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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.

In this edition:

• Rise of the machines
• Help me, Seymour!
• Crossing the party line
• A powerful instrument
• Turn, turn, turn

**A Note on Paywalls ** In order to publish compelling original work and pay writers a living wage, publications sometimes have paywalls. Because some paywalls are determined by a person’s browsing history, we’re unable to know with certainty whether you’ll encounter one when you follow one of our links. If you’re able to, please consider supporting these outlets.

1. Waymo Money, Waymo Problems

Joanne McNeil | New York Review of Architecture | October 1, 2025 | 2,866 words

I would be remiss if I didn’t start this blurb by tipping my hat to the editor who wrote this headline. I suspect many readers have already clicked on the link to the story purely because of this pun. Well done, whoever you are. Now to the meat of the thing: A self-driving Waymo taxi recently killed a bodega cat in San Francisco. In my book, that alone is reason enough to get the machines off the street. But I’m a grouch, so don’t listen to me—listen to Joanne McNeil. A resident of the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, McNeil considers Waymo and other robots now populating the city’s corridors in the context of the wider techno-capitalist push to force certain workers out of the US economy. McNeil follows a pink Coco food delivery robot to a ghost kitchen, where “twenty-six restaurants that exist only on DoorDash and Grubhub cook food for takeout customers” and “delivery bags and boxes are waiting . . . in lockers.” The endgame of facilities like this, McNeil posits, is to eliminate delivery drivers (and mom-and-pop restaurants, too). “It’s a setup primed for robots,” she writes, that “further warp[s] the coronavirus class divide: With machines (however remotely assisted) where essential workers used to be, those who WFH are ever more shielded from strangers beneath their tax bracket.” McNeil ties the robots in California’s streets to what’s happening in the state’s fields. She speaks to a Lyft driver originally from Salinas, who explains that agricultural companies in the Central Valley “haven’t been that vocal coming out against the ICE raids because they’re assuming that they’ll be able to automate farmwork.” In other words, they’ve decided it isn’t worth protecting the rights and dignity of people they won’t need to make money in the long term. In fewer words, they’re greedy and soulless. McNeil’s story is an essential tour of several overlapping landscapes—physical, technological, and political—shaped by the robber barons of the 21st century. —SD

2. Saving the Venus Flytrap: How One Woman Rallied a Town Around Its Weirdest Attraction

Lindsey Liles | Garden & Gun | September 17, 2025 | 3,627 words

An avid gardener, my mum often dragged me to garden centers as a child. While she spent hours inspecting the foliage thickness of identical-seeming lavender bushes, I would make a beeline for the greenhouses and their more exotic offerings. There, I’d gape at Venus flytraps, part horrified, part fascinated by insects thrashing in their delicate green prisons. I always assumed these wondrous plants originated from some exotic jungle, where they grew tall and violent (thanks, The Day of the Triffids). Turns out I was wrong: As Lindsey Liles explains for Garden & Gun, they’re native to a “roughly eighty-mile strip of the eastern Carolinas.” And, unsurprisingly, like so many species, their tiny native home is under threat from development. Enter Julie Moore, retired biologist and self-appointed flytrap protector. Not on any endangered list, the plant has instead benefited from Moore’s clever use of reputation: These are cool plants, people should be proud to have them. With such an excellent campaign manager, the flytrap now has the town of Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina, behind it, with the community rescuing flytraps from development areas and replanting them. Moore is delighted. (Spiders and carpenter ants, not so much.) Not afraid of an anthropomorphic turn of phrase, Liles admires the “murderous form” and “tiny pink and green mouths” as she tags along with Moore to explore the flytrap’s newfound celebrity. Breathing life into the place, its people, and its plants, she crafts a vivid, well-rounded conservation story—one that proves this remarkable plant can trap bugs, imaginations, and readers. —CW

