“The Hague Abduction Convention was meant to reunite mothers and children. Instead, it’s often used by allegedly abusive fathers to tear them apart.”
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What Care Looks Like at Every Scale (and Our Top 5)
An exploration of scale, limits, and care—featuring our new essay “By All Measures” and this week’s Top 5 reads.
Longreads Best of 2022: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks
All the stories we’ve selected as number one in our weekly Top 5 newsletter.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from David Roth, Dhruv Mehrotra and Andy Greenberg, Thomas Dai, Cameron Maynard, and Katherine Rundell.
Defining Color
“A deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral, bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet william.”
Cracking the Family Codes
A stash of encrypted diaries raises questions about the secrets we carry, and how they are revealed.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Here are five stories to kickstart your weekend of reading: Seyward starts us off with story close to her heart, set in her hometown of Greenville, North Carolina; Krista shares a remembrance of the longest siege in modern history; Peter recommends a deeply reported piece on Andrew Luck; Cheri takes us behind the scenes of […]
A Trip to Twin Peaks and the Week’s Top 5
“I’d taken for granted how strange his work is—in the defiantly non-naturalistic performances he elicits from his actors and the surreal sheen of his stories and characters—until I started trying to explain the plot of Twin Peaks to Riley on our drive to Washington.” This week, we pay homage to director David Lynch, with Katherine […]
New York City on Fire (and Our Top 5)
“As with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for instance, the lead-up to the arson campaign on November 25, 1864, was long, ugly, and both actively and tacitly encouraged by powerful men.” Hello, Friday! To help kick off your weekend, we’ve rounded up some reads for you. Our first recommendation, from […]
The Nurse Who Names the Dead
Inside a Texas nurse’s quest to document the life and death of every woman killed by a man in America.


