HELLO and welcome to the 342nd 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 longterm stewing! 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.
I feel like the world is really especially bleak right now, maybe the bleakest its been in my lifetime, and a lot of the good things I’m reading are about that, in some way or another, about the intellectual and artistic downfall of a civilization, the dark future of A.I. — like I’m not even intentionally reading longform about Trump’s impact because I read news on that topic all day already, and despite that, so much is so bleak! Anyhow, I want to try to balance it all out, in terms of what I share. But sometimes when I’ve been reading for a few hours I think, yikes
Feature image photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
Influencers Made Millions Pushing ‘Wild’ Births – Now the Free Birth Society is Linked to Baby Deaths Around the World
sirin kale and lucy osborne // the guardian // november 2025
The year-long investigation that created this article will also be a podcast come December, and I imagine jaws will drop worldwide at that time. But you could get ahead of the game and get horrified immediately by reading this piece. Two women created an online ‘community’ advocating for Freebirth — giving birth without any medical care at all, from foregoing prenatal appointments to refusing intervention when a mother or child’s life is at risk during labor — charging massive amounts of money for bogus trainings, services and access. Believe it or not, death ensued.
Stew Kids on the Block
john devore // taste cooking // september 2025
“What is perpetual stew? It’s a way of cooking and a metaphor for life. A recipe and a frame of mind. The first rule: perpetual stew wastes not. The second: perpetual stew never sleeps.”
She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges.
david guavey herbert // the new york times magazine // november 2025
I’m not sure if I’m drawn to childbirth stories these days for probably obvious reasons or if there just seem to be a lot of them right now but something about this story still feels incomplete to me. Her legal struggles ended up being the focus of the narrative but that part wasn’t all that compelling — I think the real story is what her pursuit of additional children by any means has done to the family she already has.
The Missing Kayaker
jamie thompson // the atlantic // december 2025
This was a tip from Maya on last week’s Things I Read That I Love and what a great tip it was! In the beginning there is a man who goes kayaking and fails to communicate effectively with his wife about his ETA of return and then disappears and then it goes somewhere else entirely.
Our Reasons
andrea long chu // n+1 // march 2025
The author reflects on her book Females, published in 2019 and reissued by Verso in March.
The strategy of couching the most challenging claims in the language of outlandish provocation appears dubious to me now, not least because the provocateur, as a type, has been so thoroughly claimed by the reactionaries in recent years. One does not want to cede all forms of insolence to the right, of course. But I do not know if I knew the difference in those days between audacity and courage; as a consequence, Females is a very bold book, but not always as brave as it could have been. The glowering political pessimism that runs through it, for instance, borders on the irresponsible (although not because it failed in its assessment of feminist thought, which I stand by). What I do wish is that the book had been more historical, more materialist, more capable of explicitly connecting its transcendental concerns with the empirical situation at hand.
Speak and Spell
sophie pinkham // the baffler // october 2025
A parent grapples with the conundrum of finding Ms Rachel to be sort of annoying and artless, despite appreciating her as an activist and an entertainer, which turns into a whole thing about the artfulness (or lack thereof) of children’s entertainment, the ethics of screen time, etc. On that same topic I enjoyed Let Your Kids Watch TV. It’s Fine ( kathryn vanarendonk // vulture), which is about how parents are endlessly guilted about screen time and how she handles it with her kids, as a professional TV critic, eventually coming to the conclusion that “it’s completely fine, and even good, for my kids to watch TV and movies.”
Inside the World of “The Great British Bake-Off”
ruby tandoh // new yorker // august 2025
“It is hard to think of another show that screens so carefully not just for personality type and talent but also for that more slippery variable, purity of intention. Producers find themselves in the position of trying to cast one of the best-known shows on television—one that routinely makes people famous—with people who care about neither television nor fame.”
Everything is Television
derek thompson // derek thompson
I realized reading this that it’s true — instagram has become just another platform for consuming algorithmically suggested content rather than looking at pictures of people I like and care about or seeing updates from publications I intentionally follow. Then I remembered that you can go to “settings’ and to “content preferences” and select “snooze suggested posts in feed” and then for 30 days it won’t show you anything besides what you intentionally follow and, of course, paid ads. It’s wonderful! You have to re-do it every 30 days. Anyhow, this is a great piece about how “everything that is not already television is turning into television.”
A Theory of Dumb
lane brown // new york magazine // november 2025
“The unavoidable reality is that a massive decentralized swarm of people is now talking, arguing, and opining all at once, everywhere, all the time. And if you want to say anything, or simply understand what’s going on, you have to pass through them. The medium is still the message, but the medium, today, is the mob.”
(feature image by ClassicStock/Getty Images)
