Best of 2025: All Our Number One Story Picks
December 17, 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 one stories sit up straight and make direct eye contact. They’ve got a strong point of view, they often take a stand, and they always make you think. Usually topical, always unforgettable, number one stories exemplify the power of the written word to pique our curiosity and move us as human beings. If you haven’t already, become a Longreads member so that you have these number one stories, and our other recommended reads, in your inbox on Friday mornings.
—Brendan, Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter & Seyward
January
How a Would-Be Bomber Rebuilt His Life
Michelle Shephard | The Walrus | January 6, 2025 | 5,675 words
Michelle Shephard has written about Zakaria Amara before: Working for The Toronto Star in 2006, she was the first to report on his arrest as one of the leaders of a terrorism group plotting to blow up downtown Toronto targets and a military base. The story ended for her when Amara was sentenced as a terrorist. Or so she thought. Nearly two decades on, a now-paroled Amara reached out. Initially dubious about his claims of rehabilitation, Shephard takes the time to get to know him over several months; the resulting piece is profound. Shephard discovers Amara to be sincere in his search for redemption, but finds that the police and the prison system played no part in his turnaround. Instead, a few key individuals and Amara’s own reading and writing influenced him. But it is not just Amara that has changed. In reviewing her reporting from 20 years ago, Shephard finds herself discomfited by its sensationalist tone, noting that “[a] right-wing blog calling our coverage a triumph of ‘beat reporting over political correctness’ made me feel queasy.” She returns to Amara’s story with a nuanced perspective on how radicalization has “many factors and stages that can last years before police are involved,” and awareness that deradicalization programs need “an intense one-on-one approach involving mentors who have credibility with vulnerable youths.” It is rare—and brave—to review your work with 20 years of hindsight, and while Shephard claims no regrets in her previous reporting, there’s more than one redemption story here. The same writer and subject, a new insight. —CW
Inside ‘Teflon Joe’s’: Why Your Favorite Grocery Store Is Not What You Think
Clint Rainey | Fast Company | January 7, 2025 | 2,530 words
A few months ago, I took my daughter to Pretend City, a children’s museum in Southern California that’s laid out like a miniature town. You can imagine the chaos inside such a space, with children running around pretending to be adults that have things to do and places to be. The grocery store is such a place, and in this kid-sized city, it manifests as a big and boldly branded Trader Joe’s, with colorful wall ads and adorably packaged products. As my daughter enthusiastically selected fake food off the shelves, I had a realization. While I haven’t shopped at Trader Joe’s in ages, I’ve continued to view the brand fondly and positively, ever since shopping there in my 20s. Lured by the inexpensive prices, convenient options, and “exotic” food aisle, Trader Joe’s made shopping and cooking accessible, even fun, when I was a young adult living on my own in San Francisco for the first time. But as Clint Rainey reports, the company has faced a lot of bad press recently: a series of product recalls, low rankings by environmental and animal welfare watchdog groups, and reports of intellectual property theft and workplace misconduct. In this Fast Company read—the first in a three–part series about the company’s brand identity and business practices—Rainey digs into why Trader Joe’s remains one of America’s favorite supermarkets despite the negative press. I apologize in advance if this story shatters the eco-friendly, good-vibes image of your beloved neighborhood Trader Joe’s. But I won’t hold it against you if you decide to pop in one last time to stock up on those sweet and salty umami rice crunchies—they’re ridiculously irresistible. —CLR
The Death of an Asylum Seeker and the Shelter Crisis in Peel
Fatima Syed | The Local | January 14, 2025 | 4,359 words
When I read news articles about Trump’s moves to end asylum and suspend the refugee resettlement program in the US, it’s often hard to see what that looks like on an individual and human level. Many stories on migration and immigration feel abstract, full of numbers and figures, describing people en masse. “It’s easy to forget that every single person migrating has a story,” Longreads writer Caitlin Dwyer once told me. For The Local, Fatima Syed offers a wide view of the shelter crisis in Peel, a suburban municipality in the greater Toronto area. But at the center of this feature is a powerful story of one woman, Delphina Ngigi. Shunned and attacked for being bisexual, she left Kenya—and her four children—and made the journey to Canada. For decades, the Peel region had a “no turn away” policy, but that approach has become unsustainable. Since 2023, Peel’s shelters have been unable to keep up with the surge of asylum seekers such as Delphina, a situation made worse by a severe housing crisis. (One Ontario organization providing transitional shelters saw a 700-percent increase in requests during the pandemic, almost half of whom were asylum seekers.) Delphina arrived in Canada in February 2024, hoping to declare asylum and find a bed at a shelter in Mississauga—only to die waiting for one, on just her fourth day in the country. The Peel municipality’s response to the influx of asylum seekers has saved lives, turning hotels into crisis shelters and providing social work, health care, and community support. It wants to help. But, as Delphina’s death shows, this Band-Aid approach isn’t enough. Syed writes a heartbreaking, necessary read of one woman seeking refuge, while deftly reporting on the compassionate people and organizations on the ground who want to create a real system, and real solutions, to help those like Delphina who land on their doorsteps. —CLR
The Future Is Too Easy
David Roth | Defector | 3,438 words | January 28, 2025
Dispatches from the Consumer Electronics Show have been a mainstay of the tech media for more than 25 years. Given the lurching evolution of the technology industry, those dispatches have diversified just a bit. All the way back in 2013, John Gruber wrote that “[t]here’s a nihilistic streak in tech journalism that I just don’t see in other fields.” But that streak is also increasingly warranted. What other industry has generated so much money from our attention, emotions, and data? All of this to say that Defector sending David Roth to CES is likely the apotheosis of Nihilistic CES Dispatch—and you’ll devour it gleefully. Once upon a time, Roth’s brand of polemic might have been dismissed as “snark.” It is anything but. Roth is deeply unsettled by the tech industry, and he’s deeply unsettled by CES, but what unsettles him the most about both is their insistence on the inevitability of AI. “The technology currently lavishly fucking up your grocery order in a supervised setting,” he writes, “will soon make you breakfast and drive you to work and help raise your child and manage both your glucose levels and those of your pet. It will know everything about you, and it will also care about you.” That’s just the backdrop. Roth navigates the Las Vegas Convention Center with something like awe. Or horror. Or something in between. CES is a zombie show of sorts: there are products from Kodak and Memorex and Radio Shack, all of which are no longer the original companies but rather conglomerates that now own their trademarks. “‘I once loved Memorex’s VHS tapes, so I will now buy this Memorex e-scooter,’ is on the merits an absurd value proposition, but not much more or less absurd than anything else in that space,” he writes. There are gadgets, obviously, many of which seem to be internet-connected sex toys. But what Roth is really interested in is the mounting evidence that our humanity is being extracted, reproduced, and monetized: “The fantasy and utility of AI, for the unconscionably wealthy and relentlessly wary masters of this space, converge in a high and lonesome abstraction—technology designed less to do every human thing for you than to replace all those human things with itself, and then sell that function back to you as a monthly subscription.” Roth has long been a gifted critic of greed—greed in sports, greed in entertainment, greed in politics. But in this specific moment, when we’ve watched a cadre of Big Tech CEOs paying fealty to a demonstratedly corrupt president, that greed has never felt so threatening. At least someone’s on the ramparts trying to help you see it. —PR
February
Asbestos: A Corporate Coverup, a Public Health Catastrophe
Charlotte Bailey | Prospect | January 29, 2025 | 5,457 words
Asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999. While the number of asbestos-related deaths—at least 5,000 annually—is expected to fall over time, activists are still sounding the alarm about the asbestos that remains in schools, hospitals, homes, and other older buildings in the UK. For Prospect, Charlotte Bailey traces the history and use of asbestos over the decades. Indispensable during World War II, it was hailed as a “mineral of victory and safety” and a crucial building material for the future. After the war, however, big businesses discovered (and buried) the truth: Asbestos exposure was a health risk for everyone, not just factory workers. One woman who studied patients diagnosed with mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer affecting the lining of organs, discovered they had all been exposed to asbestos, yet none of them had worked in the industry. (“They’d been plumbers, housewives and mechanics, a school building inspector and a teacher.”) For Bailey, these facts hit close to home: Her father also died from mesothelioma, likely a result of his time as an apprentice accountant, during which he also did a lot of manual labor in the building. “I had only the haziest understanding of asbestos as some dangerous substance used in decades past,” she writes. “But as I cared for my father, I learned how it came to be ubiquitous in our infrastructure.” Bailey’s reporting on the industry is thorough and vital, while her retelling of her father’s rapid decline, interwoven in the piece, is heartfelt and powerful. “My father was a character in the epilogue of an old story,” she writes. Asbestos may be considered a problem of the past in the UK, but as Bailey shows, this “killer dust” lingers and continues to impact thousands of lives each year. —CLR
Wild Clocks
David Farrier | Emergence Magazine | January 23, 2025 | 4,916 words
