Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
*Number five stories are often the perfect portal to another dimension. Great for the commute or that comfy spot on your couch, they offer a handy distraction from the mundane or that holiday gathering you wish you’d declined. Sometimes lighthearted, always thoughtful, number five…
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
Number five stories are often the perfect portal to another dimension. Great for the commute or that comfy spot on your couch, they offer a handy distraction from the mundane or that holiday gathering you wish you’d declined. Sometimes lighthearted, always thoughtful, number five stories help us to view the world through a different lens. If you haven’t already, become a Longreads member so that you get these number five stories, and our other recommended reads, in your inbox on Friday mornings.
—Brendan, Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter & Seyward
January
Do You Believe in Life After Death? These Scientists Study It.
Saskia Solomon | The New York Times | January 3, 2025 | 3,719 words
Once, years ago, I tried to gain access to the Division of Perceptual Studies, the parapsychology research office at the University of Virginia. I’d become fascinated by Dr. Ian Stevenson, who founded the division in 1967 and, over decades, collected thousands of stories from people who claimed to recall past lives. Before his own death in 2007, Stevenson bought a combination lock from a local hardware store, set a private code, and locked it. Perhaps one day, freed of his earthly body, he might somehow communicate the code. The lock might snap open; a new light might shine into an old, dark mystery. For a long time, I passed the same hardware store on my walk to work. I tried interviewing Stevenson’s colleagues, who respectfully declined to speak with me; I made an appointment to visit the division’s research library, only to have it revoked. A staff member told me that the press “has trivialized our work here . . . for entertainment purposes, and we are very wary of this sort of thing happening.” Saskia Solomon’s reported feature is a rare, deep glimpse into the work of the Division of Perceptual Studies as it quietly continues—“notably distanced from the university’s leafy main campus,” Solomon notes, “and at least a couple of miles from the medical school.” As one former director tells her, “Nobody knows we’re here.” Solomon’s work is measured throughout, appropriately questioning and quietly attuned to the wonder of the researchers she shadows. Photographs from Matt Eich—of an enclosure to block electromagnetic interference; of a drawer filled with locks—hum with potential. There is always reason for skepticism; still, every story must mean something. —BF
The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden
Jasper Nathaniel | The Paris Review | January 13, 2025 | 2,775 words
New York City has always felt immune to certain cultural forces, particularly those that require wide-open spaces. As beautiful as its public parks are, they’re not exactly suited to activities beyond running or the odd pedal-boat rental. Hiking requires driving an hour or more. Skiing, the same. The very concept of rodeo sports in the five boroughs—let alone Manhattan—seems as unlikely as putting pineapple on pizza. This impossibility animates Jasper Nathaniel’s visit to a three-day bull-riding event held in Madison Square Garden, elevating it from what might be a gawking safari to an exercise in curiosity. How does this all work? Where do the bulls stay? Who attends the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden? (Who sponsors the Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden does not invite such curiosity.) The result is incredibly entertaining, if not surprising. While the piece can skew toward glib at times, Nathaniel avoids the dreaded Coastal Writer Observes America™ trope by foregrounding his own ignorance. He’s chastened by wranglers; he comes out on the losing end of a handshake with a bull rider. So what if he dutifully recounts some conversations that happen to be hilarious? You ride with the bulls, you get the horns. —PR
Do Our Dogs Have Something to Tell the World?
Camille Bromley | The New York Times Magazine | January 6, 2025 | 5,104 words
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of bringing home Bowser. He wasn’t Bowser then; the day my wife and I met him, he had no name at all. Someone from the dog rescue had found him running around a shoreline park in the East Bay, collarless and ID-less, presumably dumped there but still friendly and trusting enough to hop in their car. We waited a month, so he could be reunited with whoever it was, if that was meant to happen, but it didn’t, and he became part of our family. Bowser has changed our lives, as dogs will do. Some of that is just the result of his being a happy, muscly little pug-mutt who walks like a cartoon—when you’re outside with a dog like that, people get happy, and they invariably talk to you—but some of it is just the alchemy of independence and utter dependence of living with a dog. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize them just a little, to map their moods and foibles to human psychology, to love them even while knowing that their bonding behaviors are more evolution than emotion. Even before we got Bowser, I’d seen TikTok videos of dogs using “talking buttons,” and couldn’t decide if it was miraculous or just well-engineered meme fodder. If a dog like Bunny the sheepadoodle really could tell her human that she had a foxtail in her paw, I reasoned, it made that bond all the more mystical. “These pets weren’t just standing by to serve their human owners,” as Camille Bromley writes of the animals she sees using talking buttons on social media. “They were companions with voices of their own.” Bromley’s fascinating feature can’t render a definitive judgment on dogs’ linguistic facility, since science can’t either, but it still plumbs the question with rigor and verve. She detours into the history of animal language experiments, she speaks to proponents and detractors in the research community, and she renders button-based communication in all caps because it’s just far more enjoyable that way. This is a piece for dog lovers, yes, but it’s really for anyone with a sense of wonder and possibility. (The readers in the story’s comment thread do not have a sense of wonder and possibility.) Besides, even if we never get Bowser a set of talking buttons, I know what he’d use it for. BALL. BALL NOW. BALL PLAY NOW. —PR
Why Children’s Books?
