Best of 2025: All Our Number Five Story Picks
December 18, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
Number five stories are often the perfect portal to another dimension. Great for the commute or that comfy spot on your couch, they offer a handy distraction from the mundane or that holiday gathering you wish you’d declined. Sometimes lighthearted, always thoughtful, number five stories help us to view the world through a different lens. If you haven’t already, become a Longreads member so that you get these number five stories, and our other recommended reads, in your inbox on Friday mornings.
—Brendan, Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter & Seyward
January
Do You Believe in Life After Death? These Scientists Study It.
Saskia Solomon | The New York Times | January 3, 2025 | 3,719 words
Once, years ago, I tried to gain access to the Division of Perceptual Studies, the parapsychology research office at the University of Virginia. I’d become fascinated by Dr. Ian Stevenson, who founded the division in 1967 and, over decades, collected thousands of stories from people who claimed to recall past lives. Before his own death in 2007, Stevenson bought a combination lock from a local hardware store, set a private code, and locked it. Perhaps one day, freed of his earthly body, he might somehow communicate the code. The lock might snap open; a new light might shine into an old, dark mystery. For a long time, I passed the same hardware store on my walk to work. I tried interviewing Stevenson’s colleagues, who respectfully declined to speak with me; I made an appointment to visit the division’s research library, only to have it revoked. A staff member told me that the press “has trivialized our work here . . . for entertainment purposes, and we are very wary of this sort of thing happening.” Saskia Solomon’s reported feature is a rare, deep glimpse into the work of the Division of Perceptual Studies as it quietly continues—“notably distanced from the university’s leafy main campus,” Solomon notes, “and at least a couple of miles from the medical school.” As one former director tells her, “Nobody knows we’re here.” Solomon’s work is measured throughout, appropriately questioning and quietly attuned to the wonder of the researchers she shadows. Photographs from Matt Eich—of an enclosure to block electromagnetic interference; of a drawer filled with locks—hum with potential. There is always reason for skepticism; still, every story must mean something. —BF
The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden
Jasper Nathaniel | The Paris Review | January 13, 2025 | 2,775 words
New York City has always felt immune to certain cultural forces, particularly those that require wide-open spaces. As beautiful as its public parks are, they’re not exactly suited to activities beyond running or the odd pedal-boat rental. Hiking requires driving an hour or more. Skiing, the same. The very concept of rodeo sports in the five boroughs—let alone Manhattan—seems as unlikely as putting pineapple on pizza. This impossibility animates Jasper Nathaniel’s visit to a three-day bull-riding event held in Madison Square Garden, elevating it from what might be a gawking safari to an exercise in curiosity. How does this all work? Where do the bulls stay? Who attends the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden? (Who sponsors the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden does not invite such curiosity.) The result is incredibly entertaining, if not surprising. While the piece can skew toward glib at times, Nathaniel avoids the dreaded Coastal Writer Observes America™ trope by foregrounding his own ignorance. He’s chastened by wranglers; he comes out on the losing end of a handshake with a bull rider. So what if he dutifully recounts some conversations that happen to be hilarious? You ride with the bulls, you get the horns. —PR
Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?
Camille Bromley | The New York Times Magazine | January 6, 2025 | 5,104 words
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of bringing home Bowser. He wasn’t Bowser then; the day my wife and I met him, he had no name at all. Someone from the dog rescue had found him running around a shoreline park in the East Bay, collarless and ID-less, presumably dumped there but still friendly and trusting enough to hop in their car. We waited a month, so he could be reunited with whoever it was, if that was meant to happen, but it didn’t, and he became part of our family. Bowser has changed our lives, as dogs will do. Some of that is just the result of his being a happy, muscly little pug-mutt who walks like a cartoon—when you’re outside with a dog like that, people get happy, and they invariably talk to you—but some of it is just the alchemy of independence and utter dependence of living with a dog. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize them just a little, to map their moods and foibles to human psychology, to love them even while knowing that their bonding behaviors are more evolution than emotion. Even before we got Bowser, I’d seen TikTok videos of dogs using “talking buttons,” and couldn’t decide if it was miraculous or just well-engineered meme fodder. If a dog like Bunny the sheepadoodle really could tell her human that she had a foxtail in her paw, I reasoned, it made that bond all the more mystical. “These pets weren’t just standing by to serve their human owners,” as Camille Bromley writes of the animals she sees using talking buttons on social media. “They were companions with voices of their own.” Bromley’s fascinating feature can’t render a definitive judgment on dogs’ linguistic facility, since science can’t either, but it still plumbs the question with rigor and verve. She detours into the history of animal language experiments, she speaks to proponents and detractors in the research community, and she renders button-based communication in all caps because it’s just far more enjoyable that way. This is a piece for dog lovers, yes, but it’s really for anyone with a sense of wonder and possibility. (The readers in the story’s comment thread do not have a sense of wonder and possibility.) Besides, even if we never get Bowser a set of talking buttons, I know what he’d use it for. BALL. BALL NOW. BALL PLAY NOW. —PR
Why Children’s Books?
Katherine Rundell | London Review of Books | January 29, 2025 | 5,753 words
Shortly after parenthood recalibrated my life, I visited the children’s section of our local library for the first time. My initial confusion—Who hid all the modern art books in the kids’ section?—quickly gave way to giddiness as I pulled more picture books from the shelves. There was subversion here, both sly and overt! There was economy of emotion! Conceptual rigor! The library’s most accessible section, I realized, was also its most powerful. “Children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning,” Katherine Rundell writes for The London Review of Books. It also holds the promise of an egalitarian space: “We can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida.” Rundell offers a brisk and entertaining history of English-language children’s books, from “conduct manuals focused on nose-picking” through Tolstoy’s stories for younger readers. (“There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain,’ a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird.”) As labor and suffrage movements gained strength, however, children’s books became less concerned with simplistic manner lessons; instead, Rundell observes, “they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be.” She draws on the mighty Ursula Le Guin for urgency: “In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power and to offer moral alternatives.” And there are so many alternatives to consider, if one only looks. —BF
February
My Quest to Find the Owner of a Mysterious WWII Japanese Sword
Kevin Chroust | Outside | February 5, 2025 | 9,866 words
This piece on returning a Japanese military sword is a passion project. Born out of love for the author’s grandfather, curiosity, and just plain lockdown boredom, it was years in the making—500 years, if you count from when the sword was crafted. Kevin Chroust’s family came into the picture a mere 80 years ago: His grandfather found the sword on an Okinawa beach in the final days of World War II and mailed it back to America. (The competence of the postal service is one of the more shocking elements of this story.) Chroust remembers the sword being brought out as a child, a prop for war stories, but it was only as an adult that he considered the wooden label attached to it, which asked, in part, “your favour to send my sword to my home,” with a name and a town on the other side. Drawn to the plea, Chroust began an internet search to track down the sword’s original owner. It was not a simple process, but after finding relatives of the owner, Chroust started to plan a trip to Japan. He has a delightfully wry tone when discussing the reality of this adventure: “[F]antasy is simple. The imagination can’t be bothered with unromantic minutiae. With weapons laws. Consulates. Viruses. Visas. Visa sponsorships.” But he perseveres until he and the sword are finally on the way to Japan. (Again, great trust is given to the postal system.) I won’t spoil the ending, but there are some beautiful moments. This is a fun detective piece and a fascinating history lesson, but, above all, it is a personal story. A tale of two families, on two sides of a war, then two sides of the world, who are brought together “with acts of kindness on both sides.” —CW
