“Yet I still doggy paddle in impostor syndrome. For I am not a biologist or cetologist, nor an oceanographer. I am just a woman with a pen, a profound love for water, and an eye for noticing patterns in the currents, eddies, and swirls of living.” Sometimes words aren’t enough. Or, at least, existing words […]
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An English Murder Mystery, an Antarctic Romance, and Our Top 5
“I know this land is far from sinister, I know it is appreciated by those who live here, but I also see that the life of a dairy farmer is often a hard, unforgiving existence. And no family saw that solitude and struggle more than the Luxtons.” In the late summer of 1975, deep in […]
What Was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?
“Dave Eggers wrote a remarkable memoir, but its afterlife was even more extraordinary.”
March 4, 2025
Hi *|FNAME|*, I’m reaching out because you’re a recent supporter of Longreads—so, first off, thank you. However, as you may have noticed, your last scheduled payment never went through. That’s not your fault. It’s ours. Last summer, when we migrated our members to a new payment platform, we were unable to transfer some existing payment […]
What Neko Case taught me about curation and the week’s Top 5
“When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features.” Books are one of the great joys in my life. The other is music. I’ve been following singer songwriter Neko Case since 1997, after picking up […]
On Different Kinds of Love (and Our Top 5)
“Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love.” Yes, today is that day. Dreadful for some of us, but delightful for others. (Especially all the excited school-age kids exchanging “Be My Valentine” messages—which, these days, are no longer […]
Seth Rogen is the Boss Now
“[T]he forty-two-year-old actor and producer is already one of the most powerful people in show business—even if he won’t admit it.”
Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Banished Forever
“The Andersons were kicked out of Disneyland’s most exclusive club. They would not go willingly.”
The Toll of War and the Week’s Top 5
“Tesfaye wan’t sure where the gunfire was coming from, and with service outages across Mekelle, he couldn’t look online for answers. He was certain something was very wrong. But what could he do? He got dressed and did what he did most mornings. He went to work.” Every month, we share an excerpt from our […]
The Future Is Too Easy
“CES, which this year claimed 141,000 attendees and 4,500 exhibitors, could on the other hand have been anywhere, or everywhere.”