Katherine Rundell | London Review of Books | January 29, 2025 | 5,753 words
Shortly after parenthood recalibrated my life, I visited the children’s section of our local library for the first time. My initial confusion—Who hid all the modern art books in the kids’ section?—quickly gave way to giddiness as I pulled more picture books from the shelves. There was subversion here, both sly and overt! There was economy of emotion! Conceptual rigor! The library’s most accessible section, I realized, was also its most powerful. “Children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning,” Katherine Rundell writes for The London Review of Books. It also holds the promise of an egalitarian space: “We can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida.” Rundell offers a brisk and entertaining history of English-language children’s books, from “conduct manuals focused on nose-picking” through Tolstoy’s stories for younger readers. (“There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain,’ a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird.”) As labor and suffrage movements gained strength, however, children’s books became less concerned with simplistic manner lessons; instead, Rundell observes, “they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be.” She draws on the mighty Ursula Le Guin for urgency: “In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power and to offer moral alternatives.” And there are so many alternatives to consider, if one only looks. —BF
February
My Quest to Find the Owner of a Mysterious WWII Japanese Sword
Kevin Chroust | Outside | February 5, 2025 | 9,866 words
This piece on returning a Japanese military sword is a passion project. Born out of love for the author’s grandfather, curiosity, and just plain lockdown boredom, it was years in the making—500 years, if you count from when the sword was crafted. Kevin Chroust’s family came into the picture a mere 80 years ago: His grandfather found the sword on an Okinawa beach in the final days of World War II and mailed it back to America. (The competence of the postal service is one of the more shocking elements of this story.) Chroust remembers the sword being brought out as a child, a prop for war stories, but it was only as an adult that he considered the wooden label attached to it, which asked, in part, “your favour to send my sword to my home,” with a name and a town on the other side. Drawn to the plea, Chroust began an internet search to track down the sword’s original owner. It was not a simple process, but after finding relatives of the owner, Chroust started to plan a trip to Japan. He has a delightfully wry tone when discussing the reality of this adventure: “[F]antasy is simple. The imagination can’t be bothered with unromantic minutiae. With weapons laws. Consulates. Viruses. Visas. Visa sponsorships.” But he perseveres until he and the sword are finally on the way to Japan. (Again, great trust is given to the postal system.) I won’t spoil the ending, but there are some beautiful moments. This is a fun detective piece and a fascinating history lesson, but, above all, it is a personal story. A tale of two families, on two sides of a war, then two sides of the world, who are brought together “with acts of kindness on both sides.” —CW
Seth Rogen is the Boss Now
Dave Holmes | Esquire | February 11, 2025 | 5,482 words
I’ve written enough celebrity profiles in my life that I’d be happy if I never write another. Judging from how rarely I recommend them here, sometimes I wonder if I’d be happy if I never read another. They rarely feel anything other than transactional; they flatten into the same small arsenal of tropes; it’s always difficult to shake the sense that you’re reading something choreographed, negotiated, artificial. That’s unfair, of course. Curious writers and engaged subjects is never a bad combination, as Dave Holmes’s cover profile of Seth Rogen proves. Rogen’s been a comedy star since he was 16 years old (at least for those of us who fell in love with the short-lived TV series Freaks and Geeks). He’s done this dance a million times. But despite what you may think from his cinematic man-child persona, Seth Rogen is also a thoughtful, decent, deeply creative person who is at home in his skin the way few people are. He cares about what he does. He knows who he is. He lives his life intentionally. He’s made creative and personal choices, all well-chronicled, that I respect. And the time he spends with Holmes makes that clear. There’s no stunty scenework here—no skydiving trips, no “come with me while I get my hands dirty pretending to drive cattle on this massive compound I bought two years ago”—just conversation. Sure, some of that conversation is about weed. (“I feel like [I’m] getting tips on my morning jog from . . . Eliud Kipchoge,” cracks Holmes.) This is Seth Rogen, after all. And in a moment when so much comedy feels like it’s curdling into something belligerent and nasty, we could all use a little bit more of his you-do-you demeanor. —PR
The Cat’s Meat Man
Kathryn Hughes | The Public Domain Review | February 12, 2025 | 2,009 words
