A Life Without Eating 

“Inflammation from Crohn’s disease had connected the tissues of my small intestine and my bladder together via fistula, and I did not want to pee out a roast chicken.”

Eating is about more than just nutrition. Eating makes us human. Read Andrew Chapman’s powerful new essay on living without food here. 

This week, our editors recommend five stories on:

- Forcibly displacing the Maasai tribe in the name of “conservation.”

- The death of a beloved Alabama pastor.

- Studying Alaska’s little brown bats.

- A dispatch from a conference on artificial intelligence.

- Remembering Shaun of the Dead, 20 years later.

Visit Longreads to learn why our editors recommended these stories.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Oh hey, weekend, c'mon in! We've got some great reading for you in this week's edition:

• How Israel uses AI for assassination in the Gaza War • A father reflects on his son’s development • The rise of the term, “gaslighting” • Toni Morrison’s expansive rejection letters • The history of PostSecret

Learn why our editors recommend these reads and find out which piece our audience loved most. 

The latest Atavist Magazine issue, by Hallie Lieberman, is a true crime story about a mysterious figure who preyed on gay men in Atlanta. From the introduction: 

There were men who said they’d narrowly escaped the Handcuff Man, and rumors that some of his victims hadn’t survived. But there were also people who thought that he was nothing more than an urban legend. Jordan’s assault would bring the truth to light: Not only did the Handcuff Man exist, but there were people in Atlanta who knew his name, including members of the police force. He hadn’t been caught because, it seemed, no one was trying in earnest to catch him.

Read an excerpt of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on Longreads.

I Nearly Died Drowning. Here’s What it’s Like to Survive.

Maggie Slepian knew she shouldn’t have been on the water that day, but she wanted to keep up—she wanted to belong.

I knew then that I didn’t want my last few minutes to be full of sadness and regret. If I wasn’t going to survive this, I didn’t want my final thoughts to be berating myself for a bad choice.

It’s OK, I thought. You didn’t mean for this to happen. You are going to die and you should just be grateful for the time you had.

The heavy, black ache in my chest fully replaced the burn. I forced myself to keep my eyes open and watch the sunbeams like I’d seen a thousand times before, when I’d been underwater by choice and could come up for air when I wanted.

Read the full feature at Longreads. 

The Top 5 of the Week 

Happy weekend! In this week's #longreads Top 5:

-Heart-warming tales of missed connections—found again

-The Army veteran who ended a mass shooting

-Nine perspectives on the prescription drug, Adderall

-The keepers of the eider duck-A Moby Dick pilgrimage 

Read why our editors loved these stories here.

One Thing After Another: A Reading List for Lovers & Makers of Lists

We all make lists, if only to buy bread and milk. But we tend to forget how mythic and subversive (as we have just seen), joyful and maddening, enchanting and sobering, and utterly chilling lists can be—and what they can do. To love a list is to partake in letter and word, form and change. To make lists is to join a long line of list makers, to indulge in a timeless art, to break down the artificial wall that separates thinking and doing, thinkers and doers.

List lovers unite! Check out Kanya Kanchana’s new reading list, with five stories for those who love to make lists. 

Hello, weekend! In this week's Top 5:

* Squatters in a Beverly Hills mansion * The (d)evolution of a "genius" biographer * Finding food in Gaza  * Found suitcases of psychiatric patients  * An Oscars dispatch from the cheap seats

Visit Longreads to read why our editors recommended these stories.

“Despite endless warnings highlighting the dangers of the digital world, there is a growing acceptance that, in return for the speed and convenience of the internet, we must relinquish a little of our privacy. It’s a trade-off, trusting that the institutions we most rely on—banks, insurance companies, government agencies—will keep our personal details safe. Seldom, however, are we without a major hacking story.”

It's been 41 years since the movie "WarGames" introduced many to the concept of hacking. In our latest #longreads reading list, Chris Wheatley rounds up some sobering and fascinating pieces about cyberattacks (and those who undertake them). Read it here.

Here’s what’s in store for you in our Weekly Top 5: 

* The magic of Formula 1 racing. * Bonding with cruel humor. * A thoughtful portrait of Mexico’s mezcal industry. * AI: the good, bad, and downright creepy. * Swimming in the sea with Kate Winslet.

Learn why our editors recommend these pieces. 

“We pretend at certainty all of the time, even in the stumbling that life almost always is.”

In our latest feature, longtime Longreads author Devin Kelly returns with a new essay that explores overcoming shame and inertia to discover the beauty of learning something new. 

Read Stumbling Can Be Lovely at Longreads. 

In the latest issue of our sister publication, The Atavist Magazine, Jessica Camille Aguirre tells a tale of billion-dollar fraud and betrayal—and the two men behind the biggest carbon trading scam in history. 

Reporters dubbed Daphne the “prince of carbon,” but it wasn’t just his flamboyant charisma that elevated him to criminal royalty. So did the nature of his new fraud. Daphne was scamming the fight against climate change by exploiting a policy flaw that left billions for the taking.

Read chapter one of “Watch It Burn” at Longreads.

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

The Top 5 of the week has landed! This week our editors chose stories on:

-The underground beauty salons in Ukraine

-The fight for a wild butterfly population

-The quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama

-The culture of Criterion Collection

-The AI takeover in customer service

Read what made these stories stand out here. 

“The most important part of my job is to make the library a safe space. One where kids burst through the door and go running with glee to the children’s area so they can say hello to whoever is at the desk. One where a patron can have a full metal meltdown about the state of the world and still be given resources to find housing, a shower, a meal. One where someone can come in blasted high for years and then return the next day sober and clean, ensconcing themselves in the safety of the books to stay that way.”

Lisa Bubert’s Instagram bio reads "Public librarian who has seen some 💩," and her latest piece makes clear just how much “some” is. When so much of our society has seemingly turned its back on its neediest members, public libraries have never been more important. To read “Safety Net,” head to Longreads.

In a new Longreads essay, Arkansas writer Jordan P. Hickey writes about a Palestinian American chef who honors her family's roots and culinary traditions through her pop-up bakery and cooking classes

And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable. They’re celebrated not because they’re beautiful, but because it means the family ate well that day—because they made something out of nothing.

Read Jordan’s essay, “The Expanding Table: Honoring Palestinian Culinary Tradition in Arkansas,” on Longreads.

"Done well, there are few foods on this Earth more satisfying. Warm, rich, salty, and deeply filling in a way I’ve not encountered elsewhere, a good cholent is ambrosial. What I might call divine."

New on the site today: A lovely piece from Benjamin DuBow about a workaround that became a way of life. Read it here.

In this week’s Top 5 edition:

A discussion for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The next home of Bus 142.

A nuanced portrait of a ramen chef in Chicago.

Ireland in the age of digitization.

The past and future of robots.txt.

Learn why our Longreads editors picked these stories.