In this edition: the appeal of the surreal, decoding AI dreck, goop relations, learning to think, and pigeon racing pitfalls
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Constraints: A Hometown Ode
“When I was in high school, ambition meant two things: escaping my hometown and becoming a writer.”
Matthew Perry’s Radical Honesty About His Addiction Battle Helped Us All
“But he did get sober. By the time his book came out almost exactly a year ago, he’d been clean 18 months.”
The Toll of War and the Week’s Top 5
“Tesfaye wan’t sure where the gunfire was coming from, and with service outages across Mekelle, he couldn’t look online for answers. He was certain something was very wrong. But what could he do? He got dressed and did what he did most mornings. He went to work.” Every month, we share an excerpt from our […]
Piecing Together My Father’s Murder
“I was too young to remember what happened to my dad, and no one explained it to me. So I tried to assemble the story myself.”
With Melville in Pittsfield
“The true believers were nowhere in sight on that snowy morning.”
Help Us Publish Stories That Outlast the Noise
We’re a home for stories that linger. In 2017, I reached out to Candace Rardon, a writer and artist whose watercolor sketches I’d admired for years. Up until that point, I’d only edited traditional essays for Longreads, but I wanted to experiment with illustrated personal narratives. We brainstormed a visual direction, and the final piece […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring standout reads from Ian Urbina, Hanif Abdurraqib, Sallie Tisdale, Brad Rassler, and Adam Reiner.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we have stories from Sarah Miller, James D. Walsh, Hanif Abdurraqib, Gabrielle Drolet, and Jeremiah David.