Seth Rogen is the Boss Now
Dave Holmes | Esquire | February 11, 2025 | 5,482 words
I’ve written enough celebrity profiles in my life that I’d be happy if I never write another. Judging from how rarely I recommend them here, sometimes I wonder if I’d be happy if I never read another. They rarely feel anything other than transactional; they flatten into the same small arsenal of tropes; it’s always difficult to shake the sense that you’re reading something choreographed, negotiated, artificial. That’s unfair, of course. Curious writers and engaged subjects is never a bad combination, as Dave Holmes’s cover profile of Seth Rogen proves. Rogen’s been a comedy star since he was 16 years old (at least for those of us who fell in love with the short-lived TV series Freaks and Geeks). He’s done this dance a million times. But despite what you may think from his cinematic man-child persona, Seth Rogen is also a thoughtful, decent, deeply creative person who is at home in his skin the way few people are. He cares about what he does. He knows who he is. He lives his life intentionally. He’s made creative and personal choices, all well-chronicled, that I respect. And the time he spends with Holmes makes that clear. There’s no stunty scenework here—no skydiving trips, no “come with me while I get my hands dirty pretending to drive cattle on this massive compound I bought two years ago”—just conversation. Sure, some of that conversation is about weed. (“I feel like [I’m] getting tips on my morning jog from . . . Eliud Kipchoge,” cracks Holmes.) This is Seth Rogen, after all. And in a moment when so much comedy feels like it’s curdling into something belligerent and nasty, we could all use a little bit more of his you-do-you demeanor. —PR
The Cat’s Meat Man
Kathryn Hughes | The Public Domain Review | February 12, 2025 | 2,009 words
Somewhere in my drafts folder sits a long blog post about how I don’t know anything about history. (Apologies to Sam Cooke.) Little things, sure—I’ll never forget the year the Battle of Hastings was fought, for some reason—but my grasp of “world history” is absolutely shameful. I’ve thought more about this recently, and I think my issue is that too much history writing is boring. You know what’s not boring? Kathryn Hughes’s piece about the “itinerant offal vendors” who crisscrissed Victorian London, selling horsemeat to cat owners. At one point, she writes, there were 1,000 pushcarts traversing the city, feeding 300,000 cats. These were men bound by a code: They respected each other’s turf, and were up with the sun “threading the chunks onto wooden skewers, to make up anything from a ha’penny snack to a three-penny feast.” Hughes surveys the phenomenon with agility and verve, skipping from true crime (early speculation that Jack the Ripper may have been a cat’s meat man) to the spectacle of a 1901 grand banquet held for these hardworking friends of felines. What really brings this piece to life, though, is the wealth of archival materials that accompies it: photos, magazine illustrations, and postcards that span more than a century. This is history not as a dry excavation, but as a living, meowing, offal-reeking tour of the past. I may not know anything about World War I, but at least now I can horrify friends with tales of horse kebabs and the men who peddled them. —PR
Day 1,509 in the Big Brother House
Gary Grimes | The Fence | January 29, 2025 | 1,856 words
For a certain generation, the sound of the MSN Messenger notification is an instant time warp. I am transported back to my dad’s home office, a tiny room dominated by a giant desktop that whirred and groaned as it came to life. In my early teens, I spent hours in that room, playing Lemmings and talking to friends (and crushes) on MSN Messenger. That ding-dong-ding signaling a new message was a pure thrill, and I still feel its echoes today. But when I left the room after being shouted at to free up the phone line, the conversations stayed behind, trapped in a computer now whirring its way through an agonizingly slow shutdown. This was all before smartphones made online conversations perpetual. Gary Grimes knows what I am talking about. A veteran of pre-social media online interactions, Grimes spent his tween years on ThisIsBigBrother.com, or TiBB, “an online forum created in the early 2000s for discussion of the eponymous television phenomenon.” (Big Brother is another nostalgia bomb.) Grimes joyfully brings the disparate groups of the forum to life, explaining its operation “like the lunchroom from Mean Girls.” He is also happy to throw shade at his self-aggrandizing former self, not shying away from any of the cringeworthy teenage memories. The narrative revels in Grimes’s youthful world before bringing you back to the present, where Grimes tracks down his former forum buddies. These online voices from the past now have “jobs, partners, friends, and grown-up responsibilities.” Real things. While that early 2000s forum helped shape them all, it was always something they could leave behind. After all, the computer shut off. —CW
March
I Survived Downhill Skiing’s Rowdiest Party
Devon O’Neil | Outside | February 27, 2025 | 2,432 words
Outside seems to be on a run of stories about getting worse for wear in a European ski resort. (A much more raucous and free experience than most lawsuit-happy North American resorts.) A few weeks ago, Kassondra Cloos reported on the debauchery of a singles ski trip to Val Thorens, France, and now it’s Devon O’Neil’s turn to slap on some skis (briefly) and down some shots (many). O’Neil is nothing if not committed. There is no fly-in-fly-out reporting here; he is in Kitzbühel, Austria, for six whole days and nights. Six nights spent in a six-bunk room at the SnowBunnys Hostel with snoring Josh, who sounds like “a semi-truck using its engine brake,” and puking Rupert, who loses a battle with some peach schnapps. SnowBunnys may be grim, but O’Neil’s descriptions of sleep deprivation and urine on the toilet floor still gave me twinges of nostalgia: I stayed in many such ski hostels in my early 20s, and damn, it was fun. Nowadays, such a trip would result in a hospital stay, or at best, tears. So big respect for O’Neil, a middle-aged dad who manages to complete this challenge while keeping the moaning to a minimum. One perk of the SnowBunnys Hostel is its location close to the finish line of the Hahnenkamm downhill ski race, or as O’Neil writes, “alpine schussing’s holy grail, where skiers become legends on a twisting elevator shaft of ice called the Streif.” While feigning to cover this event, this piece is more about the sport found off the slopes. From the camaraderie of locals drinking in a tiny mountaintop bar to the legendary post-race shenanigans in the Londoner pub, this is an homage to having a good time. It is also a dissection of a tiny mountain hamlet and the vast array of very different people who descend upon it each year. At one point, O’Neil watches “a young man dig a beer bottle out of the snow, hoping it was full, then toss it back when it wasn’t, next to a mother nursing her baby on the ground.” While the subject matter is unashamedly trivial, this is the humorous cavort I needed this week. So, cheers to European après. I do miss it. —CW
A ‘Jeopardy!’ Win 24 Years in the Making
Claire McNear | The Ringer | March 11, 2025 | 2,678 words
Ringer writer Claire McNear has consistently owned the Jeopardy! news beat since Alex Trebek’s 2020 death, including hastening the departure of initial replacement Mike Richards. But it’s stories like this one that really explain the game show’s foothold in the cultural firmament. More than two decades ago, a man named Harvey “H-Bomb” Silikovitz auditioned for Jeopardy! He failed the test. Over the years, he auditioned nine more times. Those times, he passed the test. But he still never got on the show. He became friendly with the producers. He became a well-known personality in the larger trivia subculture, which is a thing that exists. He developed Parkinson’s disease. Finally, last fall, he was invited to be a contestant. And in his first episode, which aired earlier this week, he won. (Alas, that would be his only victory; he was vanquished by a nuclear engineer the next night.) On its own, that’s a mildly heartwarming story. Buoyed by McNear’s reporting, though, it’s a fascinating look behind the buzzer. Jeopardy! has somehow only become more popular in the post-Trebek era—more than 65,000 people have taken the online test in the past year alone—and by now is a subculture of its own, beloved by alumni and spectators alike. McNear navigates its intricacies with a breezy assurance, less an anthropologist than a confidant. When you have that many people fighting to get on, simply getting to the lectern is a victory of its own. The winding nature of H-Bomb’s journey makes it all the sweeter. —PR
