Hello, welcome back, and Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there!
This year's Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday. Poynter has a complete list of the awarded work; it's a stunning reminder of all the fantastic journalism still being produced, despite the many challenges facing newsrooms around the country.
One more exciting piece of news before we get to this week's stories: You can now buy Sunday Long Read merchandise. Help us spread the word and support The SLR with our debut collection of hats, shirts, mugs and more!
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By Sarah Fitzpatrick for The Atlantic
~10 minutes
Don Van Natta Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at ESPN, which he joined in 2012. Prior to that he worked for 16 years at The New York Times, based in Washington, London, Miami and NYC. A NYT bestselling author, he is now writing a book about Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones for Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. Don lives in Miami with his wife, the award-winning journalist Lizette Alvarez, and a black rescue lab named Bango. Don and Lizette have two daughters, Isabel and Sofia.
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By Ellen Barry for The New York Times
~15 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
Powerful personal essay meets fascinating science reporting in this exploration of what dementia takes from us.
> The New York Times: Her Self-Experiment with Drug Detox Almost Broke Her (Free for SLR Readers)
Jacob Feldman is a sports business reporter at Sportico, where he has covered tech and the modern fan experience since 2020. Prior to that he worked for Sports Illustrated, writing about the NFL and media. He lives in Brooklyn.
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By Anna Wiener for The New Yorker
~45 minutes
"Childhood has never been easy," Anna Wiener writes, "but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous." Wiener follows one girl—and her family—along that dramatic journey and comes away with an unforgettable profile.
> Western Edge: The Age of No Innocence
> The New Yorker: When Your Digital Life Vanishes [$]
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By Annalisa Quinn for The Boston Globe
~30 minutes
This story might be paywalled
A tear-jerking Mother's Day read on the families desperately hoping to rescue loved ones from the throes of addiction—if only they can be found.
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By Mina Tavakoli for n+1
~40 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
Join Mina Tavakoli for a joy-ride on the MSC Seashore, “a luxury megaship with the fuel economy of an oil-tanker fire and the handling of a Marriott,” to hang with a few members of the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators. Sinatra. Bezos. Ozzy. Orbison. Marilyn Monroe. Rodney Dangerfield. The gang’s all here, below deck and on stage, and oh boy, have they got problems.
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By Philip Connors for The Baffler
~15 minutes
The Baffler asked seven critics, poets, and journalists about the side-gigs (or full-time careers) they’ve taken on to make ends meet while writing. Read all of them, but start with Philip Connors’s report on falling in love with the countercultural trade of being a fire lookout.
> The New York Review: My Classroom Life
> AP: Disappearing before our eyes: One photographer's passion project of capturing local newsrooms
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By Jon Greenaway for Current Affairs
~10 minutes
Beginning with a gleeful take-down of that hair-trigger phony laugh, late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon gets wrecking-balled by Jon Greenaway in this delightful scorched-earth tour de force.
Fallon is “the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real. Here, in the sanitized, over-lit heart of the American culture industry, there is an inescapable horror... If the Gothic tradition of fear teaches us that the ruins of the past haunt the present, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon offers the inverse: a present so forcefully flattened, so aggressively ‘fun,’ that it has exorcised history entirely, leaving us trapped in a sterile, eternal loop of viral games and celebrity lip-syncing while the world slides into climate collapse and fascist politics.”
> The New York Times: After 43 Years, an Unproduced Larry David Script Surfaces Online (Free for SLR Readers)
> The New Yorker: How “The Fast and the Furious” Tells the Story of Hollywood [$]
> The New Yorker: Attention Must Be Paid [$]
> Vulture: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and the Feud of the Century [$]
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By Kenny Jacoby for USA Today
~30 minutes
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By Gabrielle Bruney for Places
~40 minutes
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By Eli Saslow for The New York Times
~20 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
Eli Saslow alert. Any other words we write would mean less time spent reading his latest.
> The Dispatch: Shades of Color in Philipsburg (Free for SLR Readers)
> Texas Monthly: How Texas Republicans Turned on George W. Bush (Email required)
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By Staff of Brooklyn Public Library
~45 minutes
To commemorate America’s upcoming 250th birthday, the staff of Brooklyn Public Library assembled a fantastic list of 250 indispensable books.
