This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Before longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj works on his writing projects, he seeks inspiration by reading and sharing short stories that are freely available on the web. In 2023, he posted 256 stories to X, tagged with #Longreads, from “The Big Quit“by David Means at Harper’s Magazine to “Bitch Baby” by Helle Hill at Oxford American. Of that 256, here are the 10 he loved most.

“Make it Black” by Andre Dubus III (Narrative Magazine)

Andre Dubus III’s immersive novella is about a couple that lives separately in the densely forested acreage they co-own.

Through the screened windows of her bedroom she can hear them, hundreds, maybe thousands of them munching on the leaves of her oaks and maples and other trees she cannot name, even though she has lived in these woods for over twenty years. It’s after midnight, and beside her in the darkness Michael sleeps, his big hairless chest rising and falling. When they made love earlier, his smooth back had felt like rubber to her and she imagined that he was not real, that this man she’s been seeing for over a year now is just some device she bought to ease her loneliness, to ground her away from the nagging sense that she’s hanging as still in the air as a nightgown on a branch.

Some nights she asks him to go sleep at his own place, and she wished she’d asked him that tonight too. If only so can be alone as she listens to the gypsy caterpillars decimate her trees. Their tiny waste rains down through the branches, and she does not know why she wants to listen to this, but she does.

It is late May and the air coming through the screens is cool. She can smell her magnolias and cherry blossoms but also the broken green of leaves that had only just begun their season, and now a hot anger opens up in her at these tiny fuckers that her husband Kai had warned her were coming again. It had been almost nine years since the last generation of them, and Kai had missed the signs then but not this time.

“I Won’t Let You Go” by Hiromi Kawakami (Granta)(Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell)

Hiromi Kawakami has won several Japanese literary prizes and is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary authors. This story’s plot reveals her fascinating imagination.

I came by something strange while I was travelling. This was what Enomoto had said to me about two months ago.

Enomoto is a painter-slash-high school teacher who lives in the apartment directly above mine. We met when we both served on the local residents’ association, and have been friendly ever since. He would call me on the phone every so often and say, I’m brewing some nice coffee. I would traipse up the stairs to Enomoto’s apartment to enjoy his delicious coffee. We would make small talk and then I would trudge back down the stairs and return to my own apartment. That was the extent of our relationship.

Enomoto’s apartment is exactly the same layout as mine, but it has quite a different feel. It’s tidy, for a bachelor’s flat, but what with his painting supplies and his hobby cameras and his magazines on those subjects, there were things all over the place. Interestingly, though, his apartment gave the overall impression of being much more clearly delineated than mine.

Enomoto only ever referred to the coffee that he brewed as ‘nice’. He would grind the beans on a hand-operated coffee mill, and use a cloth filter. Then he would gently pour it into warmed coffee mugs. The aroma and the taste were both extremely sophisticated. Which is why, whenever Enomoto called me for coffee, I would abandon whatever I was doing and traipse up the stairs to his place.

Lately, though, there haven’t been any invitations from Enomoto for ‘nice coffee’. Ever since the call, two months ago, when he mentioned that he had come by something strange, he hasn’t invited me over.

“That Particular Sunday” by Jamel Brinkley (Guernica)

A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s first short story collection, was a finalist for a National Book Award. His 2023 collection, Witness—in which this story appears—has received strong reviews.

There are times when a family has an aura of completion. Remembering such a time feels like gazing at a masterpiece in an art gallery. You might find yourself taking one or two steps backward to absorb the harmonious perfection of the entire image. Or you may be lured by it, drawn to it, inching closer to study every fine detail of composition, the faultless poise with which each element confirms the necessary presence of the others. Take the figure of the son, who hurtles into the foreground of the picture, claiming his position in a web of femaleness, affixing himself to the very center of its adhesive heart, because he belongs there, or so he believes with the wild unblemished certainty of a boy’s imagination. Like everything else in the image, he never changes. Yes, that is my mother, his presence announces. And those are my aunts, he seems to say. And this—of the girl closest to him, her expression as breathless as his own—this is my cousin. My companion. My closest friend. Her soul is the identical twin of mine. The absence of the father doesn’t matter one bit. The absence of the siblings doesn’t matter much either, even though the son will love them hopelessly. Recklessly. They belong to a different elsewhere, a time yet to come, with another father to come, and the circumstances of their lives will frenzy the family, purpling it, cloying it until it is spoiled. Then it will be no different from any ordinary clan. Unpleasant to regard. An eyesore.

“Splashdown” by Jonathan Escoffery (Oprah Daily)

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You—short-listed for the Booker Prize and long-listed for a National Book Award—is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami.

The summer he turned thirteen, Cukie Panton set out for the Florida Keys to meet his father for the first time. By then, Ox meant little more to Cukie than a syllable spat from his mother’s lips. What he knew of Ox was that he was American— the catalyst for Cukie having been born in Baptist Hospital, right on Kendall Drive—and that Ox had stuck out the first two months of fatherhood, then bounced, leaving to Cukie the dried ink on his birth record that spelled out Lennox Martin.

More than a dozen years after this abrupt departure, Cukie’s mom answered the phone to hear a remorseful Ox, saying he should know his boy. By this time Cukie felt ambivalent. It didn’t help that Daphne Panton figured that the drink or else some brush with death must have resuscitated Ox’s conscience to bring him calling. Perhaps Andrew had inspired Ox’s reemergence, the hurricane having wiped away so much that would have to be rebuilt, not even a year ago. Whatever the affliction, Cukie’s mother assumed it was ephemeral. The calls continued, though, and when plans grew specific, she told Cukie to pack his duffel and they departed Kendall for Smuggler’s Key.

“The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” by Kelly Luce (Colorado Review)

A new short story by the author of the novel Pull Me Under and the collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail.

After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. I wanted to learn something I never would have learned in Jacksonville while married to Carl. To feel like the person I’d once been, a person I’d liked being. The first trade that came up was in Happy, Texas, a town of 603 souls outside of Amarillo. The carrier there was eager to move to Florida to be near his twin grandsons. My new route consisted mostly of cluster boxes I could drive right up to.

Happy’s motto was “the town without a frown.” I set up a bank account at Happy Bank, got my Texas driver’s license at Happy City Hall, and waited for a line of pickup trucks to follow a hearse into Happy Cemetery. I found an apartment on Happy’s main street, Main Street, above an event hall called Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion. The apartment had two bedrooms—plenty of space for my equipment. The stove didn’t work and there were no closets, but the ceilings were high and there was a filthy skylight in the kitchen that Randall, the property manager, told me was put in after a meteorite came through the roof in 1999. The meteorite sold me on the place.

“The Pink House at the End of the Street on the Other Side of the Town” by Manuel Muñoz (Virginia Quarterly Review)

Manuel Muñoz is the author of the story collections Zigzagger, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, The Consequences, as well as the novel What You See in the Dark. He received a 2023 MacArthur fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American community of California’s central valley.”   

Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo, had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when the fields ran muddy and no one else would brave the kind of cold that would lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves. By spring, he’d return to a pueblito called Pozos, which made everyone ask why he’d go back to a hole in the ground. A frog crawling under the mud to wait out the heat. That was El Sapo, leaving sometime in early April before the heat came. And then the others would arrive. Fidelio and his twin brother, Modesto, who for some reason was several inches shorter than him. Jerónimo, quiet and stark, who claimed to know Silvio, but nobody knew for sure. Baldomero El Mero Mero, who boasted that he was the one who had shown the others how to start with a bus in Celaya, take it to the outskirts of Tijuana, and, right over there, at a llantería owned by his old friend Raimundo, you could sneak through the dust yard of Raimundo’s old tires and cross to the other side, get to the highway on foot, and, if you were smart enough to hide your money, catch a Greyhound to a place called Goshen, where you’d go to the phone booth outside of the station, look out at the cotton fields as you dialed a number and told a man named Poldo that you’d made it across. A cousin by way of another cousin. A friend of the family. From Celaya. From Ojo de Agua. From La Cuevita. From Charco Blanco. Yes, yes, of course. A third yes if you promised you had the money to pay a little rent for a month. That’s how Eliseo showed up. And poor Casimiro, who wore thick glasses and peered into the fruit trees with his whole face to see what he was picking. But you’d have to know Spanish to know why all the other men laughed at his name.

“Love Machine” by Nic Anstett (Passages North)

In a doomed world in which robots are taking over, a lonely transgender woman explores her sexuality.

The robots have taken Seattle and I am on the apps again. I can no longer sleep in my half empty queen bed without another body. More than India, I miss her dog, Binky, who diagonally draped himself across the mattress every night. Whether it was a soggy July evening or one of Baltimore’s cruelly dry winter nights, I could count on a furry dog blanket. Now, my nighttime hands grab only limp fabric and empty air. I miss the warmth and I miss having something living to pull towards me, which in the last several months had always been Binky. Even before she left, I could tell India was pulling away. So, now I’m spending my nights during the machine uprising swiping through the singles of the greater Chesapeake Bay area.

I’m not alone in this at least. It turns out that the oncoming annihilation of organic life makes loneliness even more lonely.

“You picked the right time to start messing around,” Krista told me over bloody marys two weeks back. “Even the straightest of straight guys are sleeping with transsexuals now. There’s no room for pickiness.”

“Is it Too Late?” By Pegah Ouji (Isele Magazine)

An Iranian immigrant remembers a retirement community resident she cared for during her early years in in the United States.

The first time I met you, I thought you looked like a dried peach, sweet but aged. Please forgive my crude description. I’d just turned seventeen and oddly enough, a young girl’s imagination sometimes defies delicacy. I close my eyes and imagine you now after all these years. It has become an old game. How much of you can I still remember? Your hands, wrinkled, slender fingers with soft tips which had typed up many articles on your old typewriter and hardly ever had held anything heavier than a ball-point pen. Your honey-colored eyes, marble-like, in the folds of your wrinkled eyelids. By the time I met you, you had barely any hair left, the remaining survivors white and fuzzy. You see now why the peach was an apt metaphor?

We met during my first week at Hillside Retirement Community, a place you had already been calling home at that point for more than five years. Being so young and naive and having immigrated from Iran with my mother and grandmother only a year before that, I felt alive to have a job of my own. Life in America was finally beginning to pay off, I’d thought. Despite my shaky grasp of the English language, Mrs. Hazelwood had hired me for four hours every day after school as a dining room server. The trick to getting hired had been to appear like I understood more than I actually did, achieved chiefly this through vigorous head nods and readily dispensed yes replies.

“Different” by Sindya Bhanoo (The Masters Review)

Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. “Different” appears in this collection.

For three decades, Chand gave his Indian graduate students his house keys when he and Raji left town. He told them to relax and use his spacious home as a place to rest and study, to use the hot tub in the back, and the grill, as long as they did not put beef on it. “Sleep in the guest bedroom,” he said. “Escape your dreary apartments.” It gave him pleasure to offer comforts that graduate student stipends could not afford. In his home, students could watch satellite channels like Zee TV and TV Asia and catch up on episodes of Koffee with Karan and Kaun Banega Crorepati. Before Skype and WhatsApp and FaceTime, some students made long distance phone calls from his landline. Chand never charged them for it. He treated them like family, because their own families were so far away.

He had been a graduate student once, in a small town in Montana, tens of thousands of miles away from Vellore, his hometown in South India. Things were different then. When he moved to America, he called his parents once every three months, and was careful to think through what to say before dialing. Back then, calls cost three dollars for the first minute and one dollar for every minute thereafter. He remembered the loneliness, the immense sorrow that came from going months without uttering a word of Tamil. There was no way for him to express certain thoughts, certain feelings, in the English language. He remembered the warmth he felt when the one Indian professor on campus, a Punjabi chemical engineer named Dr. Gupta, occasionally invited him to his home for dinner.

“Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li (The New Yorker)

For Pravesh, this story was love at first read.

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for . . . Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled.

All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been cancelled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.

She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would cancelled trains only lead to more cancelled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

Check out all of Pravesh’s previous story recommendations:  2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

Pravesh Bhardwaj wrote and directed “Baby Doll,” an Audible Original podcast in Hindi (featuring Richa Chadha and Jaideep Ahlawat).

A disturbing child psychiatric facility. The changing city of Cairo. An optimistic take on AI supremacy. The mystery of a cookie disappearance. And a joyful 51 years in the Smithsonian Zoo Panda House.

1. The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | September 25, 2023 | 14,695 words

Margaret Talbot’s story about Evy Mages, a woman who was held as a child at a mysterious psychiatric facility in Innsbruck from 1973-74, was the first piece I dove into at the start of the week—and I’m still thinking about it. For the past few years, Talbot has helped Mages investigate her own family history and recall the memories from this cruel place, where children were observed, humiliated, abused, and even given shots of epiphysan—a veterinary drug derived from cattle—to try and suppress sexual urges. This “villa” was as horrific as it sounds, run by a Nazi-trained psychologist named Maria Nowak-Vogl whose sole purpose was to destroy children and extinguish their inner light. This is a devastating story and a hard one to read. But I’ve thought a lot about the long journey Mages has made since that awful experience, and how incredible it is that she’s come out the other side—now a loving mother to her own grown children, and helping other survivors report the abuse they experienced. Talbot deftly writes a moving story of one woman’s resilience and the harrowing child psychiatry of postwar Austria. —CLR

2. Cairo Song

Wiam El-Tamami | Granta | July 20, 2023 | 5,860 words

Wiam El-Tamami was raised in the “the hushed, air-conditioned sterility” of Kuwait after her parents left Cairo, Egypt, for better job opportunities. Her beautiful Granta essay is a sensory study as she recalls the vibrancy of Cairo on her visits and compares it to the city she knows now, more than a decade after she and her mother protested Hosni Mubarak’s regime in the Egyptian Revolution. She recounts air tinged with smoke, car horns blaring, dogs snarling in the streets, and the shouts of protest: “Bread, freedom, social justice, human dignity! The people demand the downfall of the regime!” She juxtaposes this political unrest against memories of her father’s homemade flatbread, “dusted with bran, the top layer thin and speckled with dark spots, the bottom layer soft and moreish,” and the aubergines, tomatoes, and onions she “anoints with oil and spices” to make tagine with a friend. There are no scales of nostalgia covering El-Tamami’s eyes as she gazes at modern Cairo expanding outward in gated communities that delineate the ever-expanding gulf between rich and poor as inflation skyrockets and the value of the Egyptian pound plummets. In this lyrical essay, El-Tamami interrogates the pervasive undercurrent of her conflicting emotions. “There is such an inherent precarity woven into every day here, a sense of tenuousness, of the unknowability of even the most immediate future, of life always being lived on a knife-edge,” she writes. “I ate the things I had missed. I ate mahshi kromb, stuffed cabbage rolls. I ate my father’s fuul. I ate molokhiyya. I ate black-eyed peas with rice: Egyptian white rice, starchy and soft and buttery-sweet, cooked with little tendrils of vermicelli.” Even as she delights in memories of flavor, El-Tamami still hungers for a better Cairo, now a city in chaos that feels impossible to stomach. —KS

