“The legal battles over AI currently playing out—and the large number still to come—may profoundly impact the balance of wealth and power in countless democracies in the decades ahead.”
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A Year in Reading: Inward Journeys
Navigating a world in flux demands some understanding of who you really are, and some of my favorite pieces from this year speak to that need.
Technology That Lets Us “Speak” to Our Dead Relatives Has Arrived. Are We Ready?
“Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve.”
How the AI Industry Profits from Catastrophe
The demand for data labeling in the artificial intelligence industry — tagging videos, sorting photos, and transcribing audio in order to train AI — has created a massive need for cheap labor, leading data-labeling platforms such as Appen to hire low-pay workers in countries like Venezuela, the Philippines, and Kenya to do these tasks. In […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories by Jeannette Cooperman, Jackson Arn, Andrew Hui, Myriam Gurba, and Simon Hattenstone.
A “Super” Walk of Contradictions (and Our Top 5)
“To my right is one of the largest manmade toxic holes on Earth. To my left, shelves of coal-colored slag piled twenty feet high. And underfoot, ten thousand miles of poisoned shafts swimming with ghosts.” Hello from Berkeley, California. Our family loves to explore the city’s parks, where we can hike through redwood forests in […]
Parks and Re-Creation (and the Week’s Top 5)
“In spite of my confidence in cooking, I’ve never brought mulukhiyah into my urban kitchen. Eating it without my family’s elbows pressed against mine doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’d feel like an impostor, inserting myself into the sacred and altering it irreparably, as I can’t help but reinvent recipes with my own improvised […]
Help Us Publish Stories That Outlast the Noise
We’re a home for stories that linger. In 2017, I reached out to Candace Rardon, a writer and artist whose watercolor sketches I’d admired for years. Up until that point, I’d only edited traditional essays for Longreads, but I wanted to experiment with illustrated personal narratives. We brainstormed a visual direction, and the final piece […]
Both Sides of The Mirror
Introducing The Longreads Questionnaire, featuring Vauhini Vara.
DOGE-Pilled
“Luke Farritor could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing.”


