The Hardy Men
Last year a conservative publisher released two box sets of the Hardy Boys mystery novels, touting them as restored to their original form and marketed as the ideal introduction for young readers. The "restored" editions retain the series' historic racial stereotypes, gender biases, and other problematic elements that modern editions have edited out. Reviewer Daniel Lefferts notes that the publisher’s framing taps into a far‑right fantasy of white, masculine heroes defending a static, homogenous community. The move underscores the cultural tug‑of‑war over children’s literature and the politics of nostalgia.
Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.)
A cluster of Silicon Valley billionaires—including Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Vitalik Buterin—are financing embryo‑editing startups that aim to prevent disease and, for some, create children capable of outthinking advanced AI. The firms, such as Nucleus, are leveraging CRISPR...
How to Begin
Jane O’Sullivan’s essay in The Sydney Review of Books critiques the dominant writing‑advice mantra that a story must hook readers instantly. By dissecting opening lines from authors like Robbie Arnott and Laila Lalami, she links this obsession to a broader...
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Vauhini Vara
Vauhini Vara, the award‑winning author of *Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age*, sat for Longreads' questionnaire, revealing how she first experimented with GPT‑3 for her 2021 essay “Ghosts” and later used ChatGPT to critique sections of her new book. The...
The Great Ozempic Experiment
GLP‑1 medications such as Ozempic and Zepbound have moved beyond weight‑loss to treat a spectrum of conditions, from traumatic brain injury to long Covid and addiction. An interactive New York Times report highlights that roughly one in eight Americans have tried these...
Our Longing for Inconvenience
In a New Yorker essay, poet Hanif Abdurraqib argues that relentless digital convenience erodes the richness of experiences that arise from friction. He highlights how on‑demand streaming, instant shopping, and dating apps compress moments that once required patience and effort....
She Knows a Place
Sophie Abramowitz’s essay dissects Mavis Staples’ vocal artistry, showing how she dissolves the line between lead singer and choir across tracks like her a‑cappella "Stand By Me" and the duet "You Are Not Alone" with Jeff Tweedy. The piece roots...
How Our Grandmothers Made Us and Saved Us
Angela Pelster’s Orion essay argues that grandmothers were pivotal to human evolution, citing the discovery of a 9,000‑year‑old female hunter in Peru whose tools were mistakenly credited to men. She blends archaeology, science and personal narrative to reveal a forgotten...
The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt
Craig Fehrman, while researching a Lewis and Clark book, was mauled by a dog, an event that shattered the academic distance between his life and his subjects. The trauma prompted him to abandon a purely factual recounting in favor of...
What It’s Like to Go Through Perimenopause and Menopause in Prison
The U.S. female prison population has surged 600% since 1980, bringing a growing cohort of women into perimenopause and menopause. Incarcerated women face chronic medical neglect, often forced to self‑diagnose and manage symptoms without proper care. Texas prisons, for example,...
Fortress Yellowstone
The piece "Fortress Yellowstone" exposes how the ultra‑rich profit from Amazonian soy and corn farms that decimate native forest, then funnel that wealth into buying vast Montana ranches marketed as private preserves. While the Brazilian plains become barren deserts feeding...
Who Is Black Comedy For?
Geoff Bennett’s new book *Black Out Loud* charts Black comedy from vaudeville to 1990s sitcoms, framing its evolution as a steady march toward mainstream acceptance. In a counter‑review for *The Atlantic*, Kam Collins argues that Bennett’s equation of progress with...
Curiosity Is No Solo Act
In their new adaptation of *Curious Minds: The Power of Connection*, Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett trace how curiosity has been portrayed from harmless gossip‑seeker to biblical transgressor. The authors argue that the archetype of the curious individual has...
I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America
Writer Caity Weaver embarks on a quest to crown the best free restaurant bread in America, spotlighting extravagant offerings like Joël Robuchon’s $725.32 complimentary loaf in Las Vegas, the oversized, hand‑thrown rolls at Lambert’s in Foley, Alabama, and the ever‑popular Red Lobster...
Holding Pattern: A Reading List on Waiting . . .
Longreads curates a thematic reading list titled “Holding Pattern: A Reading List on Waiting,” gathering essays that explore waiting from psychology, architecture, politics, humanitarian, and medical perspectives. Highlights include Jason Farman’s queuing psychology guide, Belle Boggs’s architectural pattern for waiting...