3. What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

Virginia Heffernan | Wired | September 26, 2023 | 3,874 words

By now, most people have read Ted Chiang’s brilliant work about artificial intelligence in The New Yorker, and the metaphors he’s introduced have entered common parlance: it’s a JPEG of the web, it’s the new McKinsey. But Virginia Heffernan’s delightful feature about Cicero, an AI model that plays the strategy game Diplomacy, is the most surprising, most optimistic, and most enjoyable piece I’ve read about the technology since ChatGPT turned the tech world on its head last November. AI has already conquered Go, the strategy game once considered the last bastion of human ingenuity (at least after Deep Blue mopped Kasparov on the chessboard). Diplomacy is a very different beast, however; gameplay and negotiation are one and the same, and the world’s best human player, Andrew Goff, dominates by being kind rather than cutthroat. Yet, somehow, the bot quickly became more than competitive through similar tactics. Is it perfect? Not even close. It says “awesome!” too much for anyone’s liking, and it still struggles with hallucinations. Still, as Heffernan writes, its approach raises the prospect of a very different AI future than the brutal takeover doomsdayers imagine (or the utopia that tech bros evangelize). What truly recommends this piece, though, is how Heffernan suffuses an intrinsically inhuman story with a beating heart. Opening the piece at a Smiths cover band concert arms her with the perfect anti-Chiangian metaphor; relating her pre-teen son’s weekend-long Diplomacy parties grounds you in the game’s earnest DNA; interrogating her own kneejerk reactions on the page rather than in the editing makes you trust her even more. I don’t share her professed outlook on what this means for tomorrow—”[w]e really liked working with you, robots, and are happy you are winning”—but it’s also a vintage Heffernan provocation, the kind of thing that tells you you’re being challenged and indulged at the same time. Some people are great critics; others are deep thinkers; still others are memorable stylists. Heffernan is fortunate enough to be all three, and this story finds her at the height of her sneaky-smart prowess. —PR

4. A Baker’s Secrets

Dave Denison | The Baffler | September 21, 2023 | 5,180 words

In the 1970s, baker Ted Odell created and sold the guerrilla cookie, “a dense, moist granola cookie,” through small stores and cooperatives in Madison, Wisconsin. The cookies were famous and beloved locally until they suddenly disappeared from store shelves around 1990. “I think they contained rolled wheat flakes, but others say cracked wheat,” writes Dave Denison for The Baffler. “I remember raisins, and shredded coconut, and a mixture of honey and molasses. They were sweet enough to be addictive, but not in the way commercial cookies are, where you eat one and then another and another.” Denison—who worked for Odell as a baker’s assistant one summer—became determined to solve the mystery. Why did the cookies disappear? Why did Odell refuse to share his recipe with the world? Denison’s piece is a chewy, satisfying blend of detective work and food nostalgia. As he learns more about Odell, Denison comes to understand the baker’s wholesome ambition: to educate children about good food and the honest work that goes into it, deftly revealing that guerrilla cookies were far more than sweet confections; they were but a small sample of one man’s deeply held convictions. —KS

5. Revisit 51 Years of Giant Pandas at the National Zoo, From Beloved Babies to Fun in the Snow

Meilan Solly | Smithsonian Magazine | September 22, 2023 | 3,700 words

There’s something about pandas: these bumbling teddy bears entrance us humans, First Lady Pat Nixon included. Sitting at a dinner in Beijing with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Nixon commented on a cute panda picture she saw on a cigarette tin. Zhou responded, “I’ll give you some.” “Cigarettes?” she asked. “No. Pandas.” And so our story begins, with the two promised pandas arriving at the Smithsonian National Zoo in 1972. The next 51 years at the Smithsonian Panda House are carefully documented by Meilan Solly in this enchanting piece. Our original pandas—Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing—struggled with fertility issues, which were, rather harshly, reported at the time as being “largely because of ineptness by the male.” (Hsing-Hsing chose some bizarre positions.) But despite their lack of progeny, this pair were adored until their passing. Next into the Big Brother Panda House were Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, with Tian Tian proving a bit more competent in the bedroom department. However, artificial insemination was still necessary for the appearance of cubs—three surviving—including Xiao Qi Ji, a miracle baby born to Mei Xiang at 22. A whopping 639,000 people tuned in live to watch this birth via live Panda Cam. (No pressure, Mei Xiang.) Panda Cam remained hugely popular, with baby Xiao Qi Ji providing some much-needed endorphins to people stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Solly includes some Panda Cam footage (don’t get me started on the pandas sliding in the snow), heartwarming photos, interesting facts, and fun anecdotes. You cannot help but smile. Under an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association, the current pandas will return to China on December 7, 2023. Smithsonian Magazine has written about the Panda House for over half a century. This essay is a worthy addition as the pandas’ time in America draws to a close. —CW

Audience Award

Now for the big one. The piece our readers most enjoyed this week.

It’s Not Just You. LinkedIn Has Gotten Really Weird.

Rob Price | Business Insider | September 25, 2023 | 2,937 words

Blame the pandemic’s deprivations and our collective need for personal connection. Or maybe blame Gen Z as generational oversharers, but LinkedIn has evolved from a place where people not only post promotions and business and industry-focused content to a platform for revealing the overly personal, leading to—of course—public mockery, because some cannot resist the chance to be funny on the internet.—KS

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

A push for slavery reparations. The dilemma of wild cows. A complicated racial heritage. How bees require a balanced diet. And the joys of swimming in the slow lane.

1. Inside Barbados’ Historic Push for Slave Reparations

Janell Ross| TIME |July 6, 2023 | 4,309 words

It’s been nine years since Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his seminal essay “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic. Today, the idea of compensating Black Americans for the horrors of slavery and institutionalized racism remains fringe at best. The same goes in other countries that were once complicit in human bondage. But in the island nation of Barbados, where slaves made sugar plantations wildly lucrative, support for reparations is very real—and growing stronger. This year, under the leadership of President Mia Mottley, the country is asking European countries for a “Marshall Plan-like public investment,” as opposed to the individual payments we usually associate with reparations. Mottley, though, isn’t at the heart of this feature about Barbados’ groundbreaking efforts. Instead, writer Jannell Ross showcases Esther Phillips, the country’s poet laureate, who went from believing reparations were radical, to viewing them as unlikely, to arguing passionately for them. Phillips hopes that other people, particularly in Europe, will undergo transformations of their own. “If something of such horror is revealed,” she tells Ross, “and you’re still benefiting from the proceeds, you cannot turn you head and say, ‘Well, what has to do with me?’”—SD

