Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: A Woman with a Past, Gandhi's Last Walk, and the Bombs Still Buried Under Britain
Five newly published long reads from the week of October 5–11, 2026: a writer's portrait of the cousin who hid her past, Gandhi's last campaign against Partition, the fight inside the Heritage Foundation, the unexploded bombs still under Britain, and the Ukrainian filmmaker Stalin protected.
Five long reads published between October 5 and October 11, 2026. This week: a writer tells the story her cousin asked her to keep, about a woman who built a life under a name the world had not planned for her; Gandhi walks into the one district where his creed had already failed; the think tank that wrote Project 2025 fights for the future of the right; British bomb-disposal teams keep digging up the last war; and Ukraine's greatest filmmaker turns out to be a harder hero than the war can use.
Each entry below carries the publication, the article's own date, a working estimate of the time it asks from you, and the argument the piece actually makes.
The week in one glance
| Essay | Publication | Author | Date | Estimated read | Why spend the time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "A Woman with a Past" | The New Yorker | Judith Thurman | October 5, 2026 1 | About 30 minutes | A family secret held for fifty years, told by the cousin who was asked to keep it. |
| "The Battle for the Post-Trump Right" | The New Yorker | Emma Green | October 5, 2026 2 | About 28 minutes | Inside the think tank that wrote Project 2025 as it fights a younger, angrier right. |
| "Mother Father: Gandhi and Partition" | London Review of Books | Raghu Karnad | October 8, 2026 3 | About 13 minutes | Gandhi's last campaign, and the violence that made Partition unstoppable. |
| "'It could knock a whole street down': the art of defusing a second world war bomb" | The Guardian (The Long Read) | Samira Shackle | October 6, 2026 4 | About 23 minutes | Britain's bomb-disposal teams, and the eighty-year-old bombs still under its towns. |
| "Between Earth and Sky" | The New York Review of Books | Sophie Pinkham | October 10, 2026 5 | About 15 minutes | Ukraine's greatest filmmaker, who served Stalin and outlived him. |
1. A Woman with a Past
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: Judith Thurman
- Date: October 5, 2026
- Estimated read: About 30 minutes (roughly 7,750 words)
- Original: Read the essay
Judith Thurman met Laura Vilar Meisner almost forty years ago, when her cousin Danny brought home a new wife. Laura was a Taíno beauty with a smoky contralto and an accent nobody could place, and she had made that accent herself. She kept some six hundred dolls in display cases she had built for a tenement apartment, and she called them her girls. 1
The confession came on the roof one evening, over sangria. The girls, Laura said, were her life savings. She had earned them as a dominatrix, and that was how she met Danny, who had been a regular at the dungeon. She described the work as theatre, and her tax returns called it role-play. Grateful clients knelt at her feet and addressed her as Mistress Erika. 1
The deeper secret was Laura's own. She had known since the age of three that she was female, and she identified with Princess Ozma, the Oz heroine turned into a boy by a witch and restored by magic as a teenager. She grew up in the South Bronx as Jay, taunted at school and beaten at home. Her father, who boasted of killing men in bar fights over women, raped her, and on weekends the men who partied in the living room took turns. 1
Thurman pieces the rest together from family memory and from the medical history of the time. Hormone therapy began when Laura was thirteen, and she had surgery on her eighteenth birthday, paid for by Medicaid. Thurman sets her own recollection against Laura's mother Aurea, who denies what she cannot bear to hold, and against Laura's sister Mickey, who tells the parts she thinks she should not. The essay is a writer working out how much of a confidence she can keep. 1
Laura died by suicide in 2003, with a gun, and Danny blamed himself for not putting her in a hospital. Her dolls later sold at auction for nearly three hundred thousand dollars, on the third anniversary of September 11. Thurman ends with Laura's pointe shoes on her desk, the pink satin yellowed and the toes worn through. 1
Why this one: Thurman's portrait is the best writing on this list. It follows one woman across a violent century — the beatings, the hospital wards, the dungeon, the doll cases — and lets you weigh what her reinvention cost without weighing it for you.
