“After an emotionally tumultuous year, and in search of a way to return to his old self, a writer unexpectedly finds himself devoted to chess.”
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Worst Shot Ever Taken
“The author and his closest basketball confidantes undertake a formal analysis of Steph Curry’s shot at the Paris Olympics as art object.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Fear as a Game
“What can the philosophy of games tell us about our odd impulse to scare ourselves?”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this edition: January begins, finding beauty, powerful blues, toxic water, and begonia batons.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Last Resort
“At Bombay Beach, a half-ruined former vacation town on the edge of the Salton Sea, absurdist philosophers, artists, and everyday townsfolk have undertaken a postapocalyptic experiment in radical living.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Alice Hines, Maggie Harrison Dupré, Katie Engelhart, Pooja Bhatia, and Tom Lamont.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Love and Murder in South Africa
“Those tears were the product of the education I’d come for.”
Posted inFeature
A Year in Reading: Restraint as Wisdom
We live in a culture built on ignoring limits—of land, of bodies, of attention—and these stories kept returning me to that truth.
Posted inReading List
Watch the Skies: A UFO Believers Reading List
Amid a new flurry of media coverage, we revisit some of our favorite stories about ufologists and close encounters.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Mount Fear Diary
“Speaking to the dead can, for a short while, seem to place us outside the laws of nature—outside the rules governing time and space.”