2. The Republic of Cows

Jude Isabella | Hakai | August 15, 2023 | 5,525 words

Last year, our sister publication, The Atavist, published one of my favorite features in recent memory: a story about feral cows who were washed away in a storm surge, only to resurface miles away, perfectly fine. I don’t think I’d thought about feral cows before that point. In my mind, conditioned as it was by cheese companies and weird college mascots, “bovine” was synonymous with “domesticated.” Even after reading it, my image of feral cows remained indistinguishable from the archetype of the placid ruminant. But as Jude Isabella points out in her visit to Alaska’s uninhabited Chirikof Island, the truth is udderly different. “Trappers on Chirikof have witnessed up to a dozen bulls at a time pursuing and mounting cows, causing injury, exhaustion, and death, especially to heifers,” she writes. Troublesome rutting is only one of the issues plaguing Chirikof; the 2,000 cattle there are federally protected, but everyone else is torn about whether that’s a boon or a bane for the island’s ecosystem. One wildlife biologist Isabella talks to points out that Chirikof’s shape—either a T-bone steak or a teardrop, depending on who’s describing it—neatly embodies the tension at hand. At its heart, this is a nature piece, one that transports you (by seaplane) to a land of wind-rippled meadows and majestic untamed beasts. But it’s also a challenge to our very conceptions of cows. Yes, we can imagine Chirikof as a utopia for its massive herd—but what of the many other species that call Chirikof home? —PR

3. My Time Machine

Arthur Asseraf | Granta | July 25, 2023 | 3,029  words

Arthur Asseraf became a historian in part to overcome the confusion of his ancestry: his paternal grandmother was born in Morocco and eventually returned to France, for reasons undiscernible to Asseraf as a child. As he gains context and knowledge, Asseraf carefully confronts his grandmother’s distaste for Arabs and her unwillingness to see them as equal to her as an Algerian Jew. The more he learns about her past, the more distant he becomes to her. “I never told my colleagues the truth: that I knew colonialism not only through reading books, but also because its representative served me fish fingers after school,” he writes. Things change as Assaraf’s grandmother develops dementia and she reveals the anti-semitism she encountered as a Jew after the Second World War. This piece is a beautiful read about a grandson’s desire to understand a heritage mired in racist colonialism, coupled with the discovery that his grandmother, over the course of her life, was both oppressor and victim. —KS

4. America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem

Lex Pryor | The Ringer | August 3, 2023 | 6,482 words

Nearly 6,500 words on the state of bees in America? Yes, please. Lex Pryor’s piece is the bee’s knees—one part education, one part entertainment, and replete with fascinating characters—a piece that just might inspire you to do what you can for your local pollinators. It is well known that bees help produce many of the foods we eat, and keepers Andrew Coté and Bill Crawford are among those who tote hives to farms across the US to ensure that there are enough pollinators buzzing around for crops to thrive. But, did you know that monoculture farming is partly to blame for dwindling bee colonies in America? “It used to be that I could put down my bees somewhere and they’ll get a nice diversity of nectar and they’ll be healthy,” says Coté. “But now if I put them down in almonds, it’d be like if you or I ate kale. Kale is good, kale is healthy…But if we eat kale only for six weeks, like the bees have almond nectar only for six weeks, at the end of it, we won’t be dead—we may wish we were—but we’ll just be unhealthy and then susceptible to other health problems.” It turns out that a balanced diet isn’t just good for you, it’s good for the bees, too. —KS

5. Epiphany at the Y

Diane Mehta | Virginia Quarterly Review | June 12, 2023 | 4,236 words

I love to swim. Put me in front of a body of water and I will want to jump in it—temperature be damned. The feeling of a new silky texture rushing to envelop your skin. The silence of submerging. The sudden weightlessness of heavy limbs. However, not all swimming has equal majesty. Give me endless wild splashing in a sea or a lake, never the confusing etiquette of public pool lane-swimming. As I read this beautiful essay, I nodded to Diane Mehta’s frustration at swimming in the slow lane of her local YMCA pool. Why was a woman touching her foot? Why was another woman performing cartwheels and ballet steps? But Mehta keeps on going. Every. Single. Day. You will root for her as she learns to swim freestyle for the first time, and feel for her as she comes to grips with middle age and her new, less cooperative body. She swims until she “fell in love with the woman who cartwheeled down the lane, the stalwart silver-haired man who strode in with deliberation, [and] the older lady who gravitated forward like a Galapagos turtle.” And she swims until she also loves her own body again. I think I need to give lane-swimming another chance. —CW

Audience Award

Here’s the piece that stood out for our audience this week.

While I sat there sipping flat, caffeine-free Coke, which she insisted was the only correct form of Coke, she would tell me many stories about her life. Most of them did not make any sense. She told me, for instance, that she had been born in Morocco. As far back as we knew our family had lived in North Africa. She would also say that at some point the family ‘came back’ to France. I could not understand how you could return to a place you had never lived in before. She would show me pictures of palaces and say, look, this is where I was born, we were rich then, then we were poor, then we were rich again, then we had to leave.

My grandmother was born in 1921 in Oujda, on the border between Morocco and Algeria, to a Jewish family. Her family had roamed that land as far back as we can tell. And when the French came, they opened their mouths for colonialism, ate it, digested it, and made their own. When she told me she ‘returned’ to France when she left her native Morocco in 1956, this was not a lie: in her mind she had lived in an imaginary France her whole life. It is possible to be both native and a colonizer.

Our stories this week cover why socializing becomes more of an effort as we get older (and why it shouldn’t), the volunteers in Ukraine who are genuinely motivated by the cause, the life of a gambler, soul-saving runs with a dog named Hank, and the Buy Nothing movement. We hope that you enjoy spending time with all of these topics.

1. The Case for Hanging Out

Dan Kois | Slate | February 15, 2023 | 2,753 words

Raising a young daughter and feeling socially disconnected as an adult, I constantly think about where I want to live, but also how I’d like to live. I wrote recently about seeking “community,” but I’m unsure what that even means. So this piece, which explores why Americans spend less time these days hanging out with people, really speaks to me. Perhaps what I long for isn’t some kind of mythical tight-knit tribe to be part of, but something far simpler: more opportunities for casual hangouts. But is this simple? Dan Kois reaches out to Sheila Liming, author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, and asks if he can fly to Vermont to spend time with her, a total stranger, for a day. The piece that emerges from the visit is delightful and relatable. I can’t help but recall my college years and my 20s: wandering over to friends’ dorm rooms to see what they were up to, piling onto couches in someone’s living room to sit and chat and laugh for hours, frequenting the dive bars and weekly club nights where I knew I’d run into familiar faces. To borrow Liming’s words, these were “effortlessly social” times — and they seem so long ago. Social media, over-scheduled lives, and the pandemic have all made hanging out harder. While I also attribute my isolation to age, Kois notes how young people, including his teenage daughters, still find it hard to put themselves out there or carve out time for casual socializing. While I may not be brave enough after reading this to knock on my upstairs neighbors’ door and sit on their couch to shoot the shit, I’m inspired by Kois’ openness and curiosity. —CLR

