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In this week’s edition:

• Interracial persecution in 1960s Michigan
• The cruelty bred into the chickens we eat
• How Photo Shuffle helped one man through loss
• Navigating life not knowing you’re neurodivergent
• The deep craft in forging a handmade knife

1. In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.

Zack Stanton | Politico Magazine | December 22, 2023 | 17,959 words

The starting point for this mammoth feature by Zack Stanton is a little-known incident from the summer of 1967: a white mob tried with all their might to drive Carado and Ruby Bailey, an interracial couple, from the suburban Michigan neighborhood where they’d recently bought a new home. Drawing on interviews, public records, and press accounts, Stanton describes the horrors the Baileys and their daughter endured, including a cross burning, racist graffiti, and harassment by vigilante PTA moms who sound a whole lot like the women trying to ban books and marginalize transgender youth in schools today. But that’s not the whole story, or even half of it. In cinematic detail, Stanton shows how the battle over the Baileys’ home reached all the way to Washington, DC, where it might have shaped federal policy for the better if not for profound conservative backlash that instead helped usher in Republicanism as we know it today. I gobbled up this thick slice of forgotten history and was moved by the turn at the end when Stanton lets his sources directly address Ruby, now 95, a widow, and still living in the home she refused to leave. One source “admires your principle in the face of imminent danger,” Stanton writes. Another “wants people to understand that America isn’t simply a story of bad things that have happened; it’s the story of people trying to make things better.” Then there is the neighbor who watched from her window in ’67 and did nothing—today, she is ashamed. “When I asked what she would say to you if given the chance,” Stanton tells Ruby, “she broke down in sobs, a half-century’s worth of pain tumbling out.” —SD

2. The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

Boyce Upholt | Noema | December 19, 2023 | 3,954 words

Last week I roasted a chicken. I’ve eaten chicken probably three times since then. I’m careful about the chicken I buy and cook and eat, and as a one-time vegetarian I like to think that I do so mindfully, but even as I do I harbor a suspicion that something is irrevocably broken. That phrases like “free range” and “heritage breed” and “regenerative practices” add up to very little. Boyce Upholt’s Noema story did nothing to disabuse me of that suspicion, and I mean that as a compliment. The quest he refers to in the headline isn’t one that’s currently underway; it’s something that happened long ago. And while we certainly need “better” in the way we raise and slaughter animals for consumption—sorry, fellow meat-eaters, but there’s no use for euphemisms here—”better” here is meant in an industrial sense. It means bigger. Much bigger. So much bigger that decades of exhaustive and meticulous cross-breeding have led to a domesticated chicken that is virtually unable to live on its own. PETA videos exposing factory-farming practices are all well and good, but as Upholt writes, the true atrocity lies well upstream: “The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.” He’s not trying to guilt you about eating meat; he does so himself. (Besides, as he lays out ably, there’s not really a viable solution to the current situation.) Rather, by tracing the arc of the chicken from its initial domestication to its current fate, and by doing so with an engagingly nonjudgmental writing voice, he’s just making sure you know exactly what’s happened. Winner, winner, thought-provoking dinner. —PR

3. A Second Life for My Beloved Dog

Charlie Warzel | The Atlantic | January 5, 2024 | 1,500 words

I am the sort of person who, when watching a disaster film, will anxiously ask: “But, is their dog alright?” So—normally—I avoid any story where the dog might not, in fact, be OK. However, I conquered my fear to tackle Charlie Warzel’s essay about the death of his dog, Peggy (also the name of my dog, for extra potential trauma), and was rewarded with a beautiful, heartwarming piece. As any pet owner knows, the arrival of an animal means clogging your phone with endless photos: The pet sleeping. The pet playing. More sleeping. Charlie Warzel’s iPhone camera roll was no exception, and two-thirds of the way through 2015, it became “infused with a new vitality.” Peggy had arrived. When the time then comes for her to leave, Warzel descriptions of his grief are powerful. To remember Peggy, he tries Photo Shuffle on his phone, a feature that automatically changes the wallpaper to different photos from the camera roll. Setting a parameter to “Pets,” Peggy became his wallpaper star. Photo Shuffle is undiscerning—it may choose an Instagram-worthy shot but is just as likely to pull from the reams of outtakes, offering “chaotic, blurred streaks of fur and tongues.” The dynamic shots. The real ones. As Warzel explains, “Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle.” Every day he remembers a different trip with Peggy, or just an “ordinary Wednesday.” In this way, his phone, instead of a constant distraction, becomes a source of reflection and a teacher in grieving. Reading this lovely little essay, I realized that sometimes the dog dies—and that is OK. —CW

4. Flight Risk

Emily Stoddard | The Kenyon Review | January 8, 2024 | 5,463 words

As a child, Emily Stoddard was called gifted, the “most invisible curse you can a put on a child who already feels she does not belong.” For The Kenyon Review, Stoddard reflects on what it was like to navigate life before an ADHD diagnosis in her mid-30s, and how challenging it can be to have conversations, to work, to walk down the street in her shoes. In some of my favorite parts of this piece, her artful and intentional prose mimics the constant chatter of a feverish mind; she also uses third-person perspective to detach from her own self, stepping outside of her body in times when she’s felt it’s all been too much. This is a deeply personal piece about being (and not knowing) you’re neurodivergent—the need to always mask, the feeling that it’s all in your head, the “at-times maddening, at-times inspired” way your interior motor never stops. —CLR

5. A Knife Forged in Fire

Laurence Gonzales | Chicago Magazine | January 9, 2024 | 6,814 words

“What makes a good knife?” In trying to answer what appears to be a simple question, former chef Sam Goldbroch was “swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force” in becoming a bladesmith in Skokie, Illinois. In this gorgeous profile for Chicago Magazine, writer Laurence Gonzales commissions a knife from Goldbroch and invites us to shadow the master at work. Gonzales does what few writers can; he uses keen observation to recast an industrial space into a place of magical transformations. Read this piece and see the tangerine flame. Hear the forge roar, feel its heat, and revel in the alchemy of your tiny 6,000-word bladesmith apprenticeship. “A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes. ‘This is the moment of truth,’ Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. ‘This is when it becomes a knife.’” You’ll enjoy the science and history rendered in detailed scene work, but the most beautiful thing about this story is that it celebrates and exemplifies dedicated craft—in forging handmade knives and in revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. —KS

The rollercoaster of losing your health. Analyzing the film The Zone of Interest. An unusual con artist. Calculating love versus genetics. Recalling a dark childhood. All that—and more—in our first edition of 2024.

