Celine Nguyen - to your question about the best long-form essays of 2025, here’s MY pick and it just came out this week:

When does a divorce begin? by Anahid Nersessian for The Yale Review.

At a bar in Joshua Tree J and I are explaining what it’s like to be divorced with children. “Sometimes you’re just texting each other pictures of the kids and talking about how cute they are,” we say. “Other times it’s like, ‘This motherfucker.’”

Divorce is a writer’s business. You can paint a wedding but not a divorce.

About a year ago I had a dream. I was in an elevator with a group of people, one of whom had a birthday cake. She asked me to hold it for her, and as she began putting it into my hands it fell to the ground. I apologized frantically, promising to replace the cake right away. I thought, I ruined this beautiful thing that everyone was so invested in. When I woke up I understood that the cake was my marriage. Later I told the dream to my therapist. “What did the cake look like?” she asked. Until that moment I hadn’t realized it resembled the cake we had at my daughter’s first birthday party. In a photograph from the day I am dwarfed by it, which my husband thought was funny. “Why is that funny?” my therapist asked. “Well,” I said, “because the cake is big and I’m small.” She seemed almost angry when she asked again: “Why is that funny?”

The Yale Review is seriously kicking major ass right now and Meghan O'Rourke is doing THE MOST.