reported narrative that makes immigration and mass deportation feel less abstract. For The Washington Post, John Woodrow Cox writes about “H,” an Afghan man who supported the US during the war in Afghanistan. After arriving here through the humanitarian parole program, he applied for asylum and built a life—and raised two US-born kids—with his wife. But the Trump administration has since terminated the protections that allow Afghans like H to stay, with one Homeland Security staffer calling him an “unvetted alien from a high threat country.” H is anything but. He and his wife are law-abiding, hardworking, and educated: He took accounting classes, became a bookkeeper, and immersed himself in American culture, singing “Wheels on the Bus” in English to his kids and learning the language with the help of subtitles on Lost episodes. “He celebrated Thanksgiving with new friends, adopted the Chicago Bears, savored the buffet at Golden Corral,” writes Cox. “He imagined taking the naturalization oath and raising his family in the suburbs. He believed in Donald Trump.” Small yet vivid details like these make H’s journey impossible to ignore. Homeland Security claims that sending Afghans like H back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan would pose no danger, but H believes that deportation means death for him and his family. For safety reasons, Cox withholds identifying details, but through interviews with H, his family, and their network of friends and colleagues, he builds a portrait of a man defined by hard work and faith—someone who still believes in the American dream, even as America turns him away. —CLR
2. Remembering D’Angelo: The Eternal Spell of ‘Voodoo’
Justin Sayles | The Ringer | January 25, 2020 | 4,849 words
I still remember where I was the first time I heard D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar” in the summer of ’95. I remember where I was when I bought the CD of his 2000 masterpiece Voodoo. I remember where I was when he released 2014’s Black Messiah out of the blue. And I remember exactly where I was three days ago, when I learned he had died. Being shaken by the news felt almost exactly like it had when Chadwick Boseman passed away in 2020: two remarkable artists with decades of life in front of them, felled by the cancer they had battled outside of the public eye. Yet, in both cases, they had received their flowers before it was too late, from listeners and critics alike, and one of the few heartening things about this week was reading the stories about D’Angelo that have recirculated. One of my favorites of the bunch is this 2020 Ringer feature, itself a retrospective look at Voodoo’s creation and impact 20 years later. Justin Sayles speaks to collaborators like James Poyser and DJ Premier; he speaks with writers Faith Pennick and Oliver Wang who, like me, devoured his albums. And he combs for a gratifying amount of supplemental material, adding in texture that you might have heard elsewhere (e.g., Questlove’s tale about how he had to completely recalibrate his drumming style for the Voodoo sessions) but proves to be a crucial ingredient. The tattered state of magazine archives has been particularly cruel to hip-hop and R&B*, much of which was ignored by more mainstream music magazines until the ’00s. Until we resuscitate some of those incredible longform profiles from the ’90s, this sort of musical archaeology plays a pivotal role in making the past feel contemporary. If you weren’t there for the rise of the Soulquarians, you can at least connect with it now. How does it feel? —PR
* Even Vibe’s archive, which used to be hosted in full on Google Books, seems to be inaccessible now. My kingdom for well-digitized old Source and Rap Pages feature wells!
3. Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures
Aryn Baker | Noēma | October 7, 2025 | 3,793 words
It’s rare that a lede snaps my neck on a chain, but Aryn Baker’s did exactly that. “It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive,” she writes. “For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9—an enzyme-based genome-editing tool—to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos.” Baker learned genetic editing basics at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Then, by injecting “freshly fertilized zebrafish embryos” with CRISPR, she attempted to disable a gene associated with eye development. Her goal: to raise zebrafish without eyes. The writing here is fun, lively, and educational: “I line up dozens of single-cell embryos along the edge of a glass slide. Under the microscope, they look like a string of yellowed pearls. When I prod them with an ultra-fine glass syringe, they squish like tapioca balls in a boba tea.” In the end, some of her fish had no eyes, though some had unintended defects; several were stunted and could only swim in circles. Baker deftly uses this mini-experiment to convey the power of gene editing, its mind-numbing potential, and its many pitfalls. Imagine eradicating a disease by lopping off a gene required for its expression. (Looking at you, cancer!) Imagine altering the genetic code of mosquitos and eliminating the species that carry malaria. Baker entrances us with the potential of genetic editing, but does not shy away from asking difficult questions. Just because we can edit the genetic code of another being, should we? Are we ready for the consequences, both good and bad? (We are not.) What would happen if Baker’s fish were accidentally released into the wild? How would the eyeless fish affect the general zebrafish population? What would happen to zebrafish predators and prey? How, in turn, would changes to predators and prey affect a shared ecosystem? The implications of messing with nature are impossible to predict. Gene editing is an incredible field with limitless potential, to be sure. But are we prepared to pay the unknowable cost? —KS