Somewhere in my drafts folder sits a long blog post about how I don’t know anything about history. (Apologies to Sam Cooke.) Little things, sure—I’ll never forget the year the Battle of Hastings was fought, for some reason—but my grasp of “world history” is absolutely shameful. I’ve thought more about this recently, and I think my issue is that too much history writing is boring. You know what’s not boring? Kathryn Hughes’s piece about the “itinerant offal vendors” who crisscrissed Victorian London, selling horsemeat to cat owners. At one point, she writes, there were 1,000 pushcarts traversing the city, feeding 300,000 cats. These were men bound by a code: They respected each other’s turf, and were up with the sun “threading the chunks onto wooden skewers, to make up anything from a ha’penny snack to a three-penny feast.” Hughes surveys the phenomenon with agility and verve, skipping from true crime (early speculation that Jack the Ripper may have been a cat’s meat man) to the spectacle of a 1901 grand banquet held for these hardworking friends of felines. What really brings this piece to life, though, is the wealth of archival materials that accompies it: photos, magazine illustrations, and postcards that span more than a century. This is history not as a dry excavation, but as a living, meowing, offal-reeking tour of the past. I may not know anything about World War I, but at least now I can horrify friends with tales of horse kebabs and the men who peddled them. —PR
Day 1,509 in the Big Brother House
Gary Grimes | The Fence | January 29, 2025 | 1,856 words
For a certain generation, the sound of the MSN Messenger notification is an instant time warp. I am transported back to my dad’s home office, a tiny room dominated by a giant desktop that whirred and groaned as it came to life. In my early teens, I spent hours in that room, playing Lemmings and talking to friends (and crushes) on MSN Messenger. That ding-dong-ding signaling a new message was a pure thrill, and I still feel its echoes today. But when I left the room after being shouted at to free up the phone line, the conversations stayed behind, trapped in a computer now whirring its way through an agonizingly slow shutdown. This was all before smartphones made online conversations perpetual. Gary Grimes knows what I am talking about. A veteran of pre-social media online interactions, Grimes spent his tween years on ThisIsBigBrother.com, or TiBB, “an online forum created in the early 2000s for discussion of the eponymous television phenomenon.” (Big Brother is another nostalgia bomb.) Grimes joyfully brings the disparate groups of the forum to life, explaining its operation “like the lunchroom from Mean Girls.” He is also happy to throw shade at his self-aggrandizing former self, not shying away from any of the cringeworthy teenage memories. The narrative revels in Grimes’s youthful world before bringing you back to the present, where Grimes tracks down his former forum buddies. These online voices from the past now have “jobs, partners, friends, and grown-up responsibilities.” Real things. While that early 2000s forum helped shape them all, it was always something they could leave behind. After all, the computer shut off. —CW
March
I Survived Downhill Skiing’s Rowdiest Party
Devon O’Neil | Outside | February 27, 2025 | 2,432 words
Outside seems to be on a run of stories about getting worse for wear in a European ski resort. (A much more raucous and free experience than most lawsuit-happy North American resorts.) A few weeks ago, Kassondra Cloos reported on the debauchery of a singles ski trip to Val Thorens, France, and now it’s Devon O’Neil’s turn to slap on some skis (briefly) and down some shots (many). O’Neil is nothing if not committed. There is no fly-in-fly-out reporting here; he is in Kitzbühel, Austria, for six whole days and nights. Six nights spent in a six-bunk room at the SnowBunnys Hostel with snoring Josh, who sounds like “a semi-truck using its engine brake,” and puking Rupert, who loses a battle with some peach schnapps. SnowBunnys may be grim, but O’Neil’s descriptions of sleep deprivation and urine on the toilet floor still gave me twinges of nostalgia: I stayed in many such ski hostels in my early 20s, and damn, it was fun. Nowadays, such a trip would result in a hospital stay, or at best, tears. So big respect for O’Neil, a middle-aged dad who manages to complete this challenge while keeping the moaning to a minimum. One perk of the SnowBunnys Hostel is its location close to the finish line of the Hahnenkamm downhill ski race, or as O’Neil writes, “alpine schussing’s holy grail, where skiers become legends on a twisting elevator shaft of ice called the Streif.” While feigning to cover this event, this piece is more about the sport found off the slopes. From the camaraderie of locals drinking in a tiny mountaintop bar to the legendary post-race shenanigans in the Londoner pub, this is an homage to having a good time. It is also a dissection of a tiny mountain hamlet and the vast array of very different people who descend upon it each year. At one point, O’Neil watches “a young man dig a beer bottle out of the snow, hoping it was full, then toss it back when it wasn’t, next to a mother nursing her baby on the ground.” While the subject matter is unashamedly trivial, this is the humorous cavort I needed this week. So, cheers to European après. I do miss it. —CW
