Category: Featured

In my native New York, I don’t feel the need to perfume the air around me with the sweet scent of challah. But here in Iowa, there is a void I need to fill.

How the pandemic made us confront what it means to be alone.

Drowning out a pandemic with alcohol.

How do you love a place that is sinking?

More than a century before GoPro, Thomas Stevens’ around-the-world bike ride vaulted first-person “sports porn” into the mainstream.

Hope may seem to be in short supply these days, but these stories dare to chart a course toward something better.

Why it’s important to give things a sniff.

Five longreads about the iconoclastic American writer, director, and activist.

“Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Other times, the solution requires retooling your perspective.”

“There is no more urgent form of communication than going extinct.”

Think it’s time to get off social media? Then this is the reading list for you.

I am of that bit of earth. So I will not let it go. I show up in the small ways I can, which is talking to people, which is why I tell this to you.

Let’s go away for awhile and reflect on the genius of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys’ 1966 album “Pet Sounds.” Wouldn’t it be nice?

Kindling a new awareness of the outdoors wasn’t something the author predicted, but it brought a host of realizations — including the discovery of these five thoughtful longreads.

Powerful reads on which language comes first, second, or even third.

“I have sat inside her rib cage. And yet I know nothing about her.”

The world is full of make-believe. Some of it is sweet, some of it is sick. It persists because we have found no other antidote for pain.

Five captivating reads on adventures you never want to have.

On the fascinating world of London real estate.

North Korea hacked him. Things got personal.

And he “…stopped in his tracks, wondering what in the world two little girls were doing alone in a canoe speeding toward the Falls, apparently oarless.”

“But perhaps it’s neither here nor there how we think about death. Perhaps the work that must be done is in how we think about life.”

Do you have an idea for a Longreads essay? Now is the time to share it.

Longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj read and shared 276 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2021. Here are his favorites.

Another beauty of endurance is that it is happening at all times. It is everywhere we look. To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance.

Oh, yes I did! An attempt to explain the bizarre tradition of the British Christmas pantomime.

Women in Sinaloa, Mexico, are searching for the remains of “disappeared” loved ones — and cooking to keep their memories of the dead alive.

“The future that debt chose for me — indeed the future it chooses for many people — included a lot of shame, confusion, and pain.”

The original reporting and personal essays that were our most-read stories of the year.

The soundtrack of my life goes back a long way. Here are six longreads about music, for the love of it.