A family curse, a grandfather, a pet, a friend—and one untranslatable word to encompass them all.
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Hope in the Heartland and the Week’s Top 5
“She didn’t tell her customers that, the day before, when she was cutting parsley for an herb and cheese focaccia, she had to pause to stop tears from falling into the parsley. How the half-cut stems and greens transported her to a kitchen in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood, nearly 10 years before, when her grandmother […]
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending excellent stories by Charlotte Higgins, Lex Pryor, Michael Hardy, Elissa Altman, and Brad Phillips.
Posted inFeature
’Tis the Season to Kill the Dead-Mom Holiday Movie Trope
How many more women will festive filmmakers dispatch?
Posted inUncategorized
Writing Through It (and the Week’s Top 5)
“I don’t get creatively unstuck. I just write despite the fact that I’m stuck. I learned a long time ago that being ‘stuck’ is really just the unshakable belief that everything you can think of writing is shit, and while that may be true, it might also not be, and the biggest predictor of whether […]
Posted inReading List
Dimes, Dunks, and Devotion: A Basketball Reading List
Seven essays that go beyond the box score.
Posted inFeature
Best of 2025: All Our Number One Story Picks
Every story we selected for the number one slot in our weekly newsletter, all in one place.
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommendations from Bobbie Johnson; Bee Wilson; Jia Tolentino; Isra Fejzullaj, Rina Chandran, and Michael Zelenko; and Matthew Ponsford.
Posted inFeature
My Unlikely Existence
Is AI helping prospective parents game the fertility lottery? Should it?
Posted inFeature
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.