Spring melts seem to happen earlier, and warmer fall months stretch out, shortening the winter season. To a human who abhors the cold, this might seem like a good thing, but for animals and plants, it can alter and perhaps even endanger their life cycles. Consider mammals that emerge from hibernation earlier than usual, before their preferred foods proliferate. Consider plants that may flower too early, before critical pollinators are out and about. As David Farrier explains in this lyrical piece, such mistiming is called a chronoclasm: “a collision of different orders of time.” What’s behind these somewhat scary developments? You guessed it: climate change due to global warming. But this essay is not all doom and gloom—far from it. Farrier’s poetic look at wild intervals is accessible and thoughtful. He gives equal (ahem) time to reasons we can be hopeful about evolving ecological dependencies and partnerships, such as how new tree species might flourish in forests where conditions were once too cold for them. “Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood,” he writes. “It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. . . . As wild clocks fall out of measure, can we recalibrate our sense of time and foster a rhythm by which all life can flourish?” We know we can’t rewind the clock and reset Earth’s climate. It’s refreshing, however, to read a piece that predicts what the future might hold while planting the seeds of hope. —KS
Grave Mistakes: The History and Future of Chile’s ‘Disappeared’
Fletcher Reveley | Undark Magazine | February 19, 2025 | 9,195 words
I’ve read some fascinating forensics stories in the past year, and this haunting piece by Fletcher Reveley digs into how Chile has applied the science, unfortunately to disastrous results, in crimes of mass atrocity. For Flor Lazo, the past 50 years have been a “long, long, long, long road in search of the truth.” Her father, two brothers, and two uncles were among the more than 1,000 people who were forcibly disappeared after the 1973 coup, under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Reveley describes how in the late ’80s, forensic anthropologists began to investigate the regime’s mass graves. A series of scientific errors by the state’s forensic unit, the Servicio Médico Legal, marred the effort, misidentifying victims and delivering bodies to the wrong families. (For years, Lazo visited the grave containing what she believed was her brother Rodolfo’s remains, but after the bones were later exhumed—without her family’s knowledge—she learned that they were not his.) Reveley writes about the devastating affect these grievous mistakes have on victims’ loved ones: “For many of the affected relatives, the impact was seismic, forever altering their relationship to science, the state, and the notion of truth itself.” DNA analysis, remote-sensing technology, and a new initiative under Chile’s current president hold the promise of uncovering the remains of more victims, but as Reveley shows, Lazo and other Chileans continue to grapple with the injustice of these killings and hope for closure that they may never get. This is a meticulously reported account of a dark part of Chilean history, but also the extraordinary journey of families who have shown resilience over a lifetime of suffering. —CLR
The Languages Lost To Climate Change
Julia Webster Ayuso | Noēma | January 28, 2025 | 4,354 words
Imagine a language so beautiful and precise that there’s a word to describe “a female reindeer that has lost its calf of the same year but is accompanied by the previous year’s calf.” For the Sámi, Europe’s only recognized Indigenous community, that word is čearpmat-eadni. As Webster Ayuso says, the Sámi also have terms for specific types of snow, “everything from åppås, untouched winter snow without tracks; to habllek, a light, airy dust-like snow; and tjaevi, flakes that stick together and are hard to dig.” Given a warming planet under climate change, will habllek still occur? If that term is used less and less, could it possibly disappear from the Sámi lexicon, and with it, a richer experience of the world? Could preserving languages be one way to help fight climate change and encourage conservation? I learned a lot reading Julia Webster Ayuso’s piece for Noēma. Here, language and science intertwine like twin strands of DNA, and like DNA, they hold the key to preserving life on this planet. The number of languages spoken in the world is dwindling due to shrinking populations, climate change migration, and of course, colonization. “More than half of the world’s 8 billion people speak one of just 25 languages,” she writes. “Most of the remaining 7,139 languages have only a few speakers.” But Webster Ayuso suggests that the environment benefits when language and culture propagate. She cites as one example Hawaiian, which by 1980 was spoken by only 1,500 people. (Colonizers had routinely shamed and punished Hawaiian speakers, and the language languished.) Education programs for young people helped pull that back from the brink; by 2016, the number of Hawaiian speakers had grown by a factor of 10. This revival parallels the lot of the honu, or green sea turtle, “a powerful symbol of Hawaiian culture”: As the Hawaiian language found a new foothold, honu nesting populations grew by five percent annually. Now if only the whole planet wasn’t at such a steep, ongoing, collective loss for words. —KS
March
The Heroines Who Take On The Harm
Adlai Coleman | The Delacorte Review | February 25, 2025 | 6,390 words
When I write editor’s picks and recommendations for our weekly Top 5, I make notes about the piece and collect passages to spark my imagination. I know a story is special when my digital scratchpad fills quickly. This is what happened with Adlai Coleman’s Delacorte Review essay. Coleman goes to West Virginia “looking for harm.” There, he meets Danni Dineen and Donna Coleman, two women working to reduce harm for members of their community. Danni runs the Quick Response Team for the city of Charleston, a group of EMTs and recovery specialists who respond to overdose-related 911 calls, offering life-saving Narcan. Danni has been sober for nearly four years; she was given Narcan 23 times before she got treatment. Both her mother and younger sister died of overdoses. Her older sister overdosed and was placed on life support. Now, life support is exactly what Danni does for a living. When not responding to 911 calls, she’s doing wellness checks and connecting with people while she hands out water, bus passes, and Narcan. She meets people exactly where they are because she’s been there. She doesn’t judge. She keeps trying, knowing that today could be the day that a client quits drugs for good. “Danni spends her days holding doors open and watching people walk by,” writes Coleman. Over in Ripley, a town in Jackson County, Donna is the only employee of the Bo-Mar Drop-In-Center, where help varies widely, but always meets an immediate need. Sometimes it’s a free hot sandwich and a safe place to sit for awhile. Sometimes it’s finding a bed in a treatment facility. Sometimes it’s asking a few questions that show she knows what someone is up to, but that she cares anyway. Donna probes to find out what someone needs now, something that might get them one step closer to recovery. Coleman is a keen observer and clocks his own awkwardness, first at developing rapport with Donna and then at making eye contact with the Bo-Mar clients. “There is quiet appraisal in Donna’s gaze, a gentle detachment, as if she is studying you from a distance. She wears rounded glasses and her eyes are warm without being soft. She speaks deliberately, unafraid of silence,” he writes. Each sentence in this essay is stark, each paragraph pairs devastation with earned optimism. No one in this story is comfortable, especially the reader, but that discomfort is a necessary precursor to change, fueled by what Danni and Donna bring to work every day: hope. —KS
The Great AI Art Heist
Kelley Engelbrecht | Chicago Magazine | March 4, 2025 | 6,193 words
What happens in a world where machines are trained on stolen creativity? In this story for Chicago Magazine, Kelley Engelbrecht introduces us to Kim Van Deun, a fantasy illustrator who, a few years ago, began searching for a way to protect her work from generative AI tools that could produce images of anything in seconds. Her search led her to Ben Zhao, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab, where he and his team have developed protective tech—software called Glaze and Nightshade—that confuses and corrupts AI models that scrape and train on images without consent. “Take an image of a cat,” Engelbrecht explains. “Apply Nightshade to the image, and the AI model will see not a cat but something entirely different — perhaps a chair. Do this to enough images of cats, and gradually the model stops seeing cats and sees only chairs.” Engelbrecht’s profile of Zhao and the SAND Lab’s efforts to disrupt Big Tech highlights the bigger rift between AI companies and independent artists, but it also lingers on something more fundamental. At one point, when Engelbrecht asks Heather Zheng, Zhao’s wife and co-leader of the lab, about pushback to their work, she says, “I’d rather see Glaze and Nightshade as a way to tell the young generation that they have agency.” As a mother to an imaginative, artistic 6-year-old, I felt this on a deeper level. Engelbrecht weaves in a few quiet yet telling moments about children and their art, reminding us why it’s crucial for future generations to create from scratch, to build off a blank canvas, and to make something that’s entirely their own. Because even the most powerful algorithms are nothing without human imagination. —CLR
The Doctor, the Biohacker, and the Quest to Treat Their Long COVID
Erika Hayasaki | Men’s Health | March 12, 2025 | 7,584 words