2. The Secret Weapons of Ukraine

Matt Gallagher | Esquire | February 23, 2023 | 6,935 words

Matt Gallagher is no stranger to warfare. His Army deployment in Iraq became the basis of the memoir Kaboom, and (after publishing two novels) he visited western Ukraine with other combat veterans to train civilians. His return to Ukraine for this Esquire feature, however, is to chronicle the “volunteer ecosystem” that has taken root: the men and women who have converged upon the country from both sides of its borders to defend it against prolonged Russian aggression. These aren’t cosplayers or U.S. extremists trying to get militia cred — “all those bitches got weeded out quick,” says one volunteer, an Air Force vet who’s training Ukrainian recruits — but they’re not all mercenaries, either. Over the course of nearly 7,000 words, Gallagher meets a wide swath of people who have moved by the nobility of the cause, from a Ukrainian woman who coordinates medical training to a one-time Clinton administration staffer who travels through Ukraine writing checks and chipping in. This is wartime reporting I never thought I’d read, a reminder that in an age of geopolitical deceit and oil greed, there still exist people willing to take up arms in service of a democratic ideal. Add in the rich vignettes threaded throughout, and you’ve got a piece you’ll not likely forget anytime soon. —PR

3. For the Love of Losing

Marina Benjamin | Granta | February 9, 2023 | 4,596 words

There’s the thrill of the doing, but before that comes the anticipation, which for some is richer, offering everything the imagination can conjure, without the limits placed by the actual experience. When Marina Benjamin talks about ditching Ph.D. studies to hit the road as a professional gambler, you want to jump in the passenger seat of the hired convertible and burn rubber, right along with her. But what happens when gambling isn’t about winning so much as a way to quantify all that you’ve lost? Benjamin writes: “I now think it more likely that I was toying with loss itself — as one might toy with fire! — trying to figure out at a time of profound change in my life, my entry into the adult world, just how much, and what kind of loss I could comfortably tolerate.” —KS

4. Running With Hank

Caleb Daniloff | Runner’s World | February 22, 2023 | 3,324 words

This essay is about addiction — and a dog called Hank. Hank couldn’t help his 25-year-old owner, Shea, overcome her struggles with heroin and fentanyl, but he could help her father, Caleb Daniloff, who looks after him when Shea cannot. In this beautiful essay, Daniloff describes how running the Fells outside Boston, with Hank, helps ease his torment over Shea and draws him into the present, even if only briefly. He is searingly honest, not shying away from what he views as his failings, making it clear why occasionally pulling himself out of the punishment of his own mind is so important. Weaving between his time on the Fells and a narrative of Shea’s addiction and eventual recovery, Daniloff shows the complexities of his life against the straightforward pleasure of watching Hank bounding after a squirrel. A reminder that simple things can be oh-so-important. —CW

5. The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing

Vauhini Vara | WIRED | February 23, 2023 | 7,267 words

It’s a worthy concept: hyper-local Facebook community groups connecting those in need of gently used items with their owners, a practice that offers environmental benefits in reducing waste with reuse, as well as a chance to thumb your nose at capitalism. But what happened to the Buy Nothing movement founded by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller, which by 2022 had expanded to 6 million members in 60 countries? Vauhini Vara discovers that to be able to propagate your values, sometimes you need to accept the compromises of free community access at scale or risk the wrath of the community you created. “The truth was that turning Buy Nothing into a business had come with far more expenses than revenues,” Vara writes. “If Facebook profited from Buy Nothing members’ activities, it also covered many of their costs. With the launch of the app, the resources that came for free with Facebook — software development, computing power, visibility — were suddenly Clark and Rockefeller’s responsibility.” —KS

Enjoyed these recommendations? Browse all of our editors’ picks, or sign up for our weekly newsletter if you haven’t already:

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.

Sign up now

Gamblers get into trouble, not least vortices of debt, because they cannot help pitting themselves against fate. They know that luck is capricious, evasive, flighty, which is part of its dangerous appeal; but they’re also convinced that they can somehow divine it.

Those who study the phenomenon of loss aversion point out that what someone is willing to lose is always related to a reference point, and usually that reference point is the status quo: most people will put up with some degree of loss if it doesn’t upset their world too much. But if the point of reference is less stable the logic shifts. If you believe, as my father did, that you were born to have riches beyond compare then you will risk much more to lessen the gap between reality and expectation. If like me, however, the bar of your expectations is set differently, calibrated for reality, then your approach to risk is more calculated.

I wish that I could go back and tell my younger self that the world is kinder than I knew, or believed it to be. That opportunity did sometimes come knocking out of the blue. That emotional precarity is a state that one might gird oneself to wait out instead of put to the test, while expecting to fail. But I guess there are always some things one needs to learn the hard way. That cannot be learned in any displaced arena, or field of play, or even a funhouse palace, however defanged or neutered to protect against real loss.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Before he sits down to write, Pravesh Bhardwaj looks for inspiration. Nearly every day, he reads a short story freely available online and shares it on his Twitter thread. Each year he chooses his 10 favorites to share with Longreads readers.

“In Flux” by Jonathan Escoffery (Passages North)

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami. “In Flux” is excerpted from this collection.

“Why does your mother talk so funny?” your neighbor insists.

Your mother calls to you from the front porch, has called from this perch overlooking the sloping yard time and time again since you were allowed to join the neighborhood kids in play. Always, this signals that playtime is over, only now, shame has latched itself to the ritual.

Perhaps you’d hoped no one would ever notice. Perhaps you’d never quite noticed it yourself. Perhaps you ask in shallow protest, “What do you mean, ‘What language?’” Maybe you only think it. Ultimately, you mutter, “English. She’s speaking English,” before heading inside, head tucked in embarrassment.

In this moment, and for the first time, you are ashamed of your mother, and you are ashamed of yourself for not further defending her. More so than to be cowardly and disloyal, though, it’s shameful to be foreign. If you’ve learned anything in your short time on earth, you’ve learned this.

“To Sunland” by Lauren Groff (The New Yorker)

Two grieving siblings must take a road journey in this dark and complex story by Lauren Groff.

He woke to an angry house and darkness in the windows. Aunt Maisie had packed his suitcase the night before and left it near the front door, and so he dressed himself without turning on the light and came out and dropped the pajamas on top of the suitcase. She was in the kitchen, banging the pans around.

Buddy, she said when she saw him, set yourself down and get some of this food in you. Her eyes were funny, all red and puffy, and he didn’t like to see them like that. When he sat down, she came up behind him and hugged his head so hard it hurt, and her hands smelled like soap and cigarettes and grease, and he pulled away.

He ate her eggs, which were like his mother’s eggs, though her biscuit was not like his mother’s biscuit; it was too dry, and there was no tomato jam. When he was finished, she took his plate and fork and washed them.

“Thoughts and Prayers” by Ken Liu (Slate)

Ken Liu’s disturbing story is told by the family members of a young woman killed in a mass shooting. The story is included in Ken Liu’s collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

So you want to know about Hayley.

No, I’m used to it, or at least I should be by now. People only want to hear about my sister.

It was a dreary, rainy Friday in October, the smell of fresh fallen leaves in the air. The black tupelos lining the field hockey pitch had turned bright red, like a trail of bloody footprints left by a giant.

I had a quiz in French II and planned a week’s worth of vegan meals for a family of four in family and consumer science. Around noon, Hayley messaged me from California.

Skipped class. Q and I are driving to the festival right now!!!