How the Irish Pub Became One of the Emerald Isle’s Greatest Exports
Liza Weisstuch | Smithsonian Magazine | March 17, 2024 | 2,283 words
On Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, our local Irish pub was heaving by 9 a.m., a queue snaking out the door into the drizzle. The pub is called Dubh Linn Gate, and I once went there for the big day myself. To get a spot, you have to be there by breakfast (a pint of Guinness). I vaguely remember a lot of green and fiddles, then needing to go home before lunch for a little lie-down. The crowd was diverse, but with only a few genuine Irish revelers, for the Dubh Linn Gate is not in Dublin but in Canada—one of thousands of Irish pubs dotted around the world. You’ve probably got an Irish pub in your hometown. You’ve probably been. The Irish pub is cozy and inviting: mahogany bars, stained glass, intimate booths. No canteen-style sports bar here. It’s a town staple I took for granted until Liza Weisstuch’s piece enlightened me on the work it takes to replicate this Irish charm. Many of these establishments have one man to thank for their old-world ambiance: Mel McNally, whose Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has designed upward of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the globe. In a genius move, McNally studied Irish pubs for two years as an architecture school student in the ’70s. His “homework” included visiting 200 pubs around Ireland. Once a pub expert, McNally realized that while Ireland may have plenty of them, the rest of the world did not, and he was the man to help. His company takes designing Irish pubs very seriously, as Weisstuch explains: “You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.” McNally tells Weisstuch he “recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub,” which is anchored by the bar, or “altar of service,” as McNally calls it. (The bar being visible from anywhere in the pub is a non-negotiable aspect of the company’s designs.) Up to 80 people are involved in a single project, with everything made in Ireland and shipped abroad. Weisstuch takes her reporting on this detailed Irish export seriously, and both she and McNally turn a lovely phrase in their explanations. They left me with great respect for the effort that goes into creating the Irish “essence.” Next time I am in the Dubh Linn Gate, I will raise my pint to the bar—you can’t miss it, it’s positioned center stage. —CW
The Biggest Loser
Luke Winkie | Slate | March 20, 2025 | 5,265 words
Baby needs a new pair of shoes! For Slate, Luke Winkie profiles profligate gambler Matt Morrow, aka “Vegas Matt,” a man who broadcasts his betting at the El Cortez Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, to his 1.1 million followers on YouTube. Morrow plays baccarat, slots, and blackjack. By recording it all, win or lose, he’s turned his gambling into a lucrative spectacle that allows viewers to experience his highs and lows vicariously, without risking any of their own “chocolate chips.” (A chocolate chip is worth $10,000, a pittance to Morrow, who routinely risks much higher sums.) Your first question might be: Where does he get his money? Thirty percent comes from sponsorships and merch, while YouTube yields 70 percent. Casinos are notoriously private. They watch your every move but prohibit capturing video lest thieves gain an advantage against the house. Not so the El Cortez. Morrow’s 1,200 YouTube videos have earned him a legion of viewers that follow his every move. The El Cortez makes bank on fans who, inspired by Morrow, want to try their luck. Winkie does a great job of trying to dig past Morrow’s rictus-grin hype to understand what motivates a man to gamble so prolifically and record every moment of it. As you might suspect, it’s not about the buzz of the casino, or even the wins. It’s about fame, about validation from views. “The more I was around Morrow, the more I detected an elemental craving just below those gold chains,” writes Winkie. “And why is the grind worth it? Easy. It has made Vegas Matt a celebrity, which, as I learned, is much more of a thrill for him than the money is.” As much as I enjoyed reading this profile about a guy doing what he wants with his own money, I felt uneasy about the shtick, about Morrow’s parlay-as-performance. After all, if you’ve given away years of your life gambling in Vegas for the empty love of YouTube infamy, do you really have anything more to lose? —KS
April
The Last Detail
Kent Russell | Harper’s Magazine | March 21, 2025 | 8,178 words
Of the many self-selecting groups that congregate in New York City, some seem to exist only in collective form. Like chess hustlers. Or Black Israelites. Or, maybe most noticeably, the Guardian Angels: Not once have I spied that red satin jacket and almost-matching beret in the singular. I wasn’t sure if that was my own dumb luck, or if they simply kept the regalia stowed until they met up with their compatriots. Kent Russell’s Harper’s story about the volunteer patrol organization doesn’t explain the phenomenon, but given how enjoyable it is, I doubt you’ll hold it against him. Russell joins the group after living in New York for nearly 20 years, motivated by curiosity but also the sincere desire to contribute. The realization that there was a great essay in it probably didn’t hurt, either. You’re by his side through multiple patrols, each described in the deadpan detail Russell has perfected over the course of books like I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son and In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida. I’m predisposed to being annoyed by pieces like this; one person’s fish out of water is another’s white writer on class/culture safari. However, Russell approaches this with care, and while his scenework is often pitched for a laugh, its arm’s-length regard feels like a function of self-consciousness rather than judgment. (Besides, there’s something patently ridiculous about treating the New York of now—a Target on every corner, an influencer filming TikToks on every block—like the New York of the late ’70s.) Look through the group’s bluster and the writer’s self-deprecation, and you’ll see that the two are more similar than they appear. Both love the city they live in. And neither wants to be the only one. —PR
Richard E. Grant: ‘Love Again? I’m Not Looking For It’
Vassi Chamberlain | The Times | April 5, 2025 | 2,168 words
In my early 20s, I spent a few months living in France. My French was embarrassingly poor, and in those days before streaming, my media consumption was limited to the handful of English DVDs I had packed. I watched these films so many times that I can still quote huge chunks. My favorite was Withnail and I, in which Richard E. Grant plays Withnail, an out-of-work, alcoholic actor who proclaims such things as, “We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!” Withnail speaks his mind, often disparaging those around him with bitter humor, which is a trait that came to mind as I read Vassi Chamberlain’s interview with an audacious and combative Grant. There is no sycophantic pandering on either side here, which, while a touch uncomfortable, makes for a fascinating read. For every question Chamberlain asks, Grant responds by asking her the same one, including whether she has had therapy. (Chamberlain avoids answering it.) But this is not an avoidance strategy on Grant’s part: He still answers Chamberlain’s questions with searing honesty. When asked about Withnail, he is dismissive: “The last time I saw it was a rough cut in 1987. I offered to return the £20,000 fee because I thought I’d ruined the film.” (A painful blow to this ardent fan.) We also learn that he had an alcoholic, abusive father, and that he was devastated over the death of his wife of 38 years. Grant beautifully speaks about the latter: “The conversation that began in bed in January 1983, ended in bed as we held each other’s hands, still talking, on Thursday the 2nd of September, 2021. . . . Talking is the greatest intimacy of all.” He still writes to his wife every night, telling her about his day and who he has met. Chamberlain bravely, perhaps foolishly, asks him what he will write about her. He replies: “All her girlfriends now look 40 years old but her jawline is hanging around her knees and in ten years she will tie a bow with her dyed hair around her chin in a tight knot and she’ll look like the Queen at Balmoral.” Chamberlain’s response, and her final word: “Ouch.” —CW
There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People
Ellen Cushing | The Atlantic | April 14, 2025 | 2,402 words
