Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: The Book Business Is Booming, the Chip the World Runs On, and a Friendship Traded for a Scoop
Five long reads published October 19–25, 2026: the bookselling boom behind the reading panic, the chip supply chain that decides what the AI economy can do, Bob Woodward on the friend he spent for a scoop, Lebanon's disappeared Jews as an item in a negotiation, and the week Oxford Street loses its cars.
Five long reads published between October 19 and October 25, 2026.
Two of the week's largest pieces are about things that had been written off. Barnes & Noble was the corpse of American bookselling, and it now runs more than a thousand stores across two countries. The microchip was a commodity nobody thought twice about, and it now props up the stock market and limits what a government can do. Around them: Bob Woodward on the friend he spent for a front-page series, a Beirut scholar on why Lebanon's murdered Jews became an item in a negotiation, and a walk down Oxford Street in the week its cars disappear.
The week in one glance
| Essay | Publication | Author | Date | Estimated read | Why spend the time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The New Age of Reading | The New Yorker | Nathan Heller | October 19, 2026 1 | About 41 minutes | The numbers behind the reading panic, and the man who decides what is on the table in six hundred American bookshops. |
| Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made | The New Yorker | Gideon Lewis-Kraus | October 19, 2026 2 | About 38 minutes | The physical object underneath the AI economy, described from inside the factories that make it. |
| The Danger of Getting Too Close to a Source | The New Yorker | Bob Woodward | October 19, 2026 3 | About 27 minutes | Woodward turning his own method over, and finding a friendship he broke and never repaired. |
| 'Natives of the Country' | The New York Review of Books | Joelle M. Abi-Rached | October 22, 2026 4 | About 19 minutes | A forgotten history that is currently being traded across a negotiating table. |
| Everyone hates Oxford Street. Will pedestrianisation save it? | The Guardian (The Long Read) | Dan Hancox | October 22, 2026 5 | About 18 minutes | A city discovering what a shopping street is for once shopping stops being the reason to go. |
1. The New Age of Reading
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: Nathan Heller
- Date: October 19, 2026
- Estimated read: About 41 minutes (10,348 words)
- Original: Read the profile
James Daunt reaches the Barnes & Noble in Eatontown, New Jersey, on the Friday before Labor Day and finds a construction crane over the roof. His store sits in a strip mall that Kushner Companies is rebuilding into housing and shops. Daunt takes a picture with a small Lumix and says few retailers could expect shoppers to visit a building site. 1
He is sixty-three and runs both Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, the largest chains in the United States and Britain, along with more than a thousand stores, nearly twenty thousand employees and four billion dollars in annual sales. He also founded Daunt Books in London. A publisher at a major American imprint tells Heller that Daunt controls more than twenty per cent of the market, and is "respected—and feared." 1
The reform he brought to Barnes & Noble in 2019 was to give control back to the shops. Each store selects and arranges its own stock as an independent would, with covers turned outward. He ended co-op, the practice by which publishers paid for placement. At Waterstones, returns fell from twenty-five per cent of stock to four, and a forty-three-million-pound loss in 2011 became an eighteen-million-pound profit by 2017. 1
The essay's larger argument is that the reading panic is a genre, and a reliable one. Heller collects the evidence against the panic. Print sales in America are up nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago, and the number of independent bookstores has risen seventy per cent since 2020. 1
The test scores usually cited for decline hold still when set beside their own history. Thirty-five per cent of American high-school seniors read at a proficient level, against thirty-seven per cent a decade earlier and forty per cent in 1992. Nine-year-olds did better in 2025 than in 1971. 1
Some of the fall in print readers is a change of format. Pew found eight percentage points fewer adults read a print book in 2025 than in 2011, while e-book readers and audiobook listeners each rose by close to double that share. 1
Heller lets the strongest case against his subject stand. In 2019, Waterstones staff campaigned to raise entry-level pay to nine pounds an hour, gathering ninety-three hundred signatures and the support of twenty-four hundred writers, Sally Rooney among them. Daunt offered a four per cent bonus and refused the base increase. "Pay is a zero-sum game," he says, and calls the priority a career ladder instead. 1
Publishers have their own complaint. To keep returns low, Daunt's shops order tiny initial quantities, which can strand a book before word of mouth reaches it. 1
What the stores sell has changed too, and Heller takes the change seriously. Rebecca Yarros's story collection "Threshing Day" sold nearly nine hundred thousand copies in its first week, beating a new John Grisham novel to the top of the best-seller lists for the first time in four decades. 1
Daunt's own explanation is that bookshops manufacture readers. "Books aren't a fixed market," he says. "The more bookshops there are, the more people will read." The shop he says he is proudest of stands in Lowestoft, a town that has lost its fishing industry, where nobody is opening a bookshop now. 1
Why this one: Anyone who reads for a living has been told this year that reading is finished. Heller takes the claim apart with the data his readers keep hearing distorted, then refuses to make his subject a hero: the pay fight and the tiny orders stay in. Forty-one minutes buys you the state of the business and an argument about taste that will outlast the quarter.
2. Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: Gideon Lewis-Kraus
- Date: October 19, 2026
- Estimated read: About 38 minutes (9,580 words)
- Original: Read the report
Lewis-Kraus opens with a provocation and spends nine thousand words earning it. The great collective works of human history include Machu Picchu and the Great Wall; the modern contribution is the semiconductor supply chain. 2
Investors give him the comparison that anchors the piece. Brinton Johns of N.Z.S. Capital rates complexity: "rockets are maybe a five or a six." His partner Jon Bathgate finishes the thought: "Semiconductors are an eleven." 2
The stakes reach the economy first. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world, and last year its stock alone accounted for about fifteen cents of every dollar the S&P 500 returned. Cars carry around two thousand chips each. 2
They reach politics next. Most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, and Bloomberg Economics estimates that a single year of war over the island would cost the world economy 10.6 trillion dollars, roughly a tenth of global output. Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel chief, tells Lewis-Kraus that a three-week interruption there would hurt more than the Great Depression. 2
The history is where the piece becomes a story. Bell Labs built the transistor; the problem then was wiring millions of them by hand, which the industry called the tyranny of numbers. Jack Kilby in Dallas and Robert Noyce in California solved it separately in 1958 by carving a circuit out of one block of material. 2
Gordon Moore noticed in 1964 that transistor counts doubled each year and predicted sixty-five thousand by 1975. The actual figure was 65,536. 2
Lewis-Kraus then takes the reader inside the Taiwanese company that makes almost all advanced chips. Morris Chang proposed a foundry that would build other firms' designs, and Gordon Moore told him, "Morris, you've had a lot of good ideas in your time. This isn't one of them." Nvidia, nearly bankrupt in the nineties, got its start there; every iPhone since 2014 has run on TSMC silicon. One in forty-six babies born in Taiwan has a parent at the company. 2
The reporting inside the factories is the reason to read this version of a much-covered subject. He enters a fab in a purple clean-room suit reserved for visitors, and watches a shift handover where a polishing tool's idle time has fallen from 209 seconds to 121. A vice-president compares matching chips for advanced packaging to running the world's largest dating site. 2
The American attempt to build the same thing at home is where the argument turns practical. Congress put fifty billion dollars into the CHIPS Act, and TSMC's Arizona fab took about four years, against eighteen months for the first phase of a new plant in Taiwan. Phoenix had no clean-room laundry, so the suits travelled back and forth across the desert. 2
The reason is that a chip is not made in any one country. It can cross borders more than seventy times. The polysilicon is purified to eleven nines by a handful of firms; the crucibles come from the purest quartz, mined from one deposit in North Carolina. 2
He ends on Henry Adams and Stonehenge. Adams, in 1904, thought the doubling of power each decade amounted to a law. An archaeologist then explains that the stones were moved by gathering people, distributing ropes and hauling together. 2
Why this one: Chips get written about as a policy fight, with export controls on one side and stock prices on the other. This piece explains the object: why light is at the centre of it, why replacing one Dutch firm and one Taiwanese firm would take a decade, and why moving a plant is different from moving an ecology. The last pages argue for globalisation in plain terms.
