After a 30-year absence, the plover, a tiny bird, returned to touristy Sauble Beach on the Ontario Peninsula. Now, the town’s residents are arguing over what the beach should be — and how both humans and these endangered birds can share the sand. Pristine white sand is the preferred backdrop for sunbathing, picnics, sandcastles and […]
Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Cheri has been an editor at Longreads since 2014.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Online Shopping in the Middle of the Ocean
There’s no Amazon same-day delivery service for people living on the remote islands of French Polynesia, so locals launched their own e-commerce business and courier service to fill the gap. HM Coursier Express initially delivered anywhere: within Tahiti, to other islands, and also abroad. In the first year, Henriou built up a client base of […]
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‘Where the Bats Hung Out’: How a Basement Hideaway at UC Berkeley Nurtured a Generation of Blind Innovators
For decades, an underground hideaway at UC Berkeley’s Moffitt Library — better known as “The Cave” — gave rise to a generation of blind leaders, including Joshua Miele, a MacArthur genius grant winner who now builds adaptive technologies at Amazon. The Cave was where iron sharpened iron, academically — tricks for surviving Berkeley were as […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Death Spiral of an American Family
In this heartbreaking portrait of one American family, Eli Saslow offers a look at “backwards mobility” and the country’s collapsing middle class. It had been almost a month since Dave, 39, found his father lying unresponsive in bed next to his cellphone and a bill from a collections agency, having died of a heart attack […]
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The Bullet and the Ballplayer
In 2019, beloved baseball player David Ortiz was shot at a bar in the Dominican Republic. The shooting swiftly unraveled the two very different lives the Boston Red Sox star had been living, in Boston and in his home country. Mike Damiano masterfully tells Ortiz’s story for Boston magazine. That frenzied quest for answers has […]
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The Power of the Still: The Photography Behind the Scenes
There’s an art and process to capturing iconic and marketable images from films. Director Jane Campion and her unit stills photographer Kirsty Griffin — along with David Lowery, Eric Zachanowich, Joachim Trier, and Christian Belgaux — talk about behind-the-scenes photography during the filming of The Power of the Dog. There’s just something about the eye […]
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Futures From Ruins
Bombay Beach was once a vibrant resort town on the Salton Sea until agricultural pollution, drought, and toxic air led to its demise. Today, an art movement and emerging community hope to bring it back. In this Noema essay, writer Johanna Hoffman and photographer Tao Ruspoli show how a town in ruins is experiencing a […]
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Taking Stock
Rob Horning explores the term “creator” in this essay on labor, exploitation, and content production and consumption on the internet. “Creator,” like “creativity,” is essentially a null term that signifies nothing about one’s activity but instead marks one’s limitless availability — a willingness to make anything at all in one’s life into content for sale.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Night Shifts
“Clearly dreams do something for us,” writes Michael W. Clune. “If not, why would evolution have endowed us with the capacity?” In this essay, Clune explores the fascinating world of dream engineering via a device called the Dormio, which enables a person to shape the images that appear during hypnagogia, the transitional stage between wakefulness […]
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False Passives
As she travels north through Ethiopia, Anna Badkhen speaks with people who are looking for a way to escape — to cross the Gulf of Aden toward Yemen — and ruminates on the plight of refugees and vulnerable populations around the world. When does a journey begin? When droughts parch the land, or mudslides take entire farms […]