Curation is the heart of what we do at Longreads, and for years, I’ve appreciated s.e. smith’s reading recommendations, which often surface less-circulated outlets and stories. In a time of algorithmic sameness, smith’s Bluesky links—along with their periodic palate-cleansing photos of cats and peaches—are refreshingly human.
A National Magazine Award-winning essayist and journalist in Northern California, smith explores contemporary culture, with a focus on labor, disability, technology, feminism, death and dying, and animal welfare. Near the start of their new book, All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning, they ask a question: “What if we interacted with loss in more diverse ways?” From there, smith traces how the loss of their cats over the years has shaped their understanding of grief, and how that grief collides with a culture—white, American, individualist—that would rather not talk about death at all. In the book, smith makes a case for mourning as something we should be able to do together, not alone.
This collectivist spirit runs through another one of smith’s projects. They’re a co-founder and worker-owner of feminist media collective The Flytrap, an outlet for cultural criticism that pushes against the algorithm and provides a “space for people to tell stories that aren’t getting surfaced,” they said in a recent interview. That same call for collectivism shows up in how smith talks about cultural criticism more broadly: Without it, we can’t understand the world we live in. “We are going to keep doing the same shit over and over, and relitigating the same boring-ass topics,” they told The Flytrap, “if we cannot preserve, protect, and uplift cultural criticism—and people need to do the reading.” In other words, reading is essential. It’s how we stay in conversation and connection with each other. At Longreads, we’re all for it.