A ‘Jeopardy!’ Win 24 Years in the Making
Claire McNear | The Ringer | March 11, 2025 | 2,678 words
Ringer writer Claire McNear has consistently owned the Jeopardy! news beat since Alex Trebek’s 2020 death, including hastening the departure of initial replacement Mike Richards. But it’s stories like this one that really explain the game show’s foothold in the cultural firmament. More than two decades ago, a man named Harvey “H-Bomb” Silikovitz auditioned for Jeopardy! He failed the test. Over the years, he auditioned nine more times. Those times, he passed the test. But he still never got on the show. He became friendly with the producers. He became a well-known personality in the larger trivia subculture, which is a thing that exists. He developed Parkinson’s disease. Finally, last fall, he was invited to be a contestant. And in his first episode, which aired earlier this week, he won. (Alas, that would be his only victory; he was vanquished by a nuclear engineer the next night.) On its own, that’s a mildly heartwarming story. Buoyed by McNear’s reporting, though, it’s a fascinating look behind the buzzer. Jeopardy! has somehow only become more popular in the post-Trebek era—more than 65,000 people have taken the online test in the past year alone—and by now is a subculture of its own, beloved by alumni and spectators alike. McNear navigates its intricacies with a breezy assurance, less an anthropologist than a confidant. When you have that many people fighting to get on, simply getting to the lectern is a victory of its own. The winding nature of H-Bomb’s journey makes it all the sweeter. —PR
How the Irish Pub Became One of the Emerald Isle’s Greatest Exports
Liza Weisstuch | *Smithsonian Magazine *| March 17, 2024 | 2,283 words
On Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, our local Irish pub was heaving by 9 a.m., a queue snaking out the door into the drizzle. The pub is called Dubh Linn Gate, and I once went there for the big day myself. To get a spot, you have to be there by breakfast (a pint of Guinness). I vaguely remember a lot of green and fiddles, then needing to go home before lunch for a little lie-down. The crowd was diverse, but with only a few genuine Irish revelers, for the Dubh Linn Gate is not in Dublin but in Canada—one of thousands of Irish pubs dotted around the world. You’ve probably got an Irish pub in your hometown. You’ve probably been. The Irish pub is cozy and inviting: mahogany bars, stained glass, intimate booths. No canteen-style sports bar here. It’s a town staple I took for granted until Liza Weisstuch’s piece enlightened me on the work it takes to replicate this Irish charm. Many of these establishments have one man to thank for their old-world ambiance: Mel McNally, whose Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has designed upward of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the globe. In a genius move, McNally studied Irish pubs for two years as an architecture school student in the ’70s. His “homework” included visiting 200 pubs around Ireland. Once a pub expert, McNally realized that while Ireland may have plenty of them, the rest of the world did not, and he was the man to help. His company takes designing Irish pubs very seriously, as Weisstuch explains: “You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.” McNally tells Weisstuch he “recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub,” which is anchored by the bar, or “altar of service,” as McNally calls it. (The bar being visible from anywhere in the pub is a non-negotiable aspect of the company’s designs.) Up to 80 people are involved in a single project, with everything made in Ireland and shipped abroad. Weisstuch takes her reporting on this detailed Irish export seriously, and both she and McNally turn a lovely phrase in their explanations. They left me with great respect for the effort that goes into creating the Irish “essence.” Next time I am in the Dubh Linn Gate, I will raise my pint to the bar—you can’t miss it, it’s positioned center stage. —CW
The Biggest Loser
Luke Winkie | Slate | March 20, 2025 | 5,265 words