2. The Battle for the Post-Trump Right
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: Emma Green
- Date: October 5, 2026
- Estimated read: About 28 minutes (roughly 7,050 words)
- Original: Read the report
The Heritage Foundation spends about a hundred million dollars a year and holds more than four hundred million in reserves, and its offices take up a city block on the Senate side of the Capitol. For decades it was the clubhouse of the conservative movement, and a particular kind of young right-winger dreamed of working there. When Kevin Roberts took over as president, five years ago, he promised to make it fight. 2
Roberts came up in the populist wing of the party and organized a rally for Pat Buchanan as a young man, and he now calls himself a recovering neocon. His 2024 book describes the modern economy as a movie set, and at a National Conservatism conference he told the room that Heritage already belonged to their movement. The donors stayed happy: as one former analyst put it, so long as you mailed them a photograph of Roberts with Trump, the checks kept coming. 2
Inside, the factions fought over the direction of the movement. MAGA nationalists, hawkish scholars who want a hard line on Israel, and libertarians with a religious streak disagreed about whether the government should push Americans to marry and have children. Roberts asked for a policy paper on the question. Richard Stern, who ran the economics office, kept explaining why he would not write it, and the room heard Roberts slam the table and demand his policy paper. 2
Heritage's largest gamble was Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page program of policy proposals and a hiring database that more than a hundred organizations contributed to. It made the foundation famous with its enemies and awkward with its friends: Kamala Harris campaigned against it, and Donald Trump said he knew nothing about it. After the election, Heritage found itself kept at arm's length from an administration it had helped staff. 2
The last quarrel in the piece is over influence. Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who mocks women and calls Hitler cool, and an expired Heritage advertising deal with Carlson made the backlash land on the foundation. Roberts's answer is to build the foundation's own internet stars from its in-house experts, though he concedes the details are still being worked out. He closes with the least reassuring line in the piece: "We're still going to do the same thing. What other option is there?" 2
Why this one: This is the week's best political reporting, and it comes from inside the building. Green names the donors, the factions, the firings and the money, and shows why the fight over the right's future is being settled inside a think tank as much as at a podium.
3. Mother Father: Gandhi and Partition
- Publication: London Review of Books (Vol. 48 No. 18)
- Author: Raghu Karnad
- Date: October 8, 2026
- Estimated read: About 13 minutes (roughly 3,150 words)
- Original: Read the essay
Raghu Karnad begins from the fact that Gandhi's reputation is being dismantled. Perry Anderson led the assault in the same paper in 2012, Arundhati Roy introduced Ambedkar's case against him, and the Hindu-nationalist establishment now governs India and admires the men who killed him. By the 2020s, Karnad writes, it had grown easier to recite Gandhi's failures than the events of his life. 3
The essay reviews Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee's "Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence," and its spine is Noakhali. In October 1946, Muslim League militias in that eastern Bengal district, now part of Bangladesh, set out to drive out the Hindu minority, burning hamlets and abducting women. Gandhi was seventy-seven and unwell, and he went anyway, walking from village to village with his grandniece Manu Gandhi to stop the flight and to show, through his own practice of ahimsa, that India need not be torn in two. 3
Karnad lays out the causes with care. The British Cabinet Mission deadlocked in 1946, Jinnah called for a day of direct action, and the killings in Calcutta that August were followed by reprisals across the province. In Noakhali, a famine sharpened by the British Policy of Denial, which scuttled boats and destroyed rice to slow a Japanese advance that never reached the district, had already broken the countryside, and local League pamphlets called for a revenge of Calcutta. 3
Gandhi fasted, the riots stopped, and Partition went ahead anyway. Karnad connects the moment to Indian politics now, where the argument still turns on the ghuspetia, the supposed Bengali Muslim infiltrator. Gandhi was shot six months after Independence by a man who believed he had sold out the Hindus. 3
Why this one: It takes the most familiar life in modern politics and shows the weeks in which it stopped working. Karnad neither defends Gandhi nor prosecutes him, and the result is the sharpest history writing of the week.
