essay Archives - Longreads

Of Innocence and Experience

“Can anybody really say that socially reproducing the present state of things is a desirable goal? So, then, what do we dream of?”

“Before the final season of ‘Succession,’ Matthew Macfadyen and others explain the creation and expansion of the show’s most unlikely power player.”

“Every hiker is called to the trail for a different reason, but we all share a common goal: We all want to finish.”

Two new books see disability as a source of solidarity.

“The media’s obsession with my mother changed my relationship to grief.”

“Turf wars. Protection money. Scientology. And my boss, a man who’s half-convinced he really is Santa.”

Five notable personal essays published this year, on friendship, loss, war, endings, and metaphors.

These essays and reported features are our most-read stories of the year.

“Didion depicts Hawaiʻi as a place that exists solely in the white American imagination, and, because of this, her journalism is a fiction.”

In a recent essay, Grace Loh Prasad muses on motherhood, the bond of family, and finding community.