Baby needs a new pair of shoes! For Slate, Luke Winkie profiles profligate gambler Matt Morrow, aka “Vegas Matt,” a man who broadcasts his betting at the El Cortez Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, to his 1.1 million followers on YouTube. Morrow plays baccarat, slots, and blackjack. By recording it all, win or lose, he’s turned his gambling into a lucrative spectacle that allows viewers to experience his highs and lows vicariously, without risking any of their own “chocolate chips.” (A chocolate chip is worth $10,000, a pittance to Morrow, who routinely risks much higher sums.) Your first question might be: Where does he get his money? Thirty percent comes from sponsorships and merch, while YouTube yields 70 percent. Casinos are notoriously private. They watch your every move but prohibit capturing video lest thieves gain an advantage against the house. Not so the El Cortez. Morrow’s 1,200 YouTube videos have earned him a legion of viewers that follow his every move. The El Cortez makes bank on fans who, inspired by Morrow, want to try their luck. Winkie does a great job of trying to dig past Morrow’s rictus-grin hype to understand what motivates a man to gamble so prolifically and record every moment of it. As you might suspect, it’s not about the buzz of the casino, or even the wins. It’s about fame, about validation from views. “The more I was around Morrow, the more I detected an elemental craving just below those gold chains,” writes Winkie. “And why is the grind worth it? Easy. It has made Vegas Matt a celebrity, which, as I learned, is much more of a thrill for him than the money is.” As much as I enjoyed reading this profile about a guy doing what he wants with his own money, I felt uneasy about the shtick, about Morrow’s parlay-as-performance. After all, if you’ve given away years of your life gambling in Vegas for the empty love of YouTube infamy, do you really have anything more to lose? —KS
April
The Last Detail
Kent Russell | Harper’s Magazine | March 21, 2025 | 8,178 words
Of the many self-selecting groups that congregate in New York City, some seem to exist only in collective form. Like chess hustlers. Or Black Israelites. Or, maybe most noticeably, the Guardian Angels: Not once have I spied that red satin jacket and almost-matching beret in the singular. I wasn’t sure if that was my own dumb luck, or if they simply kept the regalia stowed until they met up with their compatriots. Kent Russell’s Harper’s story about the volunteer patrol organization doesn’t explain the phenomenon, but given how enjoyable it is, I doubt you’ll hold it against him. Russell joins the group after living in New York for nearly 20 years, motivated by curiosity but also the sincere desire to contribute. The realization that there was a great essay in it probably didn’t hurt, either. You’re by his side through multiple patrols, each described in the deadpan detail Russell has perfected over the course of books like I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son and In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida. I’m predisposed to being annoyed by pieces like this; one person’s fish out of water is another’s white writer on class/culture safari. However, Russell approaches this with care, and while his scenework is often pitched for a laugh, its arm’s-length regard feels like a function of self-consciousness rather than judgment. (Besides, there’s something patently ridiculous about treating the New York of now—a Target on every corner, an influencer filming TikToks on every block—like the New York of the late ’70s.) Look through the group’s bluster and the writer’s self-deprecation, and you’ll see that the two are more similar than they appear. Both love the city they live in. And neither wants to be the only one. —PR
Richard E. Grant: ‘Love Again? I’m Not Looking For It’
Vassi Chamberlain | The Times | April 5, 2025 | 2,168 words
In my early 20s, I spent a few months living in France. My French was embarrassingly poor, and in those days before streaming, my media consumption was limited to the handful of English DVDs I had packed. I watched these films so many times that I can still quote huge chunks. My favorite was Withnail and I, in which Richard E. Grant plays Withnail, an out-of-work, alcoholic actor who proclaims such things as, “We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!” Withnail speaks his mind, often disparaging those around him with bitter humor, which is a trait that came to mind as I read Vassi Chamberlain’s interview with an audacious and combative Grant. There is no sycophantic pandering on either side here, which, while a touch uncomfortable, makes for a fascinating read. For every question Chamberlain asks, Grant responds by asking her the same one, including whether she has had therapy. (Chamberlain avoids answering it.) But this is not an avoidance strategy on Grant’s part: He still answers Chamberlain’s questions with searing honesty. When asked about Withnail, he is dismissive: “The last time I saw it was a rough cut in 1987. I offered to return the £20,000 fee because I thought I’d ruined the film.” (A painful blow to this ardent fan.) We also learn that he had an alcoholic, abusive father, and that he was devastated over the death of his wife of 38 years. Grant beautifully speaks about the latter: “The conversation that began in bed in January 1983, ended in bed as we held each other’s hands, still talking, on Thursday the 2nd of September, 2021. . . . Talking is the greatest intimacy of all.” He still writes to his wife every night, telling her about his day and who he has met. Chamberlain bravely, perhaps foolishly, asks him what he will write about her. He replies: “All her girlfriends now look 40 years old but her jawline is hanging around her knees and in ten years she will tie a bow with her dyed hair around her chin in a tight knot and she’ll look like the Queen at Balmoral.” Chamberlain’s response, and her final word: “Ouch.” —CW