> The New Yorker: Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits? [$]
> The American Scholar: What He Stood For
> Sam Kriss: Reading is magic
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By Molly Olmstead for Slate
~25 minutes
Pity the much-maligned, misunderstood “penis grandma.” Renea Gamble, 62, just wanted to peacefully exercise her First Amendment rights clad in a 7-foot-tall flesh-colored inflatable penis costume at a No Kings rally in her hometown of Fairhope, Alabama. She didn’t expect to be tackled, cuffed and lectured by a police officer on a video that went viral and, now, all this.
> BBC: Clavicular Charged With Shooting at Alligator While Livestreaming [$]
> 404: Scientists Gave ‘Aggressive’ Fish Psychedelic Drugs. A Breakthrough Came Next
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By Sharon Terlep for The Wall Street Journal
~10 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
Maybe US automakers aren’t as myopic as we thought. It turns out Ford has been running a secret “skunk works” for years aiming to produce an affordable EV pickup truck—possibly as good as the Chinese models now taking over the world. Here’s the story of how the operation has been going down and how, by some time next year, the truck will be introduced. Can we get a minivan next?
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Making all our picks available to you for free is a top priority of ours. We’re currently able to routinely offer free links for several publications and are reaching out to additional publishers as well. In the meantime, we try to avoid highlighting more than a few pieces parked behind hard paywalls each week (those stories are marked with a [$] symbol). If you have additional thoughts on how we can improve your reading experience, we’re all ears.
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How You Can Support The SLR...
The Sunday Long Read exists to celebrate journalism worth reading. Our mission is to highlight the most educational, interesting, and downright entertaining writing available on the web and to help people find a bit more time in their lives for in-depth reporting.
If you believe in those goals, please consider supporting the team as an SLR Member. Your support allows us to share The SLR for free each week, fund rising writers, and fight clickbait culture. SLR Members also get:
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By Theo Baker for The Atlantic
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
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By Charles Bethea for The New Yorker
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By Mary Schlangenstein & David Leonard for Bloomberg Businessweek
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INT. Deck 7, Le Cabaret Rouge, 11:37 PM
Frank Sinatra, palming a can of Sprite in one hand and the fist of his beautiful redheaded wife in the other, sat in a dark corner across from Jeff Bezos, who looked like he was waiting for him to say something. But Sinatra said nothing. He’d been mostly quiet all evening, and now in this cabaret he seemed even more distant, staring out past fog and strobe and Bezos’s strong bald head and into the large room where at least half a dozen men had basically shattered a bistro table trying to get a better look at Marilyn Monroe. Sinatra’s wife knew, as did Roy Orbison and Austin Powers, who stood nearby, that it was only minutes before he was supposed to go onstage, and that forcing any sort of conversation on him in this mood of focus would be extremely stupid.
From Wish You Were Her by Mina Tavakoli for n+1
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“I’ve always been the only Claude in the room.”
—Claude Lynch, a Ph.D. researcher in transport planning at University College London
From It’s a Weird Time to Be Named Claude, by Madison Darbyshire for Bloomberg (Free for SLR Readers)
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By Mayeni Jones for BBC [$]
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By Pete Wells for The New York Times
~20 minutes
Non-paywalled link created for Sunday Long Read subscribers
When former New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells coughed up this fur-ball of a review in 2012, all eyes turned his way. The subject of his review, a new eatery captained by TV chef and restaurateur Guy Fieri, was a slow-moving target that would bleed profusely no matter who took aim at it. But Wells' invective, his sarcasm, his detailed demolition of Guy's American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square, all directed to Fieri by name, recalled the wicked brilliance of Ambrose Bierce, the man who really knew how to make words hurt. Have a taste:
Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?
And:
And when we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?
Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?
Most critics make you want to eat. In this go-round, Wells makes you want to barf.
Classic Bonus: Wells exited the Times restaurant critic post in 2024 after 12 years on the job, citing the high blood sugar, elevated cholesterol, hypertension, and obesity that often comes with too much food. His goodbye-to-all-that column, published at the time of his departure, expresses his devotion to food. Wells still writes on the subject for the paper.
Jack Shafer likes his eggs over hard with a splash of Hatch green chili salsa.
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SLR Members can access all 400+ of Jack's Classics picks via our members' archive.
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Our macho macho macho Secretary of War reposted one of many pastors suggesting households should have one vote, cast by the head of the household.
If there’s a man in the household, he’s the head of it.