A few years ago, I replaced my trusty old black Bosch dishwasher, seduced by a newer, sleeker silver model. I hate it. The new dishwasher may look pretty, but the damn dishes never seem to come out clean. A dishwasher without substance, I thought. But after reading Ellen Cushing’s delightfully sardonic piece on how to load a dishwasher, I’m forced to admit: Maybe I’m part of the problem. A chaotic dish-dumper by nature, I’ve long been the source of sharp intakes of breath from friends brave enough to crack the door and peer into the abyss. And according to fellow dish-dumper Cushing, we may need to refine our systems (or start one). Or maybe we’ve been misled: As she notes, the internet is clogged with dishwasher-loading advice, commentary, and anxiety. This humble source of domestic angst was clearly crying out for an investigation, and in Cushing’s hands, the quest for dishwasher-loading truth becomes highly entertaining. It turns out I had absolutely no idea how dishwashers actually work. I’ve also been wasting time faffing about pre-rinsing plates, when, as Cushing explains, today’s “enzymatic detergent” is “like a little Pac-Man, eating dirt and making room for the soap to do its job.” Life-changing. Maybe you, too, will read Cushing’s piece and quietly make a few tweaks to your own dishwasher game. Or, maybe, you’ll quickly forward this on to your partner. Whether household harmony or continued dishwasher wars lie in your future, may your glasses always come out spot-free. —CW
How Creativity Became the Reigning Value of Our Time
Bryan Gardiner | MIT Technology Review | April 18, 2025 | 1,988 words
Creativity is of the utmost importance in Minecraft, a digital fantasia for would-be architects where my 8-year-old son spends time (though not nearly as much as he would like). He studies blueprints for elaborate, blocky structures, and invents his own idiosyncratic ones. A four-story fortress made entirely from TNT? No one will mess with that, he assures me. “Anything you can dream about, you can create,” Jack Black promises, his voice brimming with awe, in A Minecraft Movie, the highest-grossing film of 2025 so far. In contrast, the Nether, Minecraft’s hellish underworld, is “a place with no joy or creativity at all.” I don’t derive much joy from Minecraft, myself. And yet Bryan Gardiner’s conversation with Samuel Franklin, a cultural historian and author of The Cult of Creativity, has me watching my son a bit more closely, wondering at his impulses to shape the space around him. “Like a lot of kids, I grew up thinking that creativity was this inherently good thing,” Franklin tells Gardiner. “Being creative meant you at least had some future in this world, even if it wasn’t clear what that future would entail.” Later, Franklin realized that “what was being sold as the triumph of the creative class wasn’t actually resulting in a more inclusive or creative world order.” While on the shorter end of a Longreads recommendation, Gardiner’s exchange with Franklin is chock-a-block with curiosities from our recent fixation on creativity as a cure-all. After you read, you’ll find yourself searching for details on the psychologists who first elevated concepts of divergent thinking, on the cognitive tests put to Norman Mailer and Louis Kahn to gather data on creativity. You may find yourself looking at a brick, and thinking more expansively about just how much heart you put in your creations. —BF
May
Fried Fish & Family Affairs
Sarah Golibart Gorman | The Bitter Southerner | April 30, 2025 | 3,489 words
No matter how many states you’ve lived in, no matter how much of the country you’ve seen, the United States is so vast and varied as to remain stubbornly unknowable. (Sorry, Alexis de Tocqueville.) Case in point: the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where Sarah Golibart Gorman spent her adolescence. It’s a place that feels distinct even from the other two states that share its peninsula—linguistically, culinarily, culturally. (The “from here” vs. “come here” divide is so strong that one transplant who had a child on the Shore is told “just because the cat has kittens in an oven, you don’t call them biscuits.”) When Golibart Gorman and her brothers come back to the Shore to help pack up their parents’ house, she tries black drum fish ribs for the first time in her life, at which point the piece shifts from a bucolic remembrance to something more viscerally satisfying. “Perfectly salty, reflective of the bay and the ocean from which it came, the drum was a taste of home I tried to memorize,” she writes, “allowing its briny flakiness to anchor me.” She unpacks drum’s importance to the region, its unappetizing exterior and its unforgettable interior, its unerring ability to bring a family together. You don’t just read this piece; you feel it. You wonder how it is that you’ve never been to this place, tasted its bounty, felt that particular satiety that comes from sharing such a meal with loved ones. And you add one more name to the list of places you want to visit. —PR
How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree
Matthew Ponsford | Noēma | March 6, 2025 | 4,227 words
I recently hugged a thousand-year-old yew tree. Part of The Yew Tree Project in England, this tree had a sign next to it that read “Hugging a tree increases the levels of the hormone oxytocin.” (I imagine this tree gets a lot of hugs, so I hugged the sign-bereft neighbor too.) These trees are not conventionally beautiful. Their huge limbs are knotted and furled, curling awkwardly to the ground, as if to prop up their heavy, rotting trunks. Seeing a thousand winters come and go takes its toll, and the air felt heavy with their sighs of age. Trees such as these (over 400 years old) are classified as “ancients.” The UK has more ancient trees than the rest of Europe combined. This isn’t because Brits have been particularly protective of their elderly vegetation. Rather, as Matthew Ponsford explains in this piece for Noēma, it is, at least partly, because kings and queens shut people out from vast swaths of land so they could hunt without having to clap eyes on any bothersome commoners. Sherwood Forest, William the Conqueror’s hunting ground in the 11th century, has about 380 ancient trees. Ponsford visits its most famous: an oak tree named the Major, another potentially thousand-year-old behemoth. Like the yews, this old man is past his prime. As Ponsford contemplates the wizened boughs held up by metal columns like walking sticks, he wonders if he should feel “saddened by the decline of this long-lived beast.” But arborist Rob Harris is quick to reframe Ponsford’s thoughts of the Major as a “withering geriatric.” Ancients have a fundamental role in the forest, one so important that arborists have even begun “veteranization.” This is the process of hitting and cutting holes in young trees to promote the aging seen in their elders. It seems brutal—but rot-filled caverns are fundamental ecosystems for birds and insects, and, as the ancients diminish, ones that are becoming lost. The young, beautiful trees are just not as valuable to the forest without a few life scars. As someone who has always loved trees, I devoured Ponsford’s fascinating insights, but you will be gripped regardless of your forestry inclinations. A solid reminder to always hug the ugly old ones. They are important. —CW
The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch
Forrest Wickman | Slate | May 11, 2025 | 6,365 words
As far as opening sentences go, it’s hard to beat “There is nothing quite like becoming birdpilled.” I don’t even care about birds!* Yet, Forrest Wickman grabbed me immediately. Maybe I’m a sucker for obsessions. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good hook. Probably both. Thankfully, the other 6,358 words in the story pay off the promise of those first seven. See, in becoming the kind of person who listens to birds basically all the time, Forrest Wickman has also become the kind of person who gets irritated when a bird sound in a movie or TV show doesn’t match the bird shown on screen, or is otherwise impossible. This happens a lot. But nothing is quite as irritating to Forrest Wickman as the bird who proves pivotal to the plot of 2000’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s called a pygmy nuthatch, which it is not; it’s described as being indigenous to a single city in California, which it is also not; and it makes a sound that is neither that of a pygmy nuthatch or the bird it actually is. I’m not even Forrest Wickman, and this bothers me. So Forrest Wickman (whose name I am doomed to write in full) sets off to figure out what the hell happened to create this sorry state of affairs. He talks to the original screenwriter. He talks to one of the script doctors. He talks to the animal trainer who helped cast the imposter. He talks to the sound editor. He talks to a naturalist and journalist who seems to specialize in how Hollywood screws up anything ornithological. He talks to a man who is even crazier about birds than he is. He talks to the developer of a popular birdsong app. Each of these conversations is more entertaining than it has any right to be. Ultimately, he talks to the movie’s director, McG—who, I have to say, destroyed everything I’d ever assumed about McG. McG should be interviewed about weird things more often. Yes, Forrest Wickman discovers exactly what happened with the bird on Charlie’s Angels, and why. And in the process, he writes** one of the most pleasurable stories I’ve read this year. Maybe I’ve been birdpilled too. —PR
* Clarification: I care about birds in the dignity-of-living-things sense. I don’t care inordinately about birds. No angry emails, please.
** The story was originally an episode of Slate’s podcast Decoder Ring that came out last October. As much as I enjoy Decoder Ring, though, I have to tell you: This is even better as a written feature.