I ignored her. She delighted in taunting me with the freedoms of her college life. I was envious, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.

In the afternoon, Mom messaged me.

Have you heard from Hayley?

No. The sisterly code of silence was sacred. Her secret boyfriend was safe with me.

“If you do, call me right away.”

I put the phone away. Mom was the helicopter type.

As soon as I got home from field hockey, I knew something was wrong. Mom’s car was in the driveway, and she never left work this early.

The TV was on in the basement.

Mom’s face was ashen. In a voice that sounded strangled, she said, “Hayley’s RA called. She went to a music festival. There’s been a shooting.”

“In a Jar” by Morgan Talty (Granta)

“In a Jar” comes from Morgan Talty’s collection Night of the Living Rez. The story is set in Maine on the Penobscot Indian reservation where young David finds a jar of teeth which might be a curse left by someone wishing David’s family ill.  

On those steps I wasn’t playing for too long before I lost one of my men to a gap between the stairs and the door. It was a red alien guy, and although he wasn’t my favorite, I still cared enough about him to go get him. Looking behind the steps, my knees were wet when I knelt in the snow, and my hands were cold and muddy when I pulled myself up. The sun warmed my neck, and a sliver of sunlight also shone behind the concrete steps, right at the perfect angle, and in the light I thought I saw my toy man. But when I reached into the slush I grabbed hold of something hard and round instead. I pulled it out.

It was a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth. The teeth were white with a tint of yellow at the root. The hair was gray and thin and loose. And the corn was kind of like the teeth, white and yellow and looked hard.

‘Mumma,’ I said. ‘What is this?’

‘David,’ she said from inside the shed. ‘Can you wait? Please, honey.’

I said nothing, waited, and examined the jar. My hand was slightly red from either the hot glass sitting in the sun all afternoon or from the cold snow I crawled on.

Mom came out of the shed, squinting in the bright light.

‘What’s what, gwus?’ she said. Little boy, she meant.

I held the jar to her and she took it. I watched her look at it, her head tilted and brown eyes wide as the jar. And then she dropped it into the snow and mud and told me to pack up my toys. ‘No, no, never mind,’ she said. ‘Leave the toys. Come on, let’s go inside.’

She got on the phone and called somebody, whose voice on the other end I could hear and sounded familiar. ‘I’ll be by,’ he said. ‘I can get there soon. Don’t touch it, and don’t let him touch anything.’

“Ringa Ringa Roses” by Maithreyi Karnoor (The Bombay Literary Magazine)

Karnoor, a poet, translator, and novelist writes some memorable women characters in this short story.  

Rituparna had been an ideal student. She hung on to Sameer’s every word and spent long hours with him in the studio. She was also a good guest – she not only helped with the chores but took on some of the household responsibilities upon herself and was always thanking Aruna for allowing her to stay. ‘This is not an internship, this is the continuation of the guru-shishya tradition,’ she would say and jokingly call Aruna her ‘guru-ma.’ After this, there was no way Aruna could have been threatened by the proximity of her husband to this sultry, curly-haired woman nearly 15 years their junior. Moreover, Aruna was herself every bit the shade of monsoon clouds with a cascade of ringlets like the falling of nights that held the promise of laughter in them. She had turned many a head in her time and though slightly heavier under the chin now and with some grey peeking out at the temples, she was aware of her charm. That’s why she noticed nothing when a month later, stylishly unkempt Sameer began paying special attention to his grooming. And that’s why she noticed nothing when guru and disciple began going on long walks into the hills to discuss art history. She was just happy to have the house to herself and enjoy the peace of solitude. She noticed nothing when something furtive crept into Sameer’s behaviour and Rituparna began avoiding eye contact. That’s why it took her a couple of hours before realizing something was amiss when one day she came home from shopping for supplies to find them both missing and his car gone.

“Wisteria” by Mieko Kawakami (Astra Magazine) (Translated from the Japanese by Hitomi Yoshio)

Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2022.

It took only thirty minutes to cut down the wisteria tree. Its roots, abandoned on the dirt, resembled arms that grasped at something in midair. The excavator crushed everything, mixing the laundry pole, the flowerpots, and the stones. It trampled the porch and bulldozed through the house, mercilessly clawing through the furniture and screen doors. So that’s how you destroy a house, I thought, half-amused and impressed. The old two-story house that had stood majestically in the corner lot diagonally across the road was being destroyed, and I was watching the spectacle from my second-floor kitchen window.

An old woman had lived there. I would sometimes see her. When we moved into the neighborhood six years ago, we tried to pay a visit to the house a few times, but no one ever answered the door. Every once in a while, I would pass the old woman on the street as she walked slowly around the house in the morning and evening hours, leaning against a cart. We never exchanged greetings, and yet I felt strangely serene in those moments. She always wore a black blouse with a black cardigan draped over her shoulders, and in the spring evenings, I would see her walking slowly out of the rusted gate onto the sidewalk with a broom and dustpan in her hands. When the wisteria tree shed its flowers, the gray asphalt would be covered in shades of white and pale purple, and every time the wind blew, the petals would dance in the air. The old woman would spend a long time sweeping up those petals from one corner of the road to the other. The petals fell even on seemingly windless nights, and the following day, the old woman would emerge slowly with her broom and dustpan again. This would continue until the flowers were gone. But I had not seen her recently. When was the last time I saw her?

“Just a Little Fever” by Sheila Heti (The New Yorker)

A bank teller falls in love with an easygoing older customer who doesn’t want to have an exclusive relationship.

“What is your name, dear?” he asked carefully, pulling out his wallet and putting it down on the counter.

“Angela,” she said.

“Angela, my name is Thomas.” He handed over his bank card. “Could I please have three hundred dollars in cash from my savings account?”

She rolled her eyes slightly, but as soon as she did she regretted it. She liked the man, and even if this was something that could have been done at the A.T.M. she shouldn’t have rolled her eyes. She was simply so used to disliking her customers, and she immediately apologized. “I’m sorry I rolled my eyes. It’s just habit.”

“A lot of things are habit,” he agreed, and didn’t seem offended.

“I have lots of bad habits,” she said.

“I do, too,” he said. “It takes a lifetime to get rid of them, and even then that is not enough time.”

As she counted out his money, she asked, “What habits have you overcome and which do you still have?”

“I no longer smoke or drink, but I tell little white lies. In fact, I do smoke and drink sometimes. No, I guess I haven’t overcome any.”

“I forget to exercise, and I eat junk food all the time.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Your body knows what it needs better than you do, better than all the magazines do, better than the doctors do, better than your girlfriends do. You just keep eating your junk food and lazing around.”

“Thank you,” she said. “No one has ever said that.”

“You do whatever you want. It really doesn’t matter.”

“Tumble” by Sidik Fofana (Electric Lit)

When her promising career is halted by the betrayal of a childhood friend, a young woman finds it difficult to reconcile her new situation or with the childhood friend who faces eviction. “Tumble” is one of eight interlinked stories in Sidik Fofana’s debut collection Stories From the Tenants Downstairs.

Usually, they give you time. You might see a notice on someone’s door for the whole year. Now, several units were getting one on the same day. 

So less than a week into my time as a building liaison, Emeraldine hands me a printout of Banneker tenants who got notices in the past month—twentysome in all. She does it with this attitude like she’s waiting for me to object, but I just take the list and act like the new worker who’s happy to get work. 