Five years after COVID-19 first upended the world, as many as 20 million Americans and at least 400 million people worldwide are battling long COVID, a debilitating and misunderstood condition with few answers and no cure. Erika Hayasaki follows two men—Matthew Light, a pulmonologist, and Levi Henry, a CrossFit enthusiast—who, despite their different approaches to medicine, find themselves in the same boat. They continue to search for something, anything, that might make them feel like themselves again. Light’s shortness of breath persisted for months after getting COVID. “To be a pulmonologist struggling to breathe,” writes Hayasaki, “felt like a special kind of hell.” He developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and after a year of living with his symptoms, he asked himself: “Who is supposed to take care of long COVID patients?” He decided to be that doctor. He now leads a support group at UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Colorado, where a growing community meets to commiserate and learn about potential new treatments without judgment. “They turn to each other,” writes Hayasaki, “because who better to turn to? Science does not yet have the answers.” Levi Henry, the former CrossFitter, had tried a number of experimental therapies—hyperbaric oxygen therapy, red light panels, lymphatic drainage massage, ice baths—before finding Light’s support group. Some treatments seem promising; a low dose of naltrexone has helped Light, for example, but others are risky and unproven. For both men, the search for relief is a kind of survival. In a world that’s moved on from the pandemic, and a new Trump administration decimating everything in its path, their support group is a space to share knowledge, and a lifeline. Hayasaki captures their frustration and resilience with nuance, showing what it’s really like to navigate an illness that remains a mystery. —CLR
The Human Cost of Jeff Landry’s Drive to Resume Executions
Piper French | Bolts, in partnership with Mother Jones | March 20, 2025 | 6,239 words
A scene from Lawrence Wright’s recent New Yorker feature has stayed with me: A group of nuns visit Melissa, a death row inmate in Texas, on the day of her scheduled execution, only to find her in a cage—a literal cage, not just the metaphorical one of prison. In Piper French’s story, Chris Duncan, who has been on death row in Louisiana’s Angola prison since 1998, tells French that after years of incarceration, all that remained of him was a “body in a cage”—and that execution might be a mercy. The prison-as-cage metaphor is not new, but in French’s telling, its weight is visceral. Duncan was convicted of murdering his then-girlfriend’s toddler daughter. His case was built on now-debunked bite mark forensics, the expertise of discredited doctors, a jailhouse snitch’s faulty testimony, and a damning video never seen at trial. Add to that Louisiana’s history of prosecutorial misconduct—where more than 80 percent of death sentences were overturned between 1976 and 2015—and Duncan’s case becomes a stark reflection of a deeply flawed system. French details his case with care, while zooming out to track the evolution of the state’s legal system, including reforms in recent years that gave incarcerated people, even those on death row, new avenues to claim innocence. But since taking office last year, Governor Jeff Landry has aggressively worked to reinstate executions, reauthorized electrocution, and legalized the experimental method of suffocation by nitrogen gas. After a 15-year pause, Landry got his wish: This past week, Louisiana resumed executions by killing Jessie Hoffman, a man Duncan had grown close to. French’s reporting is urgent, revealing a justice system that gets it wrong far too often—and a governor more focused on sealing the cage than opening it. —CLR
April
The Last Face Death Row Inmates See
Brenna Ehrlich | Rolling Stone | March 29, 2025 | 6,782 words
Brenna Ehrlich’s profile of the Reverend Jeff Hood is thick with tension from the opening sentence. Hood, “half metal roadie with his bald head and long, ZZ Top beard and quirky glasses, half classic priest,” ministers to men on death row. We meet him before dawn on the day that Emmanuel Littlejohn might be put to death at Oklahoma State Penitentiary, 30 years after he killed a man in a convenience store robbery. Littlejohn is one of Hood’s “guys,” men who are guilty of murder, rape, and sometimes both, men that Hood ministers to anyway, because he believes that everyone is worthy of love and compassion despite what they’ve done in life. Not all of the repulsive behavior in this piece is committed by the men behind bars: Hood has received death threats for his work, including from a 70-year-old man in a pickup truck while Hood was mowing his front lawn. Then there’s the torture committed by the state. The Pardon and Parole board had granted Littlejohn clemency weeks before his execution date, which put his life into the hands of Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt. Stitt, who could mandate Littlejohn’s reprieve or death with a single phone call, was said to be praying on the decision—a performance that was still underway when they came to measure Littlejohn’s arms and legs for the straps and gauge his veins for the needle. (Is there anything more cruel than to dangle mercy in front of a man, just because you can?) This is an emotional read. But when you stick it out to the end as Hood does, you’ll find it to be a true testament to faith, hope, and love. —KS
The Murder, the Museum, and the Monument
Kori Suzuki | High Country News | April 1, 2025 | 6,075 words
In April 1943, 63-year-old James Wakasa was walking his dog near the edge of the Topaz Relocation Center, a Japanese American incarceration camp in the Utah desert, when he was shot and killed by a soldier in a guard tower. Fellow prisoners erected a stone and concrete monument in Wakasa’s honor. Decades later, Nancy Ukai, a researcher in Berkeley whose parents had also been incarcerated at Topaz, began to learn more about Wakasa’s story, and that the Roosevelt administration had ordered the monument to be destroyed. Two archaeologists read Ukai’s research, visited Topaz, and—to their surprise—stumbled upon the monument, buried in the ground. But what followed wasn’t a triumphant rediscovery, as Kori Suzuki reports, but an example of how heritage and historical memory can be mishandled. The museum entrusted with preserving Topaz excavated the monument without involving any descendants of those imprisoned there. “In the museum’s actions, [Ukai] saw the same patterns of violence emerging,” writes Suzuki, violence in the form of silence and erasure. Suzuki’s storytelling is quiet and clear-eyed, letting the weight of history press through each sentence. More than 80 years later, Topaz descendants still seek answers about the discovery and excavation of the monument, and still fight for dignity and remembrance. This story isn’t just about an unearthed piece of stone—it’s a mirror and a warning, reminding us that the powerful are more often interested in rewriting history than reckoning with it. —CLR
Diary of a Spreadsheet
Chelsea Kirk | n+1 | April 7, 2025 | 3,990 words
As the Eaton and Palisades wildfires tore through Southern California, destroying neighborhoods and displacing tens of thousands of people, landlords moved swiftly to capitalize on disaster. In this n+1 essay, tenant organizer Chelsea Kirk writes from inside that moment: “A two-bedroom apartment on Montana Avenue was listed for $3,595 on January 7. By the next day, the price had jumped 25 percent to $4,495. By January 9, it climbed another 33 percent, reaching $5,995.” Watching Zillow rental prices surge in real time, Kirk created an open-access Google spreadsheet to track and collect instances of price gouging. The spreadsheet went viral, the number of listings exploded, and what began as one individual’s spontaneous response quickly evolved into a larger act of resistance. Kirk mobilized a network of activists, coders, urban planners, and people who simply wanted to help. “The spreadsheet taps into the anger of people who may never set foot in a tenant union meeting, but who still feel the urgency,” writes Kirk. “This crisis is reaching people who haven’t been part of the fight before.” Despite thousands of documented cases, officials have done almost nothing to protect tenants or hold exploitative landlords and realtors accountable. (Only 14 violators have been charged so far, which is less than 1 percent of total cases.) Meanwhile, the rent gouging continues. But Kirk’s essay is more than an indictment of government inaction and landlord greed; it’s a testament to the power of collective action in a time of layered crises. “What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords,” she writes. This is a vision of what’s possible when ordinary people start to imagine something different—and work together to make it real. —CLR
Radioactive Man
Maddy Crowell | Harper’s Magazine | April 21, 2025 | 5,486 words
Last year, Harper’s ran a feature about people grappling with systemic, sometimes incapacitating maladies. The afflicted blame the invisible toxins of modernity—electromagnetic frequencies, chemicals, additives—but society sees them as hypochondriacs or crackpots. Maddy Crowell’s piece in the newest issue of Harper’s acts as a bookend of sorts to that story: another case of hardship compounded by dismissal. Frank Vera III worked at George Air Force Base in the 1970s, where he interacted with what we now know are carcinogenic substances; he also claims to have been exposed to radioactive waste, and began exhibiting symptoms that ended his military career. Yet no one would validate his tale, or his suffering. Decades later, Vera began posting on Facebook, where he attracted a tribe of others who worked at the same base and claimed similar health troubles. Enter Crowell—a curious reporter who, to Vera, represented something more like a savior. As Crowell begins to investigate the alleged phenomenon, she finds herself examining the meta-phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking. Vera’s medical troubles are undeniable; so is the fact that the US military has worked with toxic materials. However, Vera’s crusade had also led him onto shakier ground, and his passion was now mixed with paranoia. “The more we spoke, the more confused I became,” Crowell writes. “Many of his most impassioned beliefs seemed wildly incoherent. But Frank’s emotional and physical pain was undeniable. He cried several times. And even if he lacked a smoking gun, he had enough evidence to indicate that the Air Force wasn’t being totally forthright about whatever had been going on at George.” There are no easy answers here. There’s plenty of stonewalling, though, and bureaucracy that seems designed to thwart accountability. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Crowell is unable to bring her investigation to a satisfying end. But that’s also the only possible outcome here, if you think about it. After all, it’s only wrong if you get caught. And the more power you have, the unlikelier that is. —PR
May
Losing My Dad in Installments
Mariana Serapicos | Electric Literature | April 24, 2025 | 3,935 words
