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

The Longreads editors love to curate the best nonfiction stories on the web for our readers, but we are always happy to have some help! 2023 has been another year where we have published reading lists from outside contributors—on eclectic topics that range from Taylor Swift to neuroscience.

We have been lucky enough to have garnered some regular reading list authors, but we are always happy to welcome first-time listers into the fold. Our top 10 most popular lists of the year include curation from both veterans and new authors, and we are delighted to remind you of their many fantastic recommendations—get comfortable before you dive in, you may be here awhile. 

We’ll continue to commission and publish reading lists in 2024. So, if you’ve got a great idea for a list, please pitch us.

1. A Reading List About the Neurology of Reading (Melanie Hamon, February 2023)

Seven stories exploring the surprising neuroscience behind the mutability of language and the reading brain.

2. Paging Dr. House: A Medical Mysteries Reading List (Lisa Bubert, March 2023)

In the spirit of TV’s Holmesian healer, enjoy these diagnostic digressions.

3. The Parent Dilemma: Should I have a Child? (Clare Egan, August 2023)

Clare Egan doesn’t know if she wants kids. Will this reading list help?

4. Working on the Edge: A Reading List About Extreme Jobs (Chris Wheatley, June 2023)

A livelihood is not a life—yet many risk the latter in order to create the former.

5. Not Serious People: A Succession Reading List (Chloe Walker, May 2023)

Great writing begets great writing — and the commentary around the HBO smash hit is some of the best around.

6. There She Goes: A Reading List on Women Adventurers (Ailsa Ross, April 2023)

The women you’ll find on top of the world.

7. Librarians on the Front Lines: A Reading List for Library Lovers and Realists (Lisa Bubert, September 2023)

Increasingly, being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival.

8. From Identity to Inspiration: A Reading List on Why We Run (Sheon Han, February 2023)

Sheon Han built a running habit during lockdown. In this collection, he highlights six writers’ insights on the sport.

9. Read ‘Em and Weep: A Reading List for Criers (Rachel Dlugatch, July 2023)

Grab your handkerchief and get ready for the waterworks.

10. Imperial Eras: A Taylor Swift Reading List (Jill Spivey Caddell, October 2023)

How Taylor Swift reflects every possible version of ourselves.

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

I came to librarianship the way most other librarians do: I fell into it. After a full-time job that had thoroughly burned me out, I found a student job in the college library; this one was part-time and entailed reshelving large academic books and sitting at the big circulation desk with a stamper, ready to land that perfectly placed due date. It came with a lot of quiet and a lot of time to read—excellent for repairing burnout, terrible for teaching me what working in libraries was actually like. 

People who do not work in libraries tend to have a romanticized view of what it is to work in libraries, and I was no exception. Once I graduated and needed to find another job, I did the next best thing and applied to work at a public library as a library associate in the children’s department. 

Unlike my last library job, this one was not quiet, did not come with reading time, and after seven years, thoroughly re-burned me out so hard I would spend years unlearning toxic workaholic traits I’d picked up there (an unlearning that is still in process). This particular public library served a population of 200,000 well-educated, affluent, self-described library lovers. They were also Tea Party Texans who saw taxes as an affront to their personal liberty; they loved the library, just not enough to fund more branches or a larger staff. 

The place was as busy as a Target on Saturday every day of the week. And because we were the only library in town, we ran the place like an amusement park. Story time was a back-to-back affair—every half-hour from 10 a.m. to noon, Tuesday through Friday—and was filled to capacity for nearly every slot. 

While our patron base was mostly conservative, white, and straight, we wanted our collection to reflect the community it served—which also included a large immigrant population and a handful of queer families. With that in mind, one of our librarians used story time to read The Family Book by Todd Parr. The Family Book won a Scholastic Parent and Child Magazine Best of 2003 Award; it also contains a single page that says “Some families have two mommies; some families have two daddies.” One parent raised such a stink with our manager that we were told to stick with reading “noncontroversial” books at story time, lest we risk losing all the queer books in the collection. 

This was in 2013. Ten years later, things haven’t changed for the better. I still work as a librarian, albeit in a different major Southern city. But my work has changed drastically. I’m trained in violence de-escalation, trauma-informed reference, and medical and mental health first aid, which includes overdose prevention training. I have intervened in fights, talked people down from suicide, removed domestic violence victims from their abusers, hugged strangers, and been screamed at and threatened. My coworkers once solved a murder. 

