Login
Get the Longreads Top 5 Email
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
This edition features stories about:
Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski | ProPublica | April 6, 2023 | 2,936 words
No matter where you get your news, you’ve likely seen this story sometime in the last 24 hours. It’s a bombshell investigation that reveals how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has received lavish gifts from a billionaire Republican donor named Harlan Crow, likely in violation of federal law. Said gifts include international cruises on a staffed superyacht, a Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass, flights on a private jet, and annual vacations to Crow’s luxury compound in upstate New York. Anyone with an iota of respect for democracy should be appalled — albeit unsurprised, given everything we already know about Thomas’s associates, including his wife. Read it and rage. But also read it and admire the craft that went into telling the story. It is rich in detail, yet precise. Its tone is finely tuned. The selection and placement of quotes are [chef’s kiss]. The writers dole out gobsmacking information throughout the piece, right down to the kicker. This is top-notch reporting and delivery. A+ all around. —SD
Michael Hall | Texas Monthly | April 4, 2023 | 8,672 words
The legend of Robert Johnson dwarfs the man himself in many ways. Johnson wasn’t the first recorded blues musician, nor the most prolific of his era. Yet, his brief career and early death shrouded him in mystery and mythology, ultimately influencing the evolution of popular music itself — and confounding would-be biographer Mack McCormick. McCormick, who spent much of his life chasing down the stories and music of men like Johnson, is the focus of this remarkable story, but he’s by no means a hero. He may have been once, when Texas Monthly executive editor Michael Hall first profiled him 20 years ago; that was before his obsession overwhelmed his clarity, and his remarkable research into Johnson’s life turned into something far more toxic. Now, Hall revisits McCormick’s life after his death, teasing the truth from hagiography and telling the long, twisting tale of a man crushed by his own masterwork. Having helped titans like Lightnin’ Hopkins find the spotlight, McCormick long ago achieved his own legendary status. The question that persists is whether a legacy like his can be tainted by a flawed final act. —PR
Ben Goldfarb | Hakai Magazine | April 4, 2023 | 2,400 words
A reported essay on the intricacies of dog-leashing rules could have felt like a real slog. But Ben Goldfarb’s piece lifts off the page. In the opening paragraphs, we meet Kit, Goldfarb’s dog, as she runs along the beach with the wind flying through her floppy ears. It’s an image I could instantly relate to: Like all dog owners, I love watching my own dog dash around off-leash. (Well, meander around. She isn’t the speediest.) But, sometimes, there can be an environmental cost. Goldfarb meticulously takes us through the problems of letting dogs off-leash on a beach, raising some concerns I had never considered. I felt for the shorebirds trying to rest after a long migration; as a contributor eloquently puts it, “Imagine you’ve just gotten home from work and want nothing more than to chill on the couch with a beer — and then a pack of barking dogs tears into the house and chases you outside, over and over again.” Combined with some horrific facts about little blue penguin deaths, this piece will make you think about when to unclip that leash. —CW
Meg Bernhard | n+1 | March 2, 2023 | 3,367 words
This week, Meg Bernhard’s piece hit the sweet spot for me as a reader, offering insight into a world I know nothing about: what it’s like to be a female long-haul truck driver. I’m fascinated by the minutia of others’ jobs and this piece delivered. You’ll meet members of REAL Women in Trucking, a rights advocacy group for women drivers, and get to know Jess, age 39, who escaped an abusive relationship to see America behind the wheel of her rig dubbed “The Black Widow.” “Jess kept a secret credit card,” Bernhard writes, “and left their home only with the clothes she was wearing. She went to her stepdad’s, applied for a trucking job, and was on a bus to a training facility in Indiana four days later. Halima spent fifth grade on the road. They solved math problems with dry erase markers on the truck’s windows and played catch in warehouse parking lots.” —KS
Angela Burke | Eater | March 24, 2023 | 1,533 words
At an early age, I had mastered a critical skill in our house: lifting the lid on our humongous cookie jar to pilfer a treat, then replacing that lid in complete silence. As a cookie burglar, I was an apple that hadn’t fallen far from its tree. My Dad was always there first. And when my mom complained about dwindling stock, dad pointed the finger directly at me and my brother. (The nerve!) That cookie jar (a brown ceramic wooden stump with a creepy, grinning gray squirrel on top) sits on their kitchen counter to this day. At Eater, in this love letter to the kooky cookie jar, Angela Burke introduces us to artist and vintage ceramic cookie jar maker Hazy Mae. Her custom jars, in homage to Dolly Parton, Andy Warhol, Elvis, and Madonna (among others), can run $800 or more. That may feel steep, but can you really put a price on a vessel that could eventually contain fond memories, too? —KS
This is the piece our audience loved most.
