“A dispatch from the final Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where the drinks were good, and the nature documentaries were, for the most part, sad.”
the believer
Posted inEditor's Pick
On Description
“If a depiction only distinguishes one thing from another, what else is lost?”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Deaths in donation bins, the Hardy boys, MAGA slop, billionaire playgrounds, and nostalgia for the complicated.
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Vauhini Vara
The author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age and The Immortal King Rao on memorable meals and books about whales.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Death of a Superman
“An entirely avoidable problem is killing dozens of homeless people across the country. Why is it being ignored?”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this edition: January begins, finding beauty, powerful blues, toxic water, and begonia batons.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Worst Shot Ever Taken
“The author and his closest basketball confidantes undertake a formal analysis of Steph Curry’s shot at the Paris Olympics as art object.”
Posted inFeature
A Year in Reading: Restraint as Wisdom
We live in a culture built on ignoring limits—of land, of bodies, of attention—and these stories kept returning me to that truth.
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Recommending stories by Alice Hines, Maggie Harrison Dupré, Katie Engelhart, Pooja Bhatia, and Tom Lamont.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Last Resort
“At Bombay Beach, a half-ruined former vacation town on the edge of the Salton Sea, absurdist philosophers, artists, and everyday townsfolk have undertaken a postapocalyptic experiment in radical living.”