The Hobo Handbook
Jeremiah David | The Paris Review | May 9, 2025 | 2,233 words
When I was in my 20s, someone passed me a map to the steam tunnels that run beneath the University of Virginia, complete with “anecdotal demonstration” of how to access locked buildings. The map had come under scrutiny from the school; a student had recently fallen from the top of the Physics Building to his death. In most respects, I was, and still am, a cautious person. Still, I felt a pull. I never used the map, but I took some satisfaction from exploring its contents and nursing the idea that I might quietly transport myself somewhere rarely traveled. Jeremiah David knows of what I speak, having frequently tested the limits of a similar, albeit more storied, desire: hopping trains. In New Orleans, he briefly takes hold of a freight car and, keeping pace, considers “what it would feel like to pull myself up on the fly.” In Oregon, he climbs aboard a stopped car one night. “I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light,” David writes. “The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.” A friend finally hands David a copy of the Crew Change Guide, an underground text that promises “best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada” and whose extremely pre-Internet history David relays with the care of a true devotee. “The Guide signified more than information to me; it signified the courage to act on it,” he writes. “I knew that no guide, no matter how detailed or digestible, could substitute for experience. But I returned to it again and again over the following days, craving some conclusive invitation.” David’s fascinating literary history is a thoughtful evaluation of his own longings, and a reminder that the most enchanting reads often feel like invitations. —BF
Haines Man Finds Father
Will Steinfeld | Chilkat Valley News | May 15, 2020 | 3,063 words
Being shown a picture in a magazine and being told it’s your long-lost father? That’s the kind of plotline that belongs in a soap opera. But in Mike Thompson’s case, it’s plausible. Thompson’s mother claimed she met his dad at a New York party in the ’60s: a suave, well-dressed model who drove fancy cars. Despite her mailing him a GQ clipping, Thompson remained doubtful. Growing up the “only son of a nurse in Anchorage,” as Will Steinfield writes, makes it hard to imagine your dad as a jet-setting James Bond type. Besides, Thompson was too busy leading his own life to chase down his father. While subtle in his comparisons, Steinfield still shows Thompson to be as impressive—if a touch less glamorous—as the man from the magazine. Entering Thompson’s home, Steinfield notes: “Through the entryway is a wall of certificates and mementos from Thompson’s service, as a park ranger, fighter pilot, and air marshal, all hung plumb and level.” It’s Thompson’s calm, level-headed demeanor that grounds this larger-than-life story. When a relative reaches out through Ancestry.com, Thompson takes months to respond with a phone number. Eventually, he learns of his half-brother. He also learns of Stephen Winn: a former model who had been to New York and drove fancy cars. Thompson then flies across the world from freezing Anchorage to freezing Scotland, where Winn lived. I’ll let you find out what happens next. Steinfield’s writing is accessible and smooth, never weighed down by sentimentality or excessive detail, light with clarity. At a tight 3,000 words, this piece of reporting brings decades-spanning revelations to life and wraps them in the quiet dignity of a man who built his own life, regardless of who his dad was. —CW
June
Laughing With the Pain
Natalie Marlin | Bright Wall / Dark Room | May 30, 2025 | 3,121 words
I never set out to watch Jackass, the unlikely media franchise born from the self-inflicted humiliation and ding-dong daredevilry of Johnny Knoxville and his crew of goons. Still, was there a teenager in the early aughts who managed to dodge it entirely? Clips resurfaced at odd hours on MTV; I was never quite sure when I might encounter footage of Steve-O, wild-eyed and jockstrapped, walking a low tightrope over an alligator pit, surrounded by his band of brothers, who were few but always seemed happy. The Jackass cast members have “an abrasive way of expressing their love for one another, but it’s a love language regardless,” writes Natalie Marlin. “To be cared for, in the world of Jackass, is to subject your friends to outlandish feats of human endurance, blows that knock the wind out, staredowns with deadly wildlife, and blunt genital trauma.” Marlin started watching Jackass after she began transitioning, joining a population “more statistically prone to pain than most people who appear in a Jackass film.” In her essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, she winces and laughs her way through two decades of Jackass content, watching the cast suffer together as they grow older. As she does, she details the pain she has invited into her own life, as well as the comfort she takes from those who have shared a version of it. Between the groin shots and hospital trips, Marlin identifies acts of “community-building, of getting closer to those you love by partaking in the stupidest, most humiliating, most dangerous acts imaginable. You wouldn’t do the kinds of things that happen in a Jackass film in front of just anyone. The most ideal way to endure those kinds of pain is with those you feel the closest to.” For years, a disclaimer ran ahead of Jackass, warning away imitators and declaring that the stunts to follow were “performed by professionals.” The joke, of course, was that they weren’t—at least not at first. But we all become veterans of pain, don’t we? May we all find a small crew of friends to soothe us. —BF
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Elena Gosalvez Blanco | The Yale Review | June 9, 2025 | 6,281 words
My wife and I lived, for a summer, in the home of a writer I admire. He told us jokes while he made us dinner, a recipe an ex taught him, tossing pieces of rotisserie chicken with arugula, olives, and goat cheese. I drove his pickup to the dump for him, his Public Enemy cassette in the deck, a garbage can filled with his empty bourbon bottles rattling in the back. When he was away, I read his story collections. There were the same pieces of his life, dispersed among his characters: the truck, the Public Enemy, the salad. The distinctions between our life and his stories blurred, sharpening the remainder of our summer together. Another couple moved in after us; later, I saw pieces of their life in a New Yorker story. Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, wielded a singular intensity in her life and work. (One critic who resisted her novels feared that “spending too much time in Highsmith’s brain might alter mine irrevocably.”) In 1994, during the final months of Highsmith’s life, Elena Gosalvez Blanco moves to Switzerland to become her live-in assistant. Highsmith controls Blanco’s access to the phone and to friends, and scolds her for using electricity. “I was trapped in her world with her, trembling,” Blanco writes. “I fantasized that she might try to kill me.” From one wing of the U-shaped house, Blanco gazes across a courtyard into Highsmith’s bedroom, aware that Highsmith might just as easily observe her when she chooses. An acquaintance tells Blanco that Highsmith “is just in love with you,” deepening Blanco’s worry: “Like Ripley, Pat could be charming but also dark, possessive, irrational, and impatient.” Blanco’s account of her weeks with Highsmith is suspenseful and precise, a dark portrait of a complex relationship that explores the scrim between life and art. —BF
Changing Lanes
Dave Denison | The Baffler | June 2, 2025 | 5,812 words
That I haven’t bowled a single time in the past 15 years* doesn’t change the fact that a bowling alley’s sounds and smells remain one of the most vivid sense memories still knocking around my temporal lobe. Besides, this isn’t really a piece about bowling. It’s a piece through the eyes of a bowler about how bowling has changed as a social sport, and particularly how it’s changed since the arrival of private equity and its well-documented playbook. We know that league bowling is down nearly 90% from its peak in the late 1970s. We know that neighborhood lanes have closed with ominous regularity. However, bowling’s renaissance, as envisioned by large PE-backed global chains like Bowlero, is loud, luxe, and decidedly anti-league. It’s bowling as an occasional night out rather than the “third place” that it used to be—which means it’s somehow both more expensive and cheaper-feeling. (Learning that pins are increasingly reset by attached cords, dragged back into position like bottom-heavy marionettes, was surprisingly disappointing.) Dave Denison takes us through the landscape as a bowler should: visiting as many New England alleys as he could drive to, and talking to the owners and enthusiasts who have kept the sport alive. There’s some nostalgia here for a bygone era, sure, but Denison also praises the places that are threading the needle, creating a community while also avoiding the cost-cutting of conglomerates. Mostly, though, bowling has been cleaved by profit motive just as so many other industries have, forcing bowlers and lane owners alike into a difficult choice. You can drown while clinging to a fading ideal, or you can jump into a lifeboat that you know is heading somewhere worse. Just make sure that 15-pound ball doesn’t make the decision for you. —PR
*I’m assuming that multiple rewatches of the Documentary Now episode “Any Given Saturday Afternoon” doesn’t count as actual bowling.
Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes
Zachary B. Hancock | Nautilus | June 12, 2025 | 3,483 words
It was the title that first pulled me in; who doesn’t want to know more about guinea pig toes? What followed was a surprisingly elegant introduction to a lesser-known evolutionary theory, wrapped in the curious biography of Sewall Wright, a geneticist with a lifelong fixation on guinea pigs. I’ve occasionally wondered: Why don’t we see fish wandering around on little legs, on their way to becoming something grander? Wright put it more scientifically: How do organisms evolve beneficial traits when the steps in between might be maladaptive? In the early 1900s, guinea pigs were the lab animal of choice, and Wright—then a graduate student at Harvard’s Bussey Institute—found himself managing a colony housed in a gothic mansion in Boston. (Yes, it’s hard not to picture them in cloaks and top hats.) It was there that he encountered guinea pigs with an extra toe and began to formulate his answer. Hancock walks us through Wright’s “shifting balance theory,” which suggests that in small populations, genetic drift can help species leap across valleys of lower fitness toward new adaptive peaks. It’s a complex idea, but Hancock is a skilled guide, helping us through with a clever Lego-brick metaphor and a timely parallel to the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. This thoughtful and fast-paced read is both accessible and delightful—an invitation to think differently about how change happens (and feel a touch smarter while doing it). —CW
July
How to Save a Dog
David W. Brown | The New Yorker | July 5, 2025 | 3,974 words
I love a story about an animal on the loose. Rusty the red panda, Betsy the cow, the Bronx zoo cobra—these are just a few of my favorite entries in the genre. Now I can add Scrim the dog to the list. I didn’t experience Scrim’s journey in real time—my preferred way to consume this kind of fare—because I’d just had a baby, but I was thrilled to learn about it in David W. Brown’s sweet, funny, captivating essay. Scrim is a scruffy white rescue terrier in New Orleans who ran away from home not once, but twice. Both times it took an army of do-gooders to track him down. Among them was Brown, who became a Scrim seeker one night while doomscrolling and feeling down. “I don’t know why I went out,” he writes of the moment he decided to act on social media posts reporting Scrim sightings near his home. “I’m not even a dog person. But it was that or reflect on every mistake I’d ever made.” (I laughed out loud at this wholly relatable line.) Alongside other dedicated volunteers, Brown soon found himself more a part of New Orleans, his adopted home, than ever before. “We engaged freely and deeply with anyone, anywhere, because that was the best way to gain intel,” he writes. “Looking for Scrim meant immersing ourselves in the place where we lived, street by street and night after night.” One volunteer gave sanitation kits to unhoused people she met. Brown helped a woman he came across who’d overdosed. Collectively, Scrim’s supporters rescued 300 other animals during their months-long search for the escape artist. I mean it when I say that I needed this piece. The world is a raging dumpster fire, but for a few thousand words, Brown dims the flames. —SD
Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized
Matt Reynolds | Wired | July 10, 2025 | 5,668 words
Until a week ago, my entire understanding of polo came from reading Jilly Cooper’s Polo—multiple times, no shame. In Cooper’s world, the sport is soaked in glamour, drama, and obscene wealth. Tight jodhpurs, loose morals, and fabulous beasts (both human and equine) abound. I assumed liberties had been taken. Then I read Matt Reynolds’s piece in Wired, and I stand corrected. Not averse to a bit of Cooper-esque flair himself, Reynolds introduces our hero, polo god Adolfo Cambiaso, as “a horse whisperer, a sex symbol, or a marvel of longevity,” with a “handsome face and cleft chin sun-beaten and stubbled, his dark hair matted with sweat.” Along with that chiseled jawline, Cambiaso also happens to own a little bay mare named Cuartetera—possibly the greatest polo pony that ever lived. But Cuartetera can’t play every chukka. Enter Texas oilman Alan Meeker, who struck a deal with Cambiaso to clone his best horses, including Cuartetera, via the pet cloning lab ViaGen. The final plan? To produce and sell foals of the clones. The catch? The golden rule of their agreement was that the Cuartetera clones themselves must never be sold. Her bloodline was just too precious. (Hence the surreal moment at the 2016 Argentine Open, when Cambiaso rode six different Cuarteteras to victory.) All was fine and dandy until, in a dastardly yet predictable plot twist, Meeker sold clones anyway—in a secret deal struck aboard a superyacht, obviously. Legal battles ensued, and Reynolds gleefully guides us through every betrayal, backstab, and bruised ego. The stakes are high, the horses are glorious, the men are brooding, and the science is bonkers. Every player on the field is fascinating, and you’ll be hooked until the last Cuartetera gallops off into the sunset. So saddle up! —CW
Puzzled
Susannah Pratt | The American Scholar | July 18, 2025 | 2,050 words
On the surface, this story is about a jigsaw puzzle, but it’s about much more. For The American Scholar, Susannah Pratt recounts working on a 1,000-piece reproduction of William Morris’s tapestry Tree of Life. Pratt is no puzzle novice. She has a piece-sorting method that has served her well, until she faces the Tree of Life. The puzzle’s patterns and colors are so subtle that they defy quick and easy categorization. When her methodical approach fails, she questions what motivates her to do puzzles in the first place: Are they leisure, or are they productivity cloaked in leisure? Does she enjoy working the puzzle to watch the image appear? Or is it the satisfaction of pieces popping into place, like task boxes getting checked off, that drives her? I love it when a piece stops me short like this one did. Given the topic, that was unexpected. The world is a rough place right now and everything seems to be getting worse by the day. But no matter how bad things get, questioning your motivation is a must. Questioning your approach is a must. Sometimes that introspection might, as in Pratt’s case, reveal the need to pause. “Often, I would simply put the piece back in the pile, realizing that I did not yet understand where it was meant to go,” she writes. This essay is a lovely reminder that when it comes to anything worth doing, it’s often more about the process than the result. —KS
August
Maximalisma
Lisa Russ Spaar | The American Scholar | May 16, 2025 | 3,007 words
My parents are purging their home of nearly 50 years as they prepare to downsize. Last week, my mom asked me if I wanted her dinnerware; this week, she gifted me her collection of massive terracotta planters. (How could I say no? My dad had already loaded them onto his truck.) I get it: It’s hard to let go of stuff, even things that lack sentimental value. In her essay for The American Scholar, Lisa Russ Spaar reflects on the accumulation of objects, both trash and treasure, and how they’ve helped shape her identity: “I have to admit, at 68, that all of these ‘things’ comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be.” Her words inspired me to reflect on my own curated spaces over the years, from my freshman dorm room—walls plastered with underground rave flyers that I’ve since stored in shoeboxes—to my current sun-filled office in my new home, filled with houseplants, miniatures, and art. Spaar shares her great-aunts’ compulsion to hold onto stuff, while also acknowledging a responsibility to pare down so her loved ones won’t have to later. The essay then evolves into a playful exploration of language and collecting. She compares her poems—”short, sonnet-haunted lyrics that juxtapose high and low diction, arcane or gnomish syntax, and contemporary slang”—to cabinets of curiosities: “My little poems—both tidy and lush at once—are perhaps, like Aunt Ruth’s grocery bags or Warhol’s boxes, a way for me to collect disparate things in one place, to create a kind of order or meaning out of what I notice and feel.” Poetry may offer Spaar a kind of balance, a way to know when to hold on and when to let go. While hoarding can feel oppressive, Spaar’s reflections reframe it as something tender and artful: a means of noticing, honoring, and building a life. Reading her piece made me see those planters, and all the things I’ve carried with me, not as clutter, but as parts of a story that I’m still shaping. —CLR
All Hail the Mighty Snail
Dina Gachman | Texas Monthly | July 31, 2025 | 1,508 words
Walking down the street this spring, I met two young girls who had found a snail about the size of a golf ball on a green stretch of lawn. They were excited to show their discovery to a complete stranger and so I knelt down to admire their languid new friend. I had never seen such a large snail before. It appeared moist, its shell variegated in tans and browns. Charmed by the snail and their enthusiasm, I exclaimed and marveled, and asked them what they noticed about it. They chattered away, interrupting each other while their mom smiled to herself a few feet away. This chance meeting made my day. Remembering the reason for this wholesome encounter, I was powerless against Dina Gachman’s appreciation of snails and the enthusiastic community behind them for Texas Monthly. This story stars Gary, a milk snail who took a wrong turn and ended up on a jade plant in Jorjana Gietl’s sister’s shop, It’s a Succulent Thang. Gary was outed by an inspector and had to be removed from the plant before sale, though, because milk snails are nonnative to Texas. Gietl decided to take Gary home and learn everything she could about raising snails so that he could have a happily ever after. Now Gietl has more than 100 garden snails that she breeds and sells locally to fellow enthusiasts. There’s plenty to learn about these creatures in this piece. Snails are hermaphrodites and easy to breed! Enthusiasts provide cuttlebone so that snails get the calcium they need to grow and repair their shells! If you listen very, very carefully you can actually hear them eating! This piece might be on the shorter side of the reading we typically recommend, but it’s no less satisfying. It’s a lovely reminder that despite what’s going on in the world, despite the grim news cycle, wonder still exists, if you stop and take the time to look. —KS
