mastodon 4.7.3Sharing the best longform storytelling on the web since 2009. Tag your favorites with #longreads
"Maybe she’s not for you, even though she’s for everyone."
Revisit Alison Fishburn's 2021 collection of seven #longreads on singer-songwriter Dolly Parton: https://longreads.com/2021/01/19/happy-birthday-dolly-parton-reading-list/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
OI is a buzzy idea, and it has drawn a lot of media attention. But practically, it’s a long-term goal. For now, organoids remain what they have always been—glorified lab rats."
Claire L. Evans for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/organoids-lab-grown-brains-neural-networks
"Here in DC, I’m seeing evidence that though being a wayward, boundary-less maverick might sound good in theory, it often doesn’t work out well in real life." Jon Ronson for GQ https://www.gq.com/story/ufc-at-the-white-house?src=longreads #ufc #fighting #fights #mma #reporting #longreads
"Somehow, we’ve made the industrial equivalent of a Fabergé egg the linchpin of our civilization. What would happen if someone started breaking them?" Christopher Cox for The New York Times Magazine https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-electricity-outage.html?src=longreads #power #electricity #transformers #reporting #longreads
A new wave of feminism kicked off in the 1980s when Madonna, Grace Jones, Joan Jett, and Whitney Houston inspired legions of girls and women to pick up an instrument and learn to play music.
"The ladies of the ’80s showed me that girls could sing, play instruments, and make cool videos (and have fun doing so). They represented opportunities for women in music, roles that were something other than being David Lee Roth’s set dressing."
"Like the subway and public library, benches are places that people who have nowhere to go, go."
Gabrielle Bruney for Places Journal: https://placesjournal.org/article/the-disappearance-of-the-public-bench/
#Longreads #Bench #Urban #UrbanPlanning #UrbanDesign #Cities
"He heard cars coming up behind him. FBI agents stormed him, guns drawn; he counted around 20. 'What the fuck is this about?' he said. 'You’re here for sports cards?'" —David Kushner for Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-curcio-trading-fraud-scandal-psa-2026-8?src=longreads
In our new Longreads Questionnaire, Ravenous founder-owner Jaya Saxena tells us where she had the best kebab of her life, the longread on Algerian hazelnut spread that she can't stop thinking about, and the Eater story she's most proud of.
https://longreads.com/2026/08/20/questionnaire-jaya-saxena/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
#Longreads #Food #FoodWriting #Writers #Journalists #Interviews
"If you’re doing something complicated, you have to think about how the reader is taking it in. Is this clear to the reader? Is the reader going to want to read the next paragraph? Where is the momentum?"
—Rachel Hartigan in conversation with Brendan O'Meara for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
"Yarddogs are the very furry canaries in the coalmine; they’re the signals that rural life is changing, and likely they’ll be the first to go in the name of progress, which is arriving soon, sooner than you think."
Jordan P. Hickey for Southlands: https://southlandsmag.com/the-yarddogs-of-northwest-arkansas/
(Subscription required.)
#Longreads #Arkansas #Bentonville #Gentrification #Change #Growth #Walmart #Dogs
"If Sputnik and Gagarin proved Soviet superiority in the heavens, an ambitious drilling project into the bowels of the planet meant the Soviets could reign in the underworld, too."
Charles Digges for Nautilus: https://nautil.us/the-soviets-drilled-the-deepest-hole-ever-1283561
This week's Top 5:
* Punishing dissent (Mother Jones)
* Embracing uncertainty (New Yorker)
* Getting scammed (Toronto Life)
* Saving cattle (Harper's Magazine)
* Screening The Odyssey @vulture@mstdn.social
https://longreads.com/2026/08/21/top-5-622/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?"
