“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 […]
Search results
Longreads Best of 2020: Music Writing
Music has been a salve this year, helping us cope with the myriad challenges that 2020 brought. Here are some favorite pieces of music writing we picked in 2020.
A Trip to the Library and Our Weekly Top 5
“I may never have wanted to be a librarian, but I love this job. This specific job. Not because of any kind of noble commitment to knowledge or love of books. I love it because every day requires me to meet humanity face to face.” What does it mean to be a librarian today? At […]
A Reading List on Succession, Stories About Unnatural Disasters, and This Week’s Top 5
“These people may have all the money in the world, but as the last four seasons have shown us in vivid, lacerating detail, their cold, loveless lives inspire little envy.” Welcome to the weekend! The final episode of Succession airs this Sunday, and to mark the end of this show about TV’s most dysfunctional media-empire […]
Celebrating Bitch Magazine: A Reading List
A writer traces her own feminist journey as she reflects on the forthcoming shutdown of Bitch Media.
The Shape Of Walking
Victoria Livingstone considers the elliptical process of writing an essay. I struggled to write this essay even when I believed I was the singular author. Now my daughter continually reminds me that our steps intersect with the movements of those around us in illegible patterns. The rhetoric of walking resists order.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
The April 12 edition features stories by Stephanie McCrummen, Mark Warren, Trina Moyles, Laura Preston, and Jack King.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories from Emily Bazelon, Eva Holland, Kevin Pang, Jessica Traynor, and David Pierce.
Getting Sober Again
Natalie Lima recounts relapsing during the pandemic, halting two years of sobriety with cheap vodka in “less than the length of a song.” At Catapult, she shares the winding path of her recovery and what she missed most during her seven-month relapse. What I missed most, during this relapse, was my writing practice—a pursuit that […]


