With “The Silence of the Lambs” hitting theaters, Orion wanted a hit. They didn’t anticipate an antihero.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard, Casey Tolan, Lou Robinson, and Byron Manley; Lindsey Liles; David Gauvey Herbert; Laura Trethewey; and Abe Beame.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
We’re recommending stories by Danny Chau, Annalisa Quinn, Bijan Stephen, Jordan Michelman, and Anna Wiener.
Walking on Faith and the Week’s Top 5
“Most people here were trying to find a way to live with events that could have broken their lives: absence, illness, loss, death. How could I fault them for something I also wanted, which was to wring meaning from things that have none?” “Why was I stumbling alongside this mass of the devout?” This is […]
10 Short Stories, The Power of Music, and Our Top 5
“I always admired how my father could play so delicately with such brutal hands. They were rough, mired with patches of psoriasis, calloused from playing the charango and the guitar, and scarred, scarred all over.” I have fond memories of playing the violin when I was a child, and over the years I’ve considered returning […]
Two Incisive Excerpts (And Our Top 5)
How Mac Barnett got inspired to write books for kids, a tense, deeply reported crime story, and our weekly Top 5.
Failure To Lawn
On what a dying patch of turfgrass can teach us about water scarcity, ecological repair, and the lies we tell ourselves about success.
The Secret Door
“When we read, we make believe. We aren’t duped or ensorcelled. Deep down we decide. We make ourselves believe.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from Patrick Fealey, S.C. Cornell, Sterry Butcher, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jenny Odell, and Francisco Garcia.
The Good Catholics of Buffalo
With thousands of US soldiers dying in Vietnam, a righteous group of young New Yorkers embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees.


