Nine essays and interviews from literature’s favorite laureate of compassion.
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Seeing is Believing: A Reading List on Making Meaning from Data
Eight stories on the power and beauty of visual communication.
Anatomy of Absolute Power
The people of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember a longtime sheriff as a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask.
Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2022
Longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj read and shared 276 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2021. Here are his favorites.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from Suzy Hansen, Raksha Vasudevan, Linda Kinstler, Erica Berry, and Dave Denison.
Where We Belong and Our Top 5
“With this 11-a-side tournament, these young men would be the first to carry their nation onto an international stage. It seemed fitting that it would happen here in Springdale, home to the largest population of Marshallese anywhere outside the islands.” This week at Longreads, I’ve been thinking about our sense of place. It’s something I […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Elizabeth Kolbert, Joshua Hammer, Tan Tuck Ming, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories from Kate Mossman, Luke Winkie, Lou Stoppard, Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne, and Rosa Lyster.
Fabulous Fungi and Our Top 5 of the Week
“To a reading list on these mind-bending entities at a planetary tipping point, welcome. What you see here are only some fruiting bodies, the rest lies underneath.” I first learned about the parasitic fungus that takes over a bug’s body and commandeers its brain back in 2023, when I picked Zhengyang Wang’s “The Last of […]
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 […]


