The Best of Longreads
20+ most popular Longreads articles, as voted by our community.
Sharing and publishing the best longform stories since 2009. An @automattic publication and the sister site of @Atavist. @longreads@mastodon.world
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The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews
Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet.
The Heart Wing
The muscle that never stops, until the very end. Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
Longreads on Addiction
Breaking the Family Silence on Alcoholism
Alicia Lutes contemplates her family’s history of addiction, her mother’s failing liver, and the effect it’s all had on her generation.
When Running Toward Yourself Looks Like Running Away
Amber Leventry recalls how getting sober forced them to confront and reveal important truths about their identity.
Longreads on Food
Eating To Save My Mind
Can diet determine the future of your mental health? Claire Fitzsimmons attempts to find out through a month of Whole30.
Life in the Slow Lane
Olivia Potts| Longreads | November, 2022 | 16 minutes (4,649 words) It’s six in the morning, and Robert Booth has already been on the road for three hours. Sitting alongside him in the cab of his…
Longreads on Justice
The Final Five Percent
If traumatic brain injuries can impact the parts of the brain responsible for personality, judgment, and impulse control, maybe injury should be a mitigating factor in criminal trials — but o…
Longreads on Memory
What It’s Like to Lose Your Short-Term Memory : Longreads
An exclusive excerpt from the new memoir by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee.
Longreads on Religion
Losing My Religion at Christian Camp
Katy Hershberger recalls the way her decade at Christian summer camp both shaped and condemned her views of faith and girlhood.
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive
Elisabet Velasquez reckons with a lifetime of disharmony with her religious, mentally ill mother.
Longreads on Self Control
My Body Is Not a Temple
All the good habits and self-optimization in the world don’t give you real control over your body. Back away from the bread starter.
Longreads on Sociology
A Sociology of the Smartphone
Smartphones have altered the texture of everyday life, digesting many longstanding spaces and rituals, and transforming others beyond recognition.
Longreads on Solarpunk
At the Very Least We Know the End of the World Will Have a Bright Side
Solarpunk, a new genre of science fiction, demands radical optimism of its writers and readers. It takes the apocalypse as given, but doesn’t assume the worst of people living through it.
Longreads on Spirituality
The (Loud) Soundtrack to My Struggle with Faith
After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Anna Gazmarian grapples with her evangelical upbringing, and finds solace in screamo music.
Mountains, Transcending
“Ever since I was five years old,” wrote opera singer–turned–Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the…
Longreads on Transgender
Finding a Path in a Broken System
Thailand is a top destination for gender confirmation surgery. Its success is a symptom of Western failure.
Popular
These are some all-time favorites with Refind users.
Stranger Things: A Reading List of Unsolved Mysteries
Tales of odd phenomena stoke our imagination even as they tease us.
Queens of Infamy: Isabella of France
Married off at age 12, Isabella put up with her husband’s shenanigans over decades. Eventually, the She-Wolf of France had had enough.
The Excesses of Compassion: A Reading List on Fallen Gurus
Stories about spiritual teachers who lose their way.
The Cabin on the Mountain
“Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Other times, the solution requires retooling your perspective.”
“I Had to Face the Blues Every Day”
Soul and gospel singer Candi Staton let no hardship stand in the way of her voice, one that helped define the music of her generation.
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