Yes, sometimes I even recommend books. But increasingly, being a librarian is less and less about books and more and more about community survival. We are a lifeline for populations that have slipped through the spaces in a weakening social safety net; we are a target for organized harassment and censorship campaigns. Yet, people are grateful for our help. They hold our hands and thank us, they tell us we are blessed, they say they can’t believe someone so kind found them so deserving of love. 

In library school, the threats of censorship and propaganda were drilled into us constantly—but mostly in the context of past authoritarian regimes, and never with the idea that past might become present. The last three years, in particular, have been difficult ones in librarianship, but they are also the ones in which I have felt most committed to the job. The work I’m doing now is possibly the most important of my life. 

“Have you been to the library lately?” asked Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Walrus earlier this year. No, really—have you? Because whatever ideas you have about what it’s like to work in libraries these days, I can assure you it’s not like that. It’s frustrating, depressing, and underpaid. It’s also life-affirming. Some days feel like utopia; many days feel like war. That’s life on the library front lines. Welcome. 

Have You Been To The Library Lately? (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Walrus, June 2023)

When I first read this piece, I saw something I hadn’t in a long time: a realistic portrayal of life in public libraries. In fact, it inspired this very reading list.

Hune-Brown doesn’t mince words, doesn’t shy away from hard truths, but also doesn’t only focus on the toxic mix of vocational awe and trauma porn that currently overshadows life in public librarianship. Yes, the job is necessary, even admirable. Yes, it’s extremely difficult and downright dangerous at times. No, none of us who got into libraries expected to be doing this kind of work. But what I love most about this piece is that Hune-Brown cuts right to the heart of the issue. If a society feels it acceptable to cut funding to social necessities like housing, education, and  healthcare, are we really that surprised that that same society wouldn’t see a problem with allowing an underpaid, women-driven profession such as librarianship to pick up the pieces? 

When people tell the story of this transformation, from book repository to social services hub, it’s usually as an uncomplicated triumph. A recent “love letter” to libraries in the New York Times has a typical capsule history: “As local safety nets shriveled, the library roof magically expanded from umbrella to tarp to circus tent to airplane hangar. The modern library keeps its citizens warm, safe, healthy, entertained, educated, hydrated and, above all, connected.”

That story, while heartwarming, obscures the reality of what has happened. No institution “magically” takes on the role of the entire welfare state, especially none as underfunded as the public library. If the library has managed to expand its protective umbrella, it has done so after a series of difficult decisions. And that expansion has come with costs.

The Small Town Library That Became a Culture War Battleground (Sasha Abramsky, The Nation, August 2023)

Let’s go back to the basics of the censorship conundrum libraries currently find themselves in. When I started working in libraries 15 years ago, we regularly talked about how librarians were some of our most trusted public servants, right behind firefighters and nurses. Book bans were vestiges of the past; when they came up, our minds would settle on imagery from Nazi book-burning parties and the cover of Fahrenheit 451. Phew, we said. At least we don’t have to deal with that anymore. 

Fast forward to 2023 and librarians are being cast as public enemy number one, pedophiles, and groomers-in-chief, courtesy of extremist groups like Moms For Liberty. The year 2022 saw a record 600-plus book challenges leveled against library collections, and 2023 is on track to beat that number handily. From the outside, this might appear to be a groundswell of public support for censorship—however, a recent Washington Post analysis of the American Library Association’s 2023 “State of America’s Libraries” report showed that the majority of book challenges being leveled at library boards around the country originated with eleven people. Eleven. 

Abramsky’s piece is a perfect cross section of the nationwide fight, distilled into one rural library’s story. Library lovers had better wake up, because the other side is currently going faster than we can drive. 

In the coming years, the conservative three-person Board of County Commissioners will likely continue to appoint people to the library’s board who reflect the values of Ruffcorn and her fellow petitioners. In other words, Ruffcorn could lose in November and yet still ultimately come out on top, setting a precedent in which a few angry citizens would get to dictate to librarians which books should carry warning labels, or be relegated to the top shelf of the adult section, or require parental approval for a child to check out.

The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries (Karawynn Long, Nine Lives, July 2023)

Speaking of library lovers needing to wake up to the myriad threats facing public libraries, I feel compelled to highlight this Substack from Karawynn Long that dives deep into the now-defunct user recommendation feature from OverDrive (the increasingly powerful middle man between e-books, libraries, and their patrons) and what it portends for the other outsourced reader services libraries have come to rely on. 