1. My Unraveling

Tom Scocca | New York Magazine | January 2, 2024 | 6,677 words

Sometimes it feels like medical mystery stories are everywhere. Long COVID. Rare disorders. The New York Times’ ever-popular “Diagnosis” column. It’s a genre to itself, and by now we know that genre’s beats: onset, frustration, revelation, closure. Tom Scocca’s own experience, though, enjoys no such arc. From the moment he notices symptoms—innocuous at first, but not for long—uncertainty is his only constant. “I’ve told the story over and over, to various doctors, till it almost sounds like a coherent narrative,” he writes. It’s not a coherent narrative, of course. That’s not how these things work, no matter what similar stories may suggest. But Scocca meets the incoherence head-on with spare, even wry, prose: “I started buying five-pound bags of rice from H Mart instead of ten-pound ones. Then I just started getting rice delivered.” His malady takes root during a professional down period, and financial dread lurks in the background here, making each new physical issue that much more harrowing. He finishes a recruiting call before going to the ER; he has a phone interview hours after he wakes up from a muscle biopsy. All the while, his body betrays him in novel and confounding ways. That’s not to say he doesn’t find some measure of relief. He does. What he doesn’t find is answers, which is exactly what makes this piece so destabilizing. “This is what disability advocates have said all along,” he writes, “not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” —PR

2. How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?

Giles Harvey | The New York Times Magazine | December 19, 2023 | 4,710 words

I have seen The Zone of Interest, the film that this article is about, twice now. It is a hypnotizing, unnerving masterpiece. For the unacquainted, a quick description: the movie is about Rudolf Höss, the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, who lived in a home that shared a garden wall with the camp. Director Jonathan Glazer never shows audiences what goes on inside the camp—though you hear it; god, do you hear it—choosing instead to focus his lens on the quotidian existence of Höss, his wife, and their five children. The effect of this bifurcation of sight and sound is extraordinary, as writer Giles Harvey explains in this essay. “The average viewer is unlikely to see himself in the figure of a death-camp C.E.O., but a family that sleepwalks through their own lives, heedless of the suffering that surrounds them, may feel closer to home,” Harvey writes. “To a greater or lesser extent, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, including—perhaps especially—when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on designated enemies.” It is fitting that such an astonishing movie is the subject of one of the best pieces of film criticism I’ve read in ages. Harvey pulls from philosophy, history, and conversations with Glazer and his team to situate The Zone of Interest both in the canon of Holocaust films and in our present moment. See: Trumpism. See also: Gaza. “When I first started on this, I genuinely couldn’t get my head around how a society could have gone along with these hideous ideas,” Glazer tells Harvey at one point. “During the time of making the film, it’s become blindingly obvious.”—SD

3. Meet the Con Artist Who Deceived the Front Range Tech Community

Chris Walker | 5280 | December 29, 2023 | 6,863 words

As I browsed links I’d missed over the holidays, André Carrilho’s colorful illustration for this 5280 story caught my eye. I’m glad I clicked. In my post-holiday COVID haze, not many stories have held my attention, but this piece by Chris Walker, about a con artist named Aaron Clark, was easy to read and enjoy. Clark was a rising star in Colorado’s tech scene in 2020: a promising Black businessman who could spark change at a time when companies pledged to invest more in DEI efforts. But the only thing Clark brought to the table, in any venture, was financial chaos. As Walker follows the trail of breadcrumbs into this mysterious man’s past, he finds a history of business scams in California and abroad in Nairobi’s emerging tech community and a man with a habit of disappearing, changing identities, and starting fresh. But why would someone with the ability to really make an impact resort to this? “In key ways, he never fit the mold of a classic con man,” writes Walker. Ultimately, Clark’s deceit seeded distrust in Colorado’s startup world, now making it harder for Black entrepreneurs and DEI consultants to get buy-in and attract investors. A curious tale of grift. —CLR

4. Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease

Krithika Varagur | Harper’s Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 8,133 words

I had missed this piece when it was originally published by Harper’s in August, but, luckily, it caught my attention after The Guardian published an edited version in December. Nkechi and Subomi first met at work. They first spoke while doing community service together. They first went for a drink at a dive bar, and Nkechi first revealed her genotype after a few days. From the beginning, they knew they had “no business” dating. Subomi had two abnormal S genes for hemoglobin, meaning he had sickle cell disease. Nkechi was a carrier—with one abnormal S gene and one normal A gene. There was a 50 percent chance their children would have the disease. Opening with their love story, Krithika Varagur instantly pulls you into a world where sharing genotype screening is typical, and a social norm is consolidating against two people with sickle cell genes from dating. Perhaps understandable in a society where nearly six million people carry the disease (Nigeria is the sickle cell capital of the world). But what about when love happens, “like a coconut dropping on your head while you’re walking down the street?” Varagur meticulously delves into the people behind the stats, talking to many disease carriers: single, married, separated, parents, and non-parents. But Nkechi and Subomi’s story is the constant thread, and the investment in their tale sheds the most light on how devastating genotype calculations can be. —CW

5. On Beauty and Violence

N.C. Happe | Guernica | December 11, 2023 | 5,021 words

It can be appealing to try to blow the dust off the old you and reinvent yourself in a place where you’re a stranger. As N.C. Happe recounts her move to Canada in this beautiful but sometimes difficult read for Guernica, she recalls her Minnesota childhood and her father’s dark moods and explosive temper alongside the casual—and sometimes invited—violence of the playground. Cinematic details make this essay an immersive read. You can hear a dying deer bleat and imagine its accidental and untimely death. You can feel the author’s cracked dry lips; you can taste the copper when they bleed. “The realization dawned: violence runs in the blood of everything, everywhere,” she writes. “For me, it took leaving the country to learn this. For the doe from my childhood home, it had been as simple and as quietly done as jumping a fence.” What Happe shows us through this thoughtful piece is that while sometimes you can jump the fence and leave home, you might be surprised by what you’re unable to leave behind. —KS

Audience Award

What was our first editor’s pick winner of the year?

A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

Audience Award

What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

In this week’s edition:

• An immigration story on the rise of Haitian refugee children traveling alone by boat
• A dive into the intricate world of romance fraud
• A profile on beloved former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe
• A hybrid of memoir, fiction, and essay on Wikipedia, knowledge, and truth
• A writer’s love letter to restaurants in the South that serve gas

1. When the Coast Guard Intercepts Unaccompanied Kids

Seth Freed Wessler | ProPublica | December 7, 2023 | 8,359 words

Since summer 2021, the US Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people at sea, including an alarming number of Haitian refugee children traveling alone. Immigration policy offshore is different than on land—asylum doesn’t apply at sea—and the system in place, reports Seth Freed Wessler, is opaque and dangerously inconsistent. Coast Guard immigration patrols are often closed off to journalists, but Wessler obtained internal documents about one boat detained in March that carried a group of Haitians, including three unaccompanied children: a 10-year-old boy and two sisters, 8 and 4. Wessler tracked down these kids, along with 18 others from the boat. He does an incredible job recounting the experience from the boy’s perspective: Tcherry started his journey at a smuggler’s house in the Bahamas and endured 12 hours inside the packed cabin of a shabby boat. The plan was to land in Florida, and then somehow make his way to Canada to join his mother. (There are many heartbreaking details in this story, but one I can’t get out of my head is that some kids on these boats are so young, they don’t even know their parents’ names or the country in which they were born.) After five days at sea, the Coast Guard has no choice but to send Tcherry and the two girls back to Haiti. As Wessler notes, detainments at sea aren’t just scarring for refugees: the work has taken a toll on Coast Guard members, too, such as the conflicted officer who encounters Tcherry and the girls on the boat—and later wonders what has become of them. A gut-wrenching look into the immigration crisis at Florida’s maritime border. —CLR

