“Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve.”
death
Why Did Walter Springs Die?
“In time, it was almost as if he had never existed at all.”
The Night Raids
“A reporter returns to investigate her past and unravel the legacy of the secretive Zero Units.”
Identity Crisis
“In a checklist of responses to a large-scale disaster, victim identification comes low down the pecking order.”
‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’
Krista Diamond | Longreads | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,342 words) In 2012, I was working at a hotel in Glacier National Park when a man I’d just met invited me for a day of tubing and drinking beer on the river. Little did I know, I would nearly drown in the rapids. But […]
The Death Artist
Her medium: the cremains of departed loved ones. Her mission: to change your perspective on the end of life.
The Mushrooms That Ate Luke Perry
As good as the headline is, the piece is even better — an essay about the actor’s afterlife plans that doubles as an elegy for privacy, nostalgia, and everything else we carry with us through this world. His heart, inside his chest, inside the mushroom burial shroud, was pressed against the silty soil left behind by […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, our editors recommend longreads by Benjamin Wofford, Josh Dzieza, Evan Osnos, Alice Wong & Ed Yong, and Dan Kois.
What the Racist Massacre in Buffalo Stole From One Family
An intimate portrait of the family of Celestine Chaney in the days after she and nine other Black people were shot and killed by a white supremacist at Tops Friendly Market. Chaney had just one child, a son named Wayne: Wayne was dissatisfied by the answers the country offered. The stagnation of gun control efforts […]
A Pandemic Tragedy in Guayaquil
In this harrowing read for The New Yorker, Daniel Alarcón paints a grim picture of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, which endured one of the world’s most lethal outbreaks of COVID-19. In Guayaquil, on any given day before the pandemic, there might have been thirty to fifty people whose deaths had to be accounted for, whose […]