Featuring stories from Charlotte Bailey, Hanif Abdurraqib, Taylar Dawn Stagnar, Patrick Madden, and Kevin Chroust.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this week’s Top 5 we have lessons from apartheid, clever Claude, feeling bodies anew, the power of wax, and free mining.
Loneliness, Power, and the Top 5 of the Week
“I want to be left alone, but I don’t want to be lonely.” Hanif Abdurraqib writes this about a tension that dominated the career of singer Phyllis Hyman—but it also feels like a familiar plea in this dim, early-January week, when many of us leave the chaos of extended family and drift back into our own homes, our own jobs, and perhaps our own small pockets of solitude.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Christina Cooke, Tim Neville, Nate Rogers, Linda Kinstler, and Sandra Beasley.
‘We Deserve So Much More Than Police, Prisons, and Jails’: Scalawag Takes On Emmy-Winning Television
We recommend these incisive essays on Abbott Elementary, The White Lotus, and The Dropout in Scalawag’s series on pop culture and justice.
The Collaborators
“As occupied territories are liberated, some residents face accusations that they sided with the enemy.”
The Teeth Makers of Kandahar
Haji Muhammad Sultan owns a business in the center of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, dedicated to handcrafting high-quality dentures. Founded by his grandfather 80 years ago, the shop was a place that Sultan came as a child to learn the family craft; he became a military doctor during the U.S.-led occupation and made teeth for […]
(Alleged) Kings of the Con and the Week’s Top 5
“[T]he most compelling tales of grift aren’t the ones that depend on technology: the bottomless library of fraud-ready photos; the platforms that let anyone claim to be an epidemiologist or electoral fraud whistleblower; the software that can plop your face onto another person’s. No, the tales that captivate us most almost always reveal a person’s longing.” […]
Up, Up, and Away to the Week’s Top 5
“Wallace was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort. A 54-year-old Massachusetts lawyer and real estate developer, he couldn’t afford to fly conservatively. Gas ballooning, similar to jockeyship, favored lightweight pilots, who could stock their baskets with more sand. Compared with his slighter opponents, Wallace’s six-foot-five, 240-pound frame meant that the equivalent of three additional 30-pound bags of sand […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re highlighting stories from Yuval Abraham, Paul Tough, Leslie Jamison, Melina Moe, and Meg Bernhard.