So, along with denying our bodily autonomy, we’re going to be disenfranchised if these Very Big Penises get their way?
I don’t think so, fellas.
For a preview of coming attractions if you try, the Tony-winning Broadway musical SUFFS is on PBS’s Great Performances.
The show reminds us that women have been fighting throughout American history to be treated as full citizens.
Women were literally chattel property of their husbands. Yes, like slaves, who were chattel property. LEGALLY OWNED.
Men, as a group, have never been a significant, public voice for women’s personhood and freedom.
I say if men cared to stop their brethren from treating women so shamefully, they’d do something about it.
They’d organize, speak out, march, boycott, lobby, run on the platform of ending gender discrimination.
Hahahahahahahahahaha as if.
SUFFS is on the PBS app, this link, and YouTube’s PBS Great Performances.
I am a co-producer of this musical (my name flashes by on the crowded credits) and the national tour.
The musical doesn’t go into detail about all the illegal, violent, destructive things women did when they were denied.
SUFFice it to say if you come for our votes you will be shocked at what we are capable of doing to stop you.
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Ruth Ann Harnisch has been the publisher of The Sunday Long Read since 2023.
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FACE-OFF AT THE CAPITOL
As Tennessee’s Republican-led Legislature redrew its congressional map this past week, carving up the state’s lone majority-Black district, the news was dominated by protests, arrests and a mock Confederate flag burning, but it was the quiet stand-off photo of a Capitol Sergeant at Arms blocking Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) from entering a special session in a state office building in Nashville that demanded a double-take. Devoid of today’s color, the nose-to-nose May 6 photograph by Nicole Hester of The Tennessean could easily have been plucked from the iconic 1960s imagery of Bob Adelman and Gordon Parks, among other photographers who documented the American civil rights movement. Tennessee is among several states scrambling to take on mid-decade redistricting following a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that narrowed race protections in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Six decades later, by keeping her story focus amid the chaos, Hester captured a defining photograph of the seismic shift in election laws.
Patrick Farrell is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Breaking News Photography for The Miami Herald, where he worked from 1987 to 2019. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Management at the University of Miami School of Communication.
Jodi Mailander Farrell has worked as a Miami Herald reporter and editor, as well as an adjunct writing instructor in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.
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By Claudia Petrucci, translated by Anne Milano Appel
In this novel, two timelines unspool in opposite directions, one spiral turning clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. Irene, the novel’s protagonist, is a very successful real-estate agent selling extremely high-end properties. When an attorney from her home town of Milan invites her to be his agent for what he implies is an unusual but unsellable house, she's instantly drawn to the challenge.
And it is architecturally a remarkable house, she finds, but with a rather sad story attached to it that she later discovers—and that the reader learns about backwards. The house also initially comes with a squatter. Untangling all of this proves far more arduous than Irene is prepared for.
Claudia Petrucci very convincingly makes this a haunted house story, complete with the very atmospheric setting of oppressive fog in a climate-changed, dystopian near-future. Although she ties up the haunting fairly neatly, many readers will prefer to keep their own counsel about that.
A slowish start, an unnecessary subplot—but in all, a deliciously unsettling novel with an excellent, climactic twist. Well worth your time.
Jacqueline Nyathi has loved books for as long as she can remember, and writes about them for The Sunday Long Read, The Continent, Strange Horizons, and others. Check out her books newsletter, Harare Review of Books, here.
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Ways To Celebrate Mother’s Day, Ranked
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Take her to/make her breakfast, lunch, or dinner
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Phone call
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Flowers/candy/card
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E-card
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Wish her “Happy Mother’s Day!” on Facebook
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Sparaboom roams about the universe with cheap ballpoint pens and overpriced Moleskines.
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By Gemma Correll for The New Yorker
~5 minutes
Would you like to take a ride on the Emotional Roller Coaster? Or perhaps the Downward Spiral? Whatever you do, don’t miss the Control Freak Show during your visit to... Anxietyland!
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Enjoy the best longform journalism.
Every Sunday. Since 2014.
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Editor in memoriam: Lyra McKee 1990-2019
Header Image: Kate Bancroft, The Devil On My Shoulder. 2026, oil on canvas, 18 × 24".
You can read more about our staff, peruse past editions and contact us (we'd love to hear from you!) on our website: sundaylongread.com. Help pick next week's selections by forwarding us your favorite stories by email.
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