Longreads features

Failure To Lawn

On what a dying patch of turfgrass can teach us about water scarcity, ecological repair, and the lies we tell ourselves about success.

The Secret Door

“When we read, we make believe. We arenโ€™t duped or ensorcelled. Deep down we decide. We make ourselves believe.”

Was It Worth It?

“I didnโ€™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?”

The Wayfinders

The Marshall Islandsโ€™ first national soccer team discovers what โ€œhomeโ€ can meanโ€”on a field in Arkansas.

The Memory Maker

OpenAI’s Sora allowed you to deepfake yourself. Users started to remember things that never happened.

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Recent editors’ picks

Iโ€™m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code?

Chris Colin | Wired | May 18, 2026 | 2,327 words

“Apparently anyone can vibe code anything these days. So Claude and I tried to make a database for tracking the petty grievances of the masses.”

Are We There Yet?

James Wade | Texas Highways | May 1, 2026 | 3,479 words

“A family trips and stumbles across 3,000 miles of Texas.”

The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

Jill Lepore | The New Yorker | May 18, 2026 | 3,589 words

โ€œBefore ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a centuryโ€™s worth of schemes for automating authorship.โ€

Traversing the Mahjong Multiverse

Nicole Wong | Coyote | May 18, 2026 | 2,578 words

“As mahjong grows in popularity, can the diverging fanbases come together?”

Roadside Attraction

Zoe Kurland | The Offing | May 8, 2026 | 4,423 words

“The desert has a changeling effect, transforming lights into magic, desert into space, visitors into lovers, me into something apart from what I actually am.”

Whither the Nerd-Bully?

Ben Tarnoff | The New York Review of Books | May 7, 2026 | 4,428 words

“Bill Gates was the monopolistic father figure who Silicon Valleyโ€™s young founders rebelled againstโ€”and, in so rebelling, became.”

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Weekly Top 5

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Stories from Mina Tavakoli, Lindsey Adler, Joshua Jackson, Ben Tarnoff, Paloma Karr, and Jon Greenaway.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Recommending notable reads by Lauren Collins, Gabrielle Bruney, Gregory Barber, Sally Oโ€™Reilly, and Jeffrey Arlo Brown.

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Learn to Love Your Search Results Again.

Introducing the Longreads Story Recommender.

The Longreads questionnaire

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Excerpts from The Atavist Magazine, our sister publication

Open Season

“Coloradoโ€™s San Luis Valley was a wildlife poacherโ€™s paradise. Then an undercover federal agent arrived.”

The Good Catholics of Buffalo

With thousands of US soldiers dying in Vietnam, a righteous group of young New Yorkers embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees.

The Dark and Stormy Tale of a ShantyTok Band

When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamoredโ€”until they learned that the bandโ€™s leader ruled with an iron fist.

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Longreads reading lists

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