Jayson Greene | Pitchfork | March 29, 2023 | 4,435 words
Yes, it has one of the best hed/dek combos I’ve seen this year, but Jayson Greene’s look back at the spuming cultural wave known as the pop-R&B gigahit “Blurred Lines” doesn’t stop there. It aims primarily at Robin Thicke, though Greene’s got heat for everyone from Thicke collaborators Pharrell Williams and T.I. to Miley Cyrus. Sometimes the best culture-crit is steeped in a vat of acid. (That said, I regret to inform you that “Shooter” still goes superduperhard.) —PR
Ben Goldfarb questions the responsibilities of dog owners in an essay focusing on the impact of unleashed dogs on shorebirds. Goldfarb brings this somewhat niche topic to life with a mixture of reporting and personal experience.
We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. She looked happy; she looked free; she looked right.
As January draws to a close, our favorite stories this week included a stirring critical essay, a paean to the world’s greatest boxed meal, a rethinking of psychedelics’ impact on the planet, a profile of a craftsperson at his peak, and an eye-opener about how humpback whales use air in some unexpected ways.
Ken Chen | n+1 | 11,542 words | January 25, 2023
After Corky Lee passed last year, the photographer and community organizer was memorialized in his hometown’s most conventionally prestigious outlets: The Times offered a sizable obituary, as did Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. This week, on the first anniversary of Lee’s death, Ken Chen rendered an altogether different kind of portrait in n+1. Much of the same biographical information is included, as are a number of Lee’s iconic photographs of Asian Americans in New York throughout the last six decades. Yet, when Chen writes about his encounters with Lee, and about the 14 photographs he selects to represent Lee’s work, the grief that suffuses his words isn’t solely about Lee, but about the many atrocities visited upon the Asian American community, up to and after Lee’s death. Chen’s critical acumen here is reason enough to read: “His images lack a charismatic subject,” he writes of Lee. “Those whom capital dismissed as surplus, he saw as beautiful. He commemorated the multitude, the striking waiters and seamstresses whose unruly abundance crowded away any beatific composition.” But he brings a similar understated poetry to the social conditions Lee’s work served to illuminate — and with violence against Asian American elders and others seemingly unending (including a horrifying recent attack in my own hometown), that juxtaposition makes Chen’s piece nearly as indelible as the images it contains. —PR
Ivana Rihter | Catapult | January 19, 2023 | 2,261 words
I only discovered Kraft dinners later in life after moving to North America revealed the cult of Kraft to me. A stable lurking in every cupboard; I admired the respect that something so impossibly orange had managed to garner. When Ivana Rihter finds KDs, though, they are much more; cooked for her by her baba, they are inextricably linked to her immigration story. She describes the process of boiling the pasta and adding the sauce with reverence, the memory mixed in with her love for her baba and appreciation for the economic hardships her family struggled through to start their new life. Her baba teaches her to put feta on top, and with this “secret little piece of the home country mixed in with all-American shelf-stable cheese” it remains a food for life, and — consistently sitting at about a dollar a box — one that carries on seeing her through hard times. I found this an unexpectedly beautiful essay, more about memory and belonging than cheesy pasta. Food can transport you back in time, especially if, as Rihter describes it, it “is soaked with memories of [an] origin story.” —CW
Amber X. Chen | Atmos | January 16, 2023 | 3,196 words
