Reads from Zefyr Lisowski, David Gessner, Susie Cagle, Brendan I. Koerner, and Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner.
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The Korean Immigrant and Michigan Farm Boy Who Taught Americans How to Cook Chow Mein
In 1922, two college classmates in Detroit — a Korean immigrant named Ilhan New and an American named Wally Smith — founded La Choy, a company that mass-produced Chinese food products. One hundred years later, to Chinese Americans the brand is “synonymous with cultural inauthenticity, even appropriation.” But, as Cathy Erway explores for Taste, the […]
Best of 2023: Personal Essays
Our favorite personal essays published this year include stories on loss, Indigenous community, video games, caring for aging relatives, and the fear of missing love.
Endless Exile: The Tangled Politics Keeping a Uyghur Man in Limbo
Sixteen years after being released from Guantánamo Bay, Ayoob Mohammed is still trying to prove he’s not a terrorist. This powerful, tragic story by Annie Hylton traces an Uyghur man’s journey from northwest China to Guantánamo to Albania — and examines the complex politics that have kept him from joining his family in Canada. As […]
Seeing is Believing: A Reading List on Making Meaning from Data
Eight stories on the power and beauty of visual communication.
Our Most-Read Longreads Originals of 2022
These essays and reported features are our most-read stories of the year.
The Gentrification of Consciousness
“San Francisco’s Mission district has become synonymous with well-paid tech workers displacing non-white longtime residents. It’s now the setting for a new battle, as the coming psychedelic-industrial complex threatens to strip hallucinogenic drugs of their historical and religious significance.”
The Price of Admission
This jaw-dropping story from Rachel Aviv starts as one of an abused child overcoming the odds against her, and ends with elite, monied institutions accusing her of lying: Norton, with whom Mackenzie had been living for nearly a year, told me, “I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending notable stories by Carolyn Ariella Sofia, Joy Williams, Ben Lerner, Steve Yarbrough, and Elizabeth Spiers.
One Thing After Another: A Reading List for Lovers & Makers of Lists
Five stories celebrating the power and beauty of lists.

