Featuring stories from Margaret Talbot, Wiam El-Tamami, Virginia Heffernan, Dave Denison, and Meilan Solly.
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A Friend Named Arthur and The Week’s Top 5
“But now I like to imagine him in Paris, sitting at a cafĂ©, drinking an espresso, his notebook open, full of notes and poetry. It’s easy to picture in my mind. He’d look perfect there.” Four years ago, Kevin Sampsell lost his friend Arthur to suicide. He started writing about him three years ago—but the […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re sharing stories from Kamran Javadizadeh, Joshua Hunt, Amy McCarthy, Jaron Lanier, and Andy Greene.
August 3, 2023
“Some animals don’t flee when the mixer comes. They hold their ground. Wait for the trouble to pass. But nothing in their evolution has prepared them for an eight-foot-wide drum covered in corkscrewing blades coming straight towards their soft bodies where they hunker in their meadow homes.” Let’s get this weekend started, shall we? We’ve […]
Best of 2023: All of Our Number Five Story Picks
Each story we chose as our number five piece of the week in 2023, all in one place.
Keeping My Promise to Popo
As Anne Liu Kellor says goodbye to her Chinese grandmother in the hospital, she taps into buried memories and family trauma.
A True (Non-Hierarchical, Shared) Love
Journalist Mithila Phadke navigates polyamory while falling in love for the first time.
New York City’s Menu Wars
In the early 1990s, food delivery services on Manhattan’s Upper West Side sparked what New York Times writer Emily M. Bernstein called “the menu wars.” Everyone from dry cleaners to nail salons followed Chinese restaurants’ lucrative lead, placing paper take-out menus inside apartment buildings’ lobbies and mail rooms and under residents’ doors. Angry tenants demanded […]
Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke
To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the […]
To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the […]