There Are Two Types of Dishwasher People
Ellen Cushing | The Atlantic | April 14, 2025 | 2,402 words
A few years ago, I replaced my trusty old black Bosch dishwasher, seduced by a newer, sleeker silver model. I hate it. The new dishwasher may look pretty, but the damn dishes never seem to come out clean. A dishwasher without substance, I thought. But after reading Ellen Cushing’s delightfully sardonic piece on how to load a dishwasher, I’m forced to admit: Maybe I’m part of the problem. A chaotic dish-dumper by nature, I’ve long been the source of sharp intakes of breath from friends brave enough to crack the door and peer into the abyss. And according to fellow dish-dumper Cushing, we may need to refine our systems (or start one). Or maybe we’ve been misled: As she notes, the internet is clogged with dishwasher-loading advice, commentary, and anxiety. This humble source of domestic angst was clearly crying out for an investigation, and in Cushing’s hands, the quest for dishwasher-loading truth becomes highly entertaining. It turns out I had absolutely no idea how dishwashers actually work. I’ve also been wasting time faffing about pre-rinsing plates, when, as Cushing explains, today’s “enzymatic detergent” is “like a little Pac-Man, eating dirt and making room for the soap to do its job.” Life-changing. Maybe you, too, will read Cushing’s piece and quietly make a few tweaks to your own dishwasher game. Or, maybe, you’ll quickly forward this on to your partner. Whether household harmony or continued dishwasher wars lie in your future, may your glasses always come out spot-free. —CW
How Creativity Became the Reigning Value of Our Time
Bryan Gardiner | MIT Technology Review | April 18, 2025 | 1,988 words
Creativity is of the utmost importance in Minecraft, a digital fantasia for would-be architects where my 8-year-old son spends time (though not nearly as much as he would like). He studies blueprints for elaborate, blocky structures, and invents his own idiosyncratic ones. A four-story fortress made entirely from TNT? No one will mess with that, he assures me. “Anything you can dream about, you can create,” Jack Black promises, his voice brimming with awe, in A Minecraft Movie, the highest-grossing film of 2025 so far. In contrast, the Nether, Minecraft’s hellish underworld, is “a place with no joy or creativity at all.” I don’t derive much joy from Minecraft, myself. And yet Bryan Gardiner’s conversation with Samuel Franklin, a cultural historian and author of The Cult of Creativity, has me watching my son a bit more closely, wondering at his impulses to shape the space around him. “Like a lot of kids, I grew up thinking that creativity was this inherently good thing,” Franklin tells Gardiner. “Being creative meant you at least had some future in this world, even if it wasn’t clear what that future would entail.” Later, Franklin realized that “what was being sold as the triumph of the creative class wasn’t actually resulting in a more inclusive or creative world order.” While on the shorter end of a Longreads recommendation, Gardiner’s exchange with Franklin is chock-a-block with curiosities from our recent fixation on creativity as a cure-all. After you read, you’ll find yourself searching for details on the psychologists who first elevated concepts of divergent thinking, on the cognitive tests put to Norman Mailer and Louis Kahn to gather data on creativity. You may find yourself looking at a brick, and thinking more expansively about just how much heart you put in your creations. —BF
May
Fried Fish & Family Affairs
Sarah Golibart Gorman | The Bitter Southerner | April 30, 2025 | 3,489 words
No matter how many states you’ve lived in, no matter how much of the country you’ve seen, the United States is so vast and varied as to remain stubbornly unknowable. (Sorry, Alexis de Tocqueville.) Case in point: the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where Sarah Golibart Gorman spent her adolescence. It’s a place that feels distinct even from the other two states that share its peninsula—linguistically, culinarily, culturally. (The “from here” vs. “come here” divide is so strong that one transplant who had a child on the Shore is told “just because the cat has kittens in an oven, you don’t call them biscuits.”) When Golibart Gorman and her brothers come back to the Shore to help pack up their parents’ house, she tries black drum fish ribs for the first time in her life, at which point the piece shifts from a bucolic remembrance to something more viscerally satisfying. “Perfectly salty, reflective of the bay and the ocean from which it came, the drum was a taste of home I tried to memorize,” she writes, “allowing its briny flakiness to anchor me.” She unpacks drum’s importance to the region, its unappetizing exterior and its unforgettable interior, its unerring ability to bring a family together. You don’t just read this piece; you feel it. You wonder how it is that you’ve never been to this place, tasted its bounty, felt that particular satiety that comes from sharing such a meal with loved ones. And you add one more name to the list of places you want to visit. —PR