2. To Catch a Catfish

Stuart McGurk | The New Statesman | December 7, 2023 | 6,664 words

Online dating is a daunting world. There are many questions to consider about the person an app plucks from the ether and plops down onto your screen as a potential partner. Will we connect? Are you funny? Are those your actual teeth? But nowadays, one question has become paramount: are you real? As Stuart McGurk explains in this fascinating piece, romance deception is the fastest-growing category of fraud. It increased by almost a third last year, and now a staggering “two in five online daters have been asked for money, and half of those gave it.” (These types of stats seem destined only to grow with the rise of AI.) McGurk profiles Constable Rebecca Mason, a detective so dedicated to tracking down online fraudsters she puts in 20-plus-hour investigative shifts. I can see why she cares so much: when she meets the victims, it is heartbreaking. In the case of Alan Baldwin, the need to believe is so strong that when Mason breaks the news that the person he has loved—and sent money to—for 15 years does not exist, he won’t believe it. The targets of these scams are the emotionally vulnerable, longing for a connection, and desperate to help the person they care for. Particularly chilling is the pithy description of the scamming network’s WhatsApp group chat; like a gaggle of young girls discussing the best response to send a crush, the scammers talk about what replies will keep their targets on the hook. It’s a sickening thought. McGurk distills Mason’s meticulous work—and the reams of online messages—into a clear, sharp piece that, satisfyingly, goes all the way to a trial and conviction. (For further reading on dating fraud, I also highly recommend a feature from our sister publication, The Atavist: “The Romance Scammer on my Sofa.”) —CW

3. Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.

Jon Mooallem | The New York Times Magazine | December 3, 2023 | 7,960 words

To say that I was excited to read this profile is a ridiculous understatement. R.E.M. is my favorite band. (“Nightswimming” is my favorite song—a sentimental choice, but whatever, I own it.) And I wasn’t disappointed. There are delightful appearances by Taylor Swift, Stipe’s 87-year-old mother, and best of all Patti Smith, who is one of his closest friends. The story of how Smith and Stipe met is one for the ages: he got her number from a friend and called her from a bar in Spain on the first Valentine’s Day after Smith’s husband died, because he thought it might be nice. “I wouldn’t be calling except that I’m completely drunk on absinthe,” he told her. Little did he know that Smith had a crush on him, just from watching MTV. (Same, Patti.) But the best part of this profile is how author Jon Mooallem captures Stipe’s unique energy, which is at once radiant and humble. One of the greatest frontmen in the history of pop music is working on his first solo album, and that means harnessing an eternally restless mind, transcending self-doubt, and forcing himself to step away from a life populated by friends and family to whom he’s fiercely devoted. “He knew he’d have to isolate himself in one of the buildings on his property,” Mooallem writes, “walk in circles for six or eight or 10 hours at a time, effect a trancelike meditation and wrench out the rest of the lyrics, line by line.” For now, Stipe’s songs-in-progress live on his laptop in a folder called “Master file. Solo album.” That pop you just heard? It’s my heart exploding. —SD

4. The Hofmann Wobble

Ben Lerner | Harper’s Magazine | November 20, 2023 | 8,414 words

To be completely honest, I don’t know if this qualifies as nonfiction—the eyebrow “Experiment” sitting above the headline gives you some clue what you’re in for—but I do know it’s far and away the most daringly executed thing I read all week. On its face, it’s a memoir detailing how Lerner moved across the country in his mid-20s to work as a progressive think tank’s “new media fellow” and ended up creating a disinformation campaign via Wikipedia. There’s just one issue: he destabilizes our experience at every possible turn. His memory is faulty, he tells us. He’s lying. The details are wrong. Lerner is best known for his literary fiction (autofiction, really) and poetry, both of which beat at the heart of this piece. It’s a dizzying, disorienting read, but it’s also so smartly constructed and beautifully written that you can’t help but press on. It all still holds true, even if he’s making up or misremembering the details. At least, it seems to, and that’s the point. We’ve constructed a system in which establishing fact is simply a function of building the right illusion. Unreliable narrators come and go, bringing with them the intermittent uproar of a philosophical debate. What debt do writers owe the truth? But at this moment of transition, with the black box of artificial intelligence beginning to reshape the textual web, it’s far more troubling to realize that it’s not just the narrators who are unreliable—it’s the architects, too. —PR

5. My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas

Kiese Laymon | The Bitter Southerner | December 6, 2023 | 1,914 words

The Bitter Southerner just published Kate Medley’s Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South, a “photographic road trip” documenting service stations, convenience stores, and pit stops across the South. This essay by Kiese Laymon is the book’s foreword. At one point I seriously considered writing a recommendation for this piece that simply read: “Kiese Laymon. That’s all you need to know.” But that would have robbed me of the opportunity to reread and savor the bounty of this essay. If you do not know Laymon’s work, do yourself a favor and read this piece. Here, he takes us back to his childhood in 1984 and the Friday nights spent with his grandmama and her boyfriend Ofa D at Jr. Food Mart: a diner, convenience store, and gas station in Forest, Mississippi. “I loved everything about where we were going,” he writes. “I loved the smell of friedness. I loved the way the red popped in the sign. I loved how the yellow flirted with the red. I loved that the name of the restaurant started with Jr. instead of ending in Jr. Like, Food Mart Jr.” It’s a captivating read about anticipation, finding joy in a place you might not expect, and the long hours worked at minimum wage that made that joy possible. At Jr. Food Mart, Laymon, his grandmama, and Ofa D got oh so much more than fried fish and ‘tato logs for a yummy Friday night supper; they got a hefty helping of love and care and history served up to go. —KS

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This week we’re featuring stories about restorative justice, donated bodies allegedly sold at Harvard, an ER doctor who recognized her own catastrophic symptoms, a fascinating career pivot, and chimpanzees on the lam.