4. Israeli Media’s Distorted View of the War in Gaza
Moran Barkai and Paul Tullis | Mother Jones | October 13, 2025 | 3,753 words
Each entry in Forcibly Involved, an online project that memorializes the children killed in Gaza, begins with a name, followed by the phrase “was here, and not anymore.” Entries also include the manner of death: “starvation,” “a bombing,” “shot in the head.” Adi Ronen Argov, an Israeli trauma therapist, started Forcibly Involved to fill a void. Her country’s media weren’t reporting on the tens of thousands of children murdered by the IDF. They weren’t reporting on atrocities in Gaza, period. As Moran Barkai and Paul Tullis explain in this excellent analysis of Israeli news coverage, while the rest of the world witnessed a genocide, “a random sample of hundreds of segments during the first six months of the war from Channel 12, the highest-rated newscast in Israel at the time, contained only four mentions of civilian casualties in Gaza.” Little has changed since. Barkai and Tullis introduce Ronen Argov as a rare voice of dissent against the Israeli media’s dominant narrative of the war, one that has parroted the government’s rhetoric—by turns nationalistic, dehumanizing, and vengeful. Perhaps more disturbingly, the coverage has echoed public sentiment. “A poll conducted in May found that 64 percent of Israelis don’t want additional information on what happens in Gaza,” Barkai and Tullis write. As of this week, a ceasefire is in effect, which may halt (or at least limit) the bombs and bullets in Gaza. But words can be weapons; so can silence. Both are still in the Israeli media’s arsenal. —SD
5. The Secret Life of Horus
Russell Cobb and Sarah Brandvold | Edify | October 1, 2025 | 2,732 words
Horus (a nickname; his real name is long lost) is an Egyptian mummy. He may be cursed. He has definitely been abused. And he’s currently living at the University of Alberta. Russell Cobb and Sarah Brandvold tell Horus’s remarkable afterlife story for Edify with a light touch and a clear moral compass: Horus, before anything else, is a human being. This was a fact conveniently forgotten in the Victorian era, when “owning a mummy was like driving a Rolls-Royce—a mark of refinement and prestige.” Unwrapping parties were all the rage, presumably wedged somewhere between cake and cigars, and “mummy brown,” paint made from, I kid you not, ground-up mummies, was a must-have palette color. Horus escaped the paint pot, but not much else. In 1942, he landed with George Woodrow of Stanmore, England, after his previous owner died (curse alert!). Mrs. Woodrow, less enthused about haunted antiquities, banished him to the shed for 25 years. Eventually, the family emigrated to Canada, where Horus also ended up. But a change of scenery did not improve his fortunes: A couple more deaths (curse alarm!) led to Horus being displayed on a city bus, unwrapped by teenagers, decapitated, sent to an Edmonton hospital, and even used as a political campaign prop (again, not kidding). I’ll let you read the fascinating details, but suffice it to say that ending up at the University of Alberta was a huge improvement. Shed spiders were swapped for a “multidisciplinary team of scientists, medical specialists, Egyptologists and conservation experts,” and Horus has been carefully studied and cared for since his arrival. But should he really be here, either? Like many, I can’t resist Egyptology, and find myself wandering straight to the mummy halls when I visit the British Museum. But as Cobb and Brandvold are so careful to remind us, these aren’t curiosities, they’re people. Horus was a lector priest and scribe, and was likely laid to rest with honor in the ancient city of Memphis, where he remained at peace for two millennia. His last hundred years have been a circus. Maybe it’s time he went home. —CW
Audience Award
What piece did our audience love most this week?
The Good Pervert
David Velasco | Harper’s | September 17, 2025 | 6,142 words
David Velasco’s memoir for the October issue of Harper’s orbits two events: his friendship with Brent Sikkema, a prominent art dealer who was found stabbed to death in his home in Rio de Janeiro, and Velasco’s ouster from Artforum, where he served as editor in chief, following publication of an open letter calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid in Gaza. These losses occurred just months apart; here, they are pulled into exquisite, compelling dialogue. Brent—”a particularly vivid friend”—is a singular, lively presence throughout, helping to power Velasco’s scrutiny of virtue. —BF
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/17/longreads-top-5-583/
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