"Their family members vanished near Mass. Ave. They won’t stop searching."
Longreads
• Seyward Darby
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• Longreads
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This edition highlights reading about messages in bottles, public benches, infinity, a series of books about everything, and pay-to-play orchestras.
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
"Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond."
Longreads
• Carolyn Wells
We Bought an Orchestra
"The rise of pay-to-play in classical music."
Longreads
• Seyward Darby
Their Ancestor Was an Enslaved Potter. They Are Battling to Recover His Legacy.
"The descendants of David Drake learned who he was 10 years ago. They see his jars as his artistic and spiritual inheritance—and their own."
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Asian Mothers, Bad Feelings: Notes on An All-conquering Stereotype
"A certain image of the tiger mom— strict, cold and demanding—is ubiquitous in popular culture. Why?"
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
Up In Smoke
"I woke up one day to the realization that I had written ten good pages of a book that was due in five months."
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
Shall We Play a Game?
"Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement."
Longreads
• Adam Dalva
Was It Worth It?
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
The First Tomato to Know Everything
"On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books."
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
A Night’s Sleep
“An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit.”
Longreads
• Longreads
Finding the Magic in Writing with Lidia Yuknavitch
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
"What happens when someone throws a message into the sea?"
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
When Your Digital Life Vanishes
"A broken phone or corrupted drive can mean the loss of work, evidence, art, or the last traces of the dead. But sometimes data-recovery experts can summon lost files from the void."
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The Disappearance of the Public Bench
"Benches are microcosms of an expansive debate about who belongs in urban public spaces. When they are removed or made uninviting, we lose more than just a place to rest."
Longreads
• Longreads
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Deaths in donation bins, the Hardy boys, MAGA slop, billionaire playgrounds, and nostalgia for the complicated.
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
The Hardy Men
"Why is a right-wing press reissuing century-old adolescent mystery novels?"
Longreads
• Seyward Darby
Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld
"DHS's regime of images."
Longreads
• Carolyn Wells
My Absolutely Chaotic Adventures at Sea During the Summer of 1984
"When we were offered jobs as deckhands, we jumped at the chance, naïve to the risks of the open sea."
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.)
"The new wave of Silicon Valley–backed gene-editing startups is straight out of 'Brave New World.'"
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine
"Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more."
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
How to Begin
"Jane O'Sullivan on first lines in fiction."
Longreads
• Longreads
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Vauhini Vara
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The Great Ozempic Experiment
"It's a new era of D.I.Y. medicine. Now the health establishment needs to catch up."
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat
"For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters."
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
How to Crash
"I thought of the pinkish, folded gel which in its mysteries congeal all my memories and dreams, and how it had been thrust from a moving vehicle onto an English road with nothing to protect it but the back of my skull."
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The Wayfinders
Longreads
• Seyward Darby
The Warehouse, in Plain Sight
"That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture—of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents. It’s a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly."
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
Our Longing for Inconvenience
"The modern world has made us ill-equipped for the nuisances of past technologies, even as it has fuelled nostalgia for things that might transport us back to calmer times."
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
She Knows a Place
"For seven decades, the gospel singer Mavis Staples has troubled the opposition between chorus and soloist, background and lead."