HELLO and welcome to the 340th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can know more about Costco! This “column” is less queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.

The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

First, some housekeeping!

It has been a full calendar year since I last published a Things I Read That I Love — for a while I was thinking I’d make it a newsletter, but time has been an incredibly scarce resource lately, now more than ever, so I wasn’t sure if I could make that commitment. But in the meantime I have been reading and loving things a lot, and I’m gonna see what happens if I try to fill our Saturday morning schedule slot with TIRTL for as long as I am able. Furthermore:

1. An interesting development since the early days of TIRTL is that these days, the majority of sites publishing great longform have paywalls. I obviously subscribe to a lot of these publications regardless, but many I merely access via Apple News, which also costs money. Articles with a “*” before them are articles with hard paywalls — if you want to read these pieces, you’ll need a subscription to the publication itself or to apple news. I did not indicate soft paywalls (where you’re able to read a set number of pieces for free before paying).

2. Within reason, this column has always been more or less agnostic when it comes to sources — I’ll share an interesting article even if I have deeply held ethical opposition to the publication itself for other reasons. The list of publications I’m currently mad at gets longer and longer every month lately, so it bears mentioning explicitly that my inclusion of a piece is never an endorsement of its publisher. I think good work deserves to be read, no matter where it is published, and I don’t believe in punishing one employee or freelancer for choices made by leadership that they had nothing to do with, and in this day and age of increasingly consolidated media, only the most privileged amongst us can afford to only write or work for ethically sound companies, and most media companies are ethically compromised on some level. I want to share stories that entertain, challenge or interest me — even if they were published in a location that frustrates me more often than it entertains or challenges, in general. But also, my inclusion of a piece is never an endorsement of all the ideas expressed within the piece, either — only an endorsement that the ideas expressed within it are interesting to read and think about.

You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Be a Reenactor
caity weaver // the atlantic // october 2025

Caity Weaver once again having a sub-cultural experience I find intriguing and writing about it perfectly and hilariously. A real gem of a piece! (They have finally killed the penny, did you hear? Great news for Caity.)

The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It?
emi nietfeld // wired // september 2025

Oh my f*cking God I cannot believe this woman!!! This extremely entitled tech venture capitalist Cindy Bi enlisted a surrogate to have her child and when the surrogate had a miscarriage, Bi blamed her and then unleashed holy hell upon her, including draconian legal measures and my lord my lord. My jaw dropped off my face reading this.

How America Got Its Baby Back, Baby Back, Baby Back
dan kois // slate // august 2025

Everybody is feeling God in this Chili’s tonight because apparently, post-COVID, “Chili’s has transformed from a ’90s relic to the hottest restaurant chain in the country,” turning its fate around with stunning success while other chains in the space struggle to escape bankruptcy. I had no idea! We used to really love going to Chili’s happy hour after a lunch shift at the Olive Garden.

House Arab
ismail ibrahim // bidoun // october 2025

He was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and it made his parents proud and it paid his bills and for two years, that was fine. But then his job became “verifying how many people died in Palestine and the ways in which they died, calling people on the phone to ask how, precisely, their relative had been killed.” And there is only so much of that one man can take.

The Billionaire, the Psychedelics and the Best-Selling Memoir
katherine rosman and elisabeth egan // the new york times // october 2025

Amy Griffin found immediate success with her bestselling debut memoir, “The Tell,” which was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, Drew Barrymore, Gweneth Paltrow and myriad other celebrities and billionaires who travel in the same circles as Griffin, one of the wealthiest women in the country. The story rests on traumatic memories of sexual assault she recovered under the influence of MDMA, but the way the author has positioned herself and her heroism around the telling story raises a lot of questions, and has prompted a great deal of unease.

The Doom Spenders
courtney shea // macleans // october 2025

The concept of the “Lipstick Effect” began in 2001, when Estée Lauder noted lipstick sales spiking after 9/11, a behavior that reflected not the consumer confidence that typically accompanies spending but the “dread and panic” that could also do so. For many Zoomers, the dread and panic is nonstop. Thus we come to what this piece describes as “the YOLO Economy — live now, pay later.” When the future seems uncertain, hard work rarely pays off, college is expensive and “keeping up with the Jonses” has become something you can conceptualize and envy from your handheld device — a lot of debt is racking up.

An Optimistic Quest In Apocalyptic Times
nylah iqbal muhammad // the bitter southerner // october 2025

The writer, a Black Muslim woman, wants to return to the land — to hunting and growing things, to reclaim the land for her family and sovereignty, to adopt ancestral recipes and practices. Because, after all, “American capitalism coerced a people — for whom freedom was always the only goal — to believe that wealth lay in urban and suburban houses and not in land, that we should plant our future in concrete and not in rich soil.”

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
peter coviello // literary hub // november 2025

“…what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage.”

Can the Golden Age of Costco Last?
molly fischer // the new yorker // october 2025

On the history of Costco, that beloved company, and what feels at risk now that the founder — and his ability and commitment to a generous environment for employees — has had to turn the company over to new leadership.

The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read
by father_karine // substack // november 2025

“I firmly believe we will look back on the “the filler and facelift era” with all the ignominy of the dust bowl farmers who, hypnotized by the prospect of UNLIMITED WHEAT, over-plowed hundreds of miles of protective native grasslands until their children’s lungs became so blackened with dirt that they could do nothing but impotently weep while their offspring suffocated in their sleep.”

*MrBeast on His Quest To Turn YouTube Fame Into an Entertainment Empire
lucas shaw // bloomberg businessweek // september 2025

Another one for the “this seems to be a dominant force in mainstream culture and yet this man has never, not once, entered my own life in any way, or been mentioned by anyone around me, aside from that time he tried to dunk on Caleb Heron. But wow this man is rich. (You can bypass the paywall here which I typically would never recommend because everybody should pay for journalism but also it’s Bloomberg Businessweek, so like…)

(feature image by ClassicStock/Getty Images)

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