3. The Xi Jinping School of Journalism

Soyonbo Borjgin | Equator | October 29, 2025 | 4,687 words

For five years, Soyonbo Borjgin worked as a journalist for The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly, a magazine overseen by the Chinese Communist Party. In the office lobby, he passed a sign that read, “If you don’t occupy the ideological battlefield, someone else will.” He’d had no real training, and his first assignment fizzled: A colleague took him on a liquor-soaked reporting trip, telling Borjgin, “You can follow my lead.” The resulting story got Borjgin benched for a year, which he spent playing videogames and basketball, but not fired. (“Say what you will about state socialism,” he writes, “but it provides workplace stability.”) A second story, about a close friend’s struggles after leaving China, landed Borjgin a feature-writing position, covering everything from the nutritional content of preserved sheep’s tails to workers who enforced state policies on family size and religious belief. Party officials frequently monitored his work; still, Borjgin writes, “You could find room to manoeuvre. The more you drank with the minders, the more affable they tended to be.” With colleagues, he covered efforts by the CCP to end Mongolian language instruction in schools, one in a series of moves that brought the Inner Mongolia Life Weekly staff before a disciplinary panel, ended the magazine, and ultimately sent Borjgin and his family overseas. Borjgin’s essay for Equator, a new publication, is wry and perceptive, tuned in to the absurdities and perils of doing clear-eyed work for state-controlled media. His final paragraphs are unsettling; the battlefield, it turns out, is bigger than one may think. But he’s well-prepared to follow his own lead. If we’re lucky, we’ll read more essays like this from Borjgin, and from Equator, very soon. —BF

4. Beyond the Machine

Frank Chimero | frankchimero.com | October 20, 2025 | 5,405 words

When I listen to designers talk about design, I sometimes find their polished presentations and lofty ideas exclusionary, as if beautiful design can only come from above, or requires a mastery I don’t have. But when I read Frank Chimero, whether he’s writing about design, the internet, or writing itself, I feel welcomed into a cozy space of curiosity and shared knowledge. Ever since stumbling upon one of his essays on digital homesteading more than a decade ago, I always come away from his writing inspired, with a renewed desire to better tend my own relationship with the web. So it’s no surprise that his reflections on AI and creative agency are deeply thoughtful and accessible. Chimero asks us to consider AI as an instrument, rather than as a tool, intelligence, or weapon. “Instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument.” He examines his spatial relationship to AI: “Where do I stand in relation to the machine—above it, beside it, under it? Each position carries a different kind of power dynamic. To be above is to steer, beside is to collaborate, below is to serve.” It’s such a helpful way to think about AI, whether or not you’re a creative professional. Chimero moves across disciplines, from the work of music producer Rick Rubin, “the poster child for vibe coding,” to animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose film Spirited Away offers a poignant lesson on appetite, imitation, and limits. While Chimero’s writing is enlightening, it doesn’t lecture from above; he invites us to think alongside him, just as he describes how Brian Eno and musical duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst show us what it means “to work beside the machine” and even step inside it to ultimately reimagine their art. The internet is noisy and restless, and reading about AI tends to make me anxious and despondent. But I find refuge in Chimero’s quiet steadiness. —CLR

5. A Circling Story

Holly Haworth | Emergence Magazine | October 23, 2025 | 4,093 words

Spring, summer, fall, and winter: Amid each, sometimes it’s easy to forget that change is ongoing, if sometimes imperceptible. I try my best to mark seasonal changes: I love hearing “bird radio” get louder as spring unfolds, when robin dads sing evening songs to ward off other males. Their voices go silent in late August, and that sudden void reminds me that fall will soon arrive. In this piece for Emergence Magazine, Holly Haworth notes that the “Japanese have seventy-two microseasons, traditionally, each lasting around five days.” Their names include: “‘bamboo shoots start to sprout,’ ‘praying mantises hatch,’ ‘distant thunder,’ and ‘frogs start singing.’” Haworth’s ode to the seasons reads like a poem. In simple yet vibrant declarative sentences, she reminds us what we stand to gain by getting outside and observing closely. Sometimes paying attention can be draining, but for Haworth, the act energizes and fulfills her as an antidote to climate change. “This is why I have been turning my attention toward the seasons so devotedly these past many years, keeping my field notebooks,” she writes. “[T]o draw myself closer to the earth’s cycles whose disruption is, in fact, the most important story of our time . . .” I read this piece just after Daylight Saving Time ended. With full darkness now at 5 p.m., it’s helped me to welcome the shorter days. It’s a lyrical reminder that fallow periods are so important for the earth and for humans, that fall decay and winter stillness are necessary, if only to help us better appreciate the light when it finally returns. —KS

Audience Award

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‘America is More Divided Than Ever — But How is it Affecting Our Love Lives? I Spent a Year Dating Conservative Men to Find Out’

Vera Papisova | Cosmopolitan | February 27, 2025 | 3,786 words

Too often, we live in personal echo chambers, surrounded by people—online and off—who reflect our own opinions. Like many, Vera Papisova had “only ever dated men who aligned with my points of view and seemed to genuinely champion my work.” Could she ever be attracted to someone with different political beliefs? Could she learn from people who saw the world differently? In a brave act of curiosity, Papisova decided to find out, going on 26 dates with men she met on a conservative dating app. No, her core beliefs don’t change, but through the experience, she earns the right to hold them. —CW