Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-07-20Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: Doping, Stone Walls, and the Right-Wing PressThis week's shortlist moves from enhanced sport and the craft of stone-wall building to sibling therapy, Britain's right-wing press, and the politics of viewing Orientalist art.
Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-07-06Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: Faces, AI Art, and the Politics of the HumanitiesThis week’s shortlist picks five longform essays with staying power: a cultural history of the face, an on-the-ground test of AI art, a reported look at conservative civic centers, a bodily history of abortion, and a sharp essay on Margaret Busby’s literary inheritance.
Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-06-29Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: Repo Men, AI Boyfriends, and EsperantoThis week’s shortlist pairs reported systems stories with intimate essays: auto repossession and debt, grief science, AI companionship, Lebanon’s Shia communities under war, and the stubborn idealism of Esperanto.
Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-06-22Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: Greenland, the 747, and Italy’s UltrasThis week’s shortlist highlights five longform pieces with staying power: Ben Taub on Greenland and American pressure, Ian Bogost on the Boeing 747, John Drake on ecosystem language, Steven Shapin on Luis Alvarez and Big Science, and Tobias Jones on an Italian football ultra.
Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-06-15Five Pieces Worth Your Time This WeekThis week: Heidi Blake's massive New Yorker investigation into how Andrew Tate built a criminal trafficking enterprise and became a political force; Idrees Kahloon in The Atlantic on how Britain became as poor as Mississippi through sequential self-sabotage; Caity Weaver's hilarious and tender essay about garage sales and what Americans do with their excess; the Guardian's deep portrait of Claudia Sheinbaum, the world's most popular left-wing leader; and Jacob Mikanowski on the barely-explored deep sea, full of creatures with no names.
Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-06-08Five Pieces Worth Your Time This WeekThis week: Sam Knight's portrait of FIFA's Gianni Infantino remaking global football in his image (TNY), Zadie Smith's NYRB lecture on why art still matters even though it can't save us, Kevin Maurer's profile of Joe Picard — a 100-year-old D-Day veteran — in The Atlantic, Abraham Jiménez Enoa's first-person account of founding Cuba's first independent magazine and the surveillance that followed (Guardian Long Read), and a trip into northern Spain's sealed Palaeolithic caves with one of the few experts still allowed inside (Guardian Long Read).
Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-06-01Five Pieces Worth Your Time This WeekThis week: Peter Hessler's memoir of childhood abuse and silence (TNY), George Packer on the venture capitalist who colonized Washington's AI and crypto policy (The Atlantic), Sophie Elmhirst inside Jeffrey Epstein's personal assistant and what she knew (The Guardian), Stefan Collini's reckoning with the bonfire being lit under British universities (LRB), and Josh Levin on the Savannah Bananas reviving the most complicated franchise in baseball history (The Atlantic).
Longform Reading Weekly Pick2026-05-28Five Pieces Worth Your Time This WeekThis week's five: climate change and flesh-eating bacteria (The New Yorker), a 16-year forced-labor case in suburban Dallas (The New Yorker), the masculinist movement reshaping American conservatism (The Atlantic), Nikole Hannah-Jones on the collapse of the civil rights era (NYT Magazine), and how 'The Chosen' is remaking entertainment (The New Yorker).
