Here’s every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine Staff, Melissa del Bosque, Nitasha Tiku, Sarah Gilman, and Tift Merritt.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Seema Jilani, Katy Kelleher, Carina del Valle Schorske, Martin Padgett, and Ben Lindbergh.
Concealing a Catastrophe: ‘The Day the Music Burned’
“The vault fire was not, as UMG suggested, a minor mishap, a matter of a few tapes stuck in a musty warehouse. It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business.”
Brains, Bonobos, and the Top 5 Reads of the Week
“Your doctors tell you that you have your whole life to recover, but also that you have a window of just six months when your brain is most primed to relearn everything you’ve forgotten. So, no pressure. Your brain can’t regenerate the neurons it’s lost. Use ’em or lose ’em. You had no idea your […]
Editor’s Roundtable: Cities, And How They Used to be Good (Podcast)
This week, Longreads editors discuss stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The CT Mirror, and Engadget.
The Tragedy of Jayquan McKenley
From the current New York issue’s package on drill music comes this urgent, saddening profile of Jayquan McKenley, a sweethearted teenager and burgeoning artist whose murder sparked a new wave of handwringing around the rap subgenre. Even to drill’s defenders, it seemed clear that social media had sped up a cycle of retaliatory shootings; the Bronx’s […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week’s edition highlights stories by Chris Walker, Katie Prout, Tim Requarth, Michael Schulman, and Celia Bell.
Secrets of the Christmas Trade
“Turf wars. Protection money. Scientology. And my boss, a man who’s half-convinced he really is Santa.”
On Resilience and Our Top 5
“It is hard, I think, to learn as an adult. This is not some profound statement. It just is. But it is not hard because of the fact of it; it is hard because learning anything means learning again how to learn. It’s not that riding a bike is hard; it’s that learning is hard. […]