1. After the Hit-and-Run

Mari Cohen | Jewish Currents | September 28, 2023 | 7,745 words

In 2015, I was on an Amtrak train that derailed, killing eight people, including the young man sitting next to me. I was lucky to escape with relatively minor physical injuries. In the years since, I have thought often about the engineer of the train, who was acquitted in a jury trial of a series of charges related to the crash. He had no intention to cause harm, and he certainly wasn’t responsible for the systemic issues that, had Amtrak addressed them proactively, might have mitigated the scale of the tragedy. I don’t think he should be made to suffer—I have no doubt that living with the knowledge of what happened while he was driving the train is a terrible enough burden. But this doesn’t mean that I’m not upset about the crash, a feeling that wasn’t really assuaged by the compensation that Amtrak provided victims. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to talk to the engineer, because in the exchange of words there might be some measure of healing for both sides. A similar notion is at the heart of Mari Cohen’s beautiful essay about being the victim of a hit-and-run. In the aftermath, Cohen began reporting on restorative justice approaches to traffic crashes, which advocates believe can “better serve the needs of all involved, creating a confidential space where drivers could express remorse without legal consequences, and where victims could receive the apologies they were looking for.” Through readings, interviews, and her own experience, Cohen considers whether restorative justice is a viable alternative to criminal justice. She suggests that it might be if we can shift our perceptions about closure. “I am trying to let go of the idea that a solution has to do everything,” she writes, “in order to do something.” —SD

2. Their Bodies Were Donated to Harvard. Then they Went Missing

Brenna Ehrlich | Rolling Stone | December 4, 2023 | 4,937 words

This grim tale explains the bizarre crossover between morgues and the oddities world. Bodies donated to Harvard (via the Anatomical Gift Program) may have inadvertently ended up as collectibles, after Cedric Lodge, the head of the Harvard morgue, allegedly allowed people to come in and pick out human remains to buy and take home. Yep, someone who gave their body for science may now have a body part on a collector’s shelf. Brenna Ehrlich unpicks this disturbing story for Rolling Stone and finds other morgue owners accused of the same crime. It’s hard to fathom that people in such positions of trust could be selling their charges or that anyone would actually want to buy them—a macabre segment of the world to discover. But it’s by talking to the families that Ehrlich shows us the true horror of this case: grieving family members are now unsure if they have the correct ashes or if their relative has ended up as an unusual knickknack. A touching detail was the number of people keen to discuss the secret recipes of their loved ones (William R. Buchanan had a famous carrot cake, Doreen Gordon some excellent macaroons, and Adele Mazzone was good at pork fried rice). I appreciated the care taken by Ehrlich to humanize those who donated their bodies in the first place. —CW

3. The Train Wrecked in Slow Motion

Grace Glassman | Slate | November 26, 2023 | 5,038 words

In an ongoing medical emergency, lay patients and their families often have no idea exactly how dangerous a situation has become as specialists and professionals speak in rapid-fire numbers and acronyms only they understand. (Strangely, if you don’t know precisely how dire things are, you also don’t understand how bad things could get, and this incomprehension can sometimes be a kindness.) As an emergency room doctor, Grace Glassman had no such luxury: when she went into hemorrhagic shock after delivering her third child via C-section, she knew she would die without heroic medical intervention and she asked for as much on the way to the operating room for life-saving surgery. “My doctor was running next to my gurney,” she writes. “I found her hand and said, ‘Dr. P., please, do everything. For my kids.’ I was shocked to see her wipe away a tear.” This piece is a master class in the personal essay: it unfolds with perfect pacing, placing you in the hospital room as trauma unfolds, delivering critical context you need to understand Glassman’s peril without overwhelming you with medical detail. It can be said that birth stories are all individual and universal, yet Glassman begets a piece that belies the genre. —KS

4. How to Build a Better Motivational Speaker

Tad Friend | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 8,925 words

Part of being an aging rap fan means periodically being confronted with bizarre “what happened to X” moments. To wit: learning that Jesse Jaymes, the man behind the ill-conceived 1991 oddity “Shake It Like a White Girl,” is now Jesse Itzler, a billionaire (by marriage) and triathlete (by hobby) who is also bent on becoming a top-tier motivational coach. I still don’t know how to react to this development, but at the very least I can say that it gave Tad Friend his latest A+ profile. This is a window into a world that feels like the end state of every “optimization” podcast you’ve ever heard: “The conference-goers, mostly in their thirties and forties, have the air of commuters who missed the first train to the city and are determined to crowd onto the next one. They seek trade secrets and, better still, the mind-set to deploy them.” Personal development, as it’s currently known, is a massive industry, awarding (mostly) men six figures for a single speech at a popular conference. That’s where Itzler is aiming, though under the guise of helping people connect with gratitude and overcome self-doubt. But while there’s no shortage of great scenework—the green room before addressing people who sell dialysis machines, a spontaneous swim race against Olympic athletes—the real draw here is the keen deconstruction of the mythologies we establish. Last year, Friend’s feature about the world of door-to-door salesmen captivated me in similar fashion; he’s able to chronicle a certain kind of masculinity like few others can, teasing out its tensions and deceptions until what starts as a profile of one person becomes an X-ray of an archetype. You may not have heard this tune before, but you won’t be able to shake it. —PR

5. One Swedish Zoo, Seven Escaped Chimpanzees

Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | December 5, 2023 | 7,400 words

You know right from the start that this one’s going to break your heart. But you carry on and brace yourself, because you can also tell, from the opening line, that Imogen West-Knights will deliver a riveting piece of reporting. Last December, the beloved chimpanzees in Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo escaped their enclosure. It took the zoo staff and keepers 72 hours to contain them to their ape house, and West-Knights reconstructs the ordeal with deft pacing and great detail. As the hours pass, the zoo must weigh the safety of the zookeepers and public at large against that of the chimps, and the situation grows more distressing. The photography in the piece—snowy landscapes of the zoo’s grounds that look more sinister than serene—add to the unsettling nature of the story, as you can’t help but imagine these great apes loose in the cold, some in their final moments. (You also wonder: why are we subjecting these animals to a place that’s too cold for them six months out of the year?) This is a sad read, but it sparks an important conversation around zoo safety protocols, climate-specific zoos, and whether zoos should even exist at all. —CLR

Audience Award

Do you hear timpani? This is the piece our readers loved most this week:

Micro-scale real estate. Marvelous birds with better memory than yours. Neighbors recording neighbors. Love among seniors. A profile of a woman who’s been both ubiquitous and anonymous for 15 years. All that—and more!—in this week’s edition.

1. Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures

Scott Huler | Esquire | November 20, 2023 | 5,653 words

In summer 2020, I ordered a miniature house kit, thinking it would be the first of many cute dioramas I’d construct while stuck at home. As I write this, however, I glance over at the unopened box, a bit embarrassed that I have yet to experience the joy of making it. For Esquire, Scott Huler immerses himself in the world of working miniaturists, and a movement that exploded during lockdown and grew even more popular thanks to Instagram and TikTok. Speaking with collectors and artists, such as professional miniaturist Robert Off, Huler explores the why behind this art. What makes a roombox—the boxed display that houses a miniature 3D environment—so irresistible? I love what Huler discovers: for many miniature makers and viewers, a roombox provides a way to focus, a place of relief. An entire world in which to escape, or to control. An outlet to imagine and dream that “just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway.” This piece brought me joy, not just because I was wowed by the skilled craftsmanship of miniaturists working today, but it also reminded me of the peace we can find within our interior world, and the power of our own imagination. —CLR

2. Last Love: A Romance in a Care Home

Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | November 23, 2023 | 4,036 words

I had to take a moment after reading this essay to sit and untangle the mess of feelings it brought up. It’s joyful, desperately sad, and a poignant reflection on aging: a standout piece. Sophie Elmhirst introduces us to two lovers, Mary and Derek. Theirs is teenage love, pure and easy, with no responsibility to weigh it down. But Mary and Derek are no teenagers; their meet-cute is in a care home. With just a few choice words, Elmhirst brings their characters to life, mixing their love story with memories to remind us of what came before a life of inconveniences and incontinence pads. She uses short, crisp sentences, jumping from place to place and emulating the way fragments of memory come bright and clear before fading and falling out of reach. It was as if I was sitting with Mary, listening as she grasped for a memory before finding another. In a few paragraphs, we have a snapshot of two lives, swinging from love to tragedy, the way life can—a history that makes the love story even more beautiful. “It’s different, meeting someone late in life,” Elmhirst explains. “You know you won’t have long, so the love feels more urgent.” (Even if this leads to awkward noises from the home’s bedrooms.) When the love is lost, it hits with a jolt, and Mary is shocked into facing the truth that she will never go home again. Yet, her final pragmatism is inspiring. An essay that made me think about aging in a way I never have before. —CW

3. How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

Lauren Smiley | WIRED | November 7, 2023 | 7,704 words

Last April, law enforcement in San Francisco’s Marina District responded to 911 calls about an unhoused man who was beating a local resident with a metal object. The suspect was quickly arrested and the story soon went viral, in no small part because there was a video of the incident. But there were other videos—as Lauren Smiley writes, “In San Francisco, there’s always another video”—and in time they revealed there was more to the story, particularly as it pertained to the supposed victim. I don’t want to give the rest away, because this feature should be read in its entirety. It’s a masterful retelling of events, certainly, but it’s also a razor-sharp, much-needed analysis of the way San Franciscans now police one another via cell phone videos, Ring cameras, and other devices. This citizen surveillance, as Smiley shows, is feeding the national narrative about San Francisco as a place of squalor and violence. Tape something on your doorstep and before long, “the cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In with Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk.” —SD

4. The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay

Brian Payton | Hakai Magazine | November 14, 2023 | 3,700 words

First, let us have a moment of appreciation for this banger of a headline, in tribute to Judith Viorst’s classic childhood read, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I was powerless to resist this piece and was well rewarded for my time. Brian Payton’s Hakai story about the winged wizard known as the Canada jay is satisfying beginning to end. This is no paltry plumed profile; Payton weaves fact, anecdote, and story together so deftly that these 3,700 words evaporate before your very eyes. I could have read a story double the length and still would have wanted more. You’ll meet 81-year old Dan Strickland, a naturalist who is the world’s foremost authority on the bird species, his knowledge gained from decades spent observing and interacting with the cunning corvids in the boreal and subalpine forests where they make their home. “Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information,” writes Payton. “London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.” Not only is this story about a jay a real joy, it’s a rare treasure that reminds me of why I fell in love with reading in the first place: learning about those with such deep interests is deeply interesting. —KS

5. Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | November 25, 2023 | 4,690 words

I always feel just a twinge of guilt recommending a story that has already become The Thing Everybody Read This Week. In my defense, though, I read the story before This Week had even officially begun, and immediately knew that it would be my Top 5 pick. Also in my defense, the first line is perfect. “One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth.” Why is this perfect? Well, because it tells you everything you need to know about what the story will be about, and what this story will be. It will be funny (as Caity Weaver’s profiles always are). It will be clear-eyed. It will be armed with some well-earned cynicism about how companies—or, rather, their vaporous and often uncanny incarnations known as “brands”—operate. The one thing this sentence doesn’t quite prepare you for is how generous the story is. How generous its subject is. And how generously you might think about things thereafter. We all have aspirations. Sometimes our life realizes those aspirations, sometimes it doesn’t. But sometimes even when it doesn’t, it does. Stephanie Courtney, the comic actor once bent on getting to Saturday Night Live and now in firm possession of a far more fulfilling gig, knows that better than anyone. —PR

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This week’s edition features stories on progressive activism, dwindling salmon, how Chicago protects birds from an untimely death, the future of the craft of coding, and a profile of an odious (and powerful) literary agent.

1. Not One Tree

Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko | n+1 | October 26, 2023 | 16,313 words

Whether you’ve been following the Cop City saga closely, only just heard about it this week, or have no idea what I’m talking about, you should read this essay. For those who fall into the third category, here’s a quick primer: Cop City is the nickname of a law enforcement training campus under construction near Atlanta, on forested land once inhabited by Native people before they were forcibly removed, then turned into a slave plantation, then into a farm worked by prisoners. (“The plantation, the prison farm, the police academy: it sounds like a history of America,” Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko write.) Opponents of the project are known as “forest defenders,” and in an incident last January, one of them was shot and killed by police. This essay is an insider account of the Stop Cop City movement. It is detailed, smart, and very moving. It is about the beauty and the bloodshed of progressive activism, the stories that the land beneath us holds, the racist history of policing, and much, much more. In a word, it is epic. —SD

2. Salmon are Vanishing from the Yukon River — And So is A Way of Life

Max Graham | Grist | November 9, 2023 | 4,931 words

Salmon stocks are dwindling in the Yukon. That should concern all of us. As Max Graham reports for Grist, fewer and fewer fish are returning to spawn, causing governments to restrict or shut down harvests. The health and cultural consequences for remote indigenous populations that rely on annual salmon runs to feed their communities over a long winter—where a tin of Spam can cost $7.95—are impossible to quantify. The main culprit? Rising river and ocean temperatures due to climate change. “Salmon are cold-water species, so when temperatures go up, their metabolism increases, so they need more energy to just be, just live,” said Ed Farley, an ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “That means they’re going to have to feed more.” Of course, with an ecological conundrum such as this, cause and effect is far more complicated than that, and Graham deftly weaves fact and color from harvesters, elders, fishery officials, and scientists to help lay readers understand not just the scope of the problem, but the potentially devastating outcomes, for the fish and the people who rely on them. Can all the humans with their various interests come together to allow salmon stocks to rebound? For everyone’s sake, I hope that notion is more than just a fish story. —KS

