In this week's Top 5:
-The governor fighting to kill
-A contaminated building site
-The honesty of Bella Ramsey
-The real Texas-Mexico border
-Gambling for show
https://longreads.com/2025/03/28/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-556/
"Dry-erase ink is not similar to tattoo ink, but it is almost identical to ink from a permanent marker. And if you leave it on a surface for long enough, especially a porous surface, it will remain. The brain is a porous surface. Memory is a porous surface."
A new essay by Aaron Rabinowitz: https://longreads.com/2025/03/27/tattoos-signs-history-antisemitism/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social
"In many ways, Ramsey is an archetype of their generation: empathetic, prone to abstemiousness." —Zing Tsjeng for British Vogue
"Over 25 years on death row, Chris Duncan has relied on and benefited from the system Landry and his cohort are set to destroy."
Piper French for Bolts and Mother Jones: https://longreads.com/2025/03/26/the-human-cost-of-jeff-landrys-drive-to-resume-executions/
"One can’t help but see a panorama of an unraveling country: the downwardly mobile white and Black working classes, the military, the guns, the drugs, the hoarded wealth."
Ben Mauk for The New York Review of Books: https://longreads.com/2025/03/25/a-nation-deranged/
"In the vast, misunderstood region that straddles, in Texas, 1,254 miles from El Paso to the Gulf, creatives are taking control of their own stories."
Ryan Cantú for Texas Observer: https://longreads.com/2025/03/25/the-texas-border-is-the-new-frontier-of-film/
"Disgust is a gut reaction, but it’s also highly sensitive to our beliefs about the food in question." —Alexandra Plakias for Aeon
"Charging people in prison to communicate with the outside world has long been good business."
Katya Schwenk for The Lever: https://longreads.com/2025/03/21/the-succession-battle-for-a-prison-empire/
Here's what we've got for you in our Weekly Top 5:
* Long COVID camaraderie (Men's Health)
* Breeding terrorists on Telegram @ProPublica / Frontline
* 737 Max coverup (Wired)
* Petrusich profiles Dacus (The New Yorker)
* The Irish pub as export (Smithsonian Magazine)
Learn why our editors have recommended these pieces and find out which story our audience loved most.
"The loss of this self was nothing to be mourned; I was glad to have arrived on the other side. But I was too freshly molted, my shell soft and nerve endings still tingling."
Sabrina Imbler for Orion: https://longreads.com/2025/03/20/key-changes/
"The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe." —Liza Weisstuch for The Smithsonian Magazine
https://longreads.com/2025/03/19/how-the-irish-pub-became-one-of-the-emerald-isles-greatest-exports/
"As time went on, he continued to gravitate toward the idea that 'you’re your own doctor.' Long COVID put this into even sharper perspective for him."
Erika Hayasaki for Men's Health: https://longreads.com/2025/03/19/the-doctor-the-biohacker-and-the-quest-to-treat-their-long-covid/
"In our special brotherhood of that summer of ’72 in London, the absence of words – in Arabic, in Persian, in distant English – did not require our names."
Salar Abdoh for Coda Story and Stranger's Guide: https://longreads.com/2025/03/18/on-brotherhood-and-blindness/
"Who among us hasn’t felt how the moment, manner, place, or company in which we walk dramatically affects our emotions and engagement with the world?"
https://longreads.com/2025/03/18/suspended-falling-a-reading-list-on-walking/
"The surviving tiles and fireplaces are (largely) all that’s left of those homes and of some of Altadena’s most historic architecture."
Marah Eakin for Dwell: https://longreads.com/2025/03/17/the-grassroots-race-to-save-altadenas-historic-batchelder-tiles-before-the-bulldozers-move-in/
"I love this notion: that in vast seas and the absence of cues, the space between whales became the point of focus."
In this excerpt from her new essay collection, Christina Rivera explores nature, the flowing relationships between things, and the missing language we need amid a time of change: https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/language-words-climate-crisis/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"Look in any direction along the political spectrum and sperm are in danger, or endangering someone else." —Rosecrans Baldwin for GQ
https://longreads.com/2025/03/14/are-men-in-a-spermpocalypse/
"During that last tortuous summer at West Chapple, he found her one day standing in the rain in just a light summer dress repeating the words, 'We should die here. We were born on the farm and we should die here.'"
"Both groups were surprised that they had so much in common. The condemned women were astonished that the nuns had chosen to live a life nearly as confined as their own, in rooms that they, too, called 'cells.'"
Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker: https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/the-nuns-trying-to-save-the-women-on-texass-death-row
When the world shifts, so must our words.
In an excerpt of her new book MY OCEANS: ESSAYS OF WATER, WHALES, AND WOMEN, Christina Rivera explores the sea of language, nature, intelligence, and the power of naming the ineffable.
(Publisher: Northwestern University Press)