Long is a library lover herself, and she highlights an uncomfortable truth about libraries and how they must exist in this increasingly capitalistic world: we have to buy in to our exploitation in order to survive. And because we’re forced to buy in to this exploitation thanks to the popular tech business practice known as “functional monopolism,” libraries are vulnerable to the whims of those vulture businesses, such as KKR (who also recently purchased Simon & Schuster), who exist to extract ever more money from their customers—libraries. 

Every extra dollar that KKR sucks out of libraries is another dollar they don’t have for buying books, or for librarian staffing, or for supporting any of the dozens of other small but important services that public libraries provide their local communities, like free access to computers and the internet. Some libraries that already struggle for funding might be starved out of existence…. And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America. Between now and then, I expect the user experience to degrade precipitously. The removal of the recommendation feature, I believe, is the canary in the coal mine.

What They Didn’t Teach Us In Library School (Chip Ward, TomDispatch, April 2007)

Chip Ward’s heartbreaking essay has been cited by many in the library sciences tasked with advising new recruits. Written in 2007, it treats the idea of library as social safety net as a little-known concept. Ward talks about going to conferences on housing and homelessness, and other attendees wondering what in the world a librarian would be doing there. Now, librarians, housing advocates, social workers, and first responders are all too familiar with the work the others do; while I’d like to consider this a win, it only proves that we are more than 15 years down the road and conditions have only remained the same—that is, if they haven’t worsened. 

In the meantime, the Salt Lake City Public Library — Library Journal’s 2006 “Library of the Year” — has created a place where the diverse ideas and perspectives that sustain an open and inclusive civil society can be expressed safely, where disparate citizens can discover common ground, self-organize, and make wise choices together. We do not collect just books, we also gather voices. We empower citizens and invite them to engage one another in public dialogues. I like to think of our library as the civic ballroom of our community where citizens can practice that awkward dance of mutuality that is the very signature of a democratic culture.

And if the chronically homeless show up at the ball, looking worse than Cinderella after midnight? Well, in a democratic culture, even disturbing information is useful feedback. When the mentally ill whom we have thrown onto the streets haunt our public places, their presence tells us something important about the state of our union, our national character, our priorities, and our capacity to care for one another. That information is no less important than the information we provide through databases and books. The presence of the impoverished mentally ill among us is not an eloquent expression of civil discourse, like a lecture in the library’s auditorium, but it speaks volumes nonetheless.

Are Libraries the Future of Media? (Kate Harloe, Popula, August 2023)

I’d like to end a difficult reading list with this universal truth: public libraries and their librarians are scrappy. Always have been. Over and over again, the world proclaims the death of libraries; over and over again, libraries respond by ascending from the grave. Don’t count us out, and don’t call our resilience a comeback.

Kate Harloe’s piece provides a perfect example of a library understanding its role in a community and leveraging it to better serve the public. Here, the Albany Public Library pairs with the local newspaper to provide citizens with publicly funded, community-owned and accessible journalism, the library and local journalists reporting and publishing community stories together. As Harloe puts it, people may not trust the media but they “really, really love the library.” And why wouldn’t they? Libraries are the last place where “your ability to exist as a human being doesn’t depend on your ability to pay.” Combine that with quality community reporting that isn’t hidden behind a paywall and you’ve got a KO combination. 

As she finished speaking, the crowd was in tears. There were many reasons for that, but for me, one was the way in which Koepaomu captured how libraries feel—how, often, they can be experienced as places outside of space and time; as small territories to retreat from the unstable, transactional realities of the world, and as pathways to a sense of belonging, and even safety, in a deeply unsafe time. Libraries represent the best of our efforts to take care of one another. Their ongoing existence is a reminder that—not just in some far-off future, but even today—other ways of being are possible.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

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

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Never mind my terrible grades in all things science. Never mind that I decided this in my second year of college, after deciding that the music school that I’d wanted for years wasn’t for me. It was 2006. It was the age of Dr. Gregory House. 

I love a good medical drama. My mother, a nurse, raised me on ER and General Hospital, always pointing out all the plot lines that “would never happen in real life” but were really cool to watch on TV. My mother credits ER with pushing her toward her decades-long career in the operating room. So when I, a poor lost college sophomore who had gone to school to play French horn (French horn!) and found it wasn’t what I thought it would be, I did what I knew best to do and turned to TV. And on TV, I found House. 

