Every piece we selected as our top story of the week in 2023, all in one place.
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A Vaccine Dispute Turns Deadly
Misinformation’s tragic toll on one California family.
The Greatest Hospitality Story Ever
While my uncle was dying from a rare cancer, he found solace in a hotel whose staff became a surrogate family.
Stranger Things: A Reading List of Unsolved Mysteries
Tales of odd phenomena stoke our imagination even as they tease us.
Announcing the 2021 Longreads Member Drive
Help fund the best stories on the web! As always, 100% of reader contributions funds work from writers, photographers, and illustrators from all around the world.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Nicole Carr, Cullen Murphy, Carrington J. Tatum, Matthew Bremner, and Nitasha Tiku.
I Remember the Bookstore
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
‘Some Things Never Leave You’: Christian Livermore on Poverty’s Indelible Marks
“For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.”
Monsters, Mothers, Mulieres: A Reading List on The Women of Classical Antiquity
Five stories of ambitious empresses, fearsome gladiators, and ordinary working-class residents — glimmering snapshots of the female experience in the classical world.

