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 […]
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Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories by Jeannette Cooperman, Jackson Arn, Andrew Hui, Myriam Gurba, and Simon Hattenstone.
Posted inNewsletter
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Karen Hao, Rebecca Solnit, Mary H.K. Choi, and Andrew Buss.
Posted inNewsletter
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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How to Build a Human
“A forensics company tells cops it can use DNA to predict a suspect’s face. Scientists worry the tool will deepen racial bias.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
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.”
Posted inFeature
Best of 2025: All Our Number Five Story Picks
Every story we selected for the number five slot in our weekly newsletter, in a handy digest.
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from David Roth, Dhruv Mehrotra and Andy Greenberg, Thomas Dai, Cameron Maynard, and Katherine Rundell.