The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario
Inori Roy | The Local | July 23, 2025 | 3,243 words
If you use nightcrawlers as fishing bait, chances are they came from a field somewhere between Toronto and Windsor, Ontario. For The Local, Inori Roy literally gets down and dirty to learn what it’s like to be a worm picker, someone who harvests nightcrawlers as they emerge from the soil in the wee hours of the morning. What started as a side hustle for young boys trying to earn a few extra dollars in the 1900s is now a C$200 million industry run by generational family businesses who employ mostly immigrants and refugees trying to make their way in Canada. This piece hooked me for a few reasons. Roy was patient; she fished around and was rejected by several worm operations for weak reasons, until she landed a chance to pick for Nick Alafogiannis, owner of A1 Bait. As a reporter, though, she is no fish out of water. She quickly develops a rapport with Alafogiannis and his crew to learn the business from the ground up, an industry threatened by a lack of temporary workers, trade tensions with the US, a downturn in recreational fishing, and of course, climate change. “And in truth, as much as I now have an intense, perhaps overly-romanticized fondness for it, worm harvesting is not an essential industry,” she writes. “The world would move on without it, and it would become a subject of nostalgic memory, a quaint eccentricity from a different time, when people had the luxury of fishing with massive, lively worms hand-selected by workers flown in from the other side of the world.” The next time I go fishing, I’ll be sure to remember Roy and the legion of workers toiling through the night, angling to keep a dying industry afloat. —KS
The Great French Fry Mystery
Harley Rustad | Toronto Life | August 11, 2025 | 3,564 words
His name was Rodolphe, or at least that’s what was written on the 10 A&W bags Harley Rustad’s neighbor found on her porch, discarded, over a period of several days. Who was Rodolphe? Why had he left his mostly eaten french fries at her door, night after night? Was it an inviting space to enjoy a late-night snack? A weird political statement? Some sort of scam? Rustad set up an old baby monitor aimed at the porch in an attempt to spot the perpetrator. Together, he and his neighbor taped a skein of thread across the staircase to the porch to determine whether the perpetrator was animal or human; they sprinkled baking soda on the stoop to capture paw pads or footprints. The following morning revealed a set of decidedly human shoes, and of course, another crumpled bag of half-eaten french fries. Late-night babycam notifications confirmed that the fries were being delivered to the front door and then devoured, first by a raccoon, followed by a squirrel munching on the leftovers. After nine days and nine bags of fries, Rustad and his neighbor decided to head to the source: their closest A&W location, only to learn that while the orders originated there, they’d been placed via Uber Eats, which revealed no further information. “Via our tests, we had figured out the how,” writes Rustad. “And we had solved one who: who had been eating the fries. But other questions remained. Who was ordering them? Who was Rodolphe? And why was someone repeatedly sending orders of french fries to my neighbour in the middle of the night?” I won’t spoil this story by delivering the ending to you. In addition to an intriguing whodunit, Rustad’s story of next-door detective work is, at its heart, a lovely testament to good neighbors in our increasingly myopic world, a piece that celebrates the simple joy of being one and having one. —KS
September
Ocean of Influence: Inside the Celebrity Boat Trip That Was All Over Your Feeds
Joe Hagan | Vanity Fair | August 6, 2025 | 4,214 words
I must have the wrong algorithm working on my feeds, because I somehow missed “the mother of all influencer trips” that unfolded aboard the Luminara, a floating behemoth in The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection. Luckily, Joe Hagan did not. His Vanity Fair dispatch drops us onto a cruise designed to make superyachting feel more accessible (for those who are merely very rich, not astronomically rich). Spending 48 hours alongside a hundred A-listers, Hagan quickly finds himself in a fever dream: Kate Hudson and Dakota Johnson sip daiquiris in the pool, Shaun White stretches on a lounger, and Leonardo DiCaprio wanders about in the background, vaping. Meanwhile, the conversation meanders from Martha Stewart’s frustration at it no longer being acceptable to drive her top-of-the-range, self-driving Tesla, to a defense of the Sánchez-Bezos wedding as “a normal, plain-Jane affair.” As someone whose own boating pinnacle tops out at precariously balancing a dog and a hamper of curling sandwiches on an aluminum dinghy, I found the sheer level of pampering fascinating—like Below Deck on steroids. But what Hagan captures is not just the luxury, but the unfiltered absurdity of it all: a forgotten vial of LSD, 3 a.m. light shows no one watches, drunk entourages. The access Vanity Fair is granted is shocking, and it’s no surprise the cruise organizer later tries (unsuccessfully) to smother the story. But beneath the spectacle runs a sharp portrait of wealth so insulated it verges on parody. (Yes, some of The White Lotus cast are there.) Part guilty pleasure, part sly cultural critique. You, like Hagan, will step off this ship a little dazed. —CW
Ecological Warfare
Nathaniel Rich | Harper’s Magazine | August 20, 2025 | 5,222 words
Nathaniel Rich’s dispatch from the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo is rich with rewards—unless, of course, you’re the invasive, orange-toothed rodent at its heart. A nutria, per Rich, is “approximately the shape of a football” and “about the same weight as a Jack Russell terrier.” In the past 25 years, nutrias have consumed more than 40 square miles of Louisiana, furthering damage done by a century of pipeline development and efforts to control the course of the Mississippi River. “A citizen is not permitted, in the current legal climate, to explode federal levees and dams, or to hunt oil and gas executives,” Rich writes. “So the nutria must pay.” And, boy, does it pay. Rich briskly unfolds the day’s events: a 40-hour hunt to bag as many “swamp rats” as possible, followed by a rodent cook-off and, finally, the Nutria Toss. He spends a portion of the day aboard a fog-shrouded airboat with the former Miss Louisiana, an avid hunter who warns him that things “can get Western real quick.” He details the nutria’s murky origins—which include a Tabasco scion’s runaway farming operation—and its culinary possibilities, from Paul Prudhomme’s popcorn-chicken approach to brined nutria chops. (He samples, too, of course. Nutria “tastes like roast beef, with an afternote of rust.”) At the Nutria Toss, dead rodents fly into the crowd, smacking onlookers. “This is essentially a conservation event,” a climate activist tells Rich. “But that’s not the appeal. The appeal is throwing nutria.” My folks live in nutria country these days, not far from the site of the rodeo, and I’ve already texted them about the event. I don’t wish the swamp rats any harm. Still, I can’t help but wonder how far I could throw one. —BF
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
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
October
The Cat Who Woke Me Up
Sy Safransky | The Sun | September 30, 2025 | 5,012 words
I’ve had cats my whole life. Mama Cat, who my parents converted from stray to pet early in their marriage, sometimes slept in my crib when I was an infant. Later there was Callie, adopted when I was 9, who delivered kittens on my bed, under the covers, one night while I slept. When I met my husband, he’d never lived with a cat before, but he knew that my calico, Trouble, and I were a package deal, so he learned to tolerate—and eventually love—her meowing, purring, licking, clawing, and snoring. There were other cats along the way: Maddie, Gracie, Emmie, Pokey. And now, there’s Elaine May, who’s lounging on the floor next to me as I write. Reading Sy Safransky’s beautiful ode to his cat, Cirrus, I thought of my many cats, all of whom “woke me up” in one way or another. Because that’s what pets do, if we let them—they crack us wide open, embolden us, humble us. They test our imaginations, expand our capacity for devotion, confront us with the mysteries of existence. They ask us to stop, see, feel. “Don’t imagine that anything you thought was yours is yours to keep,” Safransky writes of the lessons Cirrus taught him—lessons that are particularly poignant now, 20 years after Safransky first began writing this essay, as he grapples with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. “Get up and pay your dues for being in a human incarnation. . . . Play hard whenever your playmate will play. Never lose sight of your essential nature. The universe makes a home for you right now in this sixty-year-old body. Honor it as long as you’re in it.” I’ve never read a wiser or more moving piece about our relationship with animals. —SD
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
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
What Made Blogging Different?
