“Playing with Star Wars Lego bricks made them famous. Then a mysterious crime drove them apart.”
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Reads from Zefyr Lisowski, David Gessner, Susie Cagle, Brendan I. Koerner, and Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner.
Waymo Cars and Honey Bears
Gentrification has no shortage of first-order sins: displacement in the name of “progress” is bad enough. But after the displaced have been pushed to the margins, what’s left in their stead is a stunning homogeneity — not simply demographic, but dystopian. Anna Wiener’s latest “Letter From San Francisco” sums up the vague malaise that comes […]
The Landlord & the Tenant
“A young mother rents a house near Milwaukee. The previous tenant tells her, ‘Baby, they shouldn’t have let you move in.'”
What Chinatown Means to America — And to Me
In the wake of a nationwide surge of anti-Asian hate crimes, writer Bonnie Tsui reflects on the resiliency of Chinatowns: Chinatown is a place of contradiction. It serves as scapegoat and sanctuary. The first Chinatowns were ghettos for male Chinese laborers, who were forced to live among, and yet apart from, whites; Chinese women were […]
The Quest to Save the Pink Apples of Italy
A beautiful account of the remaining growers of the pink apple in Marche, Italy. Agostino Petroni’s descriptions will leave you ready to pack your bags for a visit. The earthquake, then the COVID-19 pandemic, reduced the small flow of tourism to the region. Yet Fayers believes that pink apples keep pulling people to those lands—a […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re sharing stories from Nick Bowlin, Rachel Priest and Emily Strasser, Rachel Yoder, Jake Skeets, and Willa Paskin.
A Future for Susanville
Prisons such as the California Correctional Center in Susanville, California, drive the local economy in the rural town, and its residents are just as tied to these facilities as the incarcerated ones. Piper French offers a nuanced portrait of the town, as locals in support of CCC, incarcerated organizers on the inside, and urban abolitionist […]
A lifelong labor of love, Nigerian “Yahoo Boys,” and the week’s top 5
“Over the course of 33 years, Gittins painstakingly transformed almost every surface of this flat with a series of artworks in a variety of styles and mediums, from friezes on the walls of his living room to a Roman altar in his kitchen and enormous, ambitious fireplaces (yes, multiple).” Hello and welcome to the Top […]


