“Humans are besotted with color and we always have been. We love it so much we will breathe it, eat it, drink it, and look at it until our eyes roll back in our heads. We will paint with it, paint the world with it, paint ourselves with it. We will go to the ends […]
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Award Wins, Note-Taking Advice, and Our Top 5
“So as soon as my reporting was done, I would go home. I would never permit myself to do anything, make dinner, nothing, until I’d sat down with the notebooks.” Happy Friday! We have several updates to share this week. We’re working to improve your overall Longreads experience, and you may notice some small changes while browsing […]
Sinead O’Connor Remembers Things Differently
“The mainstream narrative is that a pop star ripped up a photo of the pope on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and derailed her life. What if the opposite were true?”
Failure To Lawn
On what a dying patch of turfgrass can teach us about water scarcity, ecological repair, and the lies we tell ourselves about success.
‘The City Just Lied’: Remembering the 1921 Tulsa Massacre
One hundred years later, journalists look back on the massacre of “Black Wall Street.”
Shifting Identity, Shamans, and the Week’s Top 5
“So long as there are nations, there will be people trying to get out of them, tracking ceaselessly from one to the other while maybe wishing they could belong to the world instead.” In making a cross-country move recently, I realized that I can be a different person in a new place. There’s a certain […]
Suspended Falling: A Reading List on Walking
After seven million years of evolution, walking feels as natural as breathing. But as our environments evolve, so do our ways of walking through them.
The Heart of a Hunter and the Week’s Top 5
“Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone?” Happy Friday! We’ve got a compelling, thought-provoking feature for you this week. In […]
How Silence Protects and Harms Us (plus the Week’s Top 5)
“We still fight with the same Vietnamese stubbornness that is in our blood. I struggle with knowing far more English than Vietnamese. As you age, I fret about the ultimate silence of losing you. Although this dynamic will never go away, there have been new rhetorical tools to soften our challenges. Phrases like ‘I’m sorry’ […]
How to Fuel a Hike, What’s in a Name, and the Week’s Top 5
“What could it mean to give yourself the food you need to keep going? No punishing, no guilt, no withholding. Just nourishment.” Well hello, August! C’mon in and make yourself at home. This week, in addition to five stories chosen by the editors for our Top 5, we wanted to share two recent pieces with […]

