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The hunt and the hunt saboteur have a long history in the UK, one that continued even after the ban on fox hunting in 2004. With the ban riddled with loopholes, saboteurs have remained necessary to help protect British foxes. They are a dedicated and eclectic bunch, now embracing new technology such as drones to catch hunters who push the limits of the law.

What links ranches in Montana and the Brazilian Amazon? The ultra-rich—who extract monumental wealth from one landscape and then store and protect it in another. In this tale of ecological hypocrisy, Joseph Bullington explores the radically different standards imposed on two ecosystems. One is being lost, the other we can never enter. The ultimate case of “Not In My Back Yard.” Outside the car windows, fields of barren red earth unfurled for miles beneath the glare of the Amazonian sun.

Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today. There is a dangerous place behind barbed wire and guns, the site of some ancient cataclysm, where the normal laws of spacetime no longer hold. This is the Zone. At its heart lies the Room, said to grant the deepest desires of all who enter.

It is hard to imagine watching a video of your loved one falling to their death—but the fall of David Moudy‑Miller’s son, alpinist Balin Miller, was captured on a TikTok livestream and now lives online forever. Moudy‑Miller recounts watching the clip for the first time and trying to reclaim his son after thousands of strangers had already seen it and passed judgment. His grief is raw and spiralling, and this essay captures the messy, looping nature of a mind trapped in trauma.

In recent years, fantasy books have started to turn our image of delightful, beautiful winged mini-humans into something much darker and more sexual. But “fae,” as these books often refer to them, first appeared in sinister tales, only becoming more child-friendly in the Victorian era. Neil Armstrong traces how the fairy tale has come full circle in this fascinating history piece. There are echoes of this type of folk tale in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in the mid-1590s.

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Matthew Shaer addresses a growing movement amongst young adults to free themselves from the shackles of the smartphone. Shaer highlights the harm these devices can cause—but also does not shy away from just how hard it can be to quit them. Will we ever escape the addiction of doomscrolling? Perhaps the younger generation can lead the way.

Stephen Wood | The Atavist Magazine | March 2026 | 2,518 words (9 minutes) This is an excerpt from issue no. 173, “The Buffalo Raiders.” Paul was the favorite of Betty Good’s ten children. His next-eldest brother, Jim, still remembers his christening in 1947 as a momentous occasion, given that Paul was his maternal grandparents’ fiftieth grandchild. Consider yourself advised, right off the bat, that this is a story about Catholics.

I first found R. O. Kwon via Twitter in March 2021. Anti-Asian hate and violence had been rising across the country, and I’d stumbled on one of her essays in Vanity Fair: a letter to Asian women, written days after a shooter went into two spas and a massage parlor in Atlanta and murdered eight people, six of whom were Asian women. “It all hurts,” she wrote.

Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today. Elena Megalos | Longreads | April 2, 2026 | 2,523 words (10 minutes) Approaching the American Museum of Natural History without my children felt like a betrayal. At best, a lie by omission.