Best of 2025: The Stories You Missed
December 19, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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“Time,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote to Lillian Ross, “is the least thing we have of.” It can certainly feel that way to a reader. The stories we love tend to find us at moments that are generous enough to hold them. This year, Longreads editors personally recommended more than 600 stories to our audience. Some of those stories may have snuck past you the first time, and that’s unavoidable; the ideal moment might not always be “Right here, right now.” But good stories tend to stick around. This year’s “Stories You Missed” include journeys with mummies and endangered birds, meditations on compost and lionfish, and deep studies of time, maps, and memory. Maybe you haven’t missed them quite yet; in fact, maybe they’ve been waiting to find you at this very moment.
—Brendan, Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter & Seyward
1. The Long Fight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate
Nick Paumgarten | The New Yorker | February 10, 2025 | 7, 587 words
Over the course of 51 days, Johannes Fritz, flying a microlight along with two “foster mothers,” led a flock of Ibis birds 1,700 miles, from Germany to Spain. It’s a bizaare enterprise, brilliantly described by Nick Paumgarten in a piece that shows the lengths some people are prepared to go to repair the damage humans have caused. —CW
2. Double Exposure
Jonathan Weiner | The American Scholar | December 23, 2024 | 4,211 words
A century ago, psychologists believed that our earliest memories began at three years old; before that age, Freud wrote, we are susceptible to “infantile amnesia,” a grand slate-clearing of events that, nevertheless, leave “a definite influence for all future time.” For Jonathan Weiner, a photograph of his family taken in 1956, when he was just two, revealed his mother’s lost pregnancy and granted him new access to a few foundational memories—“those free-floating, undated scenes that are usually hard, or impossible, to explain.” In his researched essay, Weiner, a science writer, investigates those scenes with the help of a neurobiologist and psychoanalyst, to better understand why so many of our earliest moments are swept from our memories. —BF
3. Spaghetti Underground
Zoe Guttenplan | The New York Review of Books | April 18, 2025 | 3,567 words
Recently, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Agency unveiled new maps for the city’s famously complex subway system—well, diagrams, technically, since they’re too abstracted to be considered maps. The new design marks the first major visual overhaul since 1979; ironically enough, it’s based on Massimo Vignelli’s predecessor, which riled straphangers almost immediately after its 1972 debut (but enthralled designers). For The New York Review, Zoe Guttenplan descends into the tunnels to trace the winding path of cartographic evolution. —PR
4. Chimes at Midnight
Alec Nevala-Lee | Asterisk | January 2025 | 5,007 words
The Clock of the Long Now is a massive clock, powered by mechanical energy harvested from sunlight, currently under construction inside a mountain located at 31°26’54”N, 104°54’14”W. (If you’re wondering, this is in West Texas, on land owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.) The clock, a project conceived by Danny Hillis in 1989, was designed to keep accurate time for the next ten millennia. Alec Nevala-Lee tells its origin story, how Bezos came into the picture to fund its construction, and the clock’s role in humanity’s future. —CLR
5. On Compost
Fraser MacDonald | The London Review of Books | April 17, 2025 | 2,576 words
Fraser MacDonald waxes lyrical about the magic of composting for the London Review of Books. He surveys various methods and reveals what goes into his compost pile, which includes everything from seaweed to beard shavings. In looking at his heap, he sees it as a slightly messy response to the “dispiriting cleanness of modern life,” one full of one-use wet wipes and sanitizers, a pile which “stands in productive contrast to domestic disorder.” —KS
6. Car Talk
Cynthia Zarin | The Paris Review | November 3, 2025 | 1,967 words
We have, many of us, been waylaid by our own car misfortunes. But we have also been transported, often in more than one sense. Cynthia Zarin’s short personal essay for The Paris Review corners beautifully, moving with grace and good speed between the Odyssey, a marriage’s end, the expectations of parents and children, the fantasies we harbor, and, per Zarin, “the car at the end of the mind.” —BF
7. The Secret Life of Horus
Russell Cobb, Sarah Brandvold | Edify | October 1, 2025 | 2,732 words
Russell Cobb and Sarah Brandvold follow the remarkable journey of an Egyptian mummy, nicknamed “Horus.” Now at the University of Alberta, Horus has had a tumultuous time since being removed from Egypt—treated as an object of entertainment and fear, until eventually ending up in the University’s permanent collection. What questions does the afterlife of Horus raise about how we treat and display human remains? —CW
8. Building a Nest
Lauren Markham, Jenny Odell | Los Angeles Review of Books | April 25, 2025 | 3,682 words
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, authors Jenny Odell and Lauren Markham are in conversation after the publication of Markham’s latest book, Immemorial, in which she considers how we use language to memorialize what we’ve lost due to climate change. In this wide-ranging interview about the work of writing, they discuss finding and making connections, making art in a time of crisis, the puzzles of structure, the power of ritual in the process of discovery, and the great privilege and responsibility that comes with being a journalist. —KS
9. Here Come the Lionfish
James Bridle | Emergence Magazine | January 30, 2025 | 4,136 words
James Bridle, the technologist and author of Ways of Being and New Dark Age, centers this insightful essay on the lionfish, and what some people view as an “invasion” of the species in the Mediterranean. Bridle uses an unexpected diving encounter with the fish as a starting point to explore nonhuman migration over millennia due to geological and climatic change, imperialism, and colonialism. “On my second dive, I met a lionfish,” they write. “This was not the first time I had done so: I remembered their prickly, languorous form from a reef three thousand miles to the south, some twenty years ago, off the west coast of Africa. But I did not expect to meet them here, in the northwest corner of the Aegean, in a deep gulf of a different ocean.” Always take the time to read the latest from Bridle. I very much enjoyed these thought-provoking observations on the ocean, migration, and deep time. —CLR
10. Fortunate Son
Tony Ho Tran | Slate | August 13, 2025 | 5,565 words
Going home is always fraught; going home to the place you fled, 50 years after the end of the war that decimated it, is something altogether different. Tony Ho Tran’s family trip to Vietnam—which, coincidentally, took place exactly five decades after the fall of Saigon—sets the stage for him to wrestle with his own upbringing, his parents’ past, and the complicated history so many millions share. It’s part travelog, part family dramedy, and all heart. —PR
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/19/best-of-2025-the-stories-you-missed/
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