In this piece, Chen explores what the current psychedelic renaissance means for environmental activism, and how synthetic drugs like LSD and MDMA and psychoactive plants like ayahuasca and peyote can stir change within individuals — and ultimately galvanize social movements. This all sounds incredibly positive on the surface, but not everyone who dabbles in such mind-altering journeys is transformed for the better; psychedelics also fuel right-wing movements, too. (See: “QAnon Shaman.“) The decriminalization of psychedelics is a step toward making their therapeutic benefits accessible to more people, yes, but as Chen notes, it increases the threat of deforestation, and — with today’s psychedelic movement being largely white — it also takes power away from Indigenous people, who have harnessed the healing power of these sacred plants for thousands of years. (See also a Top 5 essay I picked last year: “The Gentrification of Consciousness.”) I appreciate Chen’s exploration here, and the questions posed that I haven’t stopped thinking about, like: “How broken is Western society that we think we need drugs in order to facilitate mass climate action?” —CLR
Elly Fishman | Chicago Magazine | January 17, 2023 | 4,177 words
Recently, in his late 60s, my dad decided to learn how to play the violin. I respect the choice to try the impossible, especially something as delicate and timeless as bowing a stringed instrument. (My parents’ cats, who endure the scratching out of notes from beneath the couch or bed, seem to have a different opinion.) After reading this lovely profile, I think perhaps my dad, a skilled carpenter, should also try apprenticing as a luthier. I, someone with zero skills at playing an instrument besides an egg shaker, who curses putting IKEA furniture together, was mesmerized by the descriptions of how John Becker, perhaps the best violin restorer on earth, practices his craft. Elly Fishman’s profile has a musical quality: It sweeps readers through chapters of Becker’s personal story and dwells in long, lyrical moments when, with the surest of hands, Becker repairs some of the most revered instruments on the planet — namely, Stradivari. There are just 650 of the violins left. What makes them so extraordinary? Musicians and scientists may puzzle over that question forever. In the meantime, Becker works — quietly, meticulously, instinctively. “We are caretakers of these instruments,” one of his clients tells him. “We move on, but these instruments continue to the next generation.” —SD
Doug Perrine | Hakai Magazine | December 20, 2022 | 1,500 words
It’s well known that many animals use tools to aid feeding and other tasks of life. Think: otters floating on their backs, cracking shells with rocks. You’d think it would be hard for whales to use tools, but as Doug Perrine reports at Hakai Magazine, humpbacks use what’s available to them — air and water — to form bubbles for a variety of activities. “I’m tempted to describe the air in a humpback’s lungs as a Swiss army knife because I’ve seen whales do so many different things with it,” he wrote. “It is not actually a tool collection though, but a storehouse of raw construction material with which the whale can fashion a variety of tools. Lacking free fingers and opposable thumbs, whales are unable to create and use tools in the same way as humans, but reveal their intelligence through the manner in which they utilize other body parts for tool production and use.” —KS
Enjoyed these recommendations? Browse all of our editors’ picks, or sign up for our weekly newsletter if you haven’t already:
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
Humpback whales use bubbles to screen their young, corral prey, and ward off aggressors, among other things. But do they have special bubble signatures used only when humans are present?
This young female whale approached my boat, then dove and began “drawing” with bubble curtains released in a thin stream from her blowhole. There was no food around and no other whales in sight. She rolled to one side so that she could look upward to admire her handiwork. Was she practicing making bubble structures that could be useful tools on the feeding grounds, or was she just enjoying the visual beauty of the scintillating bubble spirals? Was it art for art’s sake? Certainly, other animals, including captive dolphins, sea lions, rhinos, and elephants have learned to paint with brushes, and both wild bowerbirds and pufferfish produce visual art to impress potential mates.
FreshRSS 