Predator or Prey
“I still want to feel each meal, each touch, each body I absorb into mine.”
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How to Run 314 Miles After a Traumatic Brain Injury
After a horrific accident, doctors told Todd Barcelona that he’d likely never race again. So he and his wife decided to run farther than they ever had before.
Creation of Woman: Evangelical and Transgender in the Bible Belt
How a spouse’s confession freed a young couple from gender expectations in the Deep South.
Finding Worth Among the Echoes
Faded music dreams, a fledgling family farm, and a search for new definitions of work and success.
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
Weekly Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re recommending stories by Andrew R. Chow; Jonathan Blake; Maurice Tamman, Laura Gottesdiener, and Stephen Eisenhammer; Drew Anderson; and Ben Buckland.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring stories from Ryan Hockensmith, John Woodrow Cox, Ryan Nourai, Mary H.K. Choi, and Ferris Jabr.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week we’re recommending stories by Moira Donegan, Danyel Smith, Dan Kois, Michael Aylwin, and Becky Ferreira.
Essays and Features
Open to the Outlandish: A Conversation with Rebecca Renner
On getting that first draft down, the importance of a strong editor, and how a story evolves from pitch to publication.Â
The Shapes of Silence
On coming out and how secrets protect and harm us.
A Vigilante Murder in Grand Marais
How a shocking crime divided a small Minnesota town.
Fuel, Medicine, Pleasure
What could it mean to give yourself the food you need to keep going? No punishing, no guilt, no withholding. Just nourishment.
‘I’m Not Sure What I’m Doing Here’
When only you can find the way home.
Three Strings: Past, Present, and Future
Finding beauty, human connection, and one’s heritage in the resonant sounds of the dulcimer.
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Reading Lists
Bad Blood (Longreads’ Version): A Musical Feuds Reading List
Whether competition between artists or strife within a band, popular music features some of pop culture’s messiest rivalries.
Wild Talk: A Reading List On Artificial Intelligence and Interspecies Communication
AI is opening up the possibility of communicating with other animals. But will we listen? And can we ever truly understand?
Untold Fortunes: A Reading List on the Creative Uses of the Tarot
Five stories that explore cultural and literary references to the tarot.
Knife Insurance: An Extreme Surgery Reading List
Never before have so many people sought medical intervention to address their insecurities—and never before has that intervention gone to such lengths.
Girls Will Be Girls: A Reading List on Consumerism in the Internet AgeÂ
Are the scores of girl personas on TikTok just a marketing campaign? Let’s do the (girl) math.
Sliding into the Future: A Reading List on Snowsports
Pointless elitism, or an urgent dress rehearsal for the climate crisis?
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