The long, tangled, and mostly wrong history of the psychedelic toad.
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Susan Orlean Hands You the Keys
“At the bottom of what motivates me is a very optimistic, very joyful commitment to the idea that the more you learn of the world the better.”
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.
Defining Color
“A deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral, bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet william.”
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.
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
This week we have stories from David Roth, Dhruv Mehrotra and Andy Greenberg, Thomas Dai, Cameron Maynard, and Katherine Rundell.
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 […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this edition: the jaws of history; war and piece(s); the last day of camp; stay a while; picture me rollin’.
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.