My parents, who are in their mid-70s, are preparing to sell the house they’ve lived in for nearly 50 years. I’ve been scanning my mind for the memories we’ve made in that home. In many of them, my dad is tinkering with something—up a ladder, barefoot, hammering on the siding; searching for a tool in the garage; changing the oil in his car. He is a fixer for life, eternally excited about a piece of wood, but these days, I see him resting on the couch a lot more. Reading Mariana Serapicos’s tribute to her own father, it’s hard not to think about my dad getting older. Serapicos’s father got sick when she was a child, diagnosed with ALS at a time when not many people were aware of the disease. Her descriptions of watching his health deteriorate are tough. But her descriptions of his love for his family, and a life of joy despite hardship, are ultimately what I take away from this piece. The first (and last) time she sees her dad in the hospital, they communicate through letters and sentences on a piece of cardboard. “We talked about plain things because everything else was too big, because plainness is the fabric of life,” she writes. This line encapsulates what I love about this essay. She captures everyday details—his Birkenstocks, their days at the pool, the way she danced on his feet and combed his oily hair—that celebrate a hardworking and joyful man who lived fully. Serapicos leaves us with a moving portrait not of decline, but of presence. —CLR
North Korea Stole Your Job
Bobbie Johnson | Wired | May 1, 2025 | 3,848 words
I’ve worked remotely for almost 15 years, well before logging in from the kitchen or couch became mainstream. There’s a lot you can glean about your coworkers just by being online with them over time. You build rapport, deep respect, and above all, trust. That’s why Bobbie Johnson’s Wired piece about how North Korea used American shills to put fake workers inside over 300 US companies yanked my neck on a chain. Christina Chapman was a shill. Once a worker landed a job, she housed and maintained the fake’s laptop, received their pay, took a cut, and wired the rest of the money to North Korea. Before the law caught up to her, she ran a laptop farm from her Arizona home with dozens of computers linked to different workers. Several people in the US have been charged, and these cases are winding their way through the courts. But where did it all begin? In North Korea, all roads lead to the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. Kim is a gaming enthusiast secretly educated in Switzerland, and he made investing in IT a top priority after taking over from his father in 2011. Computer science courses now run in schools, and the most promising students are taught hacking techniques and foreign languages. They’re allowed a glimmer of freedom in access to the actual internet so that they can excel as operatives for the state. Johnson surveys the history of North Korean hacking success, and the surprising (and sad) communal conditions under which operatives work today, all to pad Kim’s pocket. This piece puts you on the edge of your seat for the audacity of the cybercrime alone. It takes a hilarious turn when Johnson rides along with a recruiter, coming face to face with more than one North Korean operative applying for, and in one case, spectacularly failing to land a lucrative American job. It’s a scene you won’t want to miss. —KS
‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Decriminalized Fentanyl
Jason Motlagh | Rolling Stone | April 27, 2025 | 6,716 words
In a bid to emulate Portugal and France, where “nuanced approaches prioritizing health care over punishment have curtailed overdoses and public drug use,” Oregon decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs like fentanyl and meth in 2020. The state redirected hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for enforcement and incarceration toward treatment and harm reduction. It all seemed reasonable in theory, but Mexican drug cartels took full advantage. They flooded the US with fentanyl, which forced the price down, making it accessible for as little as $1 per pill. Then came the pandemic, where isolation, despair, and the cheap, plentiful supply became a horrific combination. “Portland became a honeypot for local and out-of-state addicts to score cheap dope and use it freely,” writes Jason Motlagh for Rolling Stone. After the state repealed decriminalization in 2024, Motlagh visited Portland to witness the aftermath. His careful reporting puts him face to face with people on all sides of the drug crisis: He talks to a hotel owner and the local district attorney; he shadows treatment workers and harm reduction volunteers on their rounds; he witnesses a man brought back from the brink of overdose with four naloxone injections; he gets to know addicts as they cycle through rock bottom and relapse. So how’s it going? Today, naloxone is more readily available on the street. Overdoses are down slightly with a less potent supply. (Some say the cartels are trying to keep their customers alive longer.) While at times this was a very difficult read, it was plain to see that in Portland, there is something other than fentanyl available in large supply—hope. —KS
Pirates of the Ayahuasca
Sarah Miller | n+1 | May 20, 2025 | 8,216 words
Not so long ago, Sarah Miller was Not Doing Well. Like, Not Doing Well at an existential, nearly cellular level. She despaired about the world and its fate, about her own pessimisim, about her role in the world. She also had no idea how to navigate her despair, let alone resolve it, until she decided—with no small amount of misgiving—that ayahuasca was worth a shot. So: off to Peru! In the 1,500 words it takes for Miller to reach the center where she’ll journey to her own center, you get a very clear sense that you are in very good hands. Not only does she wield a gratifyingly caustic sense of humor, but she has the rare gift of bidirectional analysis; she is both intensely self-aware and intensely judgmental, leveling the same withering gaze inward and outward. (Let me be clear: This is a compliment. No one likes everybody. The least you can do is own your reasoning.) And when she arrives, all these traits combine to create a psychedelia of their own. There’s the pre-trip purgation, of course. The seven (seven!) ayahuasca experiences, each of which manages to disappoint or even re-traumatize Miller in some novel way. The other people, who she renders with a keen meanness, or possibly a mean keenness. Yet, none of this feels like punching down, or self-absorption, or any of the other pitfalls that lurk in a piece like this. It’s not that she hates, it’s that she hurts. Does the ayahuasca care? It does not. Instead, it pushes her through the darkness, again and again. “My life was a selfish joke,” she writes of the reality that consumed her during her sixth trip. “My desire to express myself was risible. I had come here to find hope but what I found instead was the definitive end of it.” The theme of the latest issue of n+1 is Harsh Realm, and this very unfunny realization in the midst of a very funny piece makes clear that, for most of us, the harshest realm of all is the doubt that lurks inside us. —PR
The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin
Andy Greenberg | Wired | May 22, 2025 | 12,182 words
Over the past week, I shared so many stories about psychedelics in a group chat that a friend asked me if I had a new hobby she should know about. I only get high on narrative journalism, maaaaan, and Andy Greenberg’s piece about Akasha Song’s DMT empire is a trip. (It also lasts longer than the average DMT experience, and causes little to no ego death.) Song fell in love with LSD in high school, back when he was named Joseph Clements; 20 years later, he discovered the mind-altering joys of dimethyltryptamine. First he learned to make the drug, extracting it from a tree bark that’s legal to buy. Then he started selling it to friends. Then he found the dark web and started selling more. A lot more. His operation grew. He laundered the money through crypto. He moved from Colorado to Texas to Northern California, expanding all the while—until, inevitably, it all came crashing down. Greenberg specializes in this sort of story, having profiled McDonald’s ice-cream machine hackers, swatting teenagers, white-hat hackers, and more, and he’s in characteristically fine form here. It helps that Song landed on his feet, and shared a trove of the detail (and proof) that’s so crucial to that cinematic feel. You’re reading Greenberg’s words, but you’re in Song’s world, from the first tab to the last chat. —PR
June
Escape from Los Angeles
Katya Apekina | Alta Journal | June 3, 2025 | 1,561 words
A mile from our home marks the burn line from a wildfire that ignited on a scorching day in May and consumed 4,000 hectares within hours, urged on by gusting south winds. Pines, poplars, and skinny ash trees are dead standing in that eerie, blackened landscape. The trees and the brush will grow back. Two people on our small peninsula did not make it out in time. This is the worst wildfire season in my province’s history and it’s only the beginning of June. I’ve read and heard many wildfire stories over the years; a US colleague used to live through the summers with a “go” bag packed with essentials and family treasures, should the worst come to pass and threaten their home. I never really understood what that meant until I read The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle, in which he reports on climate change-induced migration, wildfire being one cause. (It’s a terrific, eye-opening book, full of personal stories. You should check it out.) Ever since, I’ve been compelled to read every wildfire story I find. That’s why Katya Apekina’s account of the Palisades and Eaton Fires for Alta Journal caught my attention. The morning of January 7, 2025, dawns like an ordinary Tuesday. The Santa Ana winds feel a little spooky, a little exciting for Apekina, the “L.A. version of a snowstorm.” But then the winds pick up. The fire, which had started 20 miles away, roars closer. The tension in this essay grows and develops like a fully-fledged character as she recounts a surreal scene: her husband reading “a biography of J. Edgar Hoover by candlelight as the fire rages in the windows behind him.” Soon, the air turns acrid with dense smoke. It tastes toxic. People are losing their houses as the fire advances. They are dying. Paper artifacts of lives lived float to earth the following day, having escaped the flames. “Pages from the Bible, or Alcoholics Anonymous literature, or old encyclopedias—thin pages that traveled downwind for several miles—drifted into people’s yards,” she writes in the aftermath, a period in which she questions her future in Los Angeles and how to live, moment to moment, while processing the catastrophe. “I’m in a state of hysterical terror. I want to go home. This is not my home.” As Apekina suggests, it may be time for many of us to reconsider what home really means. If you can make a space for home in your heart, at least you can take it with you when you have to flee. —KS
The Boy Who Came Back: The Near-Death, and Changed Life, of My Son Max