3. City of Glass

Ben Goldfarb | bioGraphic | October 31, 2023 | 3,514 words

My previous house on an idyllic wooded half-acre in California’s rural West Sonoma County had lots of huge windows. So many, in fact, that birds often flew into them. Some were briefly stunned before flying off; others were not so lucky. Applying frosted decals and patterned coating to all the windows made our house more bird-safe. But what happens when an entire city is a lethal landscape for our winged friends? As Ben Goldfarb notes in this bioGraphic feature, Chicago is the most perilous city in the US for birds: its location within the Midwestern flyway—a migratory route for birds in the spring and fall—and its glass architecture and glittering lights make a deadly combination. (Case in point: on a single morning, conservation volunteers once collected around a thousand birds at McCormick Place, a massive convention center next to Lake Michigan, which is largely covered with glass and considered a collision hotspot.) Architects, building managers, and even politicians are taking measures to make Chicago more bird-friendly, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Goldfarb writes an informative piece that has something for everyone, including bird conservation, Chicago architecture and history, and urban design. —CLR

4. A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

James Somers| The New Yorker | November 13, 2023 | 4,735 words

The age of the centaurs is here. While not beaten by Artificial Intelligence (yet), programmers have a new power—and the half-human, half-AI coding team is an impressive force. While dabbling with ChatGPT-4, Somers muses on his long coding career, and it was with a jolt that he reminded me of the “era of near-zero interest rates and extraordinary growth,” when coders were gods with endless free espressos. It’s changing fast. There is a lot out there on AI, but by putting this development in the context of his own career, Somers shines a bright, glaring light on the pivotal time in which we live. It’s not necessarily frightening: sure, things are changing, but they always have, and they always will. While coders of “agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheel and crop varietals,” the ones of the future may “spend their late nights in the guts of the AIs their parents once regarded as black boxes.” No doubt the centaurs will soon be replaced by full-on AI horses, but Somers is still confident coding isn’t dead. —CW

5. Days of the Jackal

Alex Blasdel | The Guardian | November 9, 2023 | 7,941 words

Reading this profile of Andrew Wylie, the most powerful agent in book publishing and apparently one of the most odious people alive, is like eating several Big Macs: an experience so delicious you don’t mind that it leaves you queasy when it’s over. The piece’s astounding anecdotes about a man whose life is as glamorous, and legacy as enormous, as his ego is hideous beg to be binged. Wylie, who is in the twilight of his career, is the kind of person who said of his favorite chain restaurant for weekday lunches, “You feel right next door to extreme poverty when you eat at Joe and the Juice, which is a comfortable place to be.” Wylie is also the kind of person who used the following words to describe his desire to dominate the Chinese publishing market: “We need to roll out the tanks…. We need a Tiananmen Square!” I tore through this profile and was soon texting lines from it to friends, gleeful with horror and liberal in my emoji deployment. Yes, readers, I was lovin’ it. —SD

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This week’s edition highlights a series of dispatches from Gaza, a true-crime story about a family of turtle hunters, an essay on the literal messiness of death, a portrait of the last lighthouse keeper in the US, and a can’t-miss profile of a legendary basketball coach with a complicated legacy.

1. “I Am Still Alive. Gaza Is No Longer Gaza.” 

Atef Abu Saif | The Washington Post | October 30, 2023 | 5,279 words

This week marks a month since, in response to attacks by Hamas, Israel launched a campaign of unconscionable violence against the Palestinian people. As of this writing, Israel has slaughtered more than 10,000 men, women, and children. Much has been written about the unfolding genocide—it should not be controversial to use that word—and this stark diary of life under siege is among the most arresting. A raw draft of history, its contents began as voice notes that Atef Abu Saif, a novelist and the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, sent to friends abroad. He was in Gaza, enjoying a morning swim, when the bombing began, and he describes the horrors of the present through the crucial lens of the past. “I often think about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life,” he says. “Maybe I can do the same this time.” This memory, like many in the diary, is a stark reminder that Israel has oppressed Palestinians in a system of apartheid built on the heels of the mass dispossession of their land 75 years ago. And that is the wellspring: the violence that begets more violence in a devastating cycle. “Just as life is a pause between two deaths,” Atef Abu Saif says, “Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.” —SD

2. The Great Cajun Turtle Heist

Sonia Smith | Texas Monthly | November 7, 2023 | 5,973 words

I was hooked from the first line of Sonia Smith’s true-crime tale about the elusive alligator snapper—a large species of turtle found in the southeast US—and the Louisiana family of prolific hunters who poached them for decades. The snapper was declared endangered in the ’70s in Texas, which allowed a protected population to multiply. But that didn’t stop the Dietzes from crossing the border to capture and smuggle them home to sell, the carloads of turtles so heavy they’d sometimes blow out the engine or overwhelm the brakes. Smith’s piece unravels like an engrossing movie. The Dietz relatives, whose lives are deeply embedded in the bayou, are fascinating characters, and so is the Marine-turned-wildlife inspector who grows determined to catch them. My favorites, though, are the two enormous turtles, Brutus and Caesar, who are undoubtedly the most memorable characters by far. —CLR

3. Flipping Grief

James McNaughton | Guernica | November 6, 2023 | 5,369 words

James McNaughton’s brother Conor died of an overdose at 27, relapsing after two years of sobriety during which he built a successful roofing business. McNaughton bookends this essay with scenes where he and his family are clearing out Conor’s apartment, literally cleaning up what his brother left behind. Death and grief are messy, and Conor’s passing was no different. But in the face of the sheer force of death, it’s the subtlety of McNaughton’s writing that will knock you flat: “We stopped by Publix and rented a Rug Doctor. We signed a contract on the counter that said we would return it clean.” That last sentence is filthy with nuance, as is the whole piece. McNaughton deftly juxtaposes those there to help with those who prey on vulnerable people like Conor, struggling to stay sober. He exposes the scurrying cockroaches using Conor to further their own agenda, those out to make a quick buck off a distressed sale, off the distressed family of the deceased. This is by no means an easy read, whether you’ve lost someone dear to you or not. But sometimes braving what’s dark and messy—equipped with only words as a beam of light to shine on the dirty work of grief—is the one way you can try to get clean. —KS

4. The Last Lighthouse Keeper in America

 Dorothy Wickenden | The New Yorker | October 30, 2923 | 4,500 words

Sally Snowman is the 70th keeper in the history of Boston Light lighthouse. She is also the first woman. And the last. When Snowman retires, the station will be “unmanned”—“unwomaned,” as she puts it—and Boston Light will go the way of many a lighthouse before it. (The United States currently has about 850 lighthouses, but only half are active, and these use automated eclectic lamps.) In this lovely ode to a dying profession, Dorothy Wickenden looks at the history of Boston Light: tragic deaths, minimal pay, unbearable loneliness, and madness. It’s a ride. There’s also stuff on the mechanics of lighthouse lenses, if you’re into that sort of thing, but for me, it was Wickenden’s honest descriptions of lightkeeper life, with only the “moan of the foghorn and the ceaseless crashing of the waves” for company, that drew me in. A piece of history worth remembering. —CW

