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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.

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• 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."

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• Carolyn Wells

We Bought an Orchestra

"The rise of pay-to-play in classical music."

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• 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."

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• 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?"

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• 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."

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• Brendan Fitzgerald

Shall We Play a Game?

"Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement."

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• Adam Dalva

Was It Worth It?

A grid of iPhones sits atop a checkered tablecloth. Each phone shows a different image of red meat.
"I didn’t think about those nachos even once. I had never experienced anything like it. Is this, I asked my friends, how it feels to be normal?"

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• Brendan Fitzgerald

The First Tomato to Know Everything

"On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books."

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• Peter Rubin

A Night’s Sleep

“An insomniac’s lifelong pursuit.”

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• Longreads

Finding the Magic in Writing with Lidia Yuknavitch

graphic of star wand with quote that reads: "I’m a huge believer in inventing your own rituals before writing." Attribution line reads "Lidia Yuknavitch" and bottom line of graphic reads "Episode 523 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast"
On shitty first, second, and third drafts; embracing the struggle to write; and more.

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• Krista Stevens

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

"What happens when someone throws a message into the sea?"

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• 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."

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• 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."

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• 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 Valid
• Peter Rubin

The Hardy Men

"Why is a right-wing press reissuing century-old adolescent mystery novels?"

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• Seyward Darby

Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld​

"DHS's regime of images."

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• 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."

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• 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.'"

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• 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."

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• Cheri Lucas Rowlands

How to Begin

"Jane O'Sullivan on first lines in fiction."

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• Longreads

The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Vauhini Vara

two-panel collage: left panel is a portrait of author Vauhini Vara. Right panel reads "The Longreads Questionnaire, Vauhini Vara"
The author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age and The Immortal King Rao on memorable meals and books about whales.

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• 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."

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• 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."

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• 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."

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• Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The Wayfinders

diagram of soccer field with orange curving lines showing movement. ocean background.
The Marshall Islands’ first national soccer team discovers what “home” can mean—on a field in Arkansas.

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• 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."

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• 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."

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• 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."

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• Carolyn Wells

A Day with England’s Hunt Saboteurs

"Armed with drones, balaclavas and vegan sausage rolls."