“A professor endeavors to separate treasure from trash—before her children have to do it for her.”
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My Brain Finally Broke
“Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.”
A Water Obsession and Our Weekly Top 5
“The majority of home water use takes place in the bathroom, so that’s where I started. I scaled back my showers to once a week and only flushed the toilet when the need was overwhelming. I wandered my dark little apartment doing calculations on a loop. How many gallons of water does the Livingston faucet […]
Fentanyl: The Portrait of a Mass Murderer
“A cheap, white powder—50 times more powerful than heroin—which kills more than 70,000 people each year in the United States and countless others across the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”
It’s Your Last Chance to Fight the Algorithm
Hi again, First off, thank you for opening this email. I know we’ve been showing up in your inbox a bit more than usual these days. But tomorrow is the last day of our Member Drive, so I wanted to reach out one final time to explain why Longreads is counting on your support. By […]
I’d Like to Report a Murder
“Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor talk to hannah baer about the dark art of literary takedowns.”
This Week: Rituals, Emoji, and a Cold Case
“Ritual is an urge and an act; it’s an aesthetic gesture. As an adult I established the habit of turning my attention to those subtle seasonal details and recording them. I was loving and honoring the land, but this practice still left something undone. A certain clarity, maybe formality. Something like a frame around a […]
Living In A Lucid Dream
“Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.”
Hearts and Brains
“Humans always end up with clogged arteries, right? That’s not what the lives of the Tsimane in the Amazon basin tell us.”
‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’
“Army Rangers killed her parents. A Marine is raising her in America. But her Afghan family says she was taken under false pretenses.”

