Skip to content

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.

I’m writing this letter from a library that overlooks a church, just as the bells ring the hour. The spire is tall and imposing against a gray sky, its lacework of brick and stone a testament to a master craftsman’s labor centuries ago. This is not my usual library. At home, the view from the local library is a mountain, millions of years old, capped with snow and towering over a valley in Canada’s Coast Mountains. But this year, I’ve often found myself beneath this spire, spending time with family in the United Kingdom.

Looking back at my editor’s picks for 2025, I see my split between the UK and North America reflected in them. But the year’s big headlines didn’t catch my attention. Politics and economics were set aside in favor of granular stories—ones that reveal the overlooked gears of society, the jobs we rarely think about. My recommendations testify both to the two worlds tugging at me and to the brilliant writers on either side of the Atlantic that bring their hidden corners to life.

The UK comes with its stock images: a cup of tea with a foot resting on a corgi, a lost but ever-so-polite young bear clutching a marmalade sandwich, Robin Hood riding through the glen. So I’ll begin in Sherwood Forest, with Matthew Ponsford’s fascinating piece for Noēma, “How to Build a Thousand-Year-Old Tree.” Sherwood is home to the Major, a hulking oak that sprouted from an acorn at least eight centuries ago. Ponsford stands beneath the primeval canopy with arborist Reg Harris, who uses “veteranization” techniques to recreate the features of ancient trees—part of the surprising work to maintain forest ecology amid biodiversity loss.

Across the pond, Shi En Kim takes me to another forest, in the wilderness of Montana. Kim’s piece, “The Horses and Mules That Moved Mountains and Hearts,” introduces the unsung workforce of the US Forest Service: equine pack teams who work in rugged backcountry where wheels can’t go. It’s a beautiful study of these animals’ big personalities, and a concerned examination of their future in a time of political uncertainty. Skipping across the US, to North Carolina, biologists take the stage. For *Garden & Gun, *Lindsey Liles meets scientists who are embracing active interventions, much like Reg Harris in Sherwood. “Inside the Fight to Save the World’s Most Endangered Wolf” takes us to North Carolina’s swampy Albemarle–Pamlico Peninsula, where Liles joins wildlife biologist Joe Madison as he tracks “the seventeen lone dots on a map that represent the beating hearts of the only wild red wolves in existence.” Madison’s team plays a red wolf dating game, pairing potential mates in acclimation pens. Drastic, but necessary. Heading south across the state to Boiling Spring Lakes, retired biologist Julie Moore fights to save something less photogenic but no less remarkable: the Venus flytrap. In “Saving the Venus Flytrap: How One Woman Rallied a Town Around Its Weirdest Attraction,” Liles explains how Moore motivates residents to replant flytraps rooted in development zones. As the stakes rise, behind-the-scenes stewardship everywhere is becoming decidedly hands on.

After this tour of forests and swamps, let’s step inside. “If you start to see the world through its stains and messes you cannot give back this special insight,” writes Tom Lamont in “The Human Stain Remover.” Lamont’s essay for The Guardian profiles Ben Giles, a 49-year-old “extreme cleaner” who runs a biohazard firm from Cardigan, Wales. Cleaning crime scenes and hoarders’ homes takes a strong stomach, but Giles’s pride in his craft shines through. A pride echoed in Jennifer Justus’s piece for The Bitter Southerner, “All Praise to the Lunch Ladies,” a tribute to the cafeteria workers who stretch thin budgets to feed children in the American South. These are wonderful stories that lean into the reality of uncelebrated yet essential work.

And what about backstage at well-known institutions? In “‘The Ghosts Are Everywhere’: Can the British Museum Survive its Omni-Crisis?” Charlotte Higgins talks to staff inside a museum that has become “a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years,” driven by “a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness.” Peeling back the grand pillared façade, she finds vast warehouses of artifacts—and human remains—often taken from other countries. “If Britain itself is searching for meaning in a postcolonial world,” Higgins asks, “then why should not its most resonant, its most celebrated museum?” Another relic of Britain’s past: borstals, or juvenile detention centers, that operated from 1902 to 1982. In “Borstal Boys,” an essay for The Fence, Georgia Brown conjures the kind of place you’d “expect Miss Trunchbull to prowl, terrorizing children with maniacal joy.” Meanwhile, in the US, guinea pigs pulled me into the Bussey Institute at Harvard. Zachary B. Hancock’s thought-provoking “Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes” for Nautilus follows geneticist Sewall Wright, who shaped an influential evolutionary idea while managing the institute’s guinea pig colony.

To avoid all work and no play, I’ll finish with a couple of unexpected hobbies. This year, my reading took me to a Welsh hillside at 3 a.m. and to a 200-degree sauna in Brooklyn. In “Another Rave Review” at The Fence, Patrick Galbraith explores a secret, rebellious corner of England’s free-party scene. And in New York, Pat Cassels sweats his way into aufguss, which he explains in his Slate piece, “The New Hotness,” as competitive sauna-ing or “Eurovision with linens.” These stories paint two unique worlds, both running on communal joy tinged with absurdity.

Looking back at this year, my bias is obvious. Living and traveling between two Anglophone countries, my muscle memory reaches for their familiar landscapes. It’s an intimacy that allows me to explore intricacies and to find astonishing stories from incredible writers, but one that also narrows my field of view. In 2026, if you have recommendations from elsewhere in the world, I’d love to [hear them](mailto: carolyn@longreads.com). While I don’t want to abandon what I know, I’d like to let it sit alongside what I don’t—so the hidden worlds I surface aren’t just mine, but ours.

But for now, please revisit and appreciate these stories from 2025. After all, wherever we are in the world, we couldn’t run without the cogs we don’t always see.