5. Bonefishing Off Bimini With Bobby Knight

Kevin Koenig | GQ Magazine | November 7, 2023 | 6,248 words

I spent this past weekend in the college town where I grew up. This college town also happens to be where legendary basketball coach Bob Knight cemented his complicated legacy. (Yes, I was at the game where he threw the chair.) Through three national championships and more wins than any college coach at the time, he loomed over the place like a god—a temperamental, wrathful god, but a god all the same. After Knight died last week, a deluge of remembrances followed. To a one, they celebrated the man’s accomplishments and acknowledged his flaws. Yet none of them came close to capturing him the way Kevin Koenig’s 2015 profile in Angler’s Journal did. Three days with Knight fishing in the Bahamas. Three days of witnessing his locker-room joviality giving way to a tempest. Three days of conversation and combat, drama and détente. It’s a portrait that feels complete, and a portrait I never thought I’d read. I missed it the first time around; thankfully, GQ reprinted it this week, with a foreword from Koenig unpacking the aftermath of his warts-and-all approach. If you love sports, it’s a can’t-miss. Even if you don’t, it’s still mandatory reading. Rarely these days do profiles steep you in a sense of place, but Koenig’s bucks that trend. You’ll feel the spray in your face, the sun on your arms—and in the many moments where Koenig’s questions encounter Knight’s volatility, the burn of shame on your neck. —PR

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What it’s like to be a child of war, a school-shooting support group for principals, a 1981 feature on rodeo queens, on becoming a woman in NYC in 1978, and the San Francisco donut shop that hasn’t closed in over 50 years.

1. ‘I Remember The Silence Between The Falling Shells’: The Terror of Living Under Siege as a Child

Zarlasht Halaimzai | The Guardian | October 31, 2023 | 3,572 words

In the last few weeks, the Israel-Gaza war has amassed horrific statistics: the number of hostages, the number of refugees, the number of injuries, the number of deaths—and the number who were children. Yes, the number who were children. As Zarlasht Halaimzai states in this extraordinary, harrowing piece for The Guardian, “Children bear the brunt of war.” Writing of her personal experiences—of another war, at another time, with the same consequences—Halaimzai pulls us down from lofty statistics into the raw reality of being bombed, day after day. She was 10 years old when US-funded mujahideen bombarded her home city of Kabul. Ten years old when “bedtime, schooltime, playtime, and dinnertime all vanished.” Small things make her retelling incredibly powerful: How, after the rockets stopped, her granny would “produce a jar of honey and feed us children a spoonful, trying to wash the taste of terror out of our mouths.” How Halaimzai “couldn’t look at my little sister and my little brother because somehow, I felt ashamed that this was their childhood.” And how “The sound of a rocket hitting a solid object enters your body and lives there forever.” Sentences to pierce your psyche. This essay reminds us of the many conflicts that have come before; Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine—to name a few. It reminds us of the many children who have suffered. Of the many killed. The many to learn the same life lesson as Halaimzai: “that there are no monsters in the dark. Only adults who are terrified enough to kill.” If you want to restore your faith in humanity, this is not the piece for you. If you want to understand the humanity beneath the bombs, it is. —CW

2. The Club No School Principal Wants to Join

Gloria Liu | Men’s Health | November 1, 2023 | 5,411 words

After reading Gloria Liu’s piece on the support group for principals whose schools have experienced gun violence, I realize that most news stories about school shootings cover the victims, the survivors, and the shooters. Rarely do I read pieces focused on the school leaders who are left to pick up the pieces; we expect such individuals to be strong and resilient enough to carry their communities through such traumatic events (or, in some cases, expect them to take the blame). Liu recounts the formation of Principal Recovery Network (PRN) in 2019, which has since grown to 21 members, including former and current principals of Columbine, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (Parkland), and Sandy Hook. After a school tragedy, PRN reaches out to the principal, offering advice and simply letting them know they’re not alone. You don’t even know what you need right now, one of them will say, but here’s my number—call anytime. The fact that this club needs to exist is heartbreaking. But it does. Through this outlet, these individuals have given each other emotional support and a much-needed space for self-care and healing. —CLR

3. Cowgirls All the Way

E. Jean Carroll | Outside Magazine | April/May 1981 | 2,910 words

One of the week’s nicest surprises was Outside digging into its formidable archives to republish this 42-year-old E. Jean Carroll feature about that year’s Miss Rodeo America competition in Oklahoma City. New Journalism had been around for nearly two decades by the time the piece first came out, but Carroll’s vignette-first approach fits snugly into the form. (In a companion Outside interview about her career, Carroll cops freely to this: “There’s a lot of Joan Didion in that piece.”) The pleasure here is more cumulative than linear: you’re there to soak up Carroll’s scenework and side-eye as much as you are to learn anything about the actual competition, and the piece oozes with both. These rodeo queens are caught between impossible expectations—subjected to “cosmetic sessions” and paraded in front of the press in skimpy nightgowns, while also expected to deliver congenial speeches and display horsemanship. That Carroll captures all of this without a giant flashing neon sign is marvel enough; that she does so in vivid detail in her first published story makes clear that her trajectory was all but inevitable. It may clock in at fewer than 3,000 words, but like the very best magazine writing, it will stay with you well beyond the time it takes you to read it. —PR

4. 1978

Amy Margolis | The Iowa Review | Spring 2023 | 3,478 words

I love it when a personal essay can take me to a time and place I’ve never visited. Amy Margolis does just that in “1978,” for The Iowa Review. Enter, stage left, a young woman leaving Kansas City to become a dancer and make a home in New York City. Margolis, naive but ambitious, clad in leotards and Lee jeans, is going to live with a sister she barely knows who aspires to be an actress. In this essay though, the women are not the stars of the show. It’s the gay men in Amy’s life—Paul and Phillip—who steal it, as they befriend her and, in her own words, teach her “how to be a woman.” “Paul was long and lean and attenuated, like a dying note,” she writes. “It was the year my whole life started.” Paul and Phillip feed her, both literally and figuratively, give fashion advice, and teach her about sex. (Dear reader, fair warning: we are not in Kansas anymore.) Above all, the men model what it means to love oneself. “In New York, I am always afraid, but never with Paul and Philip. Paul and Philip are men, especially Philip. They’re towering figures both, and unabashed, and at home in their skin,” Margolis writes. With friends like these, indeed, there’s no place like home. —KS