Elizabeth Spiers | Talking Points Memo | October 16, 2025 | 1,726 words
I once wrote on my blog about my growing fear of missing out online, and how checking Twitter felt like trying to jump onto a moving train. That post, which generated 135 comments, ended up marking the beginning of the end for my blog, and for the kind of personal writing I used to share in public. (The link rot in that post says as much about the web’s evolution as it does about mine.) In this short but resonant piece, Elizabeth Spiers is nostalgic for the early ’00s internet, when thinking in the open could be slow, and we were able to leave our doors open for anyone who visited our online homes—because comments, even disagreements, were respectful. “The sort of considered back and forth I remember from the thoughtful members of the early blogosphere is something that is harder to find now,” she writes. Growing up in rural Alabama in a conservative family, Spiers credits bloggers during that time with challenging her worldview and helping her evolve as a writer and thinker. “I still look for people with early blogger energy,” she writes. I do, too. (This is a perfect spot to plug Phil Gyford’s post on his website about discovering the internet in 1995, which I also picked this week.) We need more of these spaces, now more than ever. And I mean independent blogs and personal websites like Phil’s—not a bunch of people crammed into a Substack mansion. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the longform writing people are publishing there, but I miss clicking a link that takes me to someone’s own house, decorated exactly as they want it. Over the years, I’ve tried and failed to revive my neglected blog, but pieces like Spiers’s remind me of what being online could be like again, if only more of us were willing to rebuild those welcoming corners of the web. Maybe the internet we miss isn’t really gone—it’s just waiting for us to come home. —CLR
November
A Circling Story
Holly Haworth | Emergence Magazine | October 23, 2025 | 4,093 words
Spring, summer, fall, and winter: Amid each, sometimes it’s easy to forget that change is ongoing, if sometimes imperceptible. I try my best to mark seasonal changes: I love hearing “bird radio” get louder as spring unfolds, when robin dads sing evening songs to ward off other males. Their voices go silent in late August, and that sudden void reminds me that fall will soon arrive. In this piece for Emergence Magazine, Holly Haworth notes that the “Japanese have seventy-two microseasons, traditionally, each lasting around five days.” Their names include: “‘bamboo shoots start to sprout,’ ‘praying mantises hatch,’ ‘distant thunder,’ and ‘frogs start singing.’” Haworth’s ode to the seasons reads like a poem. In simple yet vibrant declarative sentences, she reminds us what we stand to gain by getting outside and observing closely. Sometimes paying attention can be draining, but for Haworth, the act energizes and fulfills her as an antidote to climate change. “This is why I have been turning my attention toward the seasons so devotedly these past many years, keeping my field notebooks,” she writes. “[T]o draw myself closer to the earth’s cycles whose disruption is, in fact, the most important story of our time . . .” I read this piece just after Daylight Saving Time ended. With full darkness now at 5 p.m., it’s helped me to welcome the shorter days. It’s a lyrical reminder that fallow periods are so important for the earth and for humans, that fall decay and winter stillness are necessary, if only to help us better appreciate the light when it finally returns. —KS
Idle Things
Robert Rubsam | The Baffler | November 10, 2025 | 2,365 words
A few miles from where I live, there’s a playground made from the concrete fragments of old buildings. Its pieces were salvaged from local government offices, banks, theaters, and hotels, then invitingly arranged—“like adult-sized toy building blocks,” a nearby plaque offers. Children race between the unseeing stone faces lifted from the Bank of Montreal and balance themselves on hunks of Parliament. It’s a false ruin, fabricated by an artist and lacking deep history; still, I appreciate how it summons thoughts of power, turnover, churn. A real ruin, Robert Rubsam writes, is “time’s product and time’s survivor,” an artifact that “has lost its originating context, yet survived into our own.” For The Baffler, Rubsam ruminates on ruin, sharpening his ideas against those of Jenny Erpenbeck, a writer born in East Berlin whose childhood played out amidst the post-war wreckage. “The ruins lingered,” Rubsam writes, “and in lingering, they taught her the virtue of unproductive places and idle things, of empty spaces, left open for her to wander them and to ask: How did I get here, and how did all of this?” Rubsam’s essay is well-timed, arriving at a moment in which natural and political forces are rewriting many of our landscapes and dismantling our familiar structures, for reasons banal and unconscionable. And while it’s a powerful introduction to Erpenbeck’s writing, it doubles as a prompt to notice, to document. Erpenbeck’s writing is “a kind of bulwark, a catalog of the minor details and inconsequential impressions that make up the course of a private life,” Rubsam writes. “They are her fragments, shored up against forgetting.” Even my false ruins may one day turn to real rubble. —BF
‘I Awoke at ½ Past 7’
Elena Mary | Aeon | November 17, 2025 | 3,683 words
I’ve never wanted to optimize my life. I use one simple tool—a digital notepad, Simplenote—to jot down thoughts and track my to dos at work and at home. That’s it. I remember when Apple introduced iCloud and decided that syncing my life would make it easier. (It didn’t.) Or when apps like Instapaper and Read It Later promised to organize my reading queue and instead rewired me to consume rather than enjoy. Nearly 15 years later, this constant push toward productivity is a cultural norm. As historian Elena Mary explains, though, Victorian-era diarists were already doing this long before Big Tech. In her enlightening essay, she shows how people across all classes of UK society used diaries to meticulously record their experiences, organize their days, and measure their achievements during a period obsessed with progress and innovation. “A printed diary held out the promise of total control over time, place and the self,” writes Mary. Diaries of this time could be outlets for introspection, but many were practical tools for planning and self-improvement: “The future could be mapped out, goal-oriented, solution-focused.” Increasingly, diaries were shared with others, which sounds a lot like today’s blogs and social media. It’s no surprise, then, that some of these 19th-century diaries became records of failure, documenting the days when people fell short of their goals. “The Victorians were great innovators, but progress was Janus-faced,” writes Mary. “For every leap forward, a renewed pressure to go further, and faster, to do better, be better. The age of progress was also an age of anxiety.” As someone who has considered ditching her iPhone, I keep wondering what real progress looks like. Maybe it’s not about optimizing at all, but knowing when to opt out. —CLR
December
Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing
Oliver Egger | The Paris Review | November 26, 2025 | 3,603 words
“Imagine being blindfolded and loaded in a car, then dropped nearly four hundred miles from your house in a random field in rural Iowa and trying to get home before dark.” That thought experiment, courtesy of Oliver Egger’s piece on the American Racing Pigeon Union (ARPU) Convention Race, instantly dissolved my rosy image of the sport. I’d always pictured pigeon racing as a rather jolly pastime: birds stretching their wings on a nice flight before being proudly welcomed back by their flat-capped owners (known as “fanciers”). While the subject isn’t new, Egger offers a bracing reframing. At the start, the fanciers at the race are instantly suspicious of him. “I had no crate, no pigeons, and was probably thirty years younger than anyone else in the room,” he writes. “That could mean only one thing: undercover animal rights activist.” (Their fears are soothed only after he’s vouched for by a white-mustachioed fancier known as “Crazy Al.”) Egger isn’t an activist, sure, but this piece is still unusually clear-eyed about the welfare of racing pigeons. What is sport to their owners is, for the birds, a life-and-death struggle to get home—past hawks, power lines, bad weather, starvation. Many don’t make it. And what of the winners? If you’re a super-pigeon, navigating hundreds of miles by mechanisms we still don’t fully understand, dodging every hazard, and beating the pack, do you get to retire in glory? Do you get to stay home, put your feet up, watch the sunset with some nice corn while telling the youngsters your war stories? No. In most major races, the fastest birds are automatically sold at auction as breeders, shipped to new lofts, and never allowed to leave because they’d only try to fly back “home.” You have to wonder if they ever stop feeling lost, locked in a place that doesn’t feel like theirs. Egger fills the piece with larger-than-life characters with a palpable love for the sport (and vodka)—it’s a charming read. But the thought that stayed with me was simple: For all our fascination with their homing instinct, maybe the pigeons would have preferred never to leave home at all. —CW
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