Archie Bland | The Guardian | May 24, 2025 | 7,053 words
At seven weeks old, Max stopped breathing. His father, Guardian journalist Archie Bland, recounts what followed with harrowing clarity: performing CPR on his infant son, the frantic ambulance ride, an insect crawling “along a fluorescent light,” each detail etched into his trauma-heightened memory. Two years on, Max lives with cerebral palsy, the result of oxygen deprivation during a likely SIDS event. Bland writes not just to honor his son—“already a thousand times more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met”—but to hold a mirror up to himself. He examines the quiet entitlement of his life before (“As a white man named Archibald, I always suspected I was missing something about the impact of privilege”) and the raw rage he feels parenting a disabled child in a world full of “absolute doughnuts,” people who compare Max’s condition to a child’s squint or ask no questions at all. Bland’s writing is funny, furious, and brutally honest. “I understand things about myself and the world now that I can’t wish I didn’t know,” he writes, no longer a “genial ignoramus.” Max himself brings so much joy, and Bland wants us to know him not for what he lacks but for everything he is. After reading, listen to Bland’s interview on Today in Focus. You’ll hear Max laugh, and it’s beautiful. —CW
Crimes of the Century
Suzy Hansen | New York | June 16, 2025 | 10,071 words
Finally. That was my first thought when I finished reading Suzy Hansen’s damning cover story detailing Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza. These violations have been repeated and flagrant, and they have been documented by brave Palestinian journalists and civilians, as well as NGOs, UN agencies, and visiting medical providers. Indeed, Hansen’s feature isn’t an investigation, because an investigation wasn’t necessary—mountains of evidence of Israel’s crimes were readily available. What took so long for a writer at a legacy media publication in the West to muster that evidence and say what is so plainly true? Hansen has an answer, because her essential piece is also about the international complicity that has allowed Israel to kill, terrorize, and humiliate its targets unchecked. Chief among Israel’s aiders and abettors was the Biden administration, building on a post-9/11 legacy of normalizing humanitarian abuses; its successor is no better. “As the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, in a free society, ‘few are guilty, all are responsible.’ This includes many institutions outside government, like the mainstream media,” Hansen writes. “[W]estern newspapers and networks still faithfully print Israeli talking points, excuses, and outright lies.” The cumulative effect of this rampant cruelty and complicity is, of course, mass suffering, but it also signals the ultimate failure of a body of law established over the last century to prevent exactly that. This failure was not inevitable. Power and prejudice are to blame. Hansen hopes there is something to salvage here, a shared standard of human decency. But I’m doubtful, and I’m not alone. “Elite impunity is the sole remaining area of bipartisan consensus,” Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s former foreign-policy chief and the executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy, tells Hansen. “They understand that whatever they do, it’s not going to really hurt them because, you know, Donald Rumsfeld died in his bed.” —SD
At Jackie Robinson’s High School, Altadena Rebuilds After Fire
Alyssa Roenigk | ESPN | June 20, 2025 | 4,016 words
My husband’s cousin and her family lost their home in the Eaton Fire. Nothing was salvageable. While I was putting together a care package for them, I would look at an item in a store and wonder, “Do they already have this?” Then I’d remember: They don’t have anything. This happened again and again, as my brain struggled to grasp the fact and meaning of total loss. Here, Alyssa Roenigk spends time with students at Altadena’s John Muir High School, where unthinkable loss is nearly endemic: One in four kids at Muir lost their homes or were displaced by the fire. Roenigk gracefully timestamps sections of her piece with the number of days since the fire began, echoing the way many Altadenans now think: “Dates are no longer defined by a calendar but instead by how much time has passed since that fateful Tuesday.” Nine days after the fire, Muir senior Jasmine Collins is living in a motel with her mother and siblings; all of their worldly possessions now fit into their truck. Fifty days after the fire, someone breaks into the truck and steals everything. This is one of many details Roenigk musters to remind her readers that disaster has a long, painful, and unpredictable tail. “Money from online fundraisers is drying up,” she writes. “Donation centers are packing up and closing. The rebuilding process is slow.” People are leaving Altadena, too, including some whose families have been there for generations. Those who remain must adjust to a new normal. “If we’re choosing to stay,” one of Roenigk’s subjects says, “then we’re going to have to embrace that it’s never going to be the same again.” There is beauty, of course, in rising from the ashes. But Roenigk’s story shows that there is also beauty in making space for grief. In a memorable scene, Jasmine’s water polo coach asks how she’s doing after a game that takes place just 16 days after the fire: “Jasmine looks up. ‘I . . . ’ She stops. Her eyes fill with tears. She smiles and forms a heart with her hands.” —SD
July
The Geological Sublime
Lewis Hyde | Harper’s Magazine | June 18, 2025 | 6,655 words
Frequent readers of our curation have probably sussed out that different editors have different pet topics. Every Friday, one Longreads spouse tries to match each Top 5 pick to an editor, just from reading the headlines. (Results vary.) I have my own, but reading Lewis Hyde’s piece this week added another to the list: deep time. The fact that change happens on a scale that humans simply can’t register continues to light up the wonder center in my brain. In the past, this has happened with a 2023 Lachlan Summers Aeon story about how Mexico City residents are “stranded” in time; now, it’s Hyde’s exploration of how Charles Lyell first envisioned deep time, and how Charles Darwin rested his most famous theory on it. Species evolve, as Carolyn reminded us recently, in fits and starts, in a way that’s nearly impossible for humans to witness. Increasingly, though, that work is being undone on a scale that’s tragically perceptible. “Eleven thousand years of survival versus a few decades of decline: it may not be clear how we are to reckon with spans of time so utterly out of proportion with one another,” Hyde writes, “but that is now the task at hand as more species decline or go extinct.” Frankly, I wrestled with whether to include any quote from the piece in this blurb, since it just makes me want to share a half-dozen others. I read this story with my jaw half-open, as I always do when a writer manages to communicate science’s most incomprehensible truths. It’s the kind of writing that sends me to the bookstore, that gets my note-taking hand twitching, that makes my brain feel hungry for more. It might just do the same for you. —PR
“The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.”
Aaron Parsley | Texas Monthly | July 10, 2025 | 4,383 words
Imagine being at your family house on the Guadalupe River in Texas, ready to enjoy some July Fourth summer fun. Now imagine waking in the wee hours to discover that flash flood waters have trapped you in the house. Your elderly dad and your partner are there. Your sister and brother-in-law are there too, along with their two children, a daughter, age 4, and a son, 20 months old. It’s dark. The water is at the deck, which is 20 feet off the ground. The water is moving fast and filled with debris and it’s rising. Window glass shatters as the river invades the house. There is nowhere to evacuate to. You feel the room shift and tilt as the house is lifted off the foundation and seconds later is torn apart. This is the scene Aaron Parsley describes in his harrowing and unforgettable first-person account of the flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas. Parsley’s writing is so taut and tense and immediate that time slowed, and then stopped as I read this piece. This is a story I’ll always remember. It put my heart in my throat as I choked back sobs, bereft for this family and their tragedy. “Alissa managed to keep both kids on the countertop, one hand on each, still trying to reassure them,” he writes. “As the house came undone, she grabbed one in each arm. This is the part that will forever haunt me.” This piece doesn’t concern itself with second-guessing weather forecasts, warnings, or the timeliness of the emergency response. Those facts are important, of course, but here, they’re far beside the point. Given the catastrophic loss Parsley and his family suffered, does anything else really matter? —KS
Abandoned by Trump, a Farmer and a Migrant Search for a Better Future
John Woodrow Cox, Sarah Blaskey, and Matt McClain | The Washington Post | June 21, 2025 | 5,553 words
There’s a moment in this piece I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. Otto Vargas, a farmhand from Guatemala, asks his new boss, JJ Fricken, whether he has other employees who work his land in Colorado. Fricken hears the question through an earbud that translates in real time—the men don’t speak the same language, so this is how they communicate. Fricken points at himself, then at Vargas. “Just you and me,” he says. The scene, evoking both vulnerability and solidarity, is a succinct illustration of the wider story, which details how the two men’s fates came to be intertwined. The federal government had promised Fricken a $200,000 grant to hire a worker from Latin America, who would be given an H-2A visa. “In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment,” the authors explain. “It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future.” Vargas’s future was on the line too: “He’d prayed that he’d get a job interview, and when he did, he prayed he’d do well, and when he did, he prayed he’d receive an offer, and when he did, he prayed the United States would let him come.” Then the Trump administration, despite boasting about its love for American farmers, froze the grant money. Suddenly, Fricken was in debt, and while Vargas was able to come to Colorado, it wasn’t clear how long his job would last. To survive the administration’s cuts and cruelty, a Trump voter and an immigrant needed each other. What a terrible, beautiful thought. —SD
August
Dying for Gold: Who Killed the Miners of Buffelsfontein?
