#longreads

[longreads]

The Cousin Returns

On coming home to the Philippines.

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Joseph Trinidad’s new essay collection, Lucky Creatures, published by @sarabandebooks. In “The Cousin Returns,” Trinidad, a Filipino writer based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington, recounts a visit home to the Philippines:

The last time I was in Cabuyao, there weren’t townhouses, private swimming pools, or major shopping malls in the area. It was long stretches of grassland. There wasn’t the fluorescent glow of fast-food chains every three minutes. There weren’t as many potholes. In the name of progress, much of the town, like everywhere in its vicinity, is dragged through time.

A blip, a turn, and suddenly, I’m in a present I no longer recognize. Exhausted, my mind retreats toward sleep.

I can never truly return.

Visit Longreads to read “The Cousin Returns.”

Photo credit: Dennis Eir Lim

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What If It All Came Out?

We’re each attached to years of texts, searches, and photos, an archive of self-incrimination and humiliation that could detonate at any tim

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Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning

How one woman tried to unmask college sports fans who trolled her six-year-old daughter because of a photo with Iowa State basketball star A

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/magazine/trump-epstein-files-white-house-vance-doj.html

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To loved ones, murder victim Zackery 'Turdle' Melton was far more than just 'unhoused'

Turdle was the 16th unhoused person to be shot and killed in Los Angeles last year, an investigation by LAist and The LA Local has found.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/theater/punch-broadway-restorative-justice.html

Nine days after a local 19-year-old spoiling for a fight aimed his fist at James, she and David made the excruciating decision to have him taken off life support. Jacob Dunne, the young man who killed him, served just 14 months for manslaughter. The brevity of his sentence, which they unsuccessfully appealed, still nettles them. So it is utterly counterintuitive that Scourfield and Hodgkinson are now on warm, collaborative terms with Dunne, and that he has often credited them with saving his own life — by asking, after he got out of prison, what he planned to do with it, and genuinely caring what he answered.

[longreads]

‘It's More Like a Playlist’: Lavinia Spalding on Editing the Best Women's Travel Writing

The editor of The Best Women's Travel Writing series on curation, grief and levity, and the stories she hopes to read more of in the future.

Author Lavinia Spalding has edited The Best Women's Travel Writing series seven times, so she's learned a thing or two about strong travel narratives and writing about place. “I see how stories suffer when a writer attempts to fit the play-by-play of an entire experience into a few thousand words,” she says. "I remind myself that it’s almost always more effective to focus on just one illuminating slice of an experience and bring that to life on the page, excavating it for the inner story and zooming in close, so I can move beyond shallow observations.  Spalding takes us behind the scenes of volume 13, published this week by Travelers’ Tales. She considered more than 1,600 submissions for this edition and ultimately curated 27 stories—a collection of essays written by best-selling authors Susan Orlean and Roxane Gay, as well as emerging writers who have never been published.

Visit Longreads to read our conversation with Lavinia Spalding on curation, grief and levity, and the travel stories she hopes to read more of in the future.

[longreads]

Friction: A Reading List on Why Inconvenience Can Be Meaningful

We prize convenience and efficiency, almost to a fault. Sometimes, though, we're missing out on surprise, serendipity, and anticipation when we avoid friction. Courtney E. Martin brings us five reads that examine the pros and cons of life's little hurdles.

Without getting too nostalgic about it, these readings will make you revisit the forgotten, sometimes wonderful feelings that go with friction. We don’t have to throw away our cell phones to bring spontaneity back into our lives. We can be intentional and collective. In fact, we must be intentional and collective; it’s the only way to live expansive lives connected by slow and messy delight. And that is an aim far more worthy of our finite time than productivity, no matter what the false gods of Silicon Valley and late-stage capitalism say.