5. San Francisco’s 24-Hour Diner Stops the Cosmic Clock

Chris Colin | Alta Online | September 25, 2023 | 3,736 words

I did not expect a feature on an iconic restaurant to start out in a “small potato-farming village in the Arcadia region of Greece’s Peloponnese.” But then again, this—like many stories of the American dream—starts out somewhere else. For Alta Online, Chris Colin introduces us to proprietors George and Nina Giavris, but this profile focuses on the Silver Crest Donut Shop, a 24-hour diner they bought in 1970 that has been open every moment since, where the “new gal” has 30+ years on the job as a waitress. Time has stood still at the Silver Crest, and Colin lovingly documents the artifacts of the past that make up the diner’s interior. What’s a little more difficult to capture—and what Colin does best here—is highlight the intangible: the je ne sais quoi of the atmosphere that, along with George, Nina, and the Silver Crest, is the fourth character in this piece. “You could do worse than to age as the Silver Crest ages—no struggle, full acceptance,” writes Colin. “Once again, I find the Silver Crest a reprieve from something. Outside those doors, San Francisco teeters, democracy teeters, the ice caps teeter, sense itself teeters. . . . But here there’s no room for nonsense. You order your food, you eat your food.” With this piece, you might come for the food, but you’ll stay for the feeling. —KS

Audience Award

Here’s the piece our readers loved most this past week:

Finding beauty in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The marmot’s early wake-up call. A long-form comic on sinking prisons. An ebullient character with the power to manipulate TikTok. And the reasons for a good scare.

1. I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself

Zefyr Lisowski | Electric Lit | October 26, 2023 | 3,553 words

Apparently, this month marked the 49th anniversary of the seminal horror film Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (That odd-number-ness might explain why you haven’t been bombarded with oral histories, retrospectives, and inane listicles like “11 Times Leatherface Gave Glam-God Chic While Dismembering Hippies and We Can’t Stop Crying About It.”) I’ve never seen the movie, but that didn’t stop me from being mesmerized by Zefyr Lisowski’s essay about its outsized role in her life. Though the piece will linger with you, “haunting” is the wrong word here. Nothing about Lisowski’s prose is uncertain or vaporous; she shows the reader her scars from sentence one, and the next 3,500 words are equally stark and vulnerable. She came to Chain Saw in high school, a miserable adolescent desperate for the distraction of a watch-it-if-you-dare YouTube challenge. What she found was revelation: a brightness and beauty that helped her embrace her Southern roots, and ultimately her own self. “There are marks that are left on us, and there are marks we leave on ourselves, and I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between the two,” she writes. At multiple turns, she expresses a thought with such economy that it becomes nearly aphoristic, escaping the borders of an individual experience to become universal. That’s the mark of a great essay—whether you can stomach horror movies or not. —PR

2. The Broken Clock

David Gessner | Orion Magazine | October 11, 2023 | 1,997 words

I recently read that we’re in for an El Niño winter, which brings less precipitation and increases temperatures. I thought this was a cause for celebration—I’ll gladly take any relief from our brutal winters—until David Gessner helped me understand how global warming is altering the habits and habitats of birds and wildlife with his piece at Orion Magazine. “Consider the lowly marmot,” writes Gessner. (Up until this point, I had not considered the marmot at all other than being mildly amused at the screaming marmot meme, despite our recent move to its natural habitat.) All jokes aside, warmer winters cause marmots to emerge from hibernation earlier, before the green shoots they feed on sprout from the soil. “’The salad bar was open,’ is how Anthony Barnosky, a University of California paleoecologist, put it. ‘But now with warmer winters, they wake early and stumble out into a still snow-covered world. They starve.’” What I loved most about this piece—in addition to learning more about how habitats are stretching farther north—is how Gessner conveys that all is not doom and marmot gloom. Later hard frosts let marmots feed longer before hibernation, allowing them to put on more fat so that they’re better equipped to survive a shorter winter. “We humans have changed the basic cycles of the years. We have altered the clock of the world. . . .Noticing, it turns out, matters.” Now, if only we could turn back time. —KS

3. In Harm’s Way

Susie Cagle | The Marshall Project, in partnership with Grist | October 24, 2023

In the ’80s, a prison complex was constructed in Corcoran, a poor community in California’s Central Valley, in the dry Tulare lakebed. (Historically, Tulare Lake has been the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi.) The Department of Corrections convinced lawmakers to exempt the facility from environmental law. Fast-forward several decades, and the two prisons now house 8,000 people, the largest incarcerated population in the state. California’s very wet 2022-23 winter resulted in a record-high Sierra snowpack—great for drought conditions, but a threat to the state’s agricultural interior, bringing epic flooding to the region. In this engaging long-form comic, the first of its kind at The Marshall Project, Susie Cagle chronicles how decades-old decisions to hastily build the prisons has put thousands of incarcerated people at risk. (If you enjoy this piece, I also recommend Cagle’s illustrated Longreads feature about another rural Central Valley community, “After Water,” which offers a different angle on California’s climate and water crisis in a similarly engrossing way.) —CLR

4. Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era

Brendan I. Koerner | Wired | October 19, 2023| 6,959 words

Brendan I. Koerner’s splendid, exuberant piece took me a long time to read. For starters, it’s nearly 7,000 words—but then there are the links. So. Many. Rabbit holes. Although not one to usually click on every link on offer, after becoming engrossed in how Ursus Magana’s company, 25/7, elaborately manipulates algorithms to link music with TikTok videos, I needed to see the wrestler videos that launched YoungX777’s “Toxic” and the teens twerking to Syko’s “#BrooklynBloodPop!” (No, I was not previously familiar with these works.) Despite the time invested, I remained fascinated throughout this deep dive into the creator economy—a mystical world that Magana can weave to his will like a magician. (Probably less mysterious for those who didn’t grow up in an era where a mobile phone’s greatest wonder was Snake.) The musicians and content creators are a diverse collection, being pulled out into the light from behind their bedroom doors, but they still pale against Magana, whose backstory demonstrates true entrepreneurship in the face of adversity. His frenetic, joyful character is what repeatedly pulled me back in from the wilds of the TikTok video vortex. —CW

5. The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

Athena Aktipis, Coltan Scrivner | Scientific American | November 1, 2023 | 3,137 words

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a Halloween event. It was a big deal, with different haunted houses built in old farm buildings. As someone who jumps a mile if a piece of paper blows across my path, I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect—but my niece and her friend dragged me along. I’m not proud of how tightly I gripped the hands of those teens, or that I made them lead the way through rooms where witches and ghouls jumped out of the shadows (different teenagers, dressed up and trading their dignity for holiday money, but still terrifying). So why exactly did I do this to myself? Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner know. Their absorbing essay details how this is all a part of our evolutionary past. A morbid fascination with danger is widespread amongst all animals—we inspect threats to know how to face them in the future. I was subconsciously rehearsing for when a real witch came to whisk me away. (Spoiler: she’d get me.) The modern decline in risky play has even led to increased anxiety in children. Full of such intriguing facts, Aktipis and Scrivner’s exploration into the psychology behind the scare will keep you on your toes—and inspire you to go out for some proper frights this Halloween weekend.  —CW

Audience Award

Who won the most sets of eyes this week?