Liam Taylor | 1843 Magazine | July 24, 2025 | 6,235 words
At the risk of sounding idiotically obvious, mining is an extractive process—for those doing the mining as well as the resources being mined. Workers can meet their doom suddenly (collapse, fall, explosion), or after many years (lung disease), but to escape unscathed feels almost miraculous. No such miracles awaited many of the men who flocked to South Africa’s Buffelsfontein mine after it closed in 2013. This was mining minus any illusion of safety; any gold left was deeper underground and farther from entry shafts than ever before, requiring “zama-zamas,” or illegal miners, to live hundreds of meters below the surface for months at a time. And while some zama-zamas came on their own, others arrived under false pretenses or even duress, forced by gangs who controlled the access points. What was already difficult and dangerous became even more so last year, when the South African police began blocking both food supplies going into Buffels and the rope crews who helped zama-zamas get out. Many starved. Many died. Even when people were allowed to leave, they were arrested, with migrants from neighboring countries being held without bail. Liam Taylor’s feature about the tragedy doesn’t shy away from the horrific conditions that led to illegal mining, nor from the fact that blame lay at multiple feet: police, famo gangs, mine owners, the government, and the long shadows of colonialism and apartheid. It’s always sobering to learn of a human-rights disaster. All the more reason that journalism like this—nimble reporting, unaffected prose, and the sole purpose of making sure the world knows—is so crucial. —PR
No Entry
Hannah S. Palmer | Earth Island Journal | Summer 2025 | 3,457 words
I recently moved inland from the San Francisco Bay Area, and 90-degree-plus days are now the norm. While it’ll take time to get used to the heat, I love how often we’ve gone swimming this summer. For $6 a visit, we can enjoy two massive sparkling pools and a waterslide in a leafy park, supervised by a rotating team of lifeguards. The quick bike ride to this public pool was one reason we bought our house—and it’s made me think a lot about recreational access to water: pools, lakes, beaches, and other places to play and cool off. In this excerpt from her new book, The Pool is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim, Hannah S. Palmer reflects on lost Southern waters, retracing the history of integration in the South and how it led to the abandonment of public pools and other facilities. “When we talk about water, we’re talking about race and class,” she writes. Wondering where her young sons can learn how to swim, Palmer visits public pools in Atlanta and creeks and lakes in the region: “I drove all over Georgia investigating places where people used to swim that faded from the map after integration: pools filled, lakes drained, beaches sliced into private properties.” When white people rebuilt their own private versions of these places, these spaces were lost to everyone else, particularly Black communities. Her reflections on pools ripple outward: What she discovers also applies to parks, schools, libraries, transit. “Life is not so different from what happens when we swim in public,” she writes. This piece is a compelling introduction to her research on water and public space, as well as parenting in a time of environmental crisis. —CLR
Fortunate Son
Tony Ho Tran | Slate | August 13, 2025 | 5,565 words
In April, as the US marked 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War and a flood of anniversary projects rolled across the journalism plains, Tony Ho Tran was on the Vietnam coast with his parents and brother. This wasn’t a voyage of commemoration, but a long-delayed trip that just happened to coincide with the milestone. Still, coincidence means little when you return to the place that made you and then blew apart. The backdrop of the celebration heightens the usual tensions of a family vacation: Tran’s father goes full Dad Mode by telling everyone he meets in Hanoi that he’d served in the South Vietnamese army; Tran’s mother insists on repeating everything Tran and his brother say to locals, as though their Vietnamese is indecipherable. Ultimately, though, the enormity of the occasion snuffs out any internecine squabbles. Sharing a beer with his dad on Hạ Long Bay, Tran fills in gaps of the man’s life he’d never even known were there, and the travelogue gives way to something altogether more lyrical, something that Tran has been moving toward all along. “Returning, I realize now, was never going to answer any questions or heal us,” he writes. “Returning gives shape to memory. It allows us to feel the ragged trenches of its scars, map the landscape it creates—and that, in turn, changes us. But the past will always be with us: in the stories we tell strangers, the old enemies we welcome back, and the fights we have with those we love.” We are the strangers here, and Tran’s family story—and, particularly, its arresting final image—will stay with you for some time. —PR
Who Killed the Mercy Man?
Eric McHenry | The American Scholar | August 14, 2025 | 3,122 words
On one hand, the word “folklore” will never lose its ability to make me feel like a bored, fidgety kid. It sounds like field trips to one-room schoolhouses. But on the other hand, the word also thrums with enormous power—the same power that makes the blues the most potent artform born on American soil. The Mississippi Delta isn’t terminus in this case, but origin: The stories and tropes that made their way into the music proliferated through this country’s very sensibility, and through every other mode of expression that it spawned. And with that much embedded folklore, there’s always another discovery lurking, another path to tread from song to song, another history to uncover. Eric McHenry’s investigation for The American Scholar exercises that sonic sleuthing in journalistic form, following the character of “the Mercy Man” back through the decades all the way to its seeming genesis. It’s a fascinating investigation, whether or not you’re familiar with Alan Lomax’s famed field recordings or even the blues at all. McHenry dives into the levee camp holler, a plaintive song form born when Black men of the late 19th and early 20th century joined work crews controlled by viciously racist contractors and featuring conditions that seemed nearly indistinguishable from slavery itself. After tracing various renditions of a story in which a contractor known as Mr. Charlie kills an animal welfare officer, McHenry finally finds a 1909 incident that seems to explain everything; from there, he re-expands his search, adding vital texture to the event and sketching a stunning depiction of what inequality really looked like at the time. (Spoiler: It looks like a whole lot of Mr. Charlies.) This is a story about American history, but it’s also a story about how we cope with the unspeakable, and about how art can grow from the abject. And if you’re anything like me, it’ll remind you that the word “folklore” isn’t so boring after all. —PR
September
My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek
Viola Zhou | Rest of World | September 2, 2025 | 4,472 words
Something happened to me last year that I’ve yet to fully unpack. I was doing sit-ups when, suddenly, the left side of my body was overtaken by tingling. A colorful corona bloomed in my left eye. I found it hard to speak. My wife drove me to the emergency room. There was a cardiology investigation. Then there were others. I got a neurologist, and then a gastroenterologist. I started getting monthly blood tests. Doctors scanned my brain and tested my nerves. Each test showed me to be in good health. And yet symptoms of something have persisted. Where I live, family doctors are hard to come by, so I’ve been required to piece together my own care. My wife provides tremendous emotional support, but we’re not all so fortunate. Where, then, should we look for solace? Viola Zhou’s mother has lived with chronic kidney problems for two decades. As China’s aging population puts increased pressure on the nation’s healthcare infrastructure, Zhou’s mother has seen her marriage fracture and her daughter leave the country. In her isolation, she has turned to DeepSeek, an AI-powered chatbot, for medical guidance, tasking it with interpreting her medical records, changing her diet, and reducing her immunosuppressant dose. She warmly thanks the chatbot, and it responds in kind. Zhou brings her mother’s chat records to specialists, who point out the errors in Dr. DeepSeek’s responses. And yet Zhou’s mother dismisses the shortcomings. “DeepSeek is more humane,” she tells Zhou. “Doctors are more like machines.” These days, there is no shortage of stories about people in crisis who turn to AI for support, sometimes to perilous ends. Zhou’s feature reminds us that such stories are symptoms—of technological limits, isolation, and dysfunctional healthcare systems. —BF
Saving a New Orleans Banksy
Ivy Knight | Oxford American | August 6, 2025 | 3,266 words
Earlier this week, I watched a video of people on a street outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice, moving barriers away from a wall to uncover a Banksy mural. The artwork—depicting a judge using a gavel to strike a protester who holds a blood-spattered sign—is likely a commentary on the recent mass arrests at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. There’s been a lot of online chatter about it: the court’s swift cover-up, the legal implications for altering a listed building, and whether the artwork was genuine, which Banksy confirmed on Instagram. This question of authenticity was fresh in my mind after reading Ivy Knight’s Oxford American piece about Boy on a Life Preserver Swing, one of the murals Banksy left behind in New Orleans in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Knight tells a delightful story about an unlikely trio—a dump truck driver, a real estate developer, and an art conservator—who come together to save the piece. Originally painted on the exterior wall of a biker bar, the mural was defaced with red spray paint, then reduced to rubble when the building was demolished. Ronnie Fredericks, the truck driver, salvaged the cinderblocks and stored them for years until he stumbled upon an opportunity with Sean Cummings, an art-loving hotelier, to bring the work back to life. “Joy” is not a word I usually associate with Banksy, but I felt it while reading Knight’s account of the restoration effort, and the science behind the careful process. (“She tried every removal method in her arsenal,” Knight writes of Elise Grenier, the art conservator challenged with the task, “but she could find no way to remove spray paint from spray paint.”) The trio’s shared curiosity and appreciation for the art is palpable, and as I watched the clip of Londoners removing security barriers to glimpse Banksy’s latest critique, I felt a similar sense of collective awe and empowerment. Together, these interactions with both murals speak to Banksy’s enduring role as a chronicler of human struggle and resilience, and the power of public art, even—or, perhaps, especially—in the face of erasure and suppression. —CLR
Have We Been Measuring Mountains All Wrong?
