The Best of Longreads

Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet.

The muscle that never stops, until the very end. Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?

Alicia Lutes contemplates her family’s history of addiction, her mother’s failing liver, and the effect it’s all had on her generation.

Amber Leventry recalls how getting sober forced them to confront and reveal important truths about their identity.

Can diet determine the future of your mental health? Claire Fitzsimmons attempts to find out through a month of Whole30.

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…

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…

An exclusive excerpt from the new memoir by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee.

Katy Hershberger recalls the way her decade at Christian summer camp both shaped and condemned her views of faith and girlhood.

Elisabet Velasquez reckons with a lifetime of disharmony with her religious, mentally ill mother.

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.

Smartphones have altered the texture of everyday life, digesting many longstanding spaces and rituals, and transforming others beyond recognition.

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.

After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Anna Gazmarian grapples with her evangelical upbringing, and finds solace in screamo music.

“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…

Thailand is a top destination for gender confirmation surgery. Its success is a symptom of Western failure.

Tales of odd phenomena stoke our imagination even as they tease us.

Married off at age 12, Isabella put up with her husband’s shenanigans over decades. Eventually, the She-Wolf of France had had enough.

Stories about spiritual teachers who lose their way.

“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.”

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.