How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree
Matthew Ponsford | Noēma | March 6, 2025 | 4,227 words
I recently hugged a thousand-year-old yew tree. Part of The Yew Tree Project in England, this tree had a sign next to it that read “Hugging a tree increases the levels of the hormone oxytocin.” (I imagine this tree gets a lot of hugs, so I hugged the sign-bereft neighbor too.) These trees are not conventionally beautiful. Their huge limbs are knotted and furled, curling awkwardly to the ground, as if to prop up their heavy, rotting trunks. Seeing a thousand winters come and go takes its toll, and the air felt heavy with their sighs of age. Trees such as these (over 400 years old) are classified as “ancients.” The UK has more ancient trees than the rest of Europe combined. This isn’t because Brits have been particularly protective of their elderly vegetation. Rather, as Matthew Ponsford explains in this piece for* Noēma*, it is, at least partly, because kings and queens shut people out from vast swaths of land so they could hunt without having to clap eyes on any bothersome commoners. Sherwood Forest, William the Conqueror’s hunting ground in the 11th century, has about 380 ancient trees. Ponsford visits its most famous: an oak tree named the Major, another potentially thousand-year-old behemoth. Like the yews, this old man is past his prime. As Ponsford contemplates the wizened boughs held up by metal columns like walking sticks, he wonders if he should feel “saddened by the decline of this long-lived beast.” But arborist Rob Harris is quick to reframe Ponsford’s thoughts of the Major as a “withering geriatric.” Ancients have a fundamental role in the forest, one so important that arborists have even begun “veteranization.” This is the process of hitting and cutting holes in young trees to promote the aging seen in their elders. It seems brutal—but rot-filled caverns are fundamental ecosystems for birds and insects, and, as the ancients diminish, ones that are becoming lost. The young, beautiful trees are just not as valuable to the forest without a few life scars. As someone who has always loved trees, I devoured Ponsford’s fascinating insights, but you will be gripped regardless of your forestry inclinations. A solid reminder to always hug the ugly old ones. They are important. —CW
The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch
Forrest Wickman | Slate | May 11, 2025 | 6,365 words
As far as opening sentences go, it’s hard to beat “There is nothing quite like becoming birdpilled.” I don’t even care about birds!* Yet, Forrest Wickman grabbed me immediately. Maybe I’m a sucker for obsessions. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good hook. Probably both. Thankfully, the other 6,358 words in the story pay off the promise of those first seven. See, in becoming the kind of person who listens to birds basically all the time, Forrest Wickman has also become the kind of person who gets irritated when a bird sound in a movie or TV show doesn’t match the bird shown on screen, or is otherwise impossible. This happens a lot. But nothing is quite as irritating to Forrest Wickman as the bird who proves pivotal to the plot of 2000’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s called a pygmy nuthatch, which it is not; it’s described as being indigenous to a single city in California, which it is also not; and it makes a sound that is neither that of a pygmy nuthatch or the bird it actually is. I’m not even Forrest Wickman, and this bothers me. So Forrest Wickman (whose name I am doomed to write in full) sets off to figure out what the hell happened to create this sorry state of affairs. He talks to the original screenwriter. He talks to one of the script doctors. He talks to the animal trainer who helped cast the imposter. He talks to the sound editor. He talks to a naturalist and journalist who seems to specialize in how Hollywood screws up anything ornithological. He talks to a man who is even crazier about birds than he is. He talks to the developer of a popular birdsong app. Each of these conversations is more entertaining than it has any right to be. Ultimately, he talks to the movie’s director, McG—who, I have to say, destroyed everything I’d ever assumed about McG. McG should be interviewed about weird things more often. Yes, Forrest Wickman discovers exactly what happened with the bird on Charlie’s Angels, and why. And in the process, he writes** one of the most pleasurable stories I’ve read this year. Maybe I’ve been birdpilled too. —PR
* Clarification: I care about birds in the dignity-of-living-things sense. I don’t care inordinately about birds. No angry emails, please.
** The story was originally an episode of Slate’s podcast Decoder Ring that came out last October. As much as I enjoy Decoder Ring, though, I have to tell you: This is even better as a written feature.