Shayla Love for The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/gps-and-the-lost-art-of-getting-lost
#Longreads #Books #GPS #Navigation #Maps #Directions #Satellite
Our Top 5:
ㆍTriplets, unclaimed (New York)
ㆍDeath, unreported (Science/Retraction Watch)
ㆍDe-extinction, disputed (MIT Technology Review)
ㆍChildren, ferried (Fernando Pinho)
ㆍButterflies, tracked (The Atlantic)
#Longreads #Reading #Journalism #Nonfiction #Science #Medicine #Technology
"The wargames market was basically inaccessible to people that were part of the anti-war movement, unless it was couched in a way that wasn’t revisiting the atrocities that people were seeing on TV coming out of Vietnam." Jon Peterson with Angela Chen & Clara Collier for Asterisk https://asteriskmag.com/issues/14/shall-we-play-a-game?src=longreads #war #games #boardgames #rpg #longreads #history #conflict
"Being alone up on the trails late at night in the dark was not actually that scary, the artist says; the solitude was the point. The vibe was sort of the opposite of scary, in fact; the park had a 'borderline magic' aura."
Anna Holmes for L.A. Material: https://lamaterial.com/p/hiding-man-of-griffith-park-artist-signs
#Longreads #LosAngeles #GriffithPark #PublicArt #Art #Anonymous #GuerrillaArt
"My experience was only that dishonesty of some degree was needed to stay out of foster homes, feed myself, and obtain a few days’ grace on a bill." —Bertrand Cooper for The Baffler https://thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/the-profession-that-does-not-exist-symposium#forum-piece-ispyforgood
"Leave the bees mostly alone, and let them learn to solve the challenges of their volatile world. And they have." —Hannah Nordhaus for National Geographic
"We have been raised on films that end with cathartic tears and hugs, and promises never to hurt each other again. In real life, that’s not where most of my friends are with their mothers."
Rebecca Liu for The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/apr/28/asian-mothers-bad-feelings-tiger-mom-stereotype
#Longreads #Essay #Mothers #Chinese #Asian #Parents #Diaspora #Film #Literature #Books
"ChatGPT responded that the weapon was widely praised and 'could be a great choice for your needs.'" —Mark Follman for Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/media/2026/05/openai-chatgpt-mass-shooting-guardrails-fail/?src=longreads #investigation #journalism #safety #prevention #artificialintelligence #longreads
"Crooked cops, judges, and county employees accepted poached meat as gifts and arranged cover-ups. People in the valley who opposed poaching mostly stayed silent."
A look inside the new Atavist story, by Nick Davidson: https://longreads.com/2026/05/07/undercover-agent-wildlife-poaching/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
#Longreads #Nonfiction #Reading #Journalism #Poaching #Wildlife #Colorado #Undercover #TrueCrime
"These books have not passed through a human; they remain ignorant of culture and society." —Sally O'Reilly for Cabinet Magazine https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/70/oreilly2.php?src=longreads #literature #grayliterature #books #publishing #ai #artificialintelligence #longreads
"There are file traces everywhere, like so many ghosts in a vast bardo, which can sometimes be brought back to life." —Julian Lucas for The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/27/when-your-digital-life-vanishes?src=longreads #longreads #data #recovery #technology #memory #archives
"I was briefly stopped by a Tencent recruiter who — to his great disappointment — had misread the word 'media' on my badge as 'Meta.'" —Viola Zhou for Rest of World
https://restofworld.org/2026/chinese-ai-researchers-silicon-valley/?src=longreads #technology #innovation #ai #artificialintelligence #siliconvalley #longreads
"Between them, the bus has become something more than shelter, a way of living deliberately within borrowed time."
Joshua Jackson for RE:PUBLIC and The Guardian: https://www.republic.land/a-new-kind-of-van-life/
#Longreads #VanLife #Nomads #Desert #Arizona #Housing #BLM #PublicLands
This week's Top 5:
* Happy birthday, Sir David (The Ringer)
* The search for her son (The Boston Globe Magazine)
* A keyboard fantasy @nybooks
* A membership to midlife (Taste Cooking)
* The kids will slay (The New Yorker)
https://longreads.com/2026/05/08/top-5-609/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"I was certain secret doors existed in real life, and spent a lot of time looking for them." Today, Longreads has an excerpt from "Make Believe" by Mac Barnett, the US National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Don't miss it! https://longreads.com/2026/05/05/mac-barnett-childrens-books-make-believe/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social #literature #books #reading #libraries #essays #picturebooks #kids #adults #longreads
This week's Top 5:
- Bottles ashore, The New Yorker
- Benches awaiting, Places Journal
- Boundlessness disputed, Quanta Magazine
- Books aplenty, Cabinet
- Batons bought, The Baffler
https://longreads.com/2026/05/01/top-5-608/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"There are empty bottles everywhere—crammed onto shelves, catching the light on a windowsill. A bar cart overflows with bottles that Buffington has yet to open, or 'solve,' as he likes to say." —Lauren Collins for The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/signed-sealed-delivered
"In the back of the van, I learned other things, too, like who the Geto Boys were, what a 187 was, and that you could make a lot more money selling crack than working at McDonald’s. I also learned about my dad." —Joe Bond for the Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/04/29/all-my-dads-sons/?src=longreads #fathers #sons #family #kentucky #violence #longreads
"I hope that these stories make you feel less alone in the intermingling joy and grief that caregiving up and down the generational line elicits for so many of us."
