We’re Not All in This Together

When the only way to be a real community is to be apart, it quickly becomes obvious who is out for themselves. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Escaping Coronavirus Lockdown Through a Stranger’s Solitary Walks on YouTube

Under self-quarantine, Aaron Gilbreath ‘moves’ freely with the help of Rambalac’s video travelogues. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Poke Paradox

Where culinary bliss meets environmental peril, and how to solve America’s poke problem. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Regarding the Pain of Oprah

She gets a mansion and she gets a boat and she gets a jet! And you get to suffer and then maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you’re lucky enough and bare enough of your private pai… | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Eating to Save My Mind

Can diet determine the future of your mental health? Claire Fitzsimmons attempts to find out through a month of Whole30. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Disease of Deceit

Friends don’t let friends lie about having cancer. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Price of Dominionist Theology

After leaving fundamentalism, Eve Ettinger grapples with the loaded theological heritage of evangelical personal finance teachings. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Queens of Infamy: Mariamne I

In the ancient hot mess known as Judea, a young queen had to navigate a self-destructive royal dynasty and one of history’s worst husbands. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Still Waters

The muted response to Todd Haynes’s “Dark Waters” is depressingly similar to our culture’s muted response to climate change | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

OK Listener, We’ll Talk About OK Boomer

Longreads editors chat with Internet culture reporter Taylor Lorenz about ok boomer, TikTok, patriotism, and more. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

What Shattered My Mother’s Mind

Winston Ross recalls the heartbreaking ordeal his family endured after his mother’s routine surgery led to post-operative delirium. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Lose Your Mind

Dani Fleischer recalls how a lifetime of perfectionism led her down a path of self-destruction. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Burning Out

Search and rescue teams train for the worst conditions. But the worst conditions are getting worse. Are they ready for the next big disaster? | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People

Laura Lippman, admittedly a rotten friend, is bummed by the ways in which friendships end as one gets older. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Records on Bone

One young Ukrainian-American struggles to piece together a clear portrait of her parents’ difficult Soviet past, once they quit erasing, and began embracing, their legacy. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Here at the End of All Things: On the Geography of Fantasy Worlds (2017)

On losing oneself in the geography of fantasy worlds, from Middle Earth to Westeros. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Social media is designed for emotion, not dialogue

There’s no such thing as a 140-character exegesis: the (non)-discourse around “Joker” is the latest to prove that social media is designed for emotion, not dialogue.  | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

‘I Went Quiet and That Allowed Me to Understand’: The Life of a Molecatcher

Marc Hamer discusses life, death, and the lost art of catching a mole. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

It’s Time to Talk About Solar Geoengineering

We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids

Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Cut from the Same Cloth

Artist Myfanwy Tristram was irritated by her teenage daughter’s extreme fashions — until she took an illustrated journey into their origins. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Historian Amir Alexander on Euclidean geometry’s far-reaching effects. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Mathematics as a Cultural Force

Historian Amir Alexander on Euclidian geometry’s far-reaching effects. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Exilium Vita Est: The Island Home of Victor Hugo

Emma Jacobs takes us on an illustrated journey of Hugo’s writing life in exile on Guernsey, where he completed Les Misérables. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

My Love Affair with Chairs

Chairs the world over have loved me, and I love them all back. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance

In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Geography of Risk

Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some of the riskiest places on earth, so why do taxpayers have to pay for the hurricane damage to rich coastal communities? | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Betting the Farm on the Drought

Farmers like sixth-generation Illinois farmer Ethan Cox can’t wait for policymakers to protect them from climate change. To survive, they have to adapt their operations now, if they can. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Young Man and the Sea Sponge

SpongeBob SquarePants turned 20 this summer. This is the story of how a marine biology teacher named Stephen Hillenburg gave life to an animated character who continues to delight fans worldwide. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Nashville Contra Jaws, 1975

In their time, “Jaws” and “Nashville” were regarded as Watergate films, and both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

American Green

How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost? | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

‘My Teachers Said We Weren’t Allowed to Use Them.’

How Cecelia Watson learned to stop worrying and love the semicolon. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Searching for the Sundays

When music writers are also music fans, they can walk a line between appreciative and intrusive. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

A Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store

American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and K… | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Reading Lessons – Learning and Forgetting How to Read

You never stop learning how to read — probably because you also never stop forgetting how to read. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

What a 19th-century scammer can teach us about women, lying, and economic boom-and-bust cycles | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Big Sick: Vomit culture keeps repeating on us

Vomit culture keeps repeating on us because who doesn’t enjoy a good puke. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Cost of Reading

Ayşegül Savaş contemplates the way women’s and men’s time is valued and the uneven burden taken by women writers in literary citizenship. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?

One of the rarest religious experiences you can have in America is to join the Plain. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

‘Nothing Kept Me Up at Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’

The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

I Became ‘Rich’

During a rare opportunity to vacation in Hawai’i, Stacy Torres is forced to confront her status as better off than where she came from. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense

What’s the German word for “the world’s most forthright people have deceit in their DNA”? | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning

Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

How the Cosby story finally went viral – and why it took so long

A journalist who reported on the accusations long before they went viral wonders, “What kind of profession am I in, where stories have no logical reason for unfolding?” | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

Today’s public intellectuals have their own version of the American Dream, where one person, on their own, can achieve anything — including being the smartest person in the room. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 4 years ago

A Dispatch from the Fast-Paced, Makeshift World of High-End Catering

The unsung heroes of the food world battle against time and chaos, cooking haute cuisine over lit cans of Sterno in the gloomy back hallways of New York’s civic landmarks. | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 5 years ago

Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers

From exploding Ford Pintos to racist algorithms, all harmful technologies are a product of unethical design. And yet, like car companies in the ’70s, today’s tech companies would rather… | Continue reading


@longreads.com | 5 years ago