The Hobo Handbook
Jeremiah David | The Paris Review | May 9, 2025 | 2,233 words
When I was in my 20s, someone passed me a map to the steam tunnels that run beneath the University of Virginia, complete with “anecdotal demonstration” of how to access locked buildings. The map had come under scrutiny from the school; a student had recently fallen from the top of the Physics Building to his death. In most respects, I was, and still am, a cautious person. Still, I felt a pull. I never used the map, but I took some satisfaction from exploring its contents and nursing the idea that I might quietly transport myself somewhere rarely traveled. Jeremiah David knows of what I speak, having frequently tested the limits of a similar, albeit more storied, desire: hopping trains. In New Orleans, he briefly takes hold of a freight car and, keeping pace, considers “what it would feel like to pull myself up on the fly.” In Oregon, he climbs aboard a stopped car one night. “I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light,” David writes. “The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.” A friend finally hands David a copy of the Crew Change Guide, an underground text that promises “best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada” and whose extremely pre-Internet history David relays with the care of a true devotee. “The Guide signified more than information to me; it signified the courage to act on it,” he writes. “I knew that no guide, no matter how detailed or digestible, could substitute for experience. But I returned to it again and again over the following days, craving some conclusive invitation.” David’s fascinating literary history is a thoughtful evaluation of his own longings, and a reminder that the most enchanting reads often feel like invitations. —BF
Haines Man Finds Father
Will Steinfeld | Chilkat Valley News | May 15, 2020 | 3,063 words
Being shown a picture in a magazine and being told it’s your long-lost father? That’s the kind of plotline that belongs in a soap opera. But in Mike Thompson’s case, it’s plausible. Thompson’s mother claimed she met his dad at a New York party in the ’60s: a suave, well-dressed model who drove fancy cars. Despite her mailing him a GQ clipping, Thompson remained doubtful. Growing up the “only son of a nurse in Anchorage,” as Will Steinfield writes, makes it hard to imagine your dad as a jet-setting James Bond type. Besides, Thompson was too busy leading his own life to chase down his father. While subtle in his comparisons, Steinfield still shows Thompson to be as impressive—if a touch less glamorous—as the man from the magazine. Entering Thompson’s home, Steinfield notes: “Through the entryway is a wall of certificates and mementos from Thompson’s service, as a park ranger, fighter pilot, and air marshal, all hung plumb and level.” It’s Thompson’s calm, level-headed demeanor that grounds this larger-than-life story. When a relative reaches out through Ancestry.com, Thompson takes months to respond with a phone number. Eventually, he learns of his half-brother. He also learns of Stephen Winn: a former model who had been to New York and drove fancy cars. Thompson then flies across the world from freezing Anchorage to freezing Scotland, where Winn lived. I’ll let you find out what happens next. Steinfield’s writing is accessible and smooth, never weighed down by sentimentality or excessive detail, light with clarity. At a tight 3,000 words, this piece of reporting brings decades-spanning revelations to life and wraps them in the quiet dignity of a man who built his own life, regardless of who his dad was. —CW
June
Laughing With the Pain
Natalie Marlin | Bright Wall / Dark Room | May 30, 2025 | 3,121 words
I never set out to watch Jackass, the unlikely media franchise born from the self-inflicted humiliation and ding-dong daredevilry of Johnny Knoxville and his crew of goons. Still, was there a teenager in the early aughts who managed to dodge it entirely? Clips resurfaced at odd hours on MTV; I was never quite sure when I might encounter footage of Steve-O, wild-eyed and jockstrapped, walking a low tightrope over an alligator pit, surrounded by his band of brothers, who were few but always seemed happy. The Jackass cast members have “an abrasive way of expressing their love for one another, but it’s a love language regardless,” writes Natalie Marlin. “To be cared for, in the world of Jackass, is to subject your friends to outlandish feats of human endurance, blows that knock the wind out, staredowns with deadly wildlife, and blunt genital trauma.” Marlin started watching Jackass after she began transitioning, joining a population “more statistically prone to pain than most people who appear in a Jackass film.” In her essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, she winces and laughs her way through two decades of Jackass content, watching the cast suffer together as they grow older. As she does, she details the pain she has invited into her own life, as well as the comfort she takes from those who have shared a version of it. Between the groin shots and hospital trips, Marlin identifies acts of “community-building, of getting closer to those you love by partaking in the stupidest, most humiliating, most dangerous acts imaginable. You wouldn’t do the kinds of things that happen in a Jackass film in front of just anyone. The most ideal way to endure those kinds of pain is with those you feel the closest to.” For years, a disclaimer ran ahead of Jackass, warning away imitators and declaring that the stunts to follow were “performed by professionals.” The joke, of course, was that they weren’t—at least not at first. But we all become veterans of pain, don’t we? May we all find a small crew of friends to soothe us. —BF
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Elena Gosalvez Blanco | The Yale Review | June 9, 2025 | 6,281 words
My wife and I lived, for a summer, in the home of a writer I admire. He told us jokes while he made us dinner, a recipe an ex taught him, tossing pieces of rotisserie chicken with arugula, olives, and goat cheese. I drove his pickup to the dump for him, his Public Enemy cassette in the deck, a garbage can filled with his empty bourbon bottles rattling in the back. When he was away, I read his story collections. There were the same pieces of his life, dispersed among his characters: the truck, the Public Enemy, the salad. The distinctions between our life and his stories blurred, sharpening the remainder of our summer together. Another couple moved in after us; later, I saw pieces of their life in a New Yorker story. Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and *Strangers on a