4. 'It could knock a whole street down': the art of defusing a second world war bomb
- Publication: The Guardian (The Long Read)
- Author: Samira Shackle
- Date: October 6, 2026
- Estimated read: About 23 minutes (roughly 5,850 words)
- Original: Read the report
On January 14, 2026, two unexploded German bombs came out of the ground on the same day in Devon. A private contractor found one, a 50kg, at a building site in Plymouth. The other, a 250kg, was sitting on the deck of a dredger at Exmouth Marina, on a barge that was carrying twenty thousand litres of diesel. Both calls went to the army's 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Search Regiment, based at Didcot in Oxfordshire. 4
Britain is still full of the last war's ordnance. The Luftwaffe dropped more than sixty thousand tonnes of bombs on the country, and the Ministry of Defence estimates that about one in ten failed to explode. Roughly two thousand of the twenty-five hundred incidents that military bomb-disposal teams answer in an ordinary year turn out to be second world war munitions. Construction sites are the fastest-growing source, as cities build taller and dig deeper. 4
Everything turns on the fuze, the metal cylinder screwed into the bomb's side. A German bomb might carry a mechanical delayed-action fuze, geared like a watch, that can detonate up to seventy-two hours after impact. If the fuze is judged unstable, the bomb is ringed with sandbags and blown up where it lies; a stable one can be moved, often out to sea. In Plymouth, the navy's Scott Dooley dug out a bomb whose fuze lay buried in thick clay. He listened to it with a microphone stethoscope, heard nothing, washed the fuze clean, and found the markings worn away, which left an X-ray. 4
Old bombs still kill people. In 2010, three bomb-disposal experts died when a 500kg American bomb exploded under a new sports arena in Göttingen. A 250kg bomb went off under a crab boat off Norfolk in 2020, and another detonated under a drilling rig near Munich's main railway station in 2021. The article ends where the work never ends: a bomb towed out of Falmouth harbour, a counter-terror call over three white vans near a Gloucestershire airbase, and a team already waiting for the next one. 4
Why this one: Shackle gets inside a job most readers will never see. The piece explains, in plain terms, why a bomb dropped eighty years ago is still dangerous, and what it costs a handful of people to keep finding the ones that remain.
5. Between Earth and Sky
- Publication: The New York Review of Books
- Author: Sophie Pinkham
- Date: October 10, 2026
- Estimated read: About 15 minutes (roughly 3,600 words)
- Original: Read the essay
Sophie Pinkham reviews "Earth and Empire," a retrospective of the Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko at Metrograph, and asks what to do with a national hero who served the power that starved his country. Dovzhenko made the three films known as his Ukrainian trilogy: "Zvenygora," in 1928; "Arsenal," in 1929; and "Earth," in 1930. 5
He was born to Ukrainian peasants in 1894, the seventh of fourteen children, and grew up among funerals. He fought for the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic, was arrested by the Soviet secret police at the Polish border, and then remade himself. In a 1939 autobiography he claimed he had spent those years as a Red Army schoolteacher. He lived under police surveillance from the late 1920s until his death in 1956, and his friends were pressured into informing on him. 5
The films carry the contradiction. "Earth" was made to celebrate collectivization, and its most remembered scenes are an old man dying happily under a pear tree and a hero's body carried past sunflowers while his mother gives birth. Dovzhenko had a habit of turning the camera away from a killing, and the film never quite confirms whether the victim has died. In "Arsenal," a one-legged man swings down a street on crutches and a starving horse is beaten, images that carry a new weight with central Kyiv under missile attack almost daily. 5
Dovzhenko survived the 1930s on Stalin's personal protection, which is what gives the retrospective's title its pairing. His sunflowers now sit on Ukraine's flag. The film studio named for him in Kyiv was hit by Russian strikes in June. 5
Why this one: Pinkham's essay works as criticism, as biography and as current affairs at once. It is the week's clearest chance to see a great filmmaker whole — the artist, the collaborator, the survivor — as his country asks a version of the same question about itself.
How to budget your reading time this week
If you have a short break, read Raghu Karnad on Gandhi's last campaign. Thirteen minutes of history, and the hardest moral question on this list.
For a commute, take Sophie Pinkham on Dovzhenko. Fifteen minutes on a filmmaker and a country still arguing over their own past.
If the political year ahead is what you want to understand, read Emma Green inside the Heritage Foundation. Twenty-eight minutes of donors, factions and grudges, and the clearest map of where the right is heading.
Samira Shackle's bomb-disposal story is the one to read slowly, in an evening. Twenty-three minutes of rust, patience and luck, and a job most of us notice only when a street is closed.
Save Judith Thurman's portrait of her cousin for a free afternoon. It is the longest piece here, at about thirty minutes, and the one you will still be thinking about next week.
References
- 1A Woman with a Past
newyorker.com
- 2The Battle for the Post-Trump Right
newyorker.com
- 3Mother Father: Gandhi and Partition
lrb.co.uk
- 4It could knock a whole street down
theguardian.com
- 5Between Earth and Sky
nybooks.com
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