#IntergenerationalCare #MultigenerationalCare #SandwichGeneration
"Matt John was right: This team *was* special. The Marshall Islands had never fielded a national soccer team."
Read "The Wayfinders" by Jordan P. Hickey⚽ https://longreads.com/2026/04/21/marshall-islands-soccer-team/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
River dolphins and trading cards and brain organoids, oh my! In this week's Top 5:
• Bad medicine | The New Yorker
• Imperfect sound forever | Bitter Southerner
• Know when to fold 'em | Business Insider
• Brainiacs | WIRED
• Call of the wild | Aeon
https://longreads.com/2026/08/28/top-5-623/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social #longreads #reading #curation #magazines #journalism
"As online content increasingly becomes abstracted from the original work, what purpose does making the full version even serve?"
Mia Sato for The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/report/920005/social-media-clipping-podcasts-clavicular-marketing-mrbeast
#Longreads #Internet #Tech #SocialMedia #Clipping #Algorithms #Viral
"I’m a huge believer in inventing your own rituals before writing. They can be as weird as you want them to be so that when you go into a writing situation or practice it feels cool." —Lidia Yuknavitch
https://longreads.com/2026/04/28/cnf-pod-lidia-yuknavitch/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"He describes it all with an almost breezy enthusiasm, as if discussing a new training block rather than a pharmacological overhaul." —Clara Molot on the Enhanced Games for Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/inside-the-enhanced-games?src=longreads #sports #enhancedgames #athletes #athletics #longreads
"Is the scene consistent with the physics of the real world? 'Shadows are amazing. Lighting is amazing. Geometry is amazing,' he says. '3D reconstruction is a huge part of what I do.'"
Kai Kupferschmidt for Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/deepfakes-are-everywhere-godfather-digital-forensics-fighting-back
#Longreads #AI #Deepfake #Fake #Image #Photography #Misinformation #War
“Should we steal all these Red Bulls? Just take the whole thing?” —Sam Rockwell to Kevin Dupzyk for Esquire https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a73335120/sam-rockwell-interview-2026/?src=longreads
"As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself."
From Wilbert L. Cooper's new memoir, THE BLACK SHIELD: https://longreads.com/2026/08/25/the-black-shield-wilbert-l-cooper/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"There seems to be a sort of tether between that moment—be it with my brother in the tall grass by the lake, or speaking my final words to him through the phone held to his ear—and the still undetermined moment of my own passing." —D.S. Waldman for Poetry https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1784128/the-number-you-have-dialed?src=longreads #loss #grief #poetry #longreads
"No matter how kind or well-intentioned you believe yourself to be, you’re still an American spending dollars."
Samuel Autman for Panorama: https://panoramajournal.org/issues/issue-18-belonging/belonging-terms-conditions/
"But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents."
Read our excerpt from Wilbert L. Cooper's new #memoir, THE BLACK SHIELD:
"Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business."
In our excerpt from THE BLACK SHIELD, Wilbert L. Cooper recounts how his mother Gayle joined the police force: https://longreads.com/2026/08/25/the-black-shield-wilbert-l-cooper/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
#Longreads #Reading #Books #Cleveland #Police #Memoir #Policing
"Finding his music again feels right because it’s a connection we sorely needed and nearly missed." —Bijan Stephen on Beverly Glenn-Copeland for The New York Review of Books https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/04/30/ever-new-beverly-glenn-copeland/?src=longreads
