This week we are featuring stories from Mark Follman, Scott Stossel, Wei Tchou, Sara Franklin, and Alexander Sammon.
Search results
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories by Jenny Kleeman, Lucy Schiller, Michael Gardner, Emily Raboteau, and Angie Martoccio.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Elizabeth Kolbert, Joshua Hammer, Tan Tuck Ming, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.
Loneliness, Power, and the Top 5 of the Week
“Heartbreak makes for a delicious spectacle, from afar.” “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 […]
Hope in the Heartland and the Week’s Top 5
“She didn’t tell her customers that, the day before, when she was cutting parsley for an herb and cheese focaccia, she had to pause to stop tears from falling into the parsley. How the half-cut stems and greens transported her to a kitchen in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood, nearly 10 years before, when her grandmother […]
Poets in the Machine
Why does the literary world still hold online writing at arm’s length?
Hoops, Double Helices, and Our Top 5
“I’m not just crying, I’m truly wailing. I’m one of Homer’s grieving women, I’m Alice in Wonderland crying an actual ocean between hiccups, I’m Diane Keaton weeping then whooping in her Something’s Gotta Give breakup montage. My team, the Lakers, has lost.” I confess: I did not know much about basketball until I worked with Rachel Dlugatch […]
Best of 2023: Profiles
The profiles we loved in 2023 cover a Uvalde mom turned gun-control advocate, Ginni and Clarence Thomas, a love letter to Louisiana and two unrelated women born there in 1953, the man behind the Twitter persona “Dril,” and an underdog surfer nicknamed “Casual Luke.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending memorable pieces by Seth Freed Wessler, Stuart McGurk, Jon Mooallem, Ben Lerner, Kiese Laymon, and Amelia Tait.
People vs. 👻, Townspeople vs. Nazis, and Our Top 5
“The new bridge is square where the old bridge is round, bustling instead of deserted, awash in the sounds of schools and neighborhoods nearby. At some point, Lydia’s haunting shifted along with the traffic patterns. She’s been seen at both bridges, but the new one is the only place she might still hail passing motorists.” […]


