Everyone waits. No one is spared the waiting room, one way or another. Seven stories on an essential human condition.
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Longreads Best of 2019: Essays
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.
The Very Public Library, Food as Fuel, and Our Top 5
“It’s our least popular and most enforced rule: we don’t allow people to sleep in the library. We know you’re tired, we know it’s warm, we know it feels safe. But someone who is dying also looks like someone who is sleeping, and we’ve all seen our share of overdoses. Also, if one person is […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Showcasing stories from Julia Webster Ayuso, Abe Beame, Tracy Thompson, Will Boast, and Gary Grimes.
What Neko Case taught me about curation and the week’s Top 5
“When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features.” Books are one of the great joys in my life. The other is music. I’ve been following singer songwriter Neko Case since 1997, after picking up […]
Judge a Book Not By its Gender
Lisa Whittington-Hill suggests there’s a distinct gender bias in celebrity memoirs. Where female celebrities are expected to expose all, male writers get to write about whatever they want.
99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History
From crime panics to TikTok, summer’s favorite vehicle has driven a bumpy road.
‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’
Krista Diamond | Longreads | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,342 words) In 2012, I was working at a hotel in Glacier National Park when a man I’d just met invited me for a day of tubing and drinking beer on the river. Little did I know, I would nearly drown in the rapids. But […]
We Got the Beat
How The Go-Go’s emerged from the Los Angeles punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album in Beauty and the Beat.