We gonna start setting those folks up with the Citizens Legal Fund, she goes. 

I hold up the list doing my best to murmur the names. Michelle Sutton, Darius Kite, Verona Dallas. Then I get to one that cold knocks me out. I move it close to my face to make sure it’s not a mistake. Kya Rhodes. 

“The Americanization of Kambili” by Tochi Eze (Catapult)

Tochi Eze’s story about two sisters announces the arrival of another promising writer from Nigeria.

I was six years old when Kambili was pink and soft. Dad and Mum were loud with their joy—after five years of trying again, waiting again, Kambili was their prize at the end of those frantic years. Daddy’s trophy. Mummy’s answered prayer. Mine to watch and care for.

Mummy had returned from the hospital that Sunday after mass while Daddy fried yams and egg sauce in the kitchen. I could still taste the hot honeyed Lipton tea stinging my mouth when Daddy waltzed out to the parlor, swaying to highlife music from Oliver De Coque, his happiness hung on his neck and lips, on the bridge of his nose. I wanted to pull his neck to my chest, hear his laugh close to me, tickling me till I was bouncing and laughing too. I reached out, my arms wide open in their endless regard for him, wanting, even at six, to be picked up and lifted in the air. But then the gate rattled, the car honked, and Daddy and I knew that Mummy was back. She stepped out of Baba Kunle’s yellow taxi, with grandmama behind her, both of them smelling of white powder and fresh baby.

When Kambili was five months old, I snuck into her room as Mummy fried akara in the kitchen and I pierced her tiny baby shoulder with a razor. I watched her baby blood spurt into the sheets, and I screamed, and she screamed, and I ran to fetch Mummy.

“Happy Family” by William Pei Shih (Ursa Story)

Ursa Story Company, helmed by Dawnie Walton, Mark Armstrong*, and Deesha Philyaw, offers audio and web versions of their stories. “Happy Family” is set in a Chinatown restaurant in a bygone era.

When the real estate business was failing, and my parents’ marriage was also failing, my mother and my stepfather took out a second mortgage and opened a restaurant. This was on Grand Street, on the other side of Chinatown. My parents christened it “Ga Hing” for “Happy Family,” which didn’t make sense to me at the time because we were barely a family, and nowhere near happy. My stepfather wasn’t happy because he played mahjong, and had accumulated the kind of debt that was so impossible to pay off, he was convinced that turning back to the game could save him. My mother wasn’t happy because she said that she already knew what it was like to be poor, and that being poor again was worse because it was now entangled with bitterness and regret. I wasn’t happy because I somehow understood, even then, that there were things that I would never be able to get back. I was fourteen; I was about to start high school. In short, it was the end of my childhood. 

It was expected of me to work at Ga Hing, to contribute for the good of the family. And while my classmates could spend their afternoons at the Ice Cream Factory, or roam the halls of Elizabeth Center for anime action figures and keychains and fancy pens, I had to work at the restaurant, and at most, wish that I could be elsewhere. One wouldn’t think that at such a young age, I could learn how to take orders, serve dishes, or even work the register. But when push came to shove, I found that I could learn rather quickly. 

***

Looking for more?
Here’s the Twitter thread Pravesh uses to collect and share short stories. Be sure to check out Pravesh’s story picks from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.

Pravesh Bhardway wrote and directed “Baby Doll” an Audible Original podcast in Hindi (featuring Richa Chadha and Jaideep Ahlawat).

*Mark Armstrong (emeritus) is the founder of Longreads.

Atlantic bluefins swim in vast shoals of five hundred and more: to witness it, in all its speed and frothing water, is akin to seeing a migration of stampeding oceanic buffalo.

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. 20 Days in Mariupol

Mstyslav Chernov | The Associated Press | March 21st, 2022 | 2,400 words

“The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.” So begins video journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s account of the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine. In spare, blood-chilling prose crafted by Lori Pinnant, an AP colleague in Paris, based on conversations with Chernov, this feature recounts the extraordinary lengths journalists have gone to in reporting on Russia’s senseless bombardment of the city — and the extraordinary efforts Vladimir Putin’s forces have taken to suppress the truth. Chernov conveys the fear, shame, grief, anger, sadness, and — above all — sense of responsibility that comes with bearing witness to an unfathomable tragedy. This is war reporting at its finest, its most clear-eyed, its most humane. If you read one thing about Ukraine this weekend, make it this. —SD

2. The Book that Unleashed American Grief

Deborah Cohen | The Atlantic | March 8th, 2022 | 4,854 words

Nowadays, we are used to people sharing personal information about themselves: Social media and reality television operate as vehicles for shouting out much — and as loudly — as possible. With a few clicks, you can find out more about a perfect stranger — and their current mood — than you know about your gran. This influx can make it easy to forget how much things have changed. In the buttoned-up years pre-Second World War, over-sharing was still very much a taboo. Deborah Cohen’s fascinating essay explores how John Gunther’s book, Death Be Not Proud, led the way to public discussion of cancer and death, as well as “divorce, pain, and parental remorse.” Gunther’s book was a memoir: an account of the death of his son, Johnny, from a brain tumor. Written in 1947, it was the very first chronicle of cancer. It feels crass to portray Gunther as paving the way for today’s social media stars — but Cohen’s poignant essay did make me consider the changing social norms around emotion and the role of memoir in instigating these changes. Gunther making his grief public was brave — founding the process of making connections with others through shared experiences. This essay is not a light read, but it is powerful and meticulously researched. I will be thinking about it for a long time. —CW

3. Personal Growth

Marina Benjamin | Granta | March 11th, 2022 | 5,563 words

My brother was forever small for his age and pale; he simply refused to eat foods he didn’t like. In our house in the ’70s, that meant he was made to stay at the dinner table until he ate what was on his plate. Many nights, he would eventually push his plate away, put his head down on the table and go to sleep, his food long congealed. Years later, my parents discovered dozens of calcified dinner rolls in a little-used cupboard near the stove, evidence of his attempts to clear his plate. Distant and tenuous are two words that accurately describe his relationship with our parents. He hasn’t been at a family dinner in nearly two decades. I can’t say I blame him. In this stunner of an essay at Granta, Marina Benjamin recounts similar experiences at her own family’s table, suffering pleas and threats and edicts around eating and food. Although my brother never suffered the physical violence Benjamin endured, it’s clear my parents left their marks on him. Benjamin’s essay is one of the most gorgeous pieces of writing I’ve read this year. It’s about the fog of memory, the imbalances of power and control inherent in families, the irreparable harms even mostly well-meaning parents can do by abusing their children, and the lifetime of work some have to do to overcome it: “To refuse what the world imposes on you when you possess no other means of resisting is a strength. But refusal is a delusory power, too, because it divides you against yourself. Breaks you in two. One half of you submits to the ordeal while the other half protects the self by dissociating.” —KS

4. Futures From Ruins

Johanna Hoffman | Noēma | March 17, 2022 | 3,882 words

In the mid-20th century, Bombay Beach saw brighter days as a vibrant California resort playground on the Salton Sea. But agricultural pollution, water issues, and toxic air led to its demise, and by the ’80s, this once-thriving desert town to the southeast of Los Angeles fell into decay. In recent years, an art movement and community are breathing life back into it, with a festival, the Bombay Beach Biennale, transforming the tiny town into a post-apocalyptic wonderland. Johanna Hoffman visits and speaks with its residents, exploring how this tight-knit, compassionate community — one that’s lived and survived in such a harsh landscape — continues to reenvision itself and emerge from ruins. Can art really remake Bombay Beach? Is this just another place lost to gentrification? Or does this town at the edge of a toxic lake offer us a glimpse into our collective future? Photographs from Tao Ruspoli, who co-founded the Biennale, add a nice visual layer to Hoffman’s story. —CLR

5. Nicolas Cage Can Explain It All

Gabriella Paiella | GQ Magazine | March 22, 2022 | 6,673 words

As someone who’s been on the journalist side of plenty of celebrity profiles, believe me when I tell you that it’s not easy to break people out of autopilot press mode. Just because you sat in Jennifer Lopez’s house or walked around with Shia LeBeouf or enjoyed a cordial but stilted breakfast with Eric Bana (all real examples) doesn’t mean you’re going to leave having gotten a single milligram of candor from them. But not every celebrity is Nicolas Cage. And not every writer is Gabriella Paiella. Paiella, whose GQ profiles of Diplo and Lil Dicky have already cemented her as the magazine’s preeminent anthropologist of White Dudes, captures Cage at the perfect moment: coming off a tear of 46 movies to pull himself out of bankruptcy, and looking to the future. Yes, as a subject he delivers everything you hope he might — the guy opens the door in a goddamn kung fu suit — but it’s Paiella’s assiduous secondary reporting and lovely arm’s-length affection that makes the piece a gem. “Nothing about him feels like an affectation,” she writes. “Not the kung fu suit, not the talking crow. He is a true eccentric holdout in the increasingly banal landscape of American celebrity. You never see him posting on social media, flashing his veneers above a faux self-deprecating or inspirational caption, or giving pithy sound bites on a red carpet. The man is physically incapable of pith.” You already knew Cage was in National Treasure; now you’ll know he’s one himself. —PR

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. No Escape From Guantánamo*

Abigail Hauslohner | The Washington Post | January 7, 2022 | 3,700 Words

The United States began detaining men at Guantánamo Bay 20 years ago this week. Nearly 800 prisoners have spent time in the facility’s cells; today 39 men still remain behind bars there, 27 of whom have never been charged with a crime. This haunting, must-read story is about men who’ve been released and resettled in third countries — a Tunisian in Slovakia, for instance, and a Yemeni in Serbia. Abigail Hauslohner describes them as “the discarded men of one of America’s darkest chapters.” After enduring torture and other horrors at Guantánamo, they’ve been forced to live hundreds or thousands of miles from any family or friends. They face persecution and poverty, as well as the lingering effects of trauma. If they can rely on anything, it’s each other. “They trade advice, news and jokes in text-message chains,” Hauslohner writes. “And when things get bad, they call each other.” —SD

* Subscription required. (Note: the vast majority of the pieces we recommend are free to read online. Occasionally, we will share a story that requires a subscription when we strongly believe that piece is worth your time.)

2. The Gentrification of Consciousness

Roberto Lovato | Alta | January 4, 2022 | 5,279 words

For Alta, Roberto Lovato reports on the coming psychedelic therapy wave, led by Silicon Valley companies and investors who view psychoactive substances like mushrooms as the next disruptive technology. Treatment, however, is pricey: one session of guided ketamine therapy can cost as much as $2000. An analysis Lovato cites found that Black, Latinx, and Asian people have also been severely underrepresented in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy studies over the past 25 years. So who exactly will have access to these powerful medicines and experiences? Who will lead psychedelic policy reform? And how will this “psychedelic renaissance” play out in a place like San Francisco’s Mission District, which was once a center for psychedelic culture, and a majority Latino and non-white neighborhood before the techies drove them out? Lovato, who grew up in the Mission, weaves some of the neighborhood’s history with that of his own, and explains that people in this community, like the elders who came before them, have been exploring altered states of consciousness through sacred, mind-altering medicinas in underground and community-based spaces for a long time. This is a powerful, moving, yet sobering read on the tech-fueled psychedelic-industrial complex, spiritual extractivism (the mining of Indigenous tradition, ritual, and wisdom for profit), and the psychedelic underground. —CLR

3. On Mistaking Whales

Bathsheba Demuth | Granta | November 18th, 2021 | 4,746

“In the time and place where I was born, we were taught that the right way to consume a whale is with your eyes,” writes environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth. As she looks at the history of whaling in Russia, she considers the many ways in which whales have served humans in providing food, employment, and even housing. “I approach one house by crawling on my belly to peer down. In the dimness, the pale heavy brow of a whale’s skull holds back the earth. A bone wall. The people who lived here lived in the heads of whales.” Later, in speaking about her work to American audiences, she encounters rigid opposition to eating whales, from those who feel themselves superior partly because they hunt for food only at the grocery store. Demuth’s essay eloquently reminds us that reality is far more complicated than black and white; all of us inflict damage on the earth and on wildlife, in our own ways. “Here whales have been homes. A practical space, shelter and host to meals and births and deaths. Host to the least abstract kinds of love. Familial, romantic, parental. Here whales have made those intimacies, by giving people the capacity to live.” —KS

4. How the Speed of Climate Change is Unbalancing the Insect World

Oliver Milman | The Guardian | January 11, 2022 | 3,092 words

On New Year’s Day, I went for a walk in a local park and was struck by how much I was sweating in my huge coat. My lack of fitness was not the only culprit; it felt like a warm spring day in the middle of winter, an illusion rendered complete by a confused bumblebee buzzing past me. Oliver Milman provides an explanation for the unexpected bee in quoting Simon Potts, a bee expert: “There’s good evidence here in the UK that under climate change things are warming up early, so we’re got all these bees coming out early but not the flowers…” Bees are not the only insects suffering; early springs are unsettling the established life cycle of many insects. Even when rising temperatures benefit an insect population, it is not positive. In 2020, East Africa suffered its worst plague of locusts in decades. This fascinating and concerning essay reminds us that the disruption of these tiny insects is a crucial part of a very big problem. —CW

5. The Secret MVP of Sports? The Port-a-Potty

Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | January 5, 2022 | 4,311 words

There’s nothing quite like it. You’re out an outdoor event when nature calls; looking around, your heart sinks when see that your only option is a flimsy plastic shed, behind the door of which untold horrors lurk. Odd as it is, though, you might fear that prospect a bit less after reading Hockensmith’s breezy tour through the history and importance of port-o-potties (and, crucially, the professional maintenance thereof). Whether following a crew of Buffalo sanitation workers undertaking a frenzied early-game half-suck in the parking lots around the Bills’ stadium or speaking with academics about the future of equitable sanitation, the piece never strays from its founding charm. By the time you’re finished, you may not be ready to leave indoor plumbing behind, but you’ll have a newfound equanimity the next time you do have to hazard a trip to the Box of Uncertainty. (Not always, though; as Hockensmith knowingly writes, Sometimes the cost of having to hold it isn’t as bad as the price of getting to go.) And no matter how much pre-gaming you’ve done, I promise you this: you’ll never try to run across the roof of one. —PR