House had it all: a painkiller-addicted doctor with a smart mouth and a slap-worthy face, medical mysteries solved via CSI-style case-of-the-week format, and a beleaguered crew of sidekick physicians whose instincts were never quite as good as House’s. I would spend each episode studying the setup and trying to unravel what the medical culprit could be before the ultimate reveal. Instead of realizing that what I might want to be was a writer with a good plot, I missed the mark and decided I wanted to be a doctor. 

Reader, I did not become a doctor. (That fizzled out after one year of biology classes and a stint working in a local nursing home.) But I remain a lifelong medical mystery buff. Here, then, are a few of my recent long-form favorites — enjoy the game of whatdunnit. 

Swamp Boy (Kris Newby, Now This News, October 2022)

One day, a 14-year-old boy with no previous physical or mental issues informs his parents that he is the “evil, damned son of the devil” and he needs to kill himself before he destroys them all. Thus begins the onset of a massive medical manhunt to uncover exactly what is causing the boy’s psychosis and physical symptoms, which include OCD, shortness of breath, chronic pain, frequent urination, intense headaches, the belief that he had green vines growing under his skin, the belief that he was a bird, and the belief that the family cat was ordering him to kill everyone around him — including the family fish. 

Complete with vivid graphic-novel-styled art illustrating some of the reported hallucinations, this piece has it all, including a father’s fight against the medical establishment and an ending you’ll never see coming. In other words, it’s about as close as one can get to a real-life episode of House. 

Meanwhile, back at home, now more than seven months after his son’s first psychotic breakdown, Scott could finally clear his mind, and began to focus his analytical skills on Michael’s case.

To the medical experts, his son had been a ten-inch-tall stack of paper annotated with clinical notes. Each expert had examined one piece of Michael—his brain, his stomach, his heart, his immune system, his gut, his spine, his skin, his eyes. Scott, meanwhile, was determined to analyze Michael as a whole. “I knew I had to figure out what was wrong, or I’d lose my son,” he said.

It was during one of his many conversations with doctors about Michael’s potential treatment that Scott had an epiphany: Maybe no one could help their son because they were treating the wrong illness.

What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy (Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine, March 2012)

On an ordinary day in Le Roy, New York, a high school cheerleader begins twitching. Another cheerleader develops tics a week later. And another after that; and another after that. It spreads past the cheerleaders and on to the art kids, a boy, kids in neighboring schools. Is there something in the water? Is it those mysterious bins labeled with hazardous waste from a nearby factory? Is it that strange orange ooze coming up from the ground on the football field? Or is it all in their heads? 

Featuring media vans, Dr. Drew appearances, familial finger-pointing, women’s least favorite H-word (hysteria), and a cameo from legal crusader Erin Brockovich, Dominus’s reporting takes us into the mystery that consumed a small Northeastern town, while still making the science accessible to lay readers. 

How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.

The Pre-Pandemic Puzzle (W. Pate McMichael, St. Louis Magazine, August 2007)

No, not that pandemic. Pate McMichael looks back at the teenager who may have died of AIDS more than a decade before HIV gripped the nation. But where did the virus come from? How did a young boy who was not a drug user, had not left the state, and never received a blood transfusion contract a virus that wouldn’t be detected in the United States for another decade? Furthermore, why did the news break in the mainstream media before the scientists who first identified the strain even had a chance to understand what was in their lab?  

This piece combines two of my favorite things: a medical mystery and an ethical quandary. It pulls back the curtain on how the scientific establishment studies new diseases and how and when they release that information to the public. Add in that historical lens — doctors seeing a new and potentially terrifying disease in the 1960s, the echoes of Hurricane Katrina in Pate McMichael’s 2007 writing — and you’ve got a winner. 

A few years later, in 1973, Elvin-Lewis and Witte presented Robert R.’s case at a lymphology conference and published a journal article on his systemic chlamydia in The Journal of Lymphology. The paper they presented actually raised as many questions as it answered. Why had Chlamydia spread throughout the body, when it normally stayed near the port of entry? And why did this young man have these purplish, malignant lesions called Kaposi’s sarcoma, as the alert pathologist had discovered during the autopsy? Kaposi’s sarcoma was known as an old man’s skin disease, typically affecting Jews and Italians. The pathologist decided that Robert R. had an African variant that affected children and primarily targeted the lymphatic system. That decision suggested an intriguing question: How did a black 15-year-old from St. Louis acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma?