3. The Danger of Getting Too Close to a Source
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: Bob Woodward
- Date: October 19, 2026
- Estimated read: About 27 minutes (6,718 words)
- Original: Read the essay
Every phone call began the same way for two decades: "Woodward, Darman." Richard Darman was what Woodward calls a hide-in-plain-sight source. Everyone knew the two men were friends; what was suspected was that Darman, budget director under George H. W. Bush and staff secretary under Reagan, was a pipe into the White House. 3
They met in 1973, both thirty, when Darman was an aide to Elliot Richardson during the Saturday Night Massacre. Woodward was covering Watergate for the Washington Post. They had long weekend lunches at the Madison Hotel, and Darman explained how government actually ran. 3
Darman taught him where power sat on paper. "A key to understanding what goes on in any White House is the staff secretary," he said, then arranged to be appointed to the job, because that official sees everything sent to the President. 3
What Darman wanted in exchange becomes the essay's quiet subject. As James Baker's protégé he acted as a hatchet man, feeding reporters precise accounts of Alexander Haig's behaviour until Haig resigned in 1982, and turning the same fire on Ed Meese and William Casey. Woodward knew he was being used sometimes. The information was accurate anyway. 3
The material Darman supplied was extraordinary. After Reagan was shot in 1981, it was Darman who eventually told Woodward that the FBI had taken possession of the President's nuclear-code card, prompting a fight with the military aide carrying the war plans. Woodward published the story without naming him. 3
The break has a date. In September, 1992, Woodward told Darman he would publish a four-part series on Bush's economic policy before the election. Darman answered that the trouble was a conflict between their friendship and Woodward's obligation. The series ran above the fold from October 4 to 7. 3
The reaction told both men what they had built. The Wall Street Journal called the series "transparently Dick Darman's attempt to set the tone of all future histories" of Bush's economic policy. "How did I turn out to be the lucky man so you can prove, 'I can attack friends'?" Darman asked him. 3
Four years later Darman sent an inscribed copy of his book, thanking Woodward and his wife for years of friendship. Inside, he described the affair without naming the reporter: "A longtime reporter-friend violated both a specific promise and a basic trust." Woodward notes that he could have been named and was spared. 3
The ending is the part that stays. In December, 2007, Woodward visited Darman in intensive care, sedated and dying, and apologised for the years of silence. Darman died the next month. "I never sought to repair the friendship," Woodward writes. "I have never felt so stupid." 3
He also turns the same judgment on an earlier failure, when, as an editor, he let Janet Cooke's fabricated story win a Pulitzer. If he had tried to save the child first, he writes, the fraud would have been found. It was, he says, a moral failing. 3
Why this one: Source relationships are the part of journalism readers never get to see, and the man most associated with the technique has finally described one from the inside, with his own notes quoted against him. It is also the week's best piece of writing about friendship: two people who liked each other, a trade they both understood and neither could stop.
4. 'Natives of the Country'
- Publication: The New York Review of Books
- Author: Joelle M. Abi-Rached
- Date: October 22, 2026
- Estimated read: About 19 minutes (4,799 words)
- Original: Read the essay
On March 29, 1985, Elie Hallak, a fifty-eight-year-old physician and vice president of Lebanon's Jewish Communal Council, was taken from his home in West Beirut. His kidnappers belonged to a Shiite network calling itself the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth. 4
Hallak was held with the journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann and the sociologist Michel Seurat. Offered his own release, he refused to go without the others, and in February, 1986, the group announced it had executed him as an Israeli spy. At least eleven Lebanese Jews were abducted in the mid-eighties; ten are believed dead, and the remains of at least six have never been recovered. 4
Their fate sat in the archives for four decades. It returned this year through a war. After Israel and Hezbollah fought again from March, the United States sponsored talks that produced a framework agreement on June 26, and by early September Israel had released five civilian detainees. 4
The releases came with a condition that reads like a sentence from another century. The State Department described the arrangement plainly: "Israel is releasing detainees and Lebanon is helping Israel recover the lost remains of Lebanese Jews." 4
The historical sections are the ones to read slowly, because they establish what the negotiation is overriding. A Jewish traveller in 1824 found some fifteen merchant families in Beirut, "natives of the country" who spoke Arabic and kept a small synagogue. By 1856 a visitor counted about five hundred Sephardi Jews. 4
Lebanon recognised Judaism when it became independent in 1943, and it was the only Arab country whose Jewish population grew after 1948, reaching about nine thousand by 1951. Jewish soldiers served in the Lebanese army that year. The community's president, Joseph Attie, put the position in 1952, as the historian Kirsten Schulze records it: their first loyalty was to Lebanon. 4
The unravelling came after 1967 and accelerated through the civil war. A bomb went off at a Talmud Torah school in the seventies; the 1982 Israeli invasion made Jewishness itself dangerous, and the synagogue was hit by Israeli shelling. By 1980, only two or three hundred Jews remained in the country. 4
Abi-Rached's argument arrives from two directions at once, and it is worth following closely. The militants who seized these men treated their Jewishness as proof of allegiance to Israel. Israel now treats the same Jewishness as grounds for a claim of its own over their graves, and a spokesman explains the reasoning: Israel's responsibility to Jews "does not end at Israel's borders, nor does it end with death." 4
She is careful about Lebanon's own record too, and the essay is stronger for it. Parliament passed an amnesty in 1991 that pardoned most wartime crimes, and families of the disappeared have waited decades for an accounting. The National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared was created in 2018. 4
Why this one: This is the week's piece of recovered history, and it lands in the present. Nineteen minutes gives you a community that lived in Beirut for centuries, the war that ended it, and the strange bargain by which its dead are now being counted as another country's missing. It is also the least sentimental writing you will read about belonging this year.