Gordy Megroz | National Geographic | September 16, 2025 | 2,432 words*
Nature has left me awestruck time and time again: whether gazing at the Big Sur coastline from a mountaintop monastery, watching the Colorado River carve a sharp U-turn at Dead Horse Point in Utah, or standing where Kīlauea’s lava meets the sea on Hawaii’s Big Island. A few years ago, Henry Wismayer’s essay on the science of awe made me wonder what, exactly, stirs such emotion. This question reemerged for me as I read Gordy Megroz’s National Geographic profile of Kai Xu, a 23-year-old mountain-loving mathematician who set out to measure this feeling. On a visit to California’s Eastern Sierra region, Xu was wowed by the sight of Mount Tom. At 13,652 feet, it’s far shorter than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak at 29,032 feet, but Xu found Mount Tom’s presence just as extraordinary. Are there attributes other than height that make a mountain great? Could awe be quantified? “He had never laid eyes on the Himalaya or the Andes or any of the world’s largest mountains,” writes Megroz, “but he couldn’t have been more impressed if he had.” Xu invented a new formula to calculate grandeur, factoring in a mountain’s height above its surroundings and the steepness of its rise to produce a single number called “jut”—a measure of how dramatically a peak thrusts into the sky. Math lovers will enjoy the story’s nerdy bent, but what stays with me most is Megroz’s ability to balance technical detail with emotional resonance. He never loses sight of the human story—of a bright, curious young man who sees the world in a new way, and challenges us to do the same. —CLR
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Frankenstein’s Sheep
Alice Hines | New York | September 24, 2025 | 5,189 words
A couple of stories about cloned animals have made it into our Top 5 in recent memory—specifically, polo ponies and dogs. But ponies and dogs aren’t exactly rare. What happens when someone uses cloning to propagate a species thousands of miles from its natural home? Even weirder, what happens when they use biotech to de-extinct a species—or create one that doesn’t exist? Enter Montana Mountain King, a Marco Polo argali who was born not in Central Asia, where all the spiral-horned ruminants live, but in (duh) Montana, where rancher Jack Schubarth had implanted cloned argali embryos into his pneumonia-prone sheep. That Schubarth managed this feat of husbandry was a miracle unto itself; had he done it legally, rather than sending his son to smuggle a strip of argali hide back from Kyrgyzstan, he’d likely be a hero of the conservation movement. Instead, he got six months in federal prison. The story of Schubarth and MMK is a fascinating one, even before ketamine and rectal probes make an appearance, but it’s also just the beginning. Alice Hines expands the scope from Schubarth’s operation to a thriving, if ethically ambiguous, animal biohacking industry. One company has seemingly revived the dire wolf and has its sight set on the dodo; another wants to breed unicorns and dragons. (All together, now: What could go wrong?) Throughout, Hines melds story and science with a deft touch, and turns what might otherwise be the tale of a single resourceful rancher into a more troubling look at a future that’s roaring toward us. The bleating edge of science, indeed. —PR
October
Breakdown at the Racetrack
Nicholas Hune-Brown | The Local | September 25, 2025 | 6,315 words
Speight Rasees, a 2-year-old bay filly, suffered a catastrophic breakdown at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto, Ontario, in November 2024, crashing to the turf in an “awful tangle of limbs.” Jason Hoyte, the jockey, broke his shoulder in the accident, but Speight Rasees was not so lucky: She was euthanized by lethal injection. As Nicholas Hune-Brown reports for The Local, Speight Rasees was one of 10 horses to die after breakdowns at Woodbine in a two-month period in 2024, with several more injured. Proponents say horses receive the care and treatment of elite athletes. Critics charge that the injuries and deaths are proof that the sport needs to end. Given that the Ontario government props up racing with slot machine revenue because wagering alone is not enough to fund purses, the spate of carnage raises hard questions about precisely what the government is subsidizing. “That puts horse racing in a position that’s uncomfortable to defend,” writes Hune-Brown. “Each day at the track, hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money are paid out to the owners of racehorses, a large percentage of which is government subsidy.” Horses break down and death is inevitable in racing. Hune-Brown worked at the track as a teen and, while reporting, even placed a $2 bet on a horse called Little Teddy. Despite rising to his feet “unconsciously along with the rest of the roaring crowd, a puppet on a string as the horses pounded their way down the homestretch,” Hune-Brown wears no rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. This piece is deeply sourced. He spoke to industry workers, horse owners, animal welfare activists, and Michael Copeland, CEO of Woodbine Entertainment Group. Hune-Brown urges us to take the reins, to take a close look at the horse racing industry and ask some questions: Who’s winning and who’s losing, and most importantly, why does Ontario choose to pay the price? —KS
The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace
Robert Sanchez | 5280 | October 2, 2025 | 4,765 words
I recently attended the funeral of my uncle, who suffered a severe cervical fracture after a fall. His health had rapidly deteriorated over the years. After being admitted to the hospital, he was awake and alert, but by the next morning, he was gone. On the day of his burial, I was struck by the orderliness of the military ceremony: the precise folding of the American flag handed to his wife; the Army vets in silent procession, lifting and firing their rifles in unison; the swift, almost ritualistic way a bulldozer covered his casket and smoothed the earth. This planned, meditative efficiency was a stark contrast to the suddenness of his death. It left me thinking about how we die, and what—if anything—we can control when our time comes. Nearly 10 years ago, Colorado voters passed the End of Life Options Act, legalizing medical aid in dying for terminally ill adults who meet specific criteria. Since then, about 1,100 people in the state have chosen this path. For 5280, Robert Sanchez spent the summer learning about this option through Denver Health’s Medical Aid in Dying clinic. Who is eligible? (A person of “sound mind” with six months or less to live.) Where can an “ingestion” take place? (Either a family’s home or the home of someone volunteering their property, since hospitals and hospices don’t permit the practice.) Sanchez was invited to witness families in their most intimate and vulnerable moments. There’s Alan, a man with aggressive lung cancer, who posed for a final family photo before taking his last drink. And there’s Astrid, a woman with ALS who requested to expedite the process to end her suffering. Sanchez captures tough scenes, including a moment when Astrid uses all her strength to reach for the doctor’s syringe to initiate the procedure (a patient must administer the dose themself). Sanchez writes with compassion and curiosity, observing without intrusion, and letting the moments unravel. Through these stories, he invites us to wrestle with this question: “How much control should we have over the terms of our own deaths?” The clinic’s director, a former ER doctor, tells him that “[a]ll stories need to have an ending, and we want our stories to matter.” I keep thinking about my uncle—and how, if given the chance, he would have shaped his own ending. —CLR
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
Hidden in Plain Sight
Carolyn Ariella Sofia | Aeon | October 20, 2025 | 4,013 words
A chance meeting in a bookstore changed Carolyn Ariella Sofia’s life. The encounter was with Jerzy Kosiński, the Jewish Polish-American author of The Painted Bird, a harrowing novel about a boy wandering through Eastern European villages during the Second World War. Sofia describes the book with terrified awe: “a desperate note sent in a glass bottle that broke in my hands and made me bleed.” The two eventually go to dinner, where Sofia probes and unsettles Kosiński with her theory that one of his writing strategies is to “hide wartime details in female characters.” He resists exposure. Hiding had been deeply engraved into his psyche during childhood, when he survived the Holocaust by living with a Christian family, and Sofia cannot quite reach him. Their interactions remain taut and uneasy, almost menacing. He reveals little, even as he continues to draw her into a psychological game of cat and mouse. Beyond Kosiński, Sofia examines how the writers Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman divulge the fractured identities of their own war-torn childhoods, when they, too, suffocated their true selves to save their lives. This is no cozy read, but a piercing insight into how the inner turmoil of Holocaust survivors has painfully, gradually, turned into the raw material of their art. Sofia’s deft blend of psychology and literary analysis left me reeling at the complexity of survival, memory, and self-invention. —CW
Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?