Doctor Donor Fertility Fraud (Kudrat Wadhwa, The Verge, June 2022)

A woman seeking her familial DNA for a clinical trial learns that not only is her father not her biological father, but her bio dad is actually her mother’s fertility doctor. All together, now: Yikes. Worse, she finds out that she is not alone; several other children conceived via fertility clinics have also discovered that their fertility doctors are their real fathers. One doctor, featured in the Netflix documentary Our Father, sired over 90 children. 

This piece grapples with ethical questions and hard-to-draw lines: Is it medical rape to inseminate someone with fraudulent sperm? Do these doctor-fathers owe their scores of children anything? Should these children, once the fathers are discovered, seek a relationship with their bio dads? And what if the bio dad wants nothing to do with them? What if these men fail to see their behavior as a violation? 

Not a mystery, but still riveting — and a good case study around the meaning of consent. 

Not everyone who is watching Our Father has a personal connection at stake, but they are drawn in regardless. Fertility fraud rivets audiences because it channels the mysterious allure of genetic inheritance, crossing it with the perverse power relations between a doctor and their patient. Conception — so often an intimate act — is made impersonal and medicalized in the context of the fertility clinic, and then made intimate again through the abuse of the doctor-patient relationship. 

Every child of fertility fraud is a baby who was desperately and deeply wanted by their parents. The exploitation of that desire is devastating; the fact that the body becomes evidence of the transgression is all the worse.

Sick To Our Stomachs: Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (Natasha Boyd, The Drift, June 2022)

If Rule 34 of the internet is that there exists porn for every possible interest, then Rule 35, according to Jo Piazza of the podcast Under the Influence, is that there exists an influencer for every topic — including diarrhea. 

Why yes, Hot Girls do have IBS, and you can hear all about it on TikTok, Instagram, and pretty much anywhere else there is to make money off of “bloating positivity.” (Truly, if there was ever a sign that we really are in late-stage capitalism, this has to be it.) But really, why do so many hot girls (and other mortals) have IBS these days? This essay takes a look at the history of digestive discomforts, all the way back to the 1700s when The Gentleman’s Magazine examined why all the “well-to-do Ladies” complain of stomach “[d]iagnosticks … neither visible or certain” and to our new era of “normalizing bowel function” (finally!).

It has a name, but not much else. IBS is a so-called “functional disorder,” meaning that it is a condition without identifiable cause. Unlike with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, patients diagnosed with IBS have no medically detectable signs of damage or disease in their digestive tracts. Essentially, IBS is diagnosed when tests come back normal; it’s what’s written down on a chart when there’s nothing else left to identify. Many people with IBS struggle with the implication that their symptoms are made up — especially as IBS both relies on self-reporting and presents differently from patient to patient. It is a catch-all term for a variety of gastrointestinal ailments, including cramping, bloating, intestinal gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Statistically, it affects more women than men, and is most common in people under 50. Regular exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, and meditation have all been shown to alleviate symptoms. Even so, “IBS is not a psychiatric illness,” says Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, “though stress and depression can make symptoms worse.” Despite its growing prevalence — IBS is the most frequently diagnosed gastrointestinal disorder — some doctors and digestive specialists question its utility as a medical construct, since the diagnosis does not elucidate anything about patients’ physiology or the causes of their discomfort. It is, however, very profitable: in the United States, the annual medical costs associated with IBS exceed $1 billion.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

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

The finest romances have the messiest stories. Not messy as in poorly written; au contraire, a good romance hits all the highest points of storytelling  — the meet cute, the ecstatic joy of turning enemies into lovers, the inevitable wrench in the works, middles full of will they-won’t they tension, and a resolution that’s either a happily ever after, happy enough for now, or a bittersweet goodbye.

I am feeling particularly entranced with the genre right now having just watched La La Land. Okay, look — it’s not going to be a movie for everyone. But me? I love a good musical. I love a good homage. And I love a good love story. The prospect of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone maybe not ending up together because of the calls of their differing careers, but agreeing they will always love each other … well, let’s just say I needed several moments. 

My husband is a working musician, and I’m a writer. This May, we will have been together for 16 years — eight in sin, eight married, and all 16 sharing creative careers that don’t always align. Ours has been a romance of nights apart, beautiful Sundays together, opposite schedules, and ships passing in the night. 

