Best of 2025: The Most Popular Editors’ Picks of the Year
December 16, 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.
In addition to the Top 5 reads we share each Friday, we also recognize the most-read editor’s pick of the week: a piece that readers couldn’t put down, a story making a big splash on the internet. This list compiles the 10 most popular reads we recommended this year, including a nightmarish New York cover story involving crypto and torture, a San Francisco Chronicle critic’s unforgettable night at a famous French restaurant, and a wild Slate story exploring the world of scammers. If you missed these knockout stories the first time around, sit down and enjoy!
—Brendan, Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter & Seyward
1. The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons
Yiyun Li | The New Yorker | March 23, 2025 | 8,293 words
Yiyun Li lost both of her sons, Vincent and James, to suicide, six years apart, at 16 and 19. In this essay, drawn from her book Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li writes through her grief. It’s difficult to read, and yet Li writes with a lucidity and steadiness that guides us through with her. —CLR
2. The Crypto Maniacs and the Torture Townhouse
Ezra Marcus and Jen Wieczner | New York | August 11, 2025 | 8,014 words
Cryptocurrency turned John Woeltz and William Duplessie into friends. It also allegedly turned them into military cosplayers who club-hopped their way through New York with a cadre of guards and a seemingly bottomless appetite for drugs. And when Michael Carturan ran from their townhouse in late May, claiming Woeltz and Duplessie had been torturing him for his crypto accounts, it marked the arrival of crypto kidnappings, a.k.a. “wrench attacks,” in New York. If that all sounds like too much to fit into a single feature, trust me: It’s barely the logline of the dizzying nightmare that is this week’s New York cover story. —PR
3. Boomers Are Passing Down Fortunes—And Way, Way Too Much Stuff
Chris Rovzar | Bloomberg Weekend* | November 14, 2025 | 2,177 words
My mother’s been cleaning out the rambling study in the house she shared with my late father—which means that last week, I started researching how to ship a crate of records across the country. Next up: how to get rid of a warped and hopelessly untunable piano! I should consider myself lucky; at least she doesn’t have 10,000 Pez dispensers or 1,300 teacups, like some of the people in Chris Rovzar’s piece about how the “Great Wealth Transfer” from Boomers to their kids is really the “Great Clutter Transfer.” —PR
* Reading this piece may require a subscription to Bloomberg News.
4. Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
James D. Walsh | New York | May 7, 2025 | 5,342 words
I’ve been contemplating future education options for my 7-year-old daughter, and I get anxious when I think ahead and imagine her navigating a higher education system that feels so broken. James D. Walsh’s Intelligencer story about ubiquitous ChatGPT use among college students is a bleak read. It’s depressing to sit and think about today’s undergraduates—many of whom will never know the academic experience without AI—and the increasing number of people earning degrees who may be essentially illiterate. Teachers, on the other hand, describe “AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis.” Some professors use AI detectors to spot plagiarism, while others have decided to embrace AI in their classrooms. But most educators are at a loss for what to do, and unless there’s a radical shift, there’s no stopping the bots in higher education. —CLR
5. The Baby Whisperer
Michael Hardy | Texas Monthly | October 28, 2025 | 10,265 words
Marian Fraser once ran Spoiled Rotten, the go-to day care for Waco’s elite. But people turned against her after she was arrested for the death of a child in her charge. The cause: Benadryl poisoning. Parents came to believe Fraser had been deliberately drugging children. But the truth, Michael Hardy finds, might be less nefarious. —SD
6. Thomas Keller Asked Me to Leave The French Laundry. It Turned Into My Most Extraordinary Night as a Critic.
MacKenzie Chung Fegan | The San Francisco Chronicle | May 19, 2025 | 3,381 words
On at least two occasions, Thomas Keller, the exhaustively acclaimed chef of the French Laundry and Per Se, has served mushroom soup to restaurant critics via a glass bong—an allusion to a negative review published nearly 10 years ago. MacKenzie Chung Fegan, restaurant critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, encounters a decidedly less playful Keller during a recent visit to the French Laundry, where she is separated from her table, made to wait in a courtyard for Keller, and ultimately informed by the chef that he would like the critic gone from his restaurant. Fegan manages to stay at the French Laundry for another three hours; throughout, Keller’s power intrudes in ways subtle (“apology truffles”) and not. —BF
7. The House on West Clay Street
Ian Frisch | New York | January 9, 2025 | 6,878 words
To Tabatha Pope, an apartment in a house outside downtown Houston seemed too good to be true after living in a $35-a-night motel for the past nine months. All she and her boyfriend had to do was spruce the place up according to Pamela Merritt, a woman who was also renting in the building. Merritt’s explanation for the horrific stench that wafted out when she was about to show Pope the work to be done on the second floor seemed dubious. And where exactly was Colin, the landlord who lived on the third floor? Little did Pope know she was stepping into a house of horrors. —KS
8. It Was Already One of Texas’s Strangest Cold Cases. Then a Secretive Figure Appeared.
Peter Holley | Texas Monthly | June 24, 2025 | 13,526 words
In this piece, Peter Holley provides an exhaustive account of the disappearance of Texas student Jason Landry. But this is more than just a narrative of the event—Holley also explores the fanaticism of the online sleuths who have spent years trying to solve this case. In doing so, Holley edges into the fanatical himself. A study of both a tragedy and a true crime obsession. —CW
9. Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t.
Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker | July 21, 2025 | 8,226 words
Two sisters grew up with a mother lost in delusions. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent years in and out of psychiatric facilities. Then, after undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma, she regained her sanity. Rachel Aviv asks how this happened and what the answer presages for the future of psychiatry. She also considers, with great compassion, how a family rebuilds from a such a profound experience. —SD
10. My Scammer
Alexander Sammon | Slate | August 4, 2025 | 4, 537 words
How far would you go along with a scammer in the name of research? Upon receiving a recruitment text, Alexander Sammon took on a job, made a “friend,” and attempted to get paid. While it may be something you would never do, I bet you have always wondered about what would happen if you did. So let Sammon take you on this wild ride into the world of scammers . . . or is it even a scam? —CW
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