Jelani Cobb, Taylor Lorenz, Jack Shafer, and Max Tani | Harper’s Magazine | October 22, 2025 | 6,693 words
There’s a video production company in Chicago called Mainstream Media, whose mission is to “help companies nationwide connect to their community with crisp and clear live video.” Mainstream Media is not a news organization, a point its founders have tried to make clear over the years, even adding a disclaimer to their website that reads, “We are not the actual ‘mainstream media.’” And yet, every so often—following bad-faith partisan attacks, for instance—the company receives messages from people angry at swaths of the American press. Misguided though they might be, these critics aren’t alone: Trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in half a century, according to one popular poll. And yet the mere existence of those annual polls reveals something about our perennial anxiety over the press. “Americans have never trusted large national institutions,” Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, remarks in this lively Harper’s forum with press critic Jack Shafer and reporters Max Tani and Taylor Lorenz. “In the nineteenth century, we didn’t trust the railroad monopolies; in the early twentieth century, we didn’t trust the newly corporatized banks. Today, when people think of a large, faceless, national institution, it’s more often than not the news media.” Is our loss in trust driven primarily by failures in coverage of Gaza or COVID-19, or about our collective distance from remote institutions that fail to reflect the communities they serve? The four journalists here differ in how they apportion responsibility, as well as how they interpret threats against press freedom in the US and what AI will do to entry-level journalism positions. They also complicate each other’s arguments productively, reminding each other, and us, that the mission of the media is, per Tani, to “meet people where they are.” You mean connect to our communities? Looks like Mainstream Media has the right idea. —BF
November
Waymo Money, Waymo Problems
Joanne McNeil | New York Review of Architecture | October 1, 2025 | 2,866 words
I would be remiss if I didn’t start this blurb by tipping my hat to the editor who wrote this headline. I suspect many readers have already clicked on the link to the story purely because of this pun. Well done, whoever you are. Now to the meat of the thing: A self-driving Waymo taxi recently killed a bodega cat in San Francisco. In my book, that alone is reason enough to get the machines off the street. But I’m a grouch, so don’t listen to me—listen to Joanne McNeil. A resident of the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, McNeil considers Waymo and other robots now populating the city’s corridors in the context of the wider techno-capitalist push to force certain workers out of the US economy. McNeil follows a pink Coco food delivery robot to a ghost kitchen, where “twenty-six restaurants that exist only on DoorDash and Grubhub cook food for takeout customers” and “delivery bags and boxes are waiting . . . in lockers.” The endgame of facilities like this, McNeil posits, is to eliminate delivery drivers (and mom-and-pop restaurants, too). “It’s a setup primed for robots,” she writes, that “further warp[s] the coronavirus class divide: With machines (however remotely assisted) where essential workers used to be, those who WFH are ever more shielded from strangers beneath their tax bracket.” McNeil ties the robots in California’s streets to what’s happening in the state’s fields. She speaks to a Lyft driver originally from Salinas, who explains that agricultural companies in the Central Valley “haven’t been that vocal coming out against the ICE raids because they’re assuming that they’ll be able to automate farmwork.” In other words, they’ve decided it isn’t worth protecting the rights and dignity of people they won’t need to make money in the long term. In fewer words, they’re greedy and soulless. McNeil’s story is an essential tour of several overlapping landscapes—physical, technological, and political—shaped by the robber barons of the 21st century. —SD
When the Bears Come Back
Anya Groner | Southlands | November 11, 2025 | 3,993 words
It happens all the time: I’ll look up randomly while working, only to witness a black bear appear out of the bush and amble across our property. I can’t help but pause after these sightings. For me, it’s a moment of reverence for that wild being, and a reminder to be vigilant in the forest we share, to be sure they get the wide berth they deserve. Wendy Cowan tried to avoid conflict with a bear in the woods of Lunenburg County, Virginia, but unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. In this piece for Southlands (a new publication!), Anya Groner recounts Cowan’s harrowing bear attack and reckons with the increasing encounters between bears and humans across the United States. This braided essay is a study in building tension; I sat motionless reading it, engrossed in Cowan’s encounter and an aftermath that was bloody in more ways than one. “For a moment, they were the same height, face to face and swaying like a dancing couple,” writes Groner. “Then the bear yawned, and Wendy knew she was in trouble.” Groner follows Cowan around Richmond’s East End, observing the survivor as she shares her story and photographic evidence with the curious. The scene work here brings depth to Cowan as a main character, shading in a painful and lengthy recovery period while highlighting the attack’s lasting—and surprisingly positive—emotional outcomes. Cowan’s made deep and profound connections with those who take a moment to listen to her story and to share their own trauma. She’s found a community of survivors, and for this, she’s grateful to the bear. This piece, while at times a terrifying read, is a stark and beautiful reminder of what happens when we refuse to be defined by the things we cannot control. —KS
Heavy Metal is Healing Teens on the Blackfeet Nation
B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster | High Country News | November 7, 2025 | 6,282 words
This piece deals with suicide. If you’re having thoughts of self-harm, please call or text 988 in the US, or chat online at 988lifeline.org, for a free, confidential conversation with a trained crisis counselor.
Journalist B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster opens their High Country News piece with the words of young Indigenous metalheads on the Blackfeet Nation who have known people who have committed suicide: “Suicide has impacted my old friend group quite a bit.” “I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost family.” “My older brother.” “My sister’s youngest.” Their sobering remarks and the endless pain they hold stopped me in my tracks. Some are still teens. All have found belonging in heavy metal music, release in the fast and the loud. In vivid prose, Oaster reports on the finale of an alternative high school course that dives deep into heavy music and its history, politics, and values. As students discuss the art form, they identify subgenres of metal, deconstruct songs, and respond to what moves them. Some get inspired to start bands. Oaster also covers Fire in the Mountains, a “black metal Coachella” that took place on the Blackfeet Nation over three days in July 2025. Metal can seem violent and harsh to the uninitiated, but that easy assessment overlooks the community behind the music, a safe space where people can work through their troubles in a constructive way. “But something deeper draws metalheads together, perhaps a willingness to inquire on levels the establishment forbids,” writes Oaster. “What most clearly sets it apart from other genres is that it’s so rooted in anger and sadness—or their common ancestors: terror, lack, isolation and despair. Metal, one fan told me, is ‘a strange road to joy.’” Above all, this moving, life-affirming piece reminds us that when the going gets tough, the tough start headbanging. —KS
December
Surrealism Against Fascism
Naomi Klein | Equator | November 26, 2025 | 7,346 words
Why does this moment in time feel so uniquely awful? Naomi Klein’s expansive essay about art, philosophy, and political resistance addresses this nagging question, one that I’ve personally struggled to answer through a burst of fury every time I hear someone say, “This too shall pass.” Certainly, the concentration of horrors is part of it. We’re confronted with—and in some cases complicit in—fascism, genocide, and climatological destruction, to name just a few of the catastrophes at hand. And yes, recency bias is a factor. What’s happening now is raw, an open wound. But Klein articulates another crucial aspect. “[Time] doesn’t merely circle,” she writes, “it spirals, returning to places that feel familiar but are fundamentally different, having accumulated all the weight of what came before.” Walter Benjamin, whom Klein references throughout her piece, put it this way: “[History is] one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” In other words, today feels worse than the past because of the past. What should be the gifts of history have become painful burdens. Hard-won wisdom and knowledge are willfully ignored. Collective pledges to do and be better (“never again”) are perverted to justify new atrocities. How, then, to survive the ever-worsening of the world, the compounding of wreckage? “The interesting thing about spirals,” Klein notes, “is that if they switch directions, they don’t tighten—they broaden, opening like sunflowers, like seashells, like galaxies.” Reversing course means finding shared purpose not just in rejecting cruelty and destruction but in creating their antitheses. Among other people and movements, Klein directs readers to the Surrealists as an example of creative resistance: “We still have much to learn from their efforts—from their endless manifestos, their raucous debates, their sense of play, their solidarities, and their determination to pool their collective powers to meet the scale of their moment in history.” —SD
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