There is a montage in La La Land that shows this all-too-familiar lifestyle of two artists — Gosling lands a big gig and is gone nights, while Stone is wrapped up in writing her one-woman play, rising early and going to bed early, so over the course of their days they end up sharing only bed space. This is the moment I shout to my husband, in the bedroom preparing for his Friday night gig: “Oh shit, La La Land just got too real.” 

I go to the bedroom and tell him about the scene. He listens to me, buttoning his shirt and smiling his sad smile. We agree that his current Friday and Saturday night gig schedules are not ideal. He wraps me in a hug and we stand there, as I watch the time on our alarm clock over his shoulder. He is late.

That image of a long-haul couple eating breakfast together, sharing a morning coffee, splitting a bottle of wine after a long work day, reading books together in bed before falling asleep in each other’s arms — that has never been our reality. Do I wish it was? Certainly. But he will never ask me to give up my writing, and I will never ask him to stop playing music. The messier our lives, the more years we have together, the more we realize the value of writing our own story. Will we, won’t we make it? We’ll just have to wait and see. 

This is where the great, messy love stories come in handy — I don’t need our marriage to look a certain way to have hope. Because if I’ve learned anything from these stories, it’s the messiness, not the ideal, that strengthens a relationship. Our marriage survives because we appreciate the possibility that it may not. 

So don’t give me any of that happy ending bullshit. Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love. 

My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage (Mary H.K. Choi, GQ Magazine, March 2021)

Anyone who has actually experienced marriage knows that the saying “marriage is bliss” is woefully incorrect. Not because marriage is about petty arguments or seeing sides of your spouse you’d rather not see (think the Seinfeld episode where Jerry dates a nudist and then opines on the difference between “good naked” and “bad naked.”) The truth of the matter is that marriage is a little bit of good naked and a whole lot of bad naked, especially during a pandemic when fears run high and aging in-laws who live across the country are deteriorating. 

Choi’s essay takes a singular comment from her husband and encapsulates it as a defining “bad naked” moment in their marriage. And, as she says, “I have never loved him more than in that moment.” As someone who has had her share of “bad naked” marriage moments, I can attest that this essay rings with glaring honesty. 

Everything he’d done in support of me and my family was noble. Selfless. Bodies are a constant fucking betrayal, and that he’d strapped himself to another one that was in turn attached to a whole human centipede of decrepitude was deeply affecting. But then he’d admitted not only his reservation but his scorn. How it ran counter to his most primal instincts of self-preservation. Were he alone, with his discipline, his self-sufficiency, his precious solitary walks on Far fucking Rockaway, he’d survive this. Meanwhile, I’d demanded we head to the airport. I dared him to say no, because I knew he couldn’t. This was marriage.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro (Stephanie Clifford, ELLE, December 2020)

Just stick with me on this one. We all remember that one guy, Martin Shkreli, who became universally known as the biggest asshole on the face of the earth for raising the price of a life-saving pharmaceutical by 5,000% overnight. Top this objectively awful-for-humanity move with his love of trolling, his shit-eating grin, and his obscenely expensive purchase of a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album — because of course, a Wall Street Bro would spend an inordinate amount of money on that. Now add in a journalist who is damn determined to humanize him. Or is she also being trolled? 

I’m not saying this story is a great love story. But it will enrage you, confuse you, and make you question the patriarchy. (In a follow-up, Smythe, the journalist, insists she is acting of her own accord and that it is sexist to imply that she is in any way a “victim.”) Is she being used by the Pharma Bro to recoup his image? Is she using him to get a big-money book deal? Are they actually in love? Or has she, in the words of one of her journalism professors, ruined her life? Settle back with some popcorn for this one. 

When Shkreli found out about this article, though, he stopped communicating with her. He didn’t want her telling her story, she says. Smythe thinks it’s because he’s worried about fallout for her. While she waits to hear from him, she monitors Google Alerts for his name, posts in support groups for loved ones of inmates, and—because inmates must place outgoing calls and can’t accept incoming ones—hopes one day he will call or reply to one of her emails. “It’s completely out of her control,” Haak says; all she can do is “sit around and wait and hope.”

Smythe has only one photo of the two of them, propped next to her bed. Shkreli, his arm around Smythe, has a wide-open smile. “Doesn’t he look human there?” Smythe says, laughing. 