5. Everyone hates Oxford Street. Will pedestrianisation save it?
- Publication: The Guardian (The Long Read)
- Author: Dan Hancox
- Date: October 22, 2026
- Estimated read: About 18 minutes (4,406 words)
- Original: Read the long read
On Monday, October 26, half of Oxford Street closes to cars, buses, taxis, bicycles and scooters. The pedestrianised stretch runs 0.6 miles from near Oxford Circus to Selfridges, and the trial will last until spring 2027. 5
The street still fills, and Hancox keeps the numbers close. It receives more than 500,000 visitors a day, about the population of Edinburgh, and generates five per cent of London's economic output. In 2014 it had the highest concentration of nitrogen dioxide of any street measured in the world. 5
It is also in decline. Vacancy ran at 4.5 per cent in 2019 and 16.9 per cent by early 2023, with counterfeiters and apparently tax-exempt American candy shops filling the gaps. Sadiq Khan called the situation managed decline in 2024. 5
The design section is where the piece earns its length. The public-realm architects East went into the archives and came out with a 1932 essay in Good Housekeeping, in which Virginia Woolf watched Oxford Street as a river washing through a pebbly bed. That image became the brief: light on surfaces, places to sit, room to stand still. 5
The bollards get three paragraphs, and they are worth them. Oxford Street's must stand exactly 1.2 metres apart for hostile vehicle mitigation, and be made of ductile iron because it springs back rather than cracking. The architect objects to apologetic street furniture on the grounds that a misaligned reflective strip tells pedestrians the thing has no business being there. 5
Why it took fifty years is a story of who decides. In 1971, pedestrians were being pushed into traffic and hurt, and a protest calling for a car ban ended with twenty-two arrests; the first daytime ban on private cars followed in 1972. 5
The Danish planner Jan Gehl recommended full pedestrianisation in a 2004 report for Ken Livingstone's City Hall, then saw it confined to a document that was never published. London mayors have limited power, Hancox notes; what changed this time was moving the planning authority to a body the mayor created. 5
The opposition gets its own case. Westminster council blocked an earlier version in 2018 after a local campaign, and Khan said eight million pounds had been wasted. Taxi drivers and disability groups argue the street will become a transport desert, while Soho and Mayfair residents expect rerouted traffic in their own streets. 5
The likeliest failure is duller than crime. Hancox asks whether Oxford Street will become an open-air mall, or a stretch that empties after closing time, and points to Barcelona's La Rambla, which tourists took over while residents left. The Barcelona city hall is watching the London experiment. 5
Why this one: Urbanism writing usually argues from principle. This piece argues from lamp posts, benches, a bench sensor that counts how long people sit, and the fact that nobody looks up on Oxford Street because they would be run over. Read it this week and you can watch the thing it describes beginning.
How to spend the week
With a lunch break, take Dan Hancox on Oxford Street. Eighteen minutes, and the street you have walked through a hundred times becomes a design problem with a deadline.
On a commute, take Joelle Abi-Rached. Nineteen minutes, and a history you will not find in the news coverage of the same negotiations.
For an evening, take Bob Woodward. Twenty-seven minutes, and the only piece here where the writer is the defendant.
If you have a longer evening, take Gideon Lewis-Kraus on chips. Thirty-eight minutes inside the clean rooms, and the clearest explanation you will get of why the AI boom rests on two companies and one island.
Save Nathan Heller for a free afternoon. Forty-one minutes, the best writing of the week, and the piece you will quote at somebody who tells you nobody reads any more.
Three publications that belong on this list are thin this week. The New York Times Magazine's article pages are metered, so nothing there could be read and summarized. Harper's dates its essays to the month rather than to the day, which puts the November issue outside a seven-day window. The Atlantic's November features went up between September 30 and October 5, before the period this list covers, and the pieces it published inside the window are short. What remains is five essays from three publications.
References
- 1The New Age of Reading\
newyorker.com
- 2
- 3The Danger of Getting Too Close to a Source\
newyorker.com
- 4'Natives of the Country'\
nybooks.com
- 5
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