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

Tinder Hearted (Allison P. Davis, The Cut, August 2022) 

God, there are so many good lines in this one, it’s difficult to figure out what I want to highlight the most. Davis, a wickedly funny writer, recounts her decade of Tinder dating and how the longest relationship she’s managed to be in from it is with Tinder itself. She downloads, has great sex, has terrible sex, falls hard with men who ghost her, ghosts men who fall hard for her, deletes the app, tries traditional dating, and re-downloads it again and again in a vicious but unrelenting circle of who gives a shit. As one of the “smug couples” who “sigh with relief when they say, ‘I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps,’” let me just say … I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps, but part of me has always wondered what it would be like to have the world as your sexual oyster in the way Tinder allows, delicious or rotten as it may be. If romance is messy, then Tinder romances take the cake. What is most apparent: Davis has a wealth of great stories to tell. 

I first downloaded Tinder in the spring of 2013, seven months after it launched. I’d heard about it as a concept (Grindr for straights) but felt exempt from needing it until one evening at the tail end of a drawn-out breakup with someone I’d told myself I would marry. We were at a restaurant in San Francisco, having one of too many brutal good-bye dinners that led to this-is-the-last-time-I-swear sex, and I put the app on my phone in front of him. He stoically chugged his negroni while I marveled at the hundreds, presumably thousands of men who were waiting for me on the other end, should he decide to go through with the breakup. “Look!” I said, waving my iPhone 5 in his face. (I didn’t mention that at this early point in the app’s history, it was mostly populated by 20-year-old college students and S.F. tech bros who exclusively wore free T-shirts from start-ups.) By June, my boyfriend had gone through with the breakup and moved on — quickly and not via app — to a woman he’d met through mutual friends. I wanted to die. But instead of the sweet relief of death: Tinder.

Taking The Knife* (Randa Jarrar, Gay Mag, October 2019)

“In kink, consent is queen,” thus you need to understand what you’re going to get into before you read this essay. The piece centers around Jarrar’s visit to a queer kink club where the first thing we see/read is Mx. Cele enjoying a knife in intimate spaces. At the club, everyone is asking permission to touch, taste, and harm. It’s a mind warp to think of harm and consent working with, not against, each other in the same sentence, but that is what this entire essay does. I loved it for its deft balancing act — the daily negotiations of asking for what we want, not being asked before something is taken, and the sexual freedom and safety of owning our own bodies in a culture that feels entitled to it.  

I didn’t have a lock on my door until I moved away from my parents’ house. The last time I was abused, I was sixteen years old, and my father chased me around the house with a knife. I ran outside and he came after me. I ran back inside, and he finally put the knife down. But afterwards, I called the police. I’ve written before about what happened when the police came- how I smoked a cigarette with the cop who drove me to the station; how that cop later told me that my father being Arab would be a problem. I understood that this meant it would be a problem for my mother, and for me. I dropped the charges against him a few weeks later. But that didn’t change that I had been very afraid of my father and very afraid of that knife.

They Found Love, Then They Found Gender (Francesca Mari, Matter, October 2015)

And to round out this reading list, I have for you a beautiful love story. Not traditional, definitely fluid, but more romantic than most of the other narratives out there. Boy, born biologically female, meets girl, born biologically male. It’s love at first sight. They throw caution to the wind to be together in the most honest way they can — genderqueer, fluid, trans, and finally, the first queer couple legally married in the state of Texas. Grab your tissues for this one. (And for you journalism nerds out there, enjoy a conversation in the comments about the editorial choices in names and pronouns as one character, Johnny, transitions over the course of the piece.) 

Now that there is marriage equality, they want to get married again, with a license that better reflects who they are — not husband and wife — but partner and partner. “When you give sexual consent, you cannot give a blanket consent at the beginning of an evening or for the rest of your life,” Johnny explains. “And we feel the same way about marriage.” So they continue to propose to one another nearly every day. Once Johnny fingered the question into the soot on Ashley’s back windshield. Just last month, Johnny wrote, “Will you marry me?” “Yes” and “No” in backwards cursive in different places on their body so that Ashley could snuggle up to her answer, letting it legibly transfer onto her skin. They write it in each other’s notebooks and songbooks to discover who knows how long later. With each proposal, they affirm their love and devotion to their partner in their current identity. For they know more than anyone else how fluid one’s identity can be.

***

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands