Rae Nudson | The Atavist Magazine |December 2023 | 1,950 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 146, “Damages.”

1.

Debra* had hoped that her medical nightmares were over. In 2009, she was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. The disease was estrogen positive, which meant that it was feeding on her reproductive hormones. After six months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, the cancer was declared in remission. To keep it that way, doctors put Debra on tamoxifen, a hormonal drug used as a prophylactic against certain types of breast cancer. She expected to be on it for about five years.

Debra has a wide smile, dimples, and thin, arched eyebrows. She likes high heels and she likes to talk. She used to work as a hairstylist, a job well suited to someone who falls easily into conversation with strangers. She is also a mom to two boys, and always wanted more kids. Patients on tamoxifen are advised against becoming pregnant; Debra, who was in her early forties when she started taking the drug, planned to conceive once she’d completed treatment.

Then, about halfway through her tamoxifen regimen, Debra got a letter in the mail with bad news: The results of her latest pap smear were abnormal. She had undergone the procedure, which involves scraping cells from the cervix, during a routine visit to a Veterans Affairs medical center near her home in Portsmouth, Virginia. (Debra was in the Air Force from 1988 to 1992.) An abnormal pap can indicate the presence of cancerous or precancerous cells; follow-up testing is usually recommended.

Debra knew that even with the tamoxifen, there was a risk that her cancer might come back, possibly in a part of her body other than her breasts; oncologists call this a distant recurrence. So she took the pap results seriously. When the VA referred her to two ob-gyns, Debra reached out to both. One had a monthslong waiting list, but the other had immediate availability. His name was Javaid Perwaiz. 

Dr. Perwaiz’s main practice was in a small redbrick building near a strip mall in the city of Chesapeake. The parking lot had 14 spaces, including one for handicapped drivers, and cars came and went in quick succession. Perwaiz had a reputation for working fast: An established patient could expect to arrive for an appointment and be back in their car in under 15 minutes. The waiting room was small, with a vaulted ceiling, a bank of windows, and walls painted a soothing mauve. Many of Perwaiz’s patients were Black women on Medicaid. Debra fit that profile.

When she met Perwaiz in July 2012, Debra felt confident about him as a doctor. He was in his early sixties and short, with a thick, well-groomed white mustache, bushy eyebrows, and a comb-over. During appointments he wore a white coat. He was matter-of-fact but not cold. He remembered details about his patients’ personal lives and asked about their loved ones.

According to Debra, after performing some tests, Perwaiz told her that she had precancerous cells on her cervix that would likely develop into cancer. He said that there was no drug she could take to stop that from happening. Given her history of breast cancer, he recommended a hysterectomy.

Debra was shocked and scared. She didn’t want to lose her ability to have more children. But she also wanted to live to see her sons grow up. After subsequent appointments with Perwaiz, during which she underwent additional tests, she agreed to have surgery, but said that she didn’t want her abdomen cut open. The doctor who performed the C-section during the birth of her first son had used a “beautiful subcutaneous suture” to close up the incision, resulting in a faint scar. “You couldn’t even tell that I’d ever had a surgery,” Debra told me. She wanted to keep her stomach the way it was. According to Debra, Perwaiz assured her that he could perform the surgery through her vagina; no abdominal incision would be required.

Debra trusted what Perwaiz told her. From their conversations, her understanding was that he would remove only her ovaries, because decreasing the estrogen in her body might diminish the risk of her cancer recurring. In fact, a hysterectomy by medical definition involves the removal of the uterus. But Debra didn’t know this going into surgery, because, she said, Perwaiz never explained it to her.  

On the morning of December 29, Debra arrived at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center and filled out the required paperwork for her procedure. One of the nurses was someone she knew from church, a friendly face. Then Debra was prepped for the operating room and given the sedative propofol. Hospital staff were wheeling her on a gurney down a hallway when she saw Perwaiz.

“What time do I need to tell my friend to come back and pick me up?” Debra asked him.

“That’s not the surgery you signed for,” she remembered Perwaiz replying.

She wasn’t sure what that meant. The propofol was making her sleepy. Then everything went dark.

When Debra woke up in a recovery room, she knew something was wrong. Groggily, she moved her hands to her stomach. She found tape covering an incision. Debra didn’t understand. She began to cry.

She was discharged the next day, and only then did it fully sink in: Perwaiz had performed an invasive surgery, slicing into her abdomen. Within a few days, Debra felt persistent, agonizing pains in her lower belly. The area also became swollen and tender. Debra was alone most of the time—her elder son had already moved out, and the younger one was in school during the day. She had trouble getting out of bed.

Debra called Perwaiz’s office for a prescription to help with the pain. When the medicine didn’t work, she called again. According to Debra, she spoke with Perwaiz directly. “Women all over the world go through this,” he told her. “You are just going to have to get used to the pain.” She was so out of it that she let the comment go. “I didn’t have the wherewithal to chew his head off,” she told me.  

One day a friend called to check on her and was alarmed to hear Debra cursing and not making sense. The friend drove to Debra’s house, and when nobody came to the door, she persuaded the landlord to open it. Inside, Debra was lying down; her skin was turning blue, and her stomach was so distended that she looked nine months pregnant. Her friend called 911, and an ambulance rushed Debra back to Chesapeake Regional.

Debra wondered if she was dying. In her head, she could hear a hymn her grandmother used to sing: 

I know it was the blood,
I know it was the blood,
I know it was the blood for me;
One day when I was lost
He died upon the cross,
I know it was the blood for me.

At the hospital, Debra learned that Perwaiz had removed more than her ovaries: Her uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes were gone too. A diagnostic scan showed that a large amount of fluid had built up in her abdomen, and labs indicated that she had severe acute renal failure. There was also a perforation in her bladder—one of six, she later learned, made during her surgery. She was in sepsis.

Debra remained in the hospital for several days. She slipped in and out of consciousness. At one point she thought she saw Perwaiz at the foot of her bed. He looked nervous to her; his hands were clasped. “He might have been praying, ‘Please live,’ ” Debra said.

She did live. She had to wear a catheter for several weeks, but she got better. The long recovery gave Debra time to think on what she wanted to do about the man who had hurt her. “I’m gonna get this motherfucker—that’s how I was feeling in my head,” she said. “You don’t want to mess with me. I got teeth. I spit sulfuric acid.”

She requested her medical records and was stunned to find discrepancies with what Perwaiz had said to her during appointments. Most glaringly, she didn’t see any mention of precancerous cells on her cervix; the tests Perwaiz performed on her had come back normal. “If I was normal,” Debra said, “why did I have a surgery?”

There were other inconsistencies. One form from an appointment described Debra complaining of back and pelvic pain, which she told me she never did. Another document dated the day before her surgery stated that she “insisted on having those ovaries removed through the abdominal wall incision and not vaginally,” and that the “consent obtained after entirely counseling the patient [was] for abdominal hysterectomy.” In fact, she had requested the opposite surgical approach, and she recalled no such conversation with Perwaiz; the only time she’d spoken with him in the lead-up to her procedure was in passing in the hospital hallway.

Debra was sure she had a malpractice case. She went to several lawyers, but none of them would take her on as a client. “So many men—man after man saying, ‘You had a decent amount of care, and that’s all you’re afforded,’ ” she said. Frustrated, she came up with a new plan: “I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to learn how to sue this bastard myself.’ ” (Perwaiz declined to comment for this story.)

Debra enrolled in a paralegal program at Tidewater Community College. She learned how to research case law, how to write briefs, and how to file a suit. She didn’t have an Internet connection at home, so she used a law library at a nearby university to access everything she needed. She meticulously highlighted key phrases in her medical records and made notes in graceful cursive. When requesting materials for her case from health care providers, she signed emails “respectfully,” but she was not sorry to bother anyone. She followed up. She was tenacious. To get anything done, she knew that she had to rely on herself. “I was now acutely aware that people can’t be trusted,” she said.

As it is in much of the U.S., the statute of limitations for malpractice in the state of Virginia is two years from the date of occurrence. Debra filed her suit on December 23, 2014, six days shy of the cutoff. She asked for $1.5 million in punitive damages and to be compensated for loss of enjoyment of life, loss of the ability to reproduce, and diminished sexual intimacy, as well as lost wages and medical expenses.

Someone told her to file the suit in state court, but Debra declined. She knew about the history of coerced sterilization in America, of doctors persuading women of color to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies or performing the surgeries against their will. She couldn’t help but see her case in that context. She believed that the suit belonged in federal court because Perwaiz had violated her most fundamental rights.

A judge disagreed. In January 2015, Debra was asked to provide a valid reason why hers should be a federal case, and not one decided by a lower court. She responded with documentation explaining her position, but that May her case was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. She appealed the decision, until one day she missed a filing deadline. According to Debra, she hadn’t received paperwork she needed to complete until the day before it was due, and there was no way she could get it to the court on time.

Just like that, her legal campaign to hold Perwaiz accountable was finished. But there were more patients like Debra, more women Perwaiz had injured. There were numerous dots waiting to be connected—someone just had to come along and do it.

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All through December, we’ve been featuring Longreads’ Best of 2023. Today, we close out this year’s Best of Longreads package with a list of every story that was chosen as No. 5 in our weekly Top 5 email. Number five stories can be humorous and lighthearted or even poignant and unexpected—an antidote to the week that was. The entire Best of Longreads package is a labor of love that’s our gift to you, the reader. Enjoy this trove of great reads when you need distraction from those holiday get-togethers.

— January —

Fighting the Tree

Davon Loeb | The Sun | January 2, 2023 | 2,678 words

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been mired in home repairs that rank somewhere south of Serious DIY but somewhere north of I Can Do This Without YouTube. Every time I cut a machine screw so that a new switchplate would fit, or replaced a toilet’s fill valve, I thought about my dad. Specifically, I thought about being 8 or 9 years old and standing with my dad while he embarked on those same types of repairs — me holding a handful of screws or tools, just trying to be helpful while he worked on whatever it was he was working on. I lost him a decade ago this year, but those memories have retained the same poignancy they had when my grief was fresh, and they came roaring back all over again when I read Davon Loeb’s essay in the latest issue of The Sun. Fathers aren’t easy, and neither are sons; when the two are constitutionally different, it only compounds the difficulty. “Give Dad a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and he could design a house,” Loeb writes. “Give me a pencil, a piece of paper, and a ruler, and I could draw our family.” This misalignment sets the stage for an episode that embodies nearly every competing facet of the father-son dynamic: pride and shame, validation and disappointment, love and fear. Yet, Loeb doesn’t write this to twang some hidden heartstring in the reader. Instead, he sinks back into that moment from his own childhood in order to square the circle of fraught kinship: No matter how much we may clash, it’s the moments of peace that stay with us. —PR

Getting Lost in the World’s Largest Stack of Menus

Adam Reiner | Taste | January 1, 2023 | 2,243 words

“Menus provide a window into history, a vital connection to our foodways,” writes Adam Reiner in this fun read about restaurant menus. Frank E. Buttolph, a volunteer archivist at the New York Public Library, amassed 25,000 menus from around the world before she died in 1924. Today, the NYPL’s Buttolph Collection numbers 40,000, dating back to 1843, with most menus from between 1890 and 1910. What was served in the first Japanese and French restaurants in New York? What dishes were considered expensive or high-end or adventurous in the early 1900s? The collection’s menus, writes Reiner, are sources of inspiration for today’s chefs, researchers, and the simply (epi)curious. The scanned ones featured in his story are lovely to look at, and make you want to visit the NYPL yourself so you can pore over these pages. In our era of restaurant apps and QR codes, Reiner has also opened my eyes to the value of a physical, printed menu; I’ve always enjoyed reading the descriptions of dishes and cocktails, but after reading his piece, I realize how much a menu can also illuminate the historical and cultural context of the food they describe. —CLR

Jelly Is Ready for Its Redemption Arc

Bettina Makalintal | Eater | January 10, 2023 | 1,818 words

“I predict that we are on the threshold of a new aspic-forward aesthetic,” is something I would not have expected to read in my lifetime. I admit it. I’m a dessert fusspot. I have strong opinions: I love sticky toffee pudding and chocolate cake. The only acceptable pies are apple and pumpkin. Custard is bland. Tapioca is revolting. But Jell-O tops the many desserts on my “hard no” list. Way too squirmy! It’s always important to revisit your beliefs from time to time. (I guess.) Could Jell-O become a possibility for me? (Highly unlikely!) “I think that Jell-O, in a way, can be terrifying and delicious at the same time. There’s a little discussion in the book about the sublime: things that are really scary, but they kind of attract you anyway. It’s things that are in the liminal space between what’s acceptable and what’s really bizarre, and people find that fun from an aesthetic perspective.” —KS

For Humpbacks, Bubbles Can Be Tools

Doug Perrine | Hakai Magazine | December 20, 2022 | 1,500 words

It’s well known that many animals use tools to aid feeding and other tasks of life. Think: otters floating on their backs, cracking shells with rocks. You’d think it would be hard for whales to use tools, but as Doug Perrine reports at Hakai Magazine, humpbacks use what’s available to them — air and water — to form bubbles for a variety of activities. “I’m tempted to describe the air in a humpback’s lungs as a Swiss army knife because I’ve seen whales do so many different things with it,” he wrote. “It is not actually a tool collection though, but a storehouse of raw construction material with which the whale can fashion a variety of tools. Lacking free fingers and opposable thumbs, whales are unable to create and use tools in the same way as humans, but reveal their intelligence through the manner in which they utilize other body parts for tool production and use.” —KS

— February —

The Dirt on Pig-Pen

Elif Batuman | Astra Magazine | October 27, 2022 | 2,245 words

I’m still sad that Astra Magazine is no more. Maybe it’s because I’m seeing so much fervor for bot-written text lately (oh hi, ChatGPT) and I worry about its mind-boggling potential to pollute the internet with pap left unchecked, not to mention the repercussions of inevitable misuse. Thankfully Astra remains online for now, which allows you to read Elif Batuman’s terrific deep dive on the Peanuts character Pig-Pen. Through Pig-Pen, Batuman explores what Charles Schultz had to say about American values in the 1950s and beyond, most notably, commentary on the darker side of society and relationships. But, in wearing his messiness with pride, is Pig-Pen perhaps the most authentic Peanut of all? “Everyone, it turns out, has a Dirty version of themselves: mussed, unkempt, scribbled over. This feels true.” —KS

When Food is the Only Narrative We Consume

Angie Kang | Catapult | February 8, 2023 | 2,146 words

Food is an essential part of culture, and an accessible way into understanding it. (Exhibits A and B: See the Pixar animated short film Bao, or nearly any account of an Asian American child’s embarrassing “lunchbox moment” at school.) But Angie Kang urges storytellers to create more varied and nuanced stories about Chinese culture and the wider Asian American experience — like Fresh Off the Boat and Everything Everywhere All At Once — that reach beyond food. “We don’t stop living in between meals,” she writes. Kang’s resonant words and fantastic artwork combine in a delightful illustrated essay about narrative and representation. “I’m just hungry for something new,” she writes. I am as well, and with this fresh, inspired piece, she delivers. —CLR

Children of the Ice Age

April Nowell | Aeon | February 13, 2023 | 4,400 words

April Nowell opens this piece with a delightful story about a Palaeolithic family taking their kids and dogs to a cave to do some mud painting, which feels like the modern-day equivalent of exhausted parents taking their offspring to McDonald’s and handing them a coloring book. I was instantly entranced. Such stories are rare, partly because evidence of children (with their small, fragile bones) is tricky for archaeologists to locate, but also because of assumptions that children were insignificant to the narrative. Nowell explains how, with the help of new archaeological approaches, this is changing, and the children of the Ice Age are getting a voice. I am ready to listen, so bring on these tales of family excursions and novices struggling to learn the craft of tool sculpting (as Nowell explains, “each unskilled hit would leave material traces of their futile and increasingly frustrated attempts at flake removal”). A Palaeolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology, Nowell is an expert in this topic, but her vivid writing and human-based approach makes her fascinating field accessible to all. —CW

The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing

Vauhini Vara | WIRED | February 23, 2023 | 7,267 words

It’s a worthy concept: hyper-local Facebook community groups connecting those in need of gently used items with their owners, a practice that offers environmental benefits in reducing waste with reuse, as well as a chance to thumb your nose at capitalism. But what happened to the Buy Nothing movement founded by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller, which by 2022 had expanded to 6 million members in 60 countries? Vauhini Vara discovers that to be able to propagate your values, sometimes you need to accept the compromises of free community access at scale or risk the wrath of the community you created. “The truth was that turning Buy Nothing into a business had come with far more expenses than revenues,” Vara writes. “If Facebook profited from Buy Nothing members’ activities, it also covered many of their costs. With the launch of the app, the resources that came for free with Facebook — software development, computing power, visibility — were suddenly Clark and Rockefeller’s responsibility.” —KS

— March —

Can AI Perfect the IPA?

Tony Rehagen | Experience Magazine | February 15, 2023 | 1,267 words

Is AI fatigue a thing? Because I’ve felt it for some time. Yes, there are noteworthy AI stories worth reading right now, like Ted Chiang on blurry JPEGs or the piece on drumming that Peter had recommended. But there are only so many stories about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence that I can absorb, so I’ve started to tune out. But when I came upon this story’s headline earlier this week, I couldn’t help but laugh — and decided to dive in and just surrender to it all: A data-driven IPA brewed in Australia, fine-tuned using consumer feedback collected through QR codes on cans. Genetically modified hops in the drought-plagued U.S. Pacific Northwest. An AI company ridiculously (perfectly?) called Deep Liquid. In this ultimately fun and timely read, Tony Rehagen reports on the trend of craft breweries harnessing technology, data, and research to refine their recipes. Let’s raise a glass to hops and bots. —CLR

An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins

Cheryl Katz | Smithsonian | February 14, 2023 | 3,125 words

Every year Bloomberg Businessweek publishes what it calls the Jealousy List, featuring articles that authors wish they’d written or that editors wish they’d assigned. If I were to have my own jealousy list for 2023, this piece by Cheryl Katz would be on it. I love it so much. Seriously, drop what you’re doing and read it. Katz’s story is about a village in Iceland where, every year, residents young and old work together to save baby puffins, also known as “pufflings.” The wee birds that look like they’re wearing tuxedos often get lost leaving their burrows and struggle to fly out to sea as they’re supposed to. Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carries them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate.” Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carry them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate. As climate change does its worst to the earth, ushering pufflings into the sky has never been more important. I’m jealous I didn’t get to write this story. Or maybe I’m just mad I’m not in the Puffling Patrol. They get to do good for the world by communing with adorable baby birds. How often is something so essential also so joyful? BRB, Googling flights to Iceland. —SD

‘It Changed the World’: 50 Years On, the Story of Pong’s Bay Area Origins

Charles Russo | SFGATE | March 9, 2023 | 2,809 words

Charles Russo tracks the beginnings of the modern video game industry, which has its roots in a “scrappy Silicon Valley startup” now known as Atari. Its founders, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, had previously created the world’s first coin-operated video game, a futuristic yellow machine called Computer Space. Under Atari, they developed Pong, a simple yet engrossing arcade game that became an instant hit with the American public when it was released in March 1973 — and is now a beloved classic. This is a delightful dive into the video game industry’s “big-bang moment,” accompanied by fun images from the ’70s. My favorite is a photograph of a massive retro Atari arcade game at the Powell Street BART station in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by people with bell-bottoms. —CLR

I Can Feel God’s Presence in This Portable Toilet

Harrison Scott Key | The Bitter Southerner | March 14, 2023 | 5,200 words

Last Friday night, I had two pints of Guinness and went home, content with a St. Patrick’s Day well celebrated. Apparently, I know nothing about how to observe the feast. Harrison Scott Key enlightened me in this delightful essay about the drunken debauchery that is the holiday’s annual parade in Savannah, Georgia. I loved his raucous account of trying to claim a spot for the parade: Akin to the Sacking of Constantinople, “insults and elbows and fits [are] thrown” until everyone settles into their position, dons a green feather boa, and makes merry. The prose is so vivid you can almost hear the noise, touch the sweaty crowds, and taste the booze. I could also feel the camaraderie — over the years of attending the parade, Scott Key finds lasting friendships. A transplant to Savannah, and initially lonely and unable to find his place in a new community, this annual tradition helps Scott Key to discover his people. After all, as he writes, “it’s easier to love people you’ve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning.” —CW

America Doesn’t Know Tofu

George Stiffman | Asterisk Magazine | March 9, 2023 | 3,278 words

Having been vegetarian for the last couple of years, I have eaten many a chickpea and a lentil, but not much in the way of tofu. My efforts at cooking with it generally result in a sad, limp affair that has more than a passing resemblance to pond sludge. But this delightful essay has single-handedly turned my tofu thoughts around, with luscious descriptions that pour off the page and make you want to reach in and grab a piece of the joyfully named “exploding-juice tofu.” And if exploding juice is not your thing, fear not, for there are more than 20 other types of tofu in the world, all with “different mouthfeels.” I was as surprised as you. George Stiffman briefly touches on how the perceived value of vegetarian food differs between East and West — but for the most part, this essay is unashamedly just about how good this soybean curd can be, and is no poorer for it. (So good that Stiffman waits for a tofu teacher outside a Chinese brothel at 4 a.m. while “jotting down tofu goals.”) I have a new reverence for my pond sludge. —CW

— April —

How Cookie Jars Capture American Kitsch

Angela Burke | Eater | March 24, 2023 | 1,533 words

At an early age, I had mastered a critical skill in our house: lifting the lid on our humongous cookie jar to pilfer a treat, then replacing that lid in complete silence. As a cookie burglar, I was an apple that hadn’t fallen far from its tree. My Dad was always there first. And when my mom complained about dwindling stock, dad pointed the finger directly at me and my brother. (The nerve!) That cookie jar (a brown ceramic wooden stump with a creepy, grinning gray squirrel on top) sits on their kitchen counter to this day. At Eater, in this love letter to the kooky cookie jar, Angela Burke introduces us to artist and vintage ceramic cookie jar maker Hazy Mae. Her custom jars, in homage to Dolly Parton, Andy Warhol, Elvis, and Madonna (among others), can run $800 or more. That may feel steep, but can you really put a price on a vessel that could eventually contain fond memories, too? —KS

Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul.

Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words

Despite being on Twitter for almost 15 years — a number that’s shameful for multiple reasons — I’ve never actually followed the shitposter extraordinaire known as Dril. I didn’t need to. His absurdism was retweeted into my feed nearly every day. Sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d shake my head, but over time two things became clear. The first was that whoever was behind the blurry Jack Nicholson photo had created a wholly unique persona. The second was that this persona somehow distilled Twitter’s worst impulses into a single parodic voice: bombastic, utterly un-self-aware, and so in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger effect that you couldn’t help but marvel. Dril, in one anonymous form or another, has been written about before, but he’s never been truly profiled; that first falls to Nate Rogers, who managed both to score some face time with him and to use that as the foundation for a long, well-reported piece about the man and his legacy. Even if you’ve never heard of Dril (in which case I commend you, again for multiple reasons), Rogers’ piece functions as an incisive assessment of how we think about art and creativity, and perhaps even why so many of us have yet to fully divorce that godforsaken bird site. When a character as good as Dril exists, you don’t need the other 279. —PR

During a Pandemic, Walk

David Jenkins | High Country News | April 17, 2023 | 1,343 words

When I run or walk alone outdoors I almost always listen to music, a podcast, or an audiobook. In this thoughtful piece for High Country News, David Jenkins remarks upon passing a runner while on a 10-hour walk in western Colorado, the man’s ears “clogged with headphones.” The word clogged stopped me short. How true that even in solitary pursuits we compromise the peace we seek by inviting others’ words into our heads. “I puzzled over the need to listen to something other than wind and raven, the scuttle of a lizard, the skittering of small rocks underfoot,” he writes. Less is so much more, and while you’ll revel in soaking up every sight and sound the desert has to offer, the greatest beauty of Jenkins’ piece is that because he’s fully present during his walk, you can’t help but be, too. —KS

Inside Superiority Burger: The Buzziest Restaurant in America

Brett Martin | GQ | April 26, 2023 | 3,834 words

Most writing about food focuses on the output. Some of it focuses on the people. A bit of it focuses on technique. But not enough of it teases out the synesthesia of a night in a restaurant: the adrenaline, the prep, the community, the taste. The vibe of eating, as much as I hate to use that word. Brett Martin’s piece shrugs off those limitations on its way to being the most visceral look inside a restaurant since The Bear. Nominally a profile of punk-drummer-turned-chef Brooks Headley and his vegetarian burger joint, it manages to capture the twin high-wire acts of executing and eating inside New York City’s restaurant of the moment. Martin veers from evocative tasting notes (“[s]omething about the feathery sheets of tofu skin, layered on a squishy hero roll with broccoli rabe and a spiced chickpea paste that evokes Vietnamese pate, flips the same feral switch in my chest as does eating, say, andouillette, the most offaly of French sausages”) to capturing Headley at full speed on a packed Thursday night (“[o]ften, he’ll bustle in one direction, only to pull up short as though he’s forgotten what he was doing, and then run off in another”) to some shrewd commentary on the punk ethos and food gentrification. It feels, in the very best way, like you’re a drone being piloted through Superiority Burger during a dinner rush. Whether it makes you hungry is beside the point; it’s a feast of its own. —PR

— May —

Hive Mind

Celia Bell | Texas Highways | May 2, 2023 | 2,847 words

Celia Bell’s warm descriptions make bee society sound lovely, with her bees visiting “flowers or the quiet creek, or, on the hottest days, hang[ing] in clusters like elderberries on the outside of the hive, waiting for a breath of cool air.” The pleasure she finds in their world is not taken for granted. After entering beekeeping during the pandemic, Bell is conscious of how it grounds her and keeps her present. A video game fan, she draws thoughtful comparisons to the rendering of the natural world in gaming. While appreciating the artistry of game developers, she feels outside of her body in their virtual landscapes, whereas sweating in an apiary her body calls out its needs, forcing her to connect with her physical self. Although online life can creep in — a buzzing phone is never far away — the bees open up “the wonder and specificity of the world.” This reflective essay will make you consider which reality you choose to spend your time in. —CW

How Two Friends Sparked L.A.’s Sushi Obsession — and Changed the Way America Eats

Daniel Miller | Los Angeles Times | May 3, 2023 | 3,855 words

In 1965, Noritoshi Kanai and Harry Wolff Jr. were on a trip to Japan, looking for an interesting food product to import to the U.S. Instead, one of their dinners in Tokyo led them to another idea: sushi. Daniel Miller recounts how the two men brought the Japanese cuisine to Los Angeles, at a time when the city felt primed for something new. Which restauranteurs and chefs were the first to add sushi to their menus? When were the sushi bar and the California roll invented? Accompanied by lovely illustrations by Yuko Shimuzu, this is a fun piece of regional foodie history — one that ultimately explores whether food can truly bring different people and cultures together. —CLR

The Dave Matthews Guide to Living and Dying

Alex Pappademas | GQ | May 18, 2023 | 5,777 words

I’m not sure I ever had an opinion about Dave Matthews. I knew how I felt about his music — which is probably best left for another time, though “no thanks” pretty much sums it up — but I also think I thought he was Jack Johnson. (White guys with guitars, man; I don’t know what to tell you.) After reading Alex Pappademas’ stellar profile, though, I finally do have an opinion, and that opinion is that the world needs a few more people like Dave Matthews. Pappademas has always been able to walk the razor-wire tightrope of inserting just enough of himself to leaven a story without pushing it into This Famous Person Is Just an Excuse For My Thoughts territory, and that talent is on full display here. Even beyond the effortlessly entertaining writing, it’s a profile of the type we don’t see enough of these days: a multi-day/location/activity hang in which a rapport grows and a subject’s personality emerges. There’s lots here about Matthews’ understanding of who he is and how the world sees him, of course, but just as much about the way he moves through the world and the joy with which he approaches life and its inevitable end. Regardless of how you ever felt about DMB, you’ll leave this one feeling a little bit changed for the better. Which is probably exactly how Matthews would want it. —PR

The “Top Chef” Oral History: “How Is This Going Off the Rails on Day One?”

Mikey O’Connell | The Hollywood Reporter | May 18, 2023 | 5,573 words

In our 14 years as a couple, there is only one TV show that my husband and I have watched together consistently, and it’s Top Chef. (He leaves Outlander to me; I pass on Painting with John.) We’re not rabid fans like the people who, as this oral history of the series details, paid to go on a cruise with the hosts and several popular contestants and judges. “What really stayed with me is a lady, incredibly inebriated, running down the hallway to me,” season 10 winner Kristen Kish recalls. “I assume she was going to hug me but ended up fully licking my right cheek.” However, we never miss an episode of the show, which offers a window into the diversity and difficulties of the culinary world. Top Chef prompted me to master the art of risotto — a work in progress — and I’ve never been so excited to tell my husband, well, pretty much anything as I was to announce that I’d seen Padma working out at our gym while she was filming the Washington, D.C., season. This is all to say that I loved THR’s oral history, which is making the rounds online as the show’s 20th season wraps up. The season, which features contestants plucked from Top Chef‘s various international productions, is a testament to the show’s cultural impact. In related news, thank goodness producers didn’t go with the alternate title Grillers in the Mist. —SD

— June —

The Strange Survival of Guinness World Records

Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | May 25, 2023 | 5,775 words

I grew up watching people break world records. Not because I am from a family whose skillset includes spinning basketballs on toothbrushes or sticking spoons to their chest (actual records), but because I watched a show called Record Breakers. It was all very wholesome: Enthusiastic presenters oversaw members of the public trying to earn a place in the book of Guinness World Records. The upbeat theme song confidently declared that Dedication is all you need. Perhaps it is. In this piece, Imogen West-Knights writes that her failure to beat the record for the longest time standing on one leg blindfolded “was not because I was incapable of doing it. It was because I didn’t want it enough.” She meets plenty of people who do want it (and want it a lot), her delightful account peppered with humans who have caught the most marshmallows fired from a homemade catapult in one minute or jumped the most consecutive cars on a pogo stick. But in recent years, things at Guinness World Records have become a little less joyful and a little more corporate. West-Knights explains how GWR Consultancy now helps brands to find a way to break a record—for a fee. (Perhaps unsurprising in the TikTok age.) But even if record-breaking is not what it once was, it is lovely to know that diehard record-breakers are still out there on their pogo sticks “celebrating achievement in the abstract.” —CW

Cat-astrophe

Carrie Arnold | Noēma | June 6, 2023 | 3,186 words

Let me preface this by saying I am both a cat person and a dog person. That said, cats are assholes. That’s okay! It’s part of their charm. They’re loving, yes, but they’re also haughty and destructive and give approximately half a damn about your feelings or possessions. Carrie Arnold allows as much when she sets out her own felinophilic bonafides in her Noēma piece. Yet, even she, a woman who calls cats “the only phenomenon on Earth that could lure me out of bed before sunrise,” was surprised to learn of the havoc they wreak on the natural world. In the U.S. alone, as many as 80 million unowned cats (and another 20ish million pet cats with outdoor privileges) present a legitimate existential threat to birds, plants, and other wildlife. The story, for all its essayistic tendencies, focuses on the rift between conservationists and cat defenders—and also on the hypocrisy lurking in the way we think about outdoor cats. We shun the peaceful “free dogs” of India, yet we don’t give a second thought to the cat with a bird in its mouth (nor do we realize that for every mouth-bird we see, many others have been ravaged out of sight). Then again, as Arnold points out, “the problem with cats has nothing to do with cats at all. The issue is a fundamentally human problem.” We’re so busy marking our own territory, it seems, we don’t think about the responsibility of pet stewardship. Bob Barker was right all along. —PR

Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag

Alexander Wells | European Review of Books | April 19, 2023 | 3,551 words

Shared language is about communication, for sure, but as Alexander Wells notes in the European Review of Books, it’s also about identity and belonging. Sometimes, even understanding the latest slang makes you feel in-the-know, right!?!? (Not at all fond of how “right” has become the latest way to enthusiastically agree, but I digress.) As an editor of an English-language monthly published in Berlin, Wells is fascinated by ever-evolving common language usage in Germany, rife with combined English and German words cut like butter into flour to form something new and sometimes amusing, but always full of meaning. “German social media loves to mock awful Denglisch marketing attempts,” he writes. “But when the bilingual puns are good, they’re good—and enhanced by the thrill of belonging. I love this one billboard ad for classic indie radio that reads Everybody hörts (« everyone listens to it »), and I love it not only because I like the pun, but because I feel a surge of pride that I’m in on the joke, that maybe I do really speak German.” I came for the appreciation of evolving language and stayed for the pun of it. —KS

Is the Army’s New Tactical Bra Ready for Deployment?

Patricia Marx | The New Yorker | June 19, 2023 | 3,735 words

Who wouldn’t be grabbed by this title (combined with its cartoon illustration of a female soldier hanging from the air by her bra straps)? I certainly was, and Patricia Marx delivers on the promise of fun with her slightly tongue-in-cheek account of all things female military uniform. I could not help but envision Edna Mode (superhero fashion designer from The Incredibles) as Marx heads into the Design Pattern Protype Shop at the Soldier’s Centre in Massachusetts. After all, the designers she meets are in “chic black civvies,” there are areas designated to the Tropics and to the Arctic, and projects “have included a uniform that can change color and one that would enable troops to leap over twenty-foot walls.” These projects make a fire-resistant bra seem a touch tame, but the designers are as earnest about this brassiere as they are reluctant to let Marx squeeze herself into a prototype. (Spoiler: She persuades them.) Marx intermixes her snoop around the center with a deep dive into the history of military uniforms—which is surprisingly fascinating, full of bizarre (and sexist) tidbits such as the fact that in 1943 “[t]he government asked Elizabeth Arden to concoct a lipstick to match the red piping on women’s Marine Corps uniforms.” Neither clothes nor the military usually captures my attention, but I am glad I got sucked into this piece: A thoroughly entertaining read. —CW

Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement

Ava Kofman | ProPublica and The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words

It’s easy to think that “men trying to upgrade their dongs” is a journalism cheat code of sorts. Having written about them myself many years ago, I can assure you that it’s not. Pitfalls abound. Tone is everything. Jokes are easy; reserve is hard. (So is avoiding double entendres.) Yet, Ava Kofman manages to thread every needle in her stunning examination of the state of penile-enlargement procedures, which focuses primarily on issues surrounding the popular Penuma implant. She writes compassionately about the patients, not dismissing the complex psychological situations that led them to pursue surgery. She writes unblinkingly about the doctor who popularized the procedure, and whose practice seems at times to operate with all the care of a 30-minute oil change joint—and about the surgeon who “was doing such brisk business repairing Penuma complications that he’d relocated his practice from Philadelphia to an office down the street.” And speaking of unblinking, I dare you not to wince as she plays fly on the wall during an implantation; you may never hear the phrase “inside out” the same way again. This story may have drawn you in with its imagined salaciousness, but it delivers something far better: truth. —PR

— July —

Meet the Psychedelic Boom’s First Responders

Chris Colin | Wired | June 29, 2023 | 2,924 words

Recent psychedelics coverage tends to focus on four primary categories. There are the drugs’ benefits and/or dangers, as well as stories focusing on their creators and wielders: those who use them to help people and those who seek to profit from their use. Chris Colin’s fascinating Wired feature skirts that tetrad, instead tracing the evolving norms around supporting a person when their inward journey goes to dark places. From the opening graf, you know it’s going to be a fun read: “Everything was insane and fine. The walls had begun to bend, the grain in the floorboards was starting to run. Jeff Greenberg’s body had blown apart into particles, pleasantly so. When he closed his eyes, chrysanthemums blossomed.” Using Greenberg’s trip, his own psilocybin experience, and a solid dose of cosmic-cowboy history, Colin shows how the way we respond to a person’s “psychic distress” speaks volumes about how we respond to one another in general. That we’re in the midst of a psychonautics surge is not surprising; that we’re responding to the moment with care and common sense is. —PR

Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job

Willa Paskin | The New York Times Magazine | July 11, 2023 | 6,671 words

After the barrage of Barbie-related content that has preceded Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming film, I was not sure I was ready for another 6,000 words on the subject. Luckily, I succumbed and read Willa Paskin’s thoughtful discussion with Greta Gerwig on the Barbie film she is bemused she was allowed to make. Paskin gets why she was: “[T]he fizzy marriage of filmmaker and material would break through the cacophony of contemporary life and return a retirement-age hunk of plastic to the zeitgeist.” Smart, Mattel. (And the snippets of the film Paskin describes do sound pretty good.) But what I most enjoyed was the reporting that went beyond the film. Is Barbie a feminist, or really, really not? Why did her creator, Ruth Handler, refuse to allow Barbie to have a child? How did Mattel reinvent Barbie in 2015? Read and find out. As someone who grew up with classic Barbie—the one whose proportions meant she wouldn’t be able to stand up in real life—I was intrigued to learn about her evolution. But as evolved as she may now be, this remains my favorite quote from the piece: “A psychological study found that after playing with Barbies, girls thought themselves less capable of various careers than they did after playing with a control Mrs. Potato Head.” Go, Mrs. Potato Head. —CW

How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words

I defy you not to squirm as you read Melissa Johnson’s account of her Guatemalan trek. Her visceral descriptions conjure up the sticky, itchy, sweaty reality of the jungle until you feel enveloped by it; a written Jumanji, if you will. The only romance here lies in the purpose of the trek: A marriage at El Mirador, the ruins of a Mayan city. (The ultimate in an inconvenient destination wedding.) Ten friends attend, and each struggles on the trek, but only Johnson gets bitten on the vagina by a tick, an incident she describes with as much eloquence as she does the wedding ceremony. It’s fun and funny but also an honest reflection on aging and lost time—not to mention a brutally effective reminder to remember bug repellant spray on your next jungle trip. —CW

A Funeral for Fish and Chips: Why are Britain’s Chippies Disappearing?

Tom Lamont | The Guardian | July 20, 2023 | 5,276 words

I first came to this piece because of my own love of fish-and-chips, but also because I knew I’d find a parade of aggressively British-sounding eatery names. In that, I wasn’t disappointed. But I also found something unexpectedly tragic, and unexpectedly resolute. Over the course of a year, Tom Lamont frequented “chippies” around the U.K., concentrating on Scotland’s East Neuk of Fife—a coastal area jutting out of the land between Edinburgh and Dundee, and by many accounts the world’s preeminent purveyor of the meal. When he began, supply-chain issues and soaring energy prices had already driven the industry to the edge of disaster. By the time his year was up, things had gotten markedly worse. Yet, Lamont’s elegy is suffused with love: his love for the “paradoxical richness without grossness” that marks a great fish and chips meal; villagers’ love for the stalwart shops and shopkeepers in their communities; even the friers’ and fishers’ love for the tradition. “Fishing is a serious matter here,” Lamont writes. “Fish and chips is a serious meal.” And as shop after shop closes, from the Lowford Fish Bar to Jack Spratt’s Superior to Jackson’s Chippie, each meal takes on even more weight. It’s a microcosm. A metaphor. And Lamont’s piece unpacks it all deftly, making sure you can take it away and digest it on your own time. Hopefully by the seaside. —PR

— August —

‘I Didn’t Kill My Wife!’ — An Oral History of ‘The Fugitive’

Andy Greene | Rolling Stone | July 29, 2023 | 12,243 words

If you’ve watched The Fugitive more times than you can count—and let’s face it, you have—you probably think of the 1993 movie as a perfectly crafted thriller. Not so much, it turns out! As Andy Greene’s oral history makes clear, the classic result belies the seat-of-the-pants execution. A star who was convinced the film would tank his career. A screenplay that never got finished. An ensemble actor who constantly found ways to maximize his screen time. A cast member who fell out after most of the movie had already been shot (and, consequently, a janky fake beard). A climax that was plotted on set. Dialogue that, seemingly more often than not, came straight from the ever-fizzing brain of Tommy Lee Jones. As much as I usually despise the word, this story officially qualifies as “rollicking.” Harrison Ford may not have participated, but Greene’s reporting ensures that his presence is still felt, whether laughing over the movie’s impending dud status or inviting Sela Ward to improv their scenes together on the fly. At this rate, every movie is going to get an oral history on every major anniversary, and I regret to inform you that next year marks 30 years since Ernest Goes to School and 3 Ninjas Kick Back. Then again, as long as those inevitable pieces aim to replicate the good vibes and rich details of this one, there’s no such thing as too many. —PR

Beirut, at Sunset

Tamara Saade | The Delacorte Review & Literary Hub | August 3, 2023 | 3,971 words

When a disaster strikes affecting thousands, the only way you can possibly begin to understand the toll is to learn the stories of survivors. On August 4th, 2020, 218 were killed and 7,000 injured in an ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut. Through personal accounts, and as a way to confront her own trauma over the event, Tamara Saade bears witness to those that were there. “I had thought that telling the stories of other people would make writing about August fourth easier for me,” she writes. “But I came to see that it was as hard, if not harder, to do justice to these people and their stories of that day.” In this beautiful braided essay, Saade processes her own thoughts, reactions, and feelings, alongside those of the citizens she profiles in the aftermath of the explosions. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, Saade’s measured prose makes cogent the post-blast chaos and confusion, creating order out of disorder, in a bold attempt to find peace where once was pandemonium. —KS

Epiphany at the Y

Diane Mehta | Virginia Quarterly Review | June 12, 2023 | 4,236 words

I love to swim. Put me in front of a body of water and I will want to jump in it—temperature be damned. The feeling of a new silky texture rushing to envelop your skin. The silence of submerging. The sudden weightlessness of heavy limbs. However, not all swimming has equal majesty. Give me endless wild splashing in a sea or a lake, never the confusing etiquette of public pool lane-swimming. As I read this beautiful essay, I nodded to Diane Mehta’s frustration at swimming in the slow lane of her local YMCA pool. Why was a woman touching her foot? Why was another woman performing cartwheels and ballet steps? But Mehta keeps on going. Every. Single. Day. You will root for her as she learns to swim freestyle for the first time, and feel for her as she comes to grips with middle age and her new, less cooperative body. She swims until she “fell in love with the woman who cartwheeled down the lane, the stalwart silver-haired man who strode in with deliberation, [and] the older lady who gravitated forward like a Galapagos turtle.” And she swims until she also loves her own body again. I think I need to give lane-swimming another chance. —CW

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Werner Herzog | The New Yorker | August 21, 2023 | 3,482 words

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Every Man From Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog reflects on his time spent in Pennsylvania’s westernmost city. I’ve watched Herzog’s films, but this was my first experience of him conjuring pictures from a page. Unsurprisingly, he is very good at it: a keen eye for detail, astute character observation, and the ability to tell a good yarn make this a riveting piece. His prose knocks up another notch when he meets the Franklins, a family that takes him in during his studies at Duquesne University. His love for them is apparent in the warm descriptions of the hustle and bustle of the busy household, complete with twins, grannies, a dog, and a failed rock musician named Billy, who would only emerge from bed in the afternoon, “stark naked, stretching pleasurably.” Throughout, Herzog notes inspiration for his films—fascinating tidbits that included the dancing chickens in Stroszek deriving from a hallucination while traveling from Mexico with hepatitis. He can’t resist a bit of name-dropping and grandiosity, as might be expected, but these well-crafted scenes more than compensate.  —CW

— September —

The Evolution of the Hip-Hop Hunk

Clover Hope | Pitchfork | September 6, 2023 | 2,781 words

My wife’s in love with Method Man. Why shouldn’t she be? Dude is … very attractive. I mean, that’s just science. Besides, we’re all afforded celebrity crushes, especially those that took root in our younger years. Clover Hope was in love with Method Man too, but she was also in love with LL Cool J, DMX, Ja Rule, and Nelly, just to name a few—and in plotting her own life of crushes against the arc of hip-hop’s evolution, she elucidates how sexuality became an indispensable marketing ploy for male artists. Sometimes that entered problematic waters, as when Tupac grew into sex symbol. But times change, and when Hope surveys the present landscape, she sees little that gets her heart racing. Some of that is age, maybe, but much of it is archetype: When you’re the dominant cultural aesthetic on Planet Earth, the commercial behemoths need to flatten and trope-ify you any way possible. So we don’t have Andre 3000s anymore; instead, we have Drakes and Jack Harlows. Besides, female artists have come along and cornered the market on sexual fantasy, and queer artists have spun and subverted the the gaze as well. (“A single second of a Megan Thee Stallion Instagram workout video is worth a million and one Drake gym mirror selfies,” she writes.) This piece trades on looking backward, but Hope’s genius is in nudging our expectations—and our appetites—forward. —PR

“I Shall Not Be Moved”: Inside a New York City Sumo Wrestling Club

Jackson Wald | GQ | September 13, 2023 | 2,725 words

When you first meet James Grammer, the central character of this underdog sports tale, you’d be forgiven for thinking something along the lines of this again? The seeming disconnect of a white sumo wrestler, or any athlete in a sport that tradition (or racism) has deemed “not theirs,” has fueled many a glib fish-out-of-water piece. Thankfully, Jackson Wald’s story fully ignores that trope, and Grammer becomes one of the most interesting people I met this week. While sumo has grown in the U.S. over the past few years, it’s still a curiosity; when Grammer and his fellow enthusiasts began practicing in a Brooklyn park, they had to deal with onlookers asking to join or even betting on their matches. Grammer wants to be a champion, but the charm of his story lies less in his quest for greatness than in his human complexity. Before a match, most sumos think about their opponents’ weakness. Not Grammer. “As a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism,” Wald writes, “he believes in a series of deities, including ones that are fierce and wrathful, and that as he’s staring his opponent directly in the eyes, he imagines he and his opponent as two forearm hairs on one of the evil deities, blowing against each other in the wind.” Yes, you’ll find the hallmarks of a good niche sports piece—a giant boa constrictor, a guy who seems to want to be a samurai, Wald sparring with the 340-found Grammer to predictable results—but it’s Grammer himself you’ll remember, and particularly the man he is outside the dohyo. —PR

Revisit 51 Years of Giant Pandas at the National Zoo, From Beloved Babies to Fun in the Snow

Meilan Solly | Smithsonian Magazine | September 22, 2023 | 3,700 words

There’s something about pandas: these bumbling teddy bears entrance us humans, First Lady Pat Nixon included. Sitting at a dinner in Beijing with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Nixon commented on a cute panda picture she saw on a cigarette tin. Zhou responded, “I’ll give you some.” “Cigarettes?” she asked. “No. Pandas.” And so our story begins, with the two promised pandas arriving at the Smithsonian National Zoo in 1972. The next 51 years at the Smithsonian Panda House are carefully documented by Meilan Solly in this enchanting piece. Our original pandas—Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing—struggled with fertility issues, which were, rather harshly, reported at the time as being “largely because of ineptness by the male.” (Hsing-Hsing chose some bizarre positions.) But despite their lack of progeny, this pair were adored until their passing. Next into the Big Brother Panda House were Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, with Tian Tian proving a bit more competent in the bedroom department. However, artificial insemination was still necessary for the appearance of cubs—three surviving—including Xiao Qi Ji, a miracle baby born to Mei Xiang at 22. A whopping 639,000 people tuned in live to watch this birth via live Panda Cam. (No pressure, Mei Xiang.) Panda Cam remained hugely popular, with baby Xiao Qi Ji providing some much-needed endorphins to people stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Solly includes some Panda Cam footage (don’t get me started on the pandas sliding in the snow), heartwarming photos, interesting facts, and fun anecdotes. You cannot help but smile. Under an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association, the current pandas will return to China on December 7, 2023. Smithsonian Magazine has written about the Panda House for over half a century. This essay is a worthy addition as the pandas’ time in America draws to a close. —CW

“Florida Man,” Explained

Kristen Arnett | Vox | September 18, 2023 | 1,634 words

Have you played the game Florida Man? It’s simple: type your birthday (month, date) and “Florida Man” into a search bar. You will be regaled (as I was) with not one, but several inane crimes committed over the years by men in Florida. As Kristen Arnett explains, “These crimes are odd and incomprehensible; the kind of behavior that someone might associate with a badly behaved toddler whose brain has yet to fully develop.” I had several to choose from; my favorite was the Florida Man who was caught on video driving down I-4 while standing up, his upper body poking through the sunroof. Arnett explains that the game is made possible because of the Sunshine Law, which makes arrest records and mugshots “readily available online for the general public to gawk and point at. If you’ve committed a crime in the Sunshine State, that information becomes accessible to everyone, everywhere, immediately.” This piece is far more than just a litany of bizarre behavior. Arnett, a third-generation Floridian, suggests that while the Florida Man meme makes it easy for outsiders to dismiss the state as the epicenter of America’s ills, we need to look deeper. “I think the harder lesson is that Florida is no different from anywhere else; the headlines just turn our hardships into a joke to make things more palatable,” she writes. “We can’t and won’t disregard the fact that we’re going to stay strange and continue to be completely, authentically ourselves; we also can’t forget the wonderful alongside the troubles.” Maybe it’s time we embraced that little bit of Florida Man in all of us. —KS

— October —

The Great Zelle Pool Scam

Devin Friedman | Insider | October 1, 2023 | 6,021 words

Devin Friedman and his wife wanted a pool. So they hired a contractor. And when their contractor emailed them to ask them to wire the money to a couple of odd-sounding usernames, they did. Then they did it again. And again. And then they learned that those emails weren’t from their contractor at all. Rather than simply marinate in the shame and self-pity of getting royally scammed, Friedman tried to get his money back. When that failed, he wrote a piece about why he couldn’t get his money back. Sounds like a bummer, right? Not so fast. I mean, it is for them, but it also turned into what might be the funniest feature I’ve read all year. Sure, there’s a little Joel Stein here. (“Like so many things I use to conduct the most critical tasks in my everyday life with a carefree obliviousness, I didn’t really know what Zelle was.”) But Friedman’s self-deprecation is perfectly tuned, and even when the reporting gets heavier, he threads humor through at just the right angle, a necessary weft to the piece’s warp. (“Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the financial industry regulator banks most love to hate, has been petitioning Zelle to find out exactly how much fraud there is. And the data she’s collected suggests there’s probably, technically speaking, a whole fucking lot.”) As he says himself, “[o]ut of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of.” There’s no poor-me going on here. You, however, will be poorer for it if you skip this one. —PR

Who’s Afraid of Spatchcocked Chicken?

C Pam Zhang | Eater | October 3, 2023 | 1,300 words

I love words. (I know, shocking.) I am also a vegetarian. So it was with delight and horror that I read C Pam Zhang’s piece all about the English language—and meat. Have you ever considered why most animals are shielded by a fancy term once they hit a plate? Why is it a beef bourguignon, not a cow casserole? Zhang muses extensively on this prissiness—while spatchcocking a chicken, as a student at Cambridge, no less. It turns out (like many things in England) it has to do with the French. And class. Zhang explains: “The names of the living animals have Anglo roots, whereas the names of the ingredients came from the French—a trademark of Norman conquerors who, in the 11th century, hoped to subjugate the ‘savage’ Natives of the British Isles.” (The humble chicken managed to keep its name by being considered peasant food, not worthy of a new anointment.) Zhang compares this coyness with words in Mandarin, where pork can literally be labeled “pig flesh.” It’s a fascinating and fun essay, with the added pleasure of imagining the smell of baked chicken guts wafting down the hallowed halls of Cambridge and into the nostrils of disgruntled young lords who like their veal marinated. (Helped by the marvelous illustration of a chicken running down said halls.) While a little shorter than our usual Longreads offerings, you can’t say “spatchcocked” without encountering some joy, so I hope you will forgive me. —CW

Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

Adam Reiner | Eater | October 11, 2023 | 1,553 words

Adam Reiner’s short but sweet Eater piece on food as entertainment is perfectly satisfying. For three years Reiner worked as a captain at a Manhattan chophouse called The Grill, where he prepared food tableside, including Dover sole and Bananas Foster, the flaming pièce de résistance. Reiner serves more than stories of boorish patrons as seen from behind the gueridon. (The fancy trolley containing cooking ingredients and utensils.) He gives us a taste of food-as-performance at his restaurant and others, such as Papi Steak, where the $1,000 wagyu ribeye’s reveal is meat theater—complete with special effects that could rival Taylor Swift in concert. “The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival,” he writes. Reiner also reveals the perils of performance, and the very real anxieties that go along with it. For every Bananas Foster or cherries jubilee, there’s always the potential that the flambé is a flop, “like striking a book of matches in the rain.” Steak entrances and fancy flaming bananas aside, it’s Reiner’s writing that will keep you coming back for more in a story that’s less about the food and more about his uneasy relationship with the distastefulness of restaurant showmanship. —KS

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

— November —

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

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

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

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

— December —

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

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

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

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All through December, we’ve been featuring Longreads’ Best of 2023. Today, we’re sharing a list of every story that sat atop our weekly Top 5 email. These story picks tend to be important pieces that, over time, chart the course of history. Watch the year unfold as you revisit our selections.

— January —

No Way to Live

Ethan Ward | Capital & Main | December 27-28, 2022 | 7,714 words

Last month, Karen Bass, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, declared a state of emergency with regard to homelessness in the city. In a matter of days, teams began moving unhoused people from outdoor encampments into hotel and motel rooms as part of a new government program called “Inside Safe.” But as this poignant three-part series shows, street homelessness accounts for only a fraction of LA’s housing crisis. People like Sarah Fay, the 28-year-old subject of the series, live on the precipice of homelessness, a position that requires a daily hustle to find a safe place to sleep. The reasons for this kind of housing insecurity are complex, going well beyond low incomes and soaring rents. Fay’s story, told so well by reporter Ethan Ward, is shaped by generational trauma, the burden of debt, maddening bureaucracy, and cultural stereotypes about what it means to be a person in need. Read this story, and send it to your elected officials, in Los Angeles and elsewhere. —SD

Vigilantes for Views: The YouTube Pranksters Harassing Suspected Scam Callers in India

Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar | Rest of World | January 10, 2023 | 5,737 words

Justice can mean equality, and it can also mean retribution. In the case of Artsiom Kulik and Ashton Bingham, who have carved out a robust career orchestrating “scambusting” videos, their conception seems to skew heavily to the latter. But Kulik and Bingham’s gleeful payback has a discomfiting subtext. Somewhere along the way, Trilogy Media graduated from simply annoying phone scammers to releasing mice and cockroaches into a Kolkata call center — and as the stakes have gotten bigger, so has the sense that this isn’t really about justice at all. Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar’s piece is a profile on its face, and an investigation at its core. With the fake Best Picture Oscar on display in their office, the Trilogy duo sees itself as destined for bigger and better things; what they don’t see is that they’ve gone from coming up to punching down. This isn’t the first story to reveal the craven heart of a content creator’s ambition, but it’s the rare example that goes a step farther to tease out the troubling power dynamics at play. —PR

In a Famed Kenyan Game Park, the Animals Are Giving Up

Georgina Gustin | Undark | January 4, 2023 | 2,363 words

Once a wildlife paradise, Kenya’s Amboseli National Park has become a wasteland. Tourists on safari arrive excited but leave traumatized, reports Georgina Gustin, as carcasses of starved animals litter the terrain: “Wildebeests are gray-brown lumps with quote-shaped horns. Gazelles, small piles of suede. Zebras, bloated disco-era carpets.” Previously a lush wildlife sanctuary, Amboseli has been plagued by climate change-fueled drought for two years and braces itself for a third. In addition to a parched and changing landscape, clashes between herders and farmers and an increase in illegal poaching also contribute to the dire situation. Wildlife photographs by Larry C. Price accompany Gustin’s piece, and while they may be hard to look at, they’re an important reminder that no creature can escape a warming planet. —CLR

Corky Lee and the Work of Seeing

Ken Chen | n+1 | 11,542 words | January 25, 2023

After Corky Lee passed last year, the photographer and community organizer was memorialized in his hometown’s most conventionally prestigious outlets: The Times offered a sizable obituary, as did Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. This week, on the first anniversary of Lee’s death, Ken Chen rendered an altogether different kind of portrait in n+1. Much of the same biographical information is included, as are a number of Lee’s iconic photographs of Asian Americans in New York throughout the last six decades. Yet, when Chen writes about his encounters with Lee, and about the 14 photographs he selects to represent Lee’s work, the grief that suffuses his words isn’t solely about Lee, but about the many atrocities visited upon the Asian American community, up to and after Lee’s death. Chen’s critical acumen here is reason enough to read: “His images lack a charismatic subject,” he writes of Lee. “Those whom capital dismissed as surplus, he saw as beautiful. He commemorated the multitude, the striking waiters and seamstresses whose unruly abundance crowded away any beatific composition.” But he brings a similar understated poetry to the social conditions Lee’s work served to illuminate — and with violence against Asian American elders and others seemingly unending (including a horrifying recent attack in my own hometown), that juxtaposition makes Chen’s piece nearly as indelible as the images it contains. —PR

— February —

Molly’s Last Ride

Peter Flax | Bicycling Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 8,136 words

Exactly two years ago, 12-year-old Molly Steinsapir got onto an e-bike with her best friend, crashed, and died. I remember when it happened — the tragedy was covered widely, in no small part because Molly’s mom took to social media to talk about it. Now, in a moving and nuanced feature, Peter Flax examines the question of who, if anyone, is liable for Molly’s death. Flax, who owns two bikes made by the manufacturer of the one Molly rode, a company her parents are now suing, illuminates how the explosive growth of the e-bike industry, while a seeming net good for people and the planet, isn’t without dangerous consequences. There aren’t a lot of industry regulations, and there are pressing concerns about the quality of popular equipment. “As a country we have decided we value entrepreneurship and business and letting people just go to market,” Molly’s mom, Kaye, tells Flax, “and then we find out if the thing is safe or not as it is sold and marketed and used.” This is one of my favorite kinds of magazine feature, the personal story that serves as a lens for a bigger one, which in turn asks people to wrestle with urgent questions. Molly is gone, but her death may well save another 12-year-old girl somewhere. —SD

The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine

Joshua Yaffa | The New Yorker | January 30, 2023 | 9,078 words

“About all anyone can trust in war is that everybody lies.” As I read Joshua Yaffa’s piece about accusations of betrayal among residents of a Ukrainian city liberated from Russian occupation, I kept thinking about this sentence. It comes not from Yaffa’s piece, but from a story about the treatment of ISIS fighters after Iraqi forces retook the city of Mosul, which I had the honor of editing six years ago. So often in conflict coverage, the media are quick to draw blunt distinctions: Ukraine good, Russia evil; military righteous, ISIS monstrous. It’s easier, I suppose, than acknowledging that war is a hideous enterprise from which virtually nothing and no one will emerge clean. In the aftermath of violence, it can be hard to discern the truth from what people wish it to be, and administering justice, while an essential moral endeavor, is also a deeply fraught one. In his haunting feature, Yaffa doesn’t seek to untangle facts so much as he listens to the stories people are telling. They are talking to him, of course, but you get the sense that they are telling stories to themselves as well: They are remembering, processing, contextualizing, rationalizing, and in some cases rewriting. What do these stories and their contradictions reveal? The picture is messy, which is to say, it’s true. —SD

Edifice Complex

Bench Ansfield | Jewish Currents | January 3, 2023 | 3,358 words

I might have recommended this essay based on the excellent headline alone, but in fact the substance is the star of the show. Like many millennials, I have adopted the term “burnout” into my vocabulary as a way of describing the feeling of working too hard, juggling too much, and feeling depleted by the grinding expectations of late-stage capitalism. After reading this piece, I’ll be endeavoring to use the word differently. As historian Bench Ansfield shows, the true origins of burnout as a concept have been obscured over time. Burnout isn’t a reference to a candle burning at both ends until there’s nothing left, but to the shells of buildings left by a wave of arson that ravaged Black and brown neighborhoods in New York City in the ’70s. Much of the damage was caused by landlords looking for insurance payouts. “If we excavate burnout’s infrastructural unconscious — its origins in the material conditions of conflagration — we might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning,” Ansfield writes. “An artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalism — a dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.” If this were the premise of a college class, I’d sign up in a heartbeat. —SD

The Case for Hanging Out

Dan Kois | Slate | February 15, 2023 | 2,753 words

Raising a young daughter and feeling socially disconnected as an adult, I constantly think about where I want to live, but also how I’d like to live. I wrote recently about seeking “community,” but I’m unsure what that even means. So this piece, which explores why Americans spend less time these days hanging out with people, really speaks to me. Perhaps what I long for isn’t some kind of mythical tight-knit tribe to be part of, but something far simpler: more opportunities for casual hangouts. But is this simple? Dan Kois reaches out to Sheila Liming, author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, and asks if he can fly to Vermont to spend time with her, a total stranger, for a day. The piece that emerges from the visit is delightful and relatable. I can’t help but recall my college years and my 20s: wandering over to friends’ dorm rooms to see what they were up to, piling onto couches in someone’s living room to sit and chat and laugh for hours, frequenting the dive bars and weekly club nights where I knew I’d run into familiar faces. To borrow Liming’s words, these were “effortlessly social” times — and they seem so long ago. Social media, over-scheduled lives, and the pandemic have all made hanging out harder. While I also attribute my isolation to age, Kois notes how young people, including his teenage daughters, still find it hard to put themselves out there or carve out time for casual socializing. While I may not be brave enough after reading this to knock on my upstairs neighbors’ door and sit on their couch to shoot the shit, I’m inspired by Kois’ openness and curiosity. —CLR

— March —

What Happened to the Women Prisoners at Hickman’s Farms

Elizabeth Whitman | Cosmopolitan | February 15, 2023 | 3,897 words

Even during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that, as so often happens in America, the toll of the historic event would prove heaviest for the most vulnerable among us, including the elderly, disabled individuals, and essential workers. And the incarcerated. The virus tore through the country’s overcrowded prisons and cut their populations off from the outside world more than they were to begin with. Arizona decided to take these horrors a step further by agreeing to set up a prison labor camp — yes, you read that right — at Hickman’s Family Farms, a large egg producer. Hickman’s had long paid for incarcerated individuals to work in its facilities; the workers only got paid after the state took a huge chunk out of their wages. “This is groundbreaking,” a driver told a female prisoner as he transferred her to the camp, the first of its kind in Arizona and possibly the country, where she would live and work alongside other incarcerated women while COVID exploded. “You guys are gonna be a part of history.” Apparently, history included illness, injury, and indignity, as this investigation by Elizabeth Whitman shows — the women whose voices the story elevates were told they were necessary, and treated as if they were disposable. —SD

The Mercy Workers

Maurice Chammah | The Marshall Project | March 2, 2023 | 7,750 words

When we look at the face of a criminal in a mug shot or in a courtroom, what do we see? Many adults facing the death penalty have been shaped by childhood trauma or violence they experienced or witnessed in prison as juveniles. Mitigation specialists work to uncover traumas and dig into the personal and family histories of people on death row — not with the aim to excuse or justify their crimes, but to help paint more complete portraits of them as human beings. Maurice Chammah spends time with mitigation specialist Sara Baldwin as she works on the case of James Bernard Belcher, a man on death row for the 1996 murder of Jennifer Embry. It’s a complex story that Chammah reports and tells with great care and empathy, and highlights a little-known profession that helps to illuminate why people hurt one another and are led to violence. —CLR

Police Killed His Son. Prosecutors Charged the Teen’s Friends With His Murder

Meg O’Connor | The Appeal & Phoenix New Times | March 14, 2023 | 7,576 words

It’s been nine years since Laquan McDonald was killed by police in Chicago, shot in the back while walking away. It’s been seven years since Philando Castile was killed by police in the Minneapolis suburbs, shot while his empty hands were raised during a questionable traffic stop. And it’s been four years since Jacob Harris was killed by police in Phoenix, seconds after he emerged from a car, his back turned. You’ve likely heard less about Harris’ death than you have McDonald’s and Castile’s, but Meg O’Connor’s thorough investigation makes clear that you won’t forget it. The gross miscarriages of justice are plentiful: the circumstances of Harris’ killing and the shifting police statements around it; the money and valuables police took from Harris’ father’s home before informing him his son was dead; the fact that Harris’ friends are currently serving decades-long prison sentences for his death, while the officers who pulled the trigger (and unleashed an attack dog on his prone body) walk free. We’ve heard far, far too many names like McDonald’s and Castile’s and Harris’ over the past decade, and nothing makes me think we won’t continue to hear many more. That’s what makes this sort of journalism so necessary — not because it can bring these young men back to life, but because it makes brutally clear how unjust their deaths are, and how broken policing is. —PR

Frog

Anne Fadiman | Harper’s Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words

“There are two kinds of pets — the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you,” Anne Fadiman writes as she considers her family’s various pets, a menagerie that included a goldfish, a hamster, guinea pigs, a dog named Typo, and Bunky, an African clawed frog that the family raised from a tadpole. In eulogizing Bunky, who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press,” Fadiman remarks on his noble species, one that helped spawn (ahem) the first widely established pregnancy test, earned a Nobel Prize for a British biologist who used an African clawed frog to clone the first vertebrate, and helped establish that reproduction can be possible in zero gravity after a trip on the space shuttle Endeavor. All this, from a pet who was defined by not being a dog: “Bunky was the anti-Typo. An unpettable pet. Cool to the touch. Squishy, but not soft. Undeniably slimy. Impervious to education. A poor hiking companion. Not much of a companion at all, really. Couldn’t be taken out of his aquarium and placed on a lap.” Fadiman’s piece will make you laugh and make you think more carefully about your role as a pet owner. —KS

A Scammer Who Tricks Instagram Into Banning Influencers Has Never Been Identified. We May Have Found Him.

Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis | ProPublica | March 26, 2023 | 4,629 words

If you’ve ever lost your Instagram account to a hacker or requested aid from Meta in any way, you understand feeling helpless trying to get a faceless corporation to pay attention. Egregious tech company irresponsibility and complete disregard aside, where Meta failed, ProPublica may have succeeded in tracking down a man known for hijacking accounts by exploiting security loopholes, then hounding their owners for money. A scammer known as OBN claims to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars plaguing people who earn a living on Instagram “because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.” Not only does he shut down lucrative influencer accounts, he antagonizes account owners with taunts and threats. Meta’s response? They intend to offer a program that would charge for customer support from a real person, something that most tech companies consider not just the right thing to do, but table stakes for being in tech: “Meta has acknowledged that it needs to invest more in customer support. In February, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would offer people the ability to pay for account verification and enhanced support, including ‘access to a real person for common account issues.’” —KS

— April —

Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski | ProPublica | April 6, 2023 | 2,936 words

No matter where you get your news, you’ve likely seen this story sometime in the last 24 hours. It’s a bombshell investigation that reveals how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has received lavish gifts from a billionaire Republican donor named Harlan Crow, likely in violation of federal law. Said gifts include international cruises on a staffed superyacht, a Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass, flights on a private jet, and annual vacations to Crow’s luxury compound in upstate New York. Anyone with an iota of respect for democracy should be appalled — albeit unsurprised, given everything we already know about Thomas’s associates, including his wife. Read it and rage. But also read it and admire the craft that went into telling the story. It is rich in detail, yet precise. Its tone is finely tuned. The selection and placement of quotes are [chef’s kiss]. The writers dole out gobsmacking information throughout the piece, right down to the kicker. This is top-notch reporting and delivery. A+ all around. —SD

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein | Lux | March 3, 2023 | 3,498 words

I hate the South, and I love it. This internal conflict is my inheritance. My roots in the region run deep and strong, but I have no illusions about who and what fed them. “We bury the people we do not care about in the South,” Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote for The New York Times. “It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people.” As Cottom rightly notes, however, “Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope.” Needless to say, I’m forever grappling with the South and its sins, which lately include two high-profile mass shootings, threats to reproductive rights, two Black men’s ejection from the Tennessee legislature, and Florida circling the policy drain even more than usual. What a joy, then, to read a story with a different vision of the South. Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein introduces readers to Zac Henson and his band of leftist rednecks who run a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama. “The organizers,” Kaiser-Schatzlein writes, “believe that people in the South, conservatives especially, just need to be given the chance to operate in institutions that harness their most altruistic, communal, and caring tendencies — or, as Henson describes it, ‘positive reinforcement to not be fascist.’” I too want to believe this. Here’s to hope. —SD

Adrift

Renata Brito and Felipe Dana | The Associated Press | April 12, 2023 | 4,355 words

People call them “ghost boats,” the small vessels — at least seven in 2021 alone — that have washed up in the Caribbean and Brazil carrying dead bodies. The boats come from West Africa carrying desperate people bound for Europe via the Canary Islands, a complex, treacherous route. Somehow, somewhere the boats were forced off course and drifted out into the Atlantic, all but ensuring the deaths of the people on board. But who are those people? What are their stories? Who back home is missing them? This years-long investigation uses a handful of clues — a SIM card and scraps of clothing, for instance — to identify the dead found in one ghost boat in Tobago. Renata Brito and Felipe Dana do an impressive job situating a sensitive story about the impacts of global policies and politics within the framework of a mystery. A moving feature, and beautifully designed too. —SD

How the War in Ukraine Has Forever Changed the Children in One Kindergarten Class

Elissa Nadworny, Claire Harbage | NPR | April 12, 2023 | 4,700 words

This piece takes war down to the micro level, the story of a conflict told not through politics or death tolls but through the fate of one class of kindergarten children. It makes for a blisteringly relatable read. Elissa Nadworny and Claire Harbage have carried out meticulous reporting, meeting several children and their families from a classroom in Kharkiv with “bright yellow and green walls and long, gauzy curtains.” (Such attentive details are sprinkled throughout.) Some children remain in Ukraine, but more than half have fled around the world, separated by thousands of miles. Some are struggling with new languages. Some can’t sleep. Some are still scared. They all miss each other. Beautiful photographs and snippets from their group chats help to bring their new realities to life. A small war story but a powerful one: These few children represent so many. —CW

— May —

A Trucker’s Kidnapping, a Suspicious Ransom, and a Colorado Family’s Perilous Quest for Justice

Chris Walker | 5280 | May 2, 2023 | 5,292 words

Through a special visa program, transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import and export fees. These truckers, many originally from Central America, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s excess items into valuable goods abroad. In 2014, one trucker, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job from a Colorado employer to deliver a truck, apparently full of furniture, to his homeland. It was a journey he’d taken many times before, but this time, it all went horribly wrong. Chris Walker recounts the kidnapping, explores the unknowns around Orlando’s capture that still plague him, and describes how this terrifying ordeal has affected his entire family. Through this one man’s story, Walker exposes a dark side of the transmigrante industry. —CLR

Amor Eterno

Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 8, 2023 | 7,580 words

Years from now, when I think about this story — which will happen, because it’s that good — I will hear, no, feel the pounding of feet. Skip Hollandsworth’s profile of Kimberly Mata-Rubio opens with the subject jogging through Uvalde, Texas, pausing at a mural of her daughter, Lexi. The scene echoes the moment when, immediately after learning that there had been a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, Mata-Rubio began to run, barefoot over asphalt and through traffic, toward the building where her daughter was in the fourth grade, only to learn that Lexi was dead. “Kim could feel her feet throbbing,” Hollandsworth writes. “They were so bloodied and bruised she could barely walk.” A year after the massacre, the jog past Lexi’s mural is one of several ritual motions Mata-Rubio has adopted. She also goes to her daughter’s grave once, sometimes twice a day, never leaving Lexi alone for more than 24 hours, and regularly drives to the state Capitol to lobby for gun control. Mural, grave, Austin: Mata-Rubio goes and returns, again and again, like the tide. Other Uvalde parents do the same. Their patterns, like those of so many people who have lost loved ones in mass shootings, remind me of a Robert Frost poem: “The heart can think of no devotion / Greater than being shore to ocean / Holding the curve of one position / Counting an endless repetition.” How many more parents, children, spouses, friends will join this grieving army in their aching, unspeakable form of love? Will you be one of them? Will I? —SD

Reclaiming a North Carolina Plantation

Cynthia R. Greenlee | Garden & Gun | April 24, 2023 | 3,050 words

I went to college in North Carolina, where I took a history-meets-writing seminar about Stagville, a former slave plantation near campus. By trawling through historical documents and walking the site, I learned how a 30,000-acre operation was made possible (and profitable) by the labor of roughly 900 Black people held in bondage. Stagville is now maintained by the state; it never occurred to me as a student that the land might be used for anything other than studying and honoring the past. As this story in Garden & Gun shows, there is another way to approach land once tended by slaves, one that can provide for local communities, now and in the future. Two remarkable sisters have been transforming Snow Hill, a former plantation not far from Stagville, into an incubator for gardeners and small farmers. They are promoting sustainability and battling food insecurity while at the same time promoting land access to populations long denied it. The sisters currently lease the land, but as Cynthia R. Greenlee explains, “using a conservation easement, which restricts development rights and lowers property values,” they plan to buy the acreage, likely worth millions, for just $37,000. “Land isn’t just a source of the compounded traumas of slavery, sharecropping, migration, and food insecurity for Black Americans,” Greenlee writes. “It’s also a wellspring of pride, knowledge, economic power, and spiritual connection.” —SD

The True Cost of Tuna: Marine Observers Dying at Sea

Lee van der Voo | Civil Eats | May 23, 2023 | 5,262 words

Marine observers collect data about the fish caught at sea and monitor the practices of crews aboard commercial fishing vessels. They are the eyes and ears on the water: the people that ensure safe and responsible fishing. But the canned tuna you eat may not be as safely caught as you think. As Lee van der Voo reports in this excellent investigation, the people tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards face dangerous situations. Many of them, like Fijian observer Simi Cagilaba, experience harassment and abuse, while others have disappeared or been murdered at sea. Stronger safety measures, action from major retailers to push for better practices, and more robust technology to track illegal activities would help to improve observers’ work conditions. Van der Voo exposes the dark underbelly of Big Tuna, and will make you think twice about the origins of those tins of tuna in your pantry. —CLR

— June —

Have Assisted Dying Laws Gone Too Far?

Meagan Gillmore | The Walrus | May 30, 2023 | 5,422 words

What does it say about a country where it’s easier to request medically assisted death than it is to get support for a disability? Tarra Carlson lives with autism and ADHD. Her provincial disability benefits ceased because her husband earns too much money. She receives about $800 CDN per month from the Canada Pension Plan. “If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support,” writes Meagan Gillmore for The Walrus. “She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home.” We already know that Canada has explored expanding the Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) program to include those with disabilities, angering disability advocates. Gillmore’s terrifying piece reveals that some with disabilities facing poverty from the margins of Canadian society may choose MAiD, failed by a crumbling and byzantine Canadian health care system. For the government of Canada, what started as a program to allow the terminally ill to die on their own terms is starting to become a way for the government to legally rid itself of those they have failed: their most vulnerable citizens. —KS

What Happened to Heather Mayer?

Andy Mannix | The Star Tribune | June 2, 2023 | 10,330 words

This investigative feature comes with a warning at the top to “read at your own discretion,” and I feel obliged to say the same thing here. What follows is a deeply upsetting story about the suspicious death of a woman who was part of the BDSM community in the Minneapolis area. Heather Mayer was found naked, hanging by a chain that had been locked around her neck; she was covered in bruises and scars, with the words “Daddy Knows Best” carved into her arm. Police ruled her death a suicide, but that never sat right with the death investigator on the case or with Mayer’s mother, who was immediately suspicious that her daughter had been killed by Ehsan Karam, a “dominant” with whom she was in a relationship. Reporter Andy Mannix does a brilliant, sensitive job interrogating the lines between sex and violence, pleasure and pain, consent and coercion. There’s no judgment here, except of the dangerous assumptions many people (including members of law enforcement) make about BDSM practitioners—and of men like Karam, who crossed lines willfully and often, at the physical and emotional expense of their partners. —SD

Lady Vols Country

Jessica Wilkerson | Oxford American | June 6, 2023 | 3,644 words

I don’t just love that Jessica Wilkerson* takes on tough topics in her work, including racism, feminism, and outdated female gender roles; I love how she does it. In her writing, she gets comfortable with being uncomfortable, which allows her to go deep, probe difficult questions, and most importantly, come to some sort of (sometimes uneasy) understanding of what it means to live in a world that’s flawed. This is one of the great gifts of powerful writing. In “Lady Vols Country,” Wilkerson examines outdated southern gender roles through portraits of two women who were very important to her: her grandmother and Pat Summitt, the former head coach of the University of Tennessee’s Lady Volunteers basketball team. In remembering two strong women and the change they stood for, Wilkerson finds the permission she didn’t know she was looking for—to be true to the life she wants for herself. —KS

Everyone in Stephenville Thought They Knew Who Killed Susan Woods

Bryan Burrough | Texas Monthly | June 20, 2023 | 15,736 words

Looking back over the past couple of years, I realize I don’t often recommend true-crime investigations. Make no mistake: I like a killer-on-the-loose podcast or docuseries as much as the next media omnivore, but the explosion of the genre has sent a lot of true-crime writing into that uncanny valley of journalism that I internally call Please Option This Story and Make Me Rich, Hollywood. All that said, Bryan Burrough’s lengthy cover story for Texas Monthly falls into no such traps. It’s a curveball that you know is a curveball, yet still dips and weaves and otherwise stymies your expectations. There’s not much I can say by way of synopsis that distills more or reveals less than the story’s headline, so I’ll leave it there; however, know that part of the piece’s excellence lies in its reserve. Another writer might have made Susan Woods’ murder more lurid. Another magazine might have tried to tell the tale in half the length, robbing the characters of their depth. And another form—like the aforementioned podcast or docuseries—might have overweighted the narrative with ominous music cues or hacky video transitions. (Don’t worry: the story also exists as a podcast.) Instead, you get what true-crime journalism can and should be: unsparing, revelatory, and human. A monster’s death doesn’t undo the damage they inflicted, but Burrough’s reporting manages to wring a measure of redemption from the unseemly proceedings. —PR

The Night 17 Million Precious Military Records Went Up in Smoke

Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words

Megan Greenwell’s piece does what the best longform features do: It mesmerizes you with an opening so powerful and a story so compelling that you deliberately read it slowly, just to make it last. This piece—about a devastating fire at a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration that happened to contain records belonging to Greenwell’s grandfather—is nearly 8,000 words long, but the prose is so sharp and cinematic that you’ll wish it was longer. “The National Personnel Records Center fire burned out of control for two days before firefighters were able to begin putting it out,” she writes. “Photos show the roof ablaze, a nearly 5-acre field of flame. The steel beams that had once held up the glass walls jut at unnatural angles, like so many broken legs.” Even were it not set against a backdrop of the U.S. government, this would be a fascinating mystery: What or who started the fire and how do workers attempt to uncover precious facts from seriously damaged files? Did Greenwell’s grandfather’s records survive the blaze? Be sure to take it slow and let this story smolder. I’m certainly glad I did. —KS

— July —

They Followed Doctors’ Orders. Then Their Children Were Taken Away.

Shoshana Walter | The New York Times Magazine and Reveal | June 29, 2023 | 7,167 words

I’m not sure that there’s anything more American than making it difficult for a person to be a mother. I don’t mean physically giving birth—thanks to anti-abortion zealots and the Supreme Court, many states are now literally forcing people to do that, with horrific consequences. I mean being a person, with everything that alone entails in a country defined by inequality, precarity, and prejudice, who also has a child. Exhibit A: As Shoshana Walter found in a feat of investigative reporting, people swept up in the opioid crisis, who’ve done exactly what they’re supposed to do—who got clean and take prescription drugs to stay that way—are now having their babies seized by the government. “They don’t want you on illicit street drugs,” one of Walter’s subjects says, “so here, we’re going to give you this medicine. But then if you take this medicine, we are going to punish you for it and ruin your family.” The injustice doesn’t end there. “We also found women who were reported after taking antidepressants, anxiety and ADHD medications and even over-the-counter cold medicine during pregnancies,” Walter writes. “Some women were reported after testing positive for the fentanyl in their epidurals.” The emphasis is mine; my jaw dropped at the Helleresque insanity of that detail. —SD

A Good Prospect

Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words

The mining sector is having a moment. Due to people’s growing—if absurdly belated—concern about climate change, demand for alternative materials that can power the future is skyrocketing. We’re talking lithium, cobalt, and copper, the stuff needed to build electric-vehicle batteries, solar panels, and other items that are likely to be staples of a decarbonized economy. It’s no surprise, then, that mining interests are talking a big game about being on the right side of environmental history. Journalist Nick Bowlin heard it loud and clear while reporting on the world’s largest mining conference, which was held earlier this year in Toronto, Ontario. As Bowlin smartly details, in a story that never once gets boring despite being about—let me repeat—a mining conference, there’s an ugly underbelly to this touting of green bona fides. Extractive industries are notoriously and unrelentingly colonialist, and above all they’re eager for profit. They will strip land, exploit people, and smile as their rampant devastation earns them billions. If the mining sector were really serious about a green future, it would drop its maximalist mindset. Indeed, we all would. “The mining industry,” Bowlin writes, “benefits from the self-satisfied consumerism of the E.V. buyer. For all of its disdain for environmentalists, the industry needs green consumers who seek absolution for their carbon-intensive ways of life. With their complacent inattention to the injustices inflicted by the green economy, these consumers not only fund the industry’s expansion but give it moral cover.”  —SD

The Balkans’ Alternative Postal System: An Ad-Hoc Courier’s Tale

Ilir Gashi | The Guardian & Kosovo 2.0 | July 13, 2023 | 4,061 words

In 2012, I lived in Pristina, Kosovo for a few months. Much to the chagrin of my mother, I couldn’t receive mail at my apartment. I had no postal box or number; as far as I could tell, no one in the brutalist residential complex did. I informed my mom, who wouldn’t take “no address” for an answer, that she should send mail to the nearby NATO base; I had met someone posted there who offered to serve as a middleman. (Thanks again, Drew.) I had the privilege of being an American with a connection to a powerful institution. Still, I did what many people in the Balkans do when they need to get something from point A to point B: I asked a friend. Ilir Gashi’s essay—a runner-up for a European Press Prize—details how informal networks that move packages, letters, and passengers have developed in response to the Balkans’ disputed borders and entrenched poverty. Gashi worked as an ad-hoc courier, delivering medicine, documents, homemade food items, and even a doll, which a little girl on a trip to Belgrade left behind when her family returned to Pristina. “While the weather map on Radio Television of Serbia shows Pristina as part of Serbia,” Gashi writes, “as far as the Serbian postal service is concerned, this city doesn’t exist, just like other places in Kosovo where Serbs aren’t the majority. Private delivery services are way too expensive. The only way the doll could reach Pristina was for somebody to take it with them.” This is a beautiful story of everyday resilience. —SD

We Are All Animals at Night

Lana Hall | Hazlitt | July 12, 2023 | 3,210 words

As a sex worker in a Toronto massage parlor, Lana Hall earned her living from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., three to six shifts per week. In preparing for a particularly repellant final customer one night, Hall is humbled, not by the man she must shower with, but by the kindness of a fellow worker who curls her hair before the dreaded appointment. Reader, this small gift cut me so deeply that I found myself stifling sobs. “I felt so much care in that moment I could barely breathe,” Hall writes, “and it occurred to me that I’d never had a woman, before or since, handle my hair so tenderly.” As Hall recounts how the powerful, and society in general, look down on people with “low skill” jobs, she deftly reminds us that those who must work the wee hours serving the “incessant hungers of others” are often the most adept at conflict deflection and resolution—ironically the skills so often highly prized by those who work in sunlit ivory towers. Hall imparts with grace and nuance that the humanity on offer from those in low vs. high skill occupations is often as stark as night and day. —KS

— August —

Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words

Writer Kamran Javadizadeh’s sister, Bita, died a slow, agonizing death from cancer. Here, he writes about losing her through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from her reading of it in college; a Hafez verse that Bita herself texted to him one day. I adored this essay, a mix of personal history and literary analysis, and I also found it achingly familiar. Exactly 17 years ago this week, when I witnessed the sudden death of someone I loved, I was thrust into a private hell, a netherworld of despair. I struggled to connect with friends and family, and they with me. It was like I was trapped underwater, screaming, and they were looking down at me, unable to hear, much less help. Poetry, though, could breach the surface, offering me what I so desperately needed: a sense of empathy. I analyzed poems about death and mourning, pondering the words, meaning, and mechanics that made me feel the verses so deeply. Poems, as Javadizadeh reminds us in his essay about Bita, can be portals—to other people, to other planes, and even to ourselves. —SD

The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

Fair warning, dear reader: This will be among the best stories you read this year. Prepare yourself to be wrecked. In this masterpiece of longform journalism, Jennifer Senior reports on her aunt Adele, a woman later diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12, a genetic condition that manifests in intellectual disability and physical delays. Adele was institutionalized at 21 months old on the advice of doctors who insisted that a care placement was the best thing for her, leaving her older sister Rona bereft “as though she’d lost an arm or a leg.” At its core this story is about trauma and loss, suffered chiefly by Adele who was deprived of her family and early chances to expand her intellectual capacity, warehoused in the notorious Willowbrook State School. The shockwaves of loss extend outward to Adele’s mother, father, and sister, deprived of Adele’s presence in their lives, and to society at large, deprived of Adele and the person she could have become had she received more enlightened, loving care much earlier in life. Glimpses into Adele’s psyche, including her need for order, her penchant for needlepoint, and delight in matching her clothing, hint at the contours of Adele’s personality. Senior, in trying to name her aunt’s condition to attempt to understand the scope of loss, confronts the many ethical concerns of writing about someone who is not able to give consent. Tracing her aunt’s living conditions and likely treatment at Willowbrook makes for extremely difficult, but absolutely necessary reading, to ask and attempt to answer a vital question: How do you comprehend the cost when, despite the best of intentions, we fail to provide essential care to the most vulnerable among us? —KS

Inside Barbados’ Historic Push for Slave Reparations

Janell Ross| TIME |July 6, 2023 | 4,309 words

It’s been nine years since Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his seminal essay “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic. Today, the idea of compensating Black Americans for the horrors of slavery and institutionalized racism remains fringe at best. The same goes in other countries that were once complicit in human bondage. But in the island nation of Barbados, where slaves made sugar plantations wildly lucrative, support for reparations is very real—and growing stronger. This year, under the leadership of President Mia Mottley, the country is asking European countries for a “Marshall Plan-like public investment,” as opposed to the individual payments we usually associate with reparations. Mottley, though, isn’t at the heart of this feature about Barbados’ groundbreaking efforts. Instead, writer Jannell Ross showcases Esther Phillips, the country’s poet laureate, who went from believing reparations were radical, to viewing them as unlikely, to arguing passionately for them. Phillips hopes that other people, particularly in Europe, will undergo transformations of their own. “If something of such horror is revealed,” she tells Ross, “and you’re still benefiting from the proceeds, you cannot turn you head and say, ‘Well, what has to do with me?’”—SD

The Atomic Disease

Rachel Greenley | Orion Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 3,504 words

Despite medical science’s many advances, anyone who has ever supported a loved one through a catastrophic illness knows that science has much farther to go. Where you need answers, often there are only questions. For Orion, Rachel Greenley considers America’s love affair with nuclear bombs and nuclear power—a race for supremacy in the name of war and science that has killed countless, both directly and indirectly, as those who live downwind and downstream endure water and soil contaminated by toxic waste and the cancers that ensue. “It’s clear as thirst when life leaves a body,” she writes. “The heavy vessel left behind is void of the personality and warmth that brightly colored the world. My world…He was thirty-five years old.” It’s not that Greenley doesn’t believe in science; rather, as she so poignantly notes in this gripping essay, she cannot trust fallible officials in charge of managing nuclear projects and disasters, those who deflect concern and downplay the danger of a threat that cannot be seen with the naked eye, one that may have taken her husband and the father of her children. Is ignorance to blame, or ambivalence, or perhaps a combination of both? For Greenley and so many others, it’s a question that deserves to be answered. —KS

— September —

When Wizards and Orcs Came to Death Row

Keri Blakinger | The Marshall Project | August 31, 2023 | 4,584 words

A great longread educates, and in doing so, offers an unexpected poignancy. Keri Blakinger’s profile of Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, two men who bonded over games of Dungeons & Dragons while incarcerated in Texas, does just that. She gives us a glimpse into death row, where there are no educational or social programs because the men will never return to society, where the isolation is so extreme that the United Nations has condemned these conditions as torture. For Ford and Wardlow, Dungeons & Dragons gave them purpose. The men were incarcerated as teens, well before they had to earn a paycheck or pay rent, and D&D helped them learn to manage money. But most of all, as Blakinger so deftly reveals, Dungeons & Dragons gave them something to look forward to, a simple yet necessary form of hope. Ford and Wardlow built not just a friendship, but a deep connection in a place where the only human contact comes when the guards handcuff you. In a stroke of journalistic brilliance, Blakinger uses details from Wardlow’s D&D character Arthaxx d’Cannith, a magical prodigy, to deepen our understanding of Wardlow and his true character. “Every day, Arthaxx used his gifts to help the higher-ups of House Cannith perfect the invention they hoped would end a century of war. At night, he came home to his wife, his childhood sweetheart,” she writes. If only this Dungeons & Dragons dream could have come true. —KS

I Never Called Her Momma

Jenisha Watts | The Atlantic | September 13, 2023 | 11,129 words

Journalist Jenisha Watts was raised in Kentucky, in part by her mom Trina Renee Watts, and in part by her granny. At one time, Trina was a promising track star. She loved words and was accepted to Western Kentucky University. But when she became pregnant with Jenisha, she dropped out. Soon, Trina was addicted to drugs, with five children from five different fathers, often leaving the kids alone when she left to get high. How did everything go wrong, seemingly so suddenly? Jenisha, a senior editor at The Atlantic, unravels a tangled family history skein by skein, discovering that Trina was sexually abused by her stepfather, Big Dishman, childhood trauma that became generational when Trina spiraled into addiction. Jenisha goes to Florida to live with relatives; her siblings went into the child welfare system. They never gained a stable living situation, causing damage that spurred their own addictions. This is a very tough read. It is a master class in craft, a bold testament to courage in the face of repeated humiliation. The final line of this piece is the most triumphant and inspiring sentence I have read this year. I won’t spoil it for you. It speaks to a truth: that we come into this world with part of our story written for us unless we can stand up, take the pen, and start to write the story for ourselves. —KS

The Kids on the Night Shift

Hannah Dreier | The New York Times Magazine | September 18, 2023 | 7,705 words

The past week saw no shortage of quality investigative reporting—Wired putting the lie to Elon Musk’s claims about Neuralink lab monkeys, ProPublica uncovering how Columbia University protected a predatorial doctor—but work like Hannah Dreier’s exposé of the child labor powering poultry plants doesn’t come along often. It begins with 14-year-old Marcos Cux getting his arm nearly torn off by a conveyor belt at 2:30 in the morning. It ends, multiple surgeries and untold heartbreaking stories later, with Cux going back to another night shift at an even more dehumanizing job. He has to; his family in Guatemala is depending on him. In between, Dreier brings you into the migrant community of rural Virginia: Dreamland, the trailer park where many of these child workers live with their relatives and guardians. The high school where exhausted children sleep through class and teachers keep their students’ overnight work schedules on sticky notes. The convenience store where teen after teen cashes in their paychecks to send money home to their families. This isn’t a drive-by, it’s a live-in, fueled by tireless reporting and peerless scenework (and phenomenal photography, courtesy of Meridith Kohut). And crucially, it’s a wake-up call. Everyone knows how the factory farming industry disrespects the animals it turns into food. They even know how that same industry feasts on the people who keep its slaughterhouses running. But until now, many of us could plead ignorance of how the Perdues and Tysons of the world, buffered by the third-party contractors they hide behind, chew through the childhoods of those who have no choice. That time is over. —PR

The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | September 25, 2023 | 14,695 words

Margaret Talbot’s story about Evy Mages, a woman who was held as a child at a mysterious psychiatric facility in Innsbruck from 1973-74, was the first piece I dove into at the start of the week—and I’m still thinking about it. For the past few years, Talbot has helped Mages investigate her own family history and recall the memories from this cruel place, where children were observed, humiliated, abused, and even given shots of epiphysan—a veterinary drug derived from cattle—to try and suppress sexual urges. This “villa” was as horrific as it sounds, run by a Nazi-trained psychologist named Maria Nowak-Vogl whose sole purpose was to destroy children and extinguish their inner light. This is a devastating story and a hard one to read. But I’ve thought a lot about the long journey Mages has made since that awful experience, and how incredible it is that she’s come out the other side—now a loving mother to her own grown children, and helping other survivors report the abuse they experienced. Talbot deftly writes a moving story of one woman’s resilience and the harrowing child psychiatry of postwar Austria. —CLR

— October —

The Race to Catch the Last Nazis

Tom Lamont | GQ | September 12, 2023 | 6,622 words

Thomas Will is the bureau chief of—wait for it—the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. He is a Nazi hunter. The last to hold the role in the same capacity; it will end here, in the 2020s, with the final generation of perpetrators already in their 90s. Tom Lamont has spent a great deal of time with Will for this piece, much of it in offices. Yet, somehow, in setting scenes of bureaucracy, Lamont creates a searing, chilling atmosphere. At one point, Will uses a packet of sugar and an empty espresso cup on a conference table for a demonstration. The cup represented mass murder, and the sugar the limits of criminal culpability. The sugar is now at the outer limits. They are investigating secretaries, not camp commandants. People who would have sat in similar offices at similar tables, typing up death orders. The Holocaust was so efficient because every day, civilians turned up at an office and did their jobs. Incredibly uncomfortable to think about. Incredibly necessary. At one point, Lamont asks Will: “What if Hitler’s army had conscripted him and sent him to work in a camp? Would he have gone?” His answer: “I don’t know.” Some people question sending nonagenarian office workers to trial—but it is noticed, it is discussed, and therefore worthwhile. There is such powerful writing here, with many subtle messages. I could not stop thinking about it. —CW

My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

Marco Giancotti | Nautilus | October 4, 2023 | 3,644 words

Marco Giancotti has aphantasia, which means “the absence of images” in Greek. Ask him to picture a top hat or recall a sound or a smell and he can’t imagine it. He has trouble remembering events unless he can deduce their timing by assembling facts such as where he was living and the people in his circle at the time. For Nautilus, Giancotti does a terrific job breaking down his lived experiences and the studies he’s participating in so that science, society, and the lay reader can begin to understand more about this fascinating condition. “As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind,” he writes. “I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head.” What’s most beautiful and poignant about this piece is how, by learning more about aphantasia and contributing to its study, Giancotti comes to appreciate his condition as an example of what makes humanity so beautifully diverse. “The question I started with—what’s wrong with me?—was both rhetorical and itself wrong. The better question is one we all ask ourselves at some point: ‘What makes me who I am?’” Can you imagine how much better our world would be, if we all dared to do so? —KS

The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words

Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and handled it? The more I read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and horrific work conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fleet. These ships roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas; analysts believe the country disguises some of them as fishing vessels when they’re in fact part of a “maritime militia” surveilling the sea, looking to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will. Ian Urbina, who runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, spent four years visiting the fleet’s ships and investigating their conditions. (To communicate with fishermen on ships that prohibited him on board, he tossed up plastic bottles, “weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions.”) He also tracked where squid caught irresponsibly would end up: first to plants in China, some employing Xinjiang labor, and then continuing on to the very places we buy our seafood, like Costco and Safeway. This is a massive report on how China has become a fishing superpower, but Urbina also weaves within it an emotional, devastating story of an Indonesian worker who joined one of these ships in order to give his family a better life. Extraordinary reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari. —CLR

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

— November —

‘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

“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

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

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

— December —

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

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

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

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Each week at Longreads we review our stats to find out which editor’s pick—chosen from longform stories published across the web—has been most read by our audience. The winner receives the coveted “Audience Award,” perhaps not the most lucrative prize for trophies or cash, but one that comes with something better: a spot in our weekly Top Five post and newsletter. Over the year, this award has awakened an increasingly competitive spirit amongst our editors, and we now wait with bated breath for the week’s announcement, hoping for the smug feeling that comes with a pick we chose winning.

For this post, we considered ruthlessly running the numbers to see which editor won the most awards of the year. But holiday spirit prevailed, and instead, we are simply giving you the top 10 most-read picks of 2023, which, it turns out, includes choices from all of our editors. Congratulations to the writers and publications for these stories that couldn’t help but grab attention.

If you want to follow our Audience Awards in 2024, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here. (And when you see which editor picked the winner each week, know that they will be gloating.)

—Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter, and Seyward

1. How Rural America Steals Girls’ Future

Monica Potts | The Atlantic | April 6, 2023 | 3,436 words

This excerpt, from the forthcoming The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, captures how heartfelt Monica Pott’s exploration into small-town America is. By focusing on the women she grew up with, a story that is the same across many places becomes personal—and thus deeply resonates.

The first time Vanessa had sex, she asked her boyfriend to stop, and he didn’t. Later, with other boys, Vanessa sometimes felt like she couldn’t say no to their advances, because she’d already lost her virginity. Only many years later did Vanessa recognize some of these incidents as sexual assaults, she told me when I visited her in 2017. She didn’t blame the boys, necessarily; they were just doing what everyone expected them to do, she felt. But her reputation suffered.

2. The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

Kit Chellel | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 6, 2023 | 6,516 words

In a tale that races along like a James Bond novel, Kit Chellel introduces us to Niko Tosa, the man who had casinos scrambling to change roulette. Was his winning streak down to luck, skill, or a supercomputer? We never find out, but trying to figure it out is still a really fun ride.

That night, March 15, 2004, the thin Croatian seemed to be looking for something. After a few minutes, he settled at a roulette table in the Carmen Room, set apart from the main playing area. He was flanked on either side by his companions: a Serbian businessman with deep bags under his eyes and a bottle-blond Hungarian woman. At the end of the table, the wheel spun silently, spotlighted by a golden chandelier. The trio bought chips and began to play.

3. A Star Reporter’s Break With Reality

Elaina Plott Calabro | The Atlantic | June 12, 2023 | 6,904 words

Lara Logan rose to broadcast stardom as a hungry reporter who capitalized on both her fearlessness and her telegeneity. That was before she drifted into a nest of conspiracy theories that would get her ousted from numerous TV gigs; now, she travels a far-right lecture circuit, fearmongering for profit. But Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile doesn’t relish in the gory spectacle—it’s a dispassionate, empathic look at how someone so talented can lose their way so completely.

Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.

Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.

4. What Happens When Dave Chappelle Buys Up Your Town

Tyler J. Kelley | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 28, 2023 | 4,851 words

Dave Chappelle has lived full-time in the tiny, idyllic Ohio town of Yellow Springs for more than 15 years; at this point, it’s as much a part of his personal brand as the everpresent cigarette. But as Tyler J. Kelley reports, Chappelle’s impact on Yellow Springs—including his many real estate purchases and a number of questionably zoned live shows—has become a point of contention among townspeople who fear the end of affordability and find themselves torn between pride and preservation.

Dozens spoke in favor of granting the variance, mostly touting the economic benefit of the shows. Despite her doubts, Parsons voted yes. The measure passed unanimously. “When push came to shove, we caved,” she says. “I felt so dirty afterwards.” She took the weekend to think it over, then quit the board. “If I haven’t got enough guts to stand up for what I believe, I’m not serving the people,” she says. The village has always been “weirdly dysfunctional,” she went on, but “now it’s not a fun dysfunction, and there’s people who are afraid.”

With the variance granted, the shows carried on until the end of the summer. In the village, the T-shirt shop sold more T-shirts, the restaurants sold more dinners, and the record store sold more comedy records. The celebrities arrived, the fans were happy, the jokes were funny. Meanwhile, the tensions of past years continued to bubble beneath the surface like sulfurous spring water

5. The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | September 25, 2023 | 14,695 words

In postwar Austria, a psychologist named Maria Nowak-Vogl ran a mysterious psychiatric facility where “difficult” children were sent. With help from a friend and journalist, Margaret Talbot, Evy Mages mines memories of her time at this child-observation station in the mid-seventies, remembering all the abuse that happened there. Nowak-Vogl was a well-respected academic; she was also trained by Nazis and believed in repressive practices and cruel punishments to make children compliant and “socially desirable,” including administering epiphysan, a shot meant to suppress sexual urges. Talbot accompanies Mages to Austria to learn more about Nowak-Vogl and the villa—which operated from the mid-fifties until the late-eighties—as well as her own family history. This story is as horrific and dark as it sounds. Amazingly, though, Mages has come out the other side, now helping other victims connect with each other and making it easier for them to report the abuse they experienced as children.

A news article about the commission’s findings described the villa as a combination of “home, prison, and testing clinic.” The commission had reviewed medical records and reported something shocking: children had been injected with epiphysan, an extract derived from the pineal glands of cattle which veterinarians used to suppress estrus in mares and cows. Nowak-Vogl, a conservative Catholic, had wanted to see if epiphysan would suppress sexual feelings in children, as well as discourage masturbation, thus rendering her charges more “manageable.” Masturbation—among both adolescents and young children, who use it to self-soothe—was a preoccupation of Nowak-Vogl’s. So was bed-wetting. Her staff was instructed to keep charts documenting urination and bowel movements, and to check children’s underwear “with the eyes or the nose.” Schreiber described her as being “on a crusade against masturbation and sexual excitedness.”

6. The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

In her gut-wrenching piece—a masterpiece of thoughtful longform journalism—Jennifer Senior profiles her aunt Adele, a woman eventually diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12 after being institutionalized for decades. Senior attempts to understand the trauma Adele and her family suffered after being deprived of one another based on medical advice considered best at the time.

My grandmother told my mother that she instantly knew something was different when Adele was born. Her cry wasn’t like other babies’. She was inconsolable, had to be carried everywhere. Her family doctor said nonsense, Adele was fine. For an entire year, he maintained that she was fine, even though, at the age of 1, she couldn’t hold a bottle and didn’t respond to the stimuli that other toddlers do. I can’t imagine what this casual brush-off must have done to my grandmother, who knew, in some back cavern of her heart, that her daughter was not the same as other children. But it was 1952, the summer that Adele turned 1. What male doctor took a working-class woman without a college education seriously in 1952?

Only when my mother and her family went to the Catskills that same summer did a doctor finally offer a very different diagnosis. My grandmother had gone to see this local fellow not because Adele was sick, but because she was; Adele had merely come along. But whatever ailed my grandmother didn’t capture this man’s attention. Her daughter did. He took one look at her and demanded to know whether my aunt was getting the care she required.

7. A Catatonic Woman Awakened After 20 Years. Her Story May Change Psychiatry.

Richard Sima | The Washington Post | June 1, 2023 | 4,122 words

Could autoimmune diseases be at the root of some mental illnesses? Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, thinks so. “By all accounts, she was thriving, in overall good health and showing no signs of mental distress beyond the normal teenage growing pains,” they said of April Burrell. This was before she suffered a traumatic experience, became incoherent, and was hospitalized. Twenty years after she became catatonic, Markx discovered that April’s bloodwork showed antibodies were attacking her brain. Miraculously, after several courses of steroids and immunosuppressive drugs, April improved to the point where in 2020, she was deemed mentally competent enough to check herself out of treatment, but not before a joyful reunion with her family.

The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus. Every month for six months, April would receive short, but powerful “pulses” of intravenous steroids for five days, plus a single dose of cyclophosphamide, a heavy-duty immunosuppressive drug typically used in chemotherapy and borrowed from the field of oncology. She was also treated with rituximab, a drug initially developed for lymphoma.

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately.

8. Death On The Savage Mountain: What Really Happened On K2, And Why 100 Climbers Stepped Over A Dying Man On Their Way To The Summit

Matthew Loh | Insider | August 21, 2023 | 6,472 words

What price would you pay to summit K2, a mountain far more technical and challenging than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain? Could you literally walk past a dying man in order to get there? This past July 27th, 100 people bypassed Pakistani porter Mohammed Hassan on their way to the summit as he lay dying after a fall. For Insider, Matthew Loh tries to understand.

By the end of the summit window, at least 102 people had conquered K2. All paying climbers would descend the mountain safely, and regroup at base camp.

Mohammad did not.

His death would shake the mountaineering industry in the weeks to come, and eventually make headlines worldwide. The climbers who summited K2 that day were swept into the heart of a bitter debate. Speculation churned as people argued whether a man more than 8,000 meters above sea level could have been saved from the Mountain of Mountains — or whether greed for glory had blinded more than 100 climbers and left Mohammad stranded on the ice.

9. “America Does Not Deserve Me.” Why Black People Are Leaving the United States

Kate Linthicum | Los Angeles Times | October 10, 2023 | 2,576 words

The pandemic prompted a lot of people to move to a lot of different places. But as Kate Linthicum reports for LAT, the scale of “Blaxit”—Black Americans’ emigration around the world—could make it one of the largest such patterns since the 1920s. But while Europe has long been a home for Black American artists, the current moment stretches from Mexico to Ghana, and encompasses all walks of life. This is what following one’s bliss looks like.

[Nuriddin] acknowledges that she is lucky to have a job that allows her to work remotely, and that a lot of people, including many of those from her parents’ generation, don’t. She’s trying to convince her cousins to find work that will allow them to live outside of the country.

Like many Black expats here, she’s still learning Spanish. She communicates easily with the English-speaking descendants of Jamaicans, but talking to other Costa Ricans is hard. Still, she says she feels a mutual recognition when she locks eyes with Black locals. “There’s almost a little glimmer in the eye when you look at each other,” she said. “There’s like a little nod.”

10. My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon

Amy Silverstein | The New York Times | April 18, 2023 | 1,587 words

Author Amy Silverstein has had a heart transplant—twice. Now she’s dying of cancer. Those facts are related, as she explains in this essay. The procedure that saved her is now killing her.

I gave my all to sustaining my donor hearts despite daunting odds, and the hearts rewarded me with extraordinary years. I have been so lucky.

But now I lower my chin and whisper the words malignant … metastatic … lungs … terminal. It is the end of the road for my heart and me — not because we didn’t achieve and maintain sparkling cardiac health. But because the sorry state of transplant medicine took us down.

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors. And I understand the irony of an incredibly successful and fortunate two-time heart transplant recipient making this case, but my longevity also provides me with a unique vantage point. Standing on the edge of death now, I feel compelled to use my experience in the transplant trenches to illuminate and challenge the status quo.

Profiles dig deep, assembling original details to convey the essence of a person or place—and sometimes both—as you’ll see. These are the stories that gave us keen insight into the lives of others, drawn from hundreds of editors’ picks selected in 2023.

Amor Eterno

Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 8, 2023 | 7,531 words

Before May 24, 2022, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, a part-time local reporter and mother of six children living in Uvalde, Texas, was shy and quiet. After that horrific day at Robb Elementary School, when two teachers and 19 children were murdered—including her daughter, Lexi—Mata-Rubio was forever changed. She was overwhelmed with grief, but also felt compelled to speak, to do anything she could to fight for justice for Lexi. Shortly after the shooting, she testified in a hearing about gun violence. She then started to speak at rallies, at home and in Washington DC. She became a fierce advocate for gun control, even meeting with Ted Cruz to push him to support an assault weapons ban. (Not a spoiler: he didn’t.) In those months that followed, she realized that she had a voice. (Recently, in fact, she ran for mayor of Uvalde, though she lost the bid last month in a special election.) I’ve sat down several times to write why I picked this story by Skip Hollandsworth, but have scrapped numerous attempts. They all read hollow and repetitive, because I’ve written versions of them before. My Best of 2022 pick in this category was also a Uvalde profile, about student Caitlyne Gonzales, so it seems that I can’t help but return to this town, to this tragedy. Perhaps immersing ourselves in the narrative of tragedy is a form of emotional retreat, a way of numbing the constant onslaught of violence in the world. Hollandsworth’s piece reminds us that these stories do not end when the spotlight of our attention moves on, but continue to transform communities, families, and individuals. This is an emotional, difficult, but necessary portrait of a grieving mother finding meaningful ways to honor her daughter’s life, and perhaps help birth a better world for all of us. —CLR

Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story

Kerry Howley | New York Magazine | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words

For the second year in a row, my favorite profile was written by the inimitable Kerry Howley, one of the great chroniclers of America’s right-wing resurgence. Last year, I adored—and seethed over—her profile of anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser; this year, Howley turned her attention to Clarence and Ginni Thomas. The former, of course, is the conservative Supreme Court justice confirmed to the bench despite being credibly accused of sexual harassment—laying the groundwork for the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco a quarter-century later—who more recently was exposed for accepting expensive gifts from various billionaires. Ginni, Thomas’s wife, started a political consulting firm with money provided by one of those billionaires, and used her influential perch inside the Beltway to support the January 6 insurrection. In this profile, Howley illuminates how the Thomases’ almost alchemical bond as a couple makes them such a potent, ruinous force in the American project. The insight here is as sharp as the prose. “There was something in Ginni and Clarence that reinforced and refined a shared extremism, something beyond their shared intolerance for ambiguity,” Howley writes. “There was an interlocking set of beliefs, a fatalism born of the lived experience of racism and the entire heavily manned edifice of white ignorance.” When I got to the end of this piece, I whispered under my breath, to no one in particular, damn. —SD

Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana

Wyatt Williams | The Bitter Southerner | September 4, 2023 | 6,303 words

The stories I love best are slow and savor-y, served with a love that can transcend pain. Wyatt Williams’s ode to his mother, the state of of Louisiana, and the songwriter Lucinda Williams is a piece I reread often. I return to remember how great writing disappears in serving a story, or when I’m struggling with how to get my point across just so. I’m rewarded with new resonance every time. Williams’s mother and Lucinda were born in 1953 in Louisiana, a place known most often for the destruction wrought by hurricanes; both families endured the stormy weather of violence, alcoholism, and generational trauma. When Williams writes, “She had been through crisis before. She had her ways of getting through it,” he’s talking abut his mother but alluding to Lucinda and the state of Louisiana, all three of which, on deeper inspection, reveal a special kind of resilience. Writers grapple with how to convey inchoate and entangled ideas and feelings but Williams creates beauty out of the chaos by sheer repetition, just like listening to a song on repeat and discovering something new with each spin. “It seems almost impossible that someone could spend 14 years writing 34 lines of poetry,” he writes. “But one of the things to understand about the work is that it isn’t as much about putting down words as it is about learning to see, reteaching yourself to look at the world, your own life, and find the shapes and patterns.” This story is about working hard to make something out of nothing, about naming things you don’t yet understand, about doing the work and paying deep attention in an attempt to find meaning and perhaps even earn a kind of peace. These are universal truths so bold, you know you can’t let go. —KS

Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul

Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words

When you ask people to name the profiles that have stuck with them, they nearly always point to pieces that hinge on proximity. That’s for good reason. Spending hours or days in deep conversation with a subject (or simply fishing) generally works to break down the walls of image maintenance, creating enough unvarnished moments for a good writer to plumb. But there are many other ways to write a meaningful profile, as Nate Rogers’ piece about Paul Dochney proves. Dochney is known by a large swath of the internet simply as Dril, a Twitter persona who for 15 years has polished satirical shitposting to a high sheen and in the process helped architect online culture’s dominant comic voice. It was a nearly uninterrupted piece of performance art, which makes the profile’s quotidian backdrop—an anonymous old-school L.A. greasy spoon—all the more delightful. Like any profile, Rogers gives you the broad beats of Dochney’s upbringing and CV, dutifully threading in secondary interviews for texture and context, but the profile’s real value lies in how he contends with the idea of art in the age of social media. Dochney/Dril isn’t a provocateur; he’s a guy who likes making stuff. It’s just that in a twist of fate, Twitter became the place where that stuff first connected with people. And with that platform teetering ever closer to obsolescence, Dochney’s next steps become even less certain. Amid a sea of stories that seek to examine the role of the “creator,” Rogers’ profile instead sets out to examine the creative urge—and is stronger for it. —PR

Casual Luke Rides the Big Wave

Gabriella Paiella | GQ Sports | June 13, 2023 | 5,175 words

Everyone loves a good underdog story, and this one is particularly delightful. The Eddie Aikay Big Wave Invitational is a surf contest that relies on the whims of nature—the waves in Waimea Bay must reach a butt-clenching height of a minimum of 40 feet for it to go ahead. When conditions are right, competitors race across the world to get there. For North Shore local Luke Shepardson, the commute was less of an ordeal (although he still got caught in traffic, leaving his wife in the car and running down the road). It also happened to be his commute to work. That’s right: Luke worked as a lifeguard at the event, taking his turn to ride the waves between patching up other competitors. He won the competition after riding a wave the size of a four-story building, beating the world’s greatest surfers without even being a professional on the circuit. After the win, Luke finished his shift and headed home to watch The Lion King with his kids. As Gabriella Paiella explains in her enchanting profile, this was all very Luke, who “is known as ‘Casual Luke.’ In Hawaii. Which is like being called ‘Neurotic Matt’ on the island of Manhattan.” Luke’s down-to-earth nature pervades this piece, with Paiella clearly coming to respect an attitude so different from other sports stars. Luke got some money from the Eddie, but not enough for his life to be easy. Living with his wife and two kids in a one-bedroom apartment—in an ever more expensive area—he dreams of “descending back into obscurity” and buying his own home in this little slice of paradise. Nothing more. You can see why, with Paiella painting a lovely picture of family life in this beautiful surf town. Sure, it’s expensive, but the height of elegance is a flip-flop, and everyone knows everyone. (“As Luke’s mom put it after the Eddie: I changed first- and second-place’s diapers.”) This profile oozes sun, sand, salt, and joy. Everyone loves an underdog story, and everyone loves Casual Luke—after all, he has all the big stuff figured out.  —CW

At the time of this writing, Longreads editors have created nearly 650 recommendations in 2023, and just about every one of them can be considered a feature. However, you’ll find that the stories contained herein are features in the classic sense: marriages of deep reporting and indelible prose. Some are light, others emotionally taxing. Their subjects range from subcultures to ideas to life itself. And just as they do every year, they represent the very best that narrative journalism has to offer. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

When Wizards and Orcs Came to Death Row

Keri Blakinger | The Marshall Project | August 31, 2023 | 4,440 words

This piece by Keri Blakinger is an extraordinary look at how world-building, through the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, became a form of escape for incarcerated men in Texas. The story centers around two men, Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, both of whom land on death row as young adults and meet in the late ’90s in Polunsky, one of the most restrictive death row units in the US. Through D&D, the men transcend their utterly isolating circumstances to find both camaraderie and a therapeutic outlet. Despite death row’s restrictive conditions, D&D crews find a way to play—passing secret notes from cell to cell, constructing handmade game spinners in lieu of dice, and hand-drawing detailed maps and character sheets, the latter of which are included in the piece and offer a peek into the vast worlds they built, and the personas they developed and inhabited. (Wardlow’s magical alter ego, Arthaxx d’Cannith, was a better version of himself—one that had never shot and killed a man during an attempted robbery.) “Sometimes, through their characters, they opened up about problems they would never otherwise discuss,” writes Blakinger, “unpacking their personal traumas through a thin veil of fantasy.” Like the intricate worlds Ford and Wardlow imagined, Blakinger—herself formerly incarcerated—builds this world behind bars in a way only she can. I wondered at first whether to call this piece uplifting, given the fates of most death-row prisoners. But Blakinger beautifully illustrates here the transformative power of storytelling and play, and how humans can come together to spark a bit of hope in the most unexpected places. —CLR

Molly’s Last Ride

Peter Flax | Bicycling Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 8,136 words

Twelve-year-old Molly Steinsapir was riding an e-bike with her friend on a residential street in California called, of all things, Enchanted Way, when she crashed and suffered injuries she would not survive. Her parents sued the bike manufacturer, claiming it was liable for Molly’s death. Peter Flax tells this tragic story exceedingly well by all the traditional measures of feature-writing (excellent prose, delicate tone). But this piece has stuck with me all year chiefly for two other reasons: because it delves into Big Questions about the human toll of rapid innovation, ones that go well beyond the e-bike industry, and because it demonstrates the incredible value of niche magazines. Flax used to be the editor-in-chief of Bicycling, and he is himself an avid cyclist. His expertise and insight elevate the story. So does the fact that the magazine let him go deep on the mechanics and economics of e-bikes, as well as the community of consumers who know this increasingly popular equipment better than anyone else. Put another way, this is an insider’s story. But to this outsider—I am not a cyclist—it still feels both accessible and urgent. It changed the way I view the e-bikes zipping up and down my block. Maybe it will do the same for you. —SD

Three Falls in The Alps

Xenia Minder | FT Magazine | December 21, 2022 | 4,475 words

I first stumbled upon this piece last year, in that blur of days between Christmas and the New Year, when time is lost to endless cycles of family conversations and cheese. It made enough of an impression on me to not only cut through the haze of over-indulgence but to stay in mind for the whole year. (As it was published after our “Best of 2022” was released, it still qualifies for this year’s list.) Xenia Minder tells her story to her brother, Raphael Minder—the Financial Times Central Europe correspondent—and I do not doubt that the closeness of this relationship helped the Minders create such a vivid, candid account. As the title suggests, it is the story of three catastrophic falls. In one, Xenia breaks her back, resulting in months in a back brace, and in the other two, she loses men she loves—first Erhard Loretan, then Jean-François. I live near a mountain resort, where tales of big falls are part of the mantra, but not three, not with such consequences. Searing sentences pull the reality of such tragedy brutally to the surface, with Erhard being found “still tied to my waist. I never realized that he had been right there, within touching distance,” while “Jean-François died on the mountain that he knew like the back of his hand.” But while the descriptions of the events are powerful, Xenia’s thoughtful reflections—and her pragmatism and strength—struck me most about this piece. She reminds us “that key events in our lives are unknown to us, particularly the moment of our death” and comes to see herself as just a tenant inside her own body. Quitting her job as a judge in Geneva, she starts a new chapter feeling both “light” and “solid,” moving to a chalet on the outskirts of a village—in the mountains. Combined with some beautiful, otherworldly photography from Olivo Barbieri, it’s haunting, poetic, and inspiring. —CW

Hitting Zero

Jana G. Pruden | The Globe and Mail | June 2, 2023, | 3,231 words

Jana G. Pruden takes us into the frenzy that is the Canadian National Cheer Championships, a space blaring Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, arcing with the energy of sparkly young heroines who “compete by performing short, highly technical acrobatic routines in unison at the highest energy, with scores based on execution, difficulty, creativity and showmanship.” Pruden goes behind the sequins to discover that while cheer requires much from those who compete, the sport welcomes every body shape and size including “small flyers, lithe tumblers,” and “powerful bases” who each have their own precise and perfect role to play in helping their squad to “hit zero”—cheer speak for an error-free performance. “There is nothing quite like cheer, which combines the hyper-feminine aesthetic of a pageant with the posturing and swagger of boxing, the performative flair of pro wrestling, the tribal fandom of football and the raucous atmosphere of a rock concert,” writes Pruden. Streamers and glitter aside, cheer is serious—and dangerous—business. Participants get injured, sometimes severely, while performing their physically and mentally demanding routines. Vomit buckets stand ready and a clean-up protocol is in place should the intensity of performance press the buckets into service. Pruden fortifies you with this and oh, so much more necessary (and fascinating!) background information to prepare you for an intense, high-flying finale that will leave you cheering for more. —KS

What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

Virginia Heffernan | Wired | September 26, 2023 | 3,874 words

Quick, name the topic you got most tired of reading about in 2023. Assuming you didn’t mention a certain musical artist who managed both a #1 tour and a #1 movie, I’m gonna go ahead and guess your answer involved two letters: A and I. (Sure, said musical artist’s name also involves those two letters, but let’s not get caught up in technicalities.) It’s been just over a year since ChatGPT became available to the general population, and in those 12 months we’ve seen everything from “AI will save the world” to “AI could destroy humanity,” with nearly every flavor of equivocation in between. But none of that makes for a good story, and that’s exactly why Virginia Heffernan’s Wired feature was a lock for my pick in this category. Nominally about Cicero, an AI model created to play the strategy game Diplomacy, the piece contends with AI’s potential less than it does human psychology. Heffernan correctly pegs that much of our discomfort with chatbots lies in their ersatz personalities. “An entity that feigns human emotions is arguably a worse object of affection than a cold, computational device that doesn’t emote at all,” she writes. Enter Cicero, and its programmers’ quest to make it unbeatable at a game that is, at its heart, about negotiation. Not deception or guile, but finding a path forward so that both sides benefit. Diplomacy isn’t an end in itself, but rather a means: how can AI relate better to people, and how can we reach a state of allyship and even trust, something more R2-D2 than HAL? (That Cicero is a Meta project goes only lightly acknowledged here, but it certainly makes Cicero’s victory over the world’s best Diplomacy player feel just a touch more ominous.) Heffernan is the perfect writer for this kind of piece—she’s long found the joy in everything from semiconductors to particle physics—though it also may just be that this wouldn’t be a piece in another writer’s hands. Either way, consider it the one AI story this year that’s not just thought-provoking, but narratively satisfying. —PR

Today’s Best of 2023 list honors five notable investigations we read in 2023. Below, our editors recommend deeply reported stories about child laborers working overnight, migrant boats lost at sea, the preservation of historical records, the criminalization of pregnant mothers, and penile enhancement surgery.

The Kids on the Night Shift

Hannah Dreier | The New York Times Magazine | September 18, 2023 | 7,705 words

One mark of a great investigation is that it leads to regulatory or legislative change. The other is that the target of said investigation tries to erect a wall of silence. The first happened earlier this year, when Hannah Dreier began her New York Times series on migrant child labor; the second happened while reporting this stirring, heartbreaking exposé. “Soon slaughterhouses around the country began passing out fliers with my photograph,” Dreier writes. Of course they did. When a 14-year-old Guatemalan migrant named Marcos nearly loses an arm to an industrial accident on an overnight shift at a Perdue-run chicken processing plant, it’s hard to claim innocence. When the incident report leaves out Marcus’ age, and the state investigation takes less than two weeks to attribute the tragedy to “poor training” without ever visiting the plant, it’s hard to claim innocence. When a rural Virginia community is filled with so many night-shift kids that teachers arrive in the morning to find students sleeping in their cars, fresh from the plant, it’s hard to claim innocence. There’s plenty of innocence here—it’s just being stolen from those who are only trying to help their families. Dreier’s reporting is as human as it is probing, making clear that the children she profiles are far more than tales of adversity or damning statistics. They’re children. No matter what Perdue and Tyson allow themselves to think. —PR

Adrift

Renata Brito and Felipe Dana | The Associated Press | April 12, 2023 | 4,351 words

One morning in May 2021, fishermen in Tobago spotted a strange boat offshore. To their horror, they discovered a dozen dead men on board. Among the objects left behind: Tattered clothes. Prayer beads. A water bottle labeled with Arabic writing. A phone, through which local authorities eventually pull a list of contacts. All of these items and more would offer evidence about this doomed journey. In this immersive feature, Renata Brito and Felipe Dana use video storytelling, photography, and interactive graphics to reconstruct what happened to these men. Part of a group of 43 migrants that left Mauritania 135 days earlier, they intended to sail to Europe, along a treacherous Atlantic route via the Canary Islands, to start a better life. As is the fate of other boats like it, the pirogue lost its way and washed up in the Caribbean. For two years, Brito and Dana followed a trail of clues, piecing together a narrative that spans three continents. Their investigation, drawn from police documents and interviews with forensic experts and disappeared migrants’ loved ones halfway across the world, led to the identification by name of more than three-quarters of the people on the boat; DNA testing also confirmed the identity of one man, bringing closure to at least one family. “These migrants are as invisible in death as they were in life,” they write of these men—and the larger African refugee crisis. “But even ghosts have families.” These “ghost boats” are vessels of hope for these men, but many of them vanish and are forgotten at sea; with exceptional and empathetic reporting, Brito and Dana tell a very moving human story of one. —CLR

The Night 17 Million Precious Military Records Went Up in Smoke

Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words

As line by line of this piece’s lede unfurled, I leaned a little bit closer, already riveted. In 1973, a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed 17 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF), service records that unlock “home, business, and educational loans; health insurance and medical treatment; life insurance; job training programs; and other perks the country has long considered part of the debt it owes its veterans.” For reporter Megan Greenwell, one personnel file was personal. Her grandfather, who died in 2012, had served in the Army in 1943. Could his OMPF have miraculously survived the devastating fire? Greenwell completed “Standard Form 180, ‘Request Pertaining to Military Records,’” in a bid to find out. This piece, dealing with the US Federal Government, could have easily been bogged down by a bureaucracy unwilling to share its secrets about the blaze. But Greenwell brings us fascinating humans who lovingly apply surprising science and technology to restore and decipher records damaged by fire, water, and humidity. For these technicians, each record—each person—is precious, an identity revealed. But did Greenwell find her grandfather’s personnel file? Was his among the few that survived the fire or was carefully restored? I couldn’t possibly spoil that for you; you’ll have to read the piece to find out. —KS

They Followed Doctors’ Orders. Then Their Children Were Taken Away.

Shoshana Walter | Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting | June 29, 2023 | 7,167 words

Sometimes an investigation begins with a single word. In 2016, as part of legislation expanding government support for the prevention and treatment of opioid addiction, Congress amended existing child-welfare policy. “Federal law had long required newborns vaguely identified as ‘affected by’ illegal drugs to be flagged to child protective services,” Shoshana Walter explains. “In this new iteration, lawmakers removed the word ‘illegal.’” The change was intended to help infants exposed in utero to prescription opioids, but in practice, it created a devastating dragnet. Drawing from meticulous research, Walter reveals instances of new mothers being reported for taking antidepressants and run-of-the-mill cold medicines, and for testing positive for the fentanyl found in epidurals (a particularly gobsmacking detail, which I have repeated aloud many times, including to my own doctor). Others were reported for using Suboxone, a drug prescribed to help recovering addicts stay clean, and had their children taken away as a result. “It’s like a sick game,” one mother told Walter. “They don’t want you on illicit street drugs, so here, we’re going to give you this medicine. But then if you take this medicine, we are going to punish you for it and ruin your family.” It would be simplistic to say that this phenomenal story, published in partnership with The New York Times Magazine, is about the unintended consequences of a government policy. On a deeper level, it is about the American impulse to marginalize and punish women who don’t fit into culturally ordained boxes. —SD

Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement

Ava Kofman | ProPublica, co-published with The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words

Once upon a time, I produced a documentary on cosmetic surgery. Having stood in a few operating rooms while silicon got wedged into various crannies, I have retained a morbid curiosity about this field. However, I was still not quite sure what to expect when I decided to join Ava Kofman “inside the secretive world of penile enlargement.” Certainly not something quite so dark—or graphic. Kofman does not shy away from describing what is involved in inserting urologist James Elist’s invention, the Penuma (a silicone implant, “shaped like a hot­dog bun”) under the skin of the penis to increase its girth and flaccid length. Having also made it into the operating room, she is fully equipped to assault the senses by describing the sights and smells involved with surgery on an inverted penis. She has done her homework in other ways too, talking to 49 enlargement patients—a high tally for an area notoriously wrapped in shame and secrecy. Her meticulous investigation pays off when she discovers the post-procedure horrors some men have endured: implants becoming infected or detached, buckling at the corners, or even breaking through the skin. The trust she gains from her case studies is impressive, as is the access given to her by Elist himself, who allows her into his inner sanctum to witness his godlike complex firsthand. Kofman is fair in pointing out that all pioneering surgeries involve some trial and error at the start, but what I found shocking was that most men “had been of at least average size before going under the knife.” (Not much education on body dysmorphia seems to make it into the rushed intake process.) This enlightening piece may not be for the faint of heart, but it’s a great piece of journalism. —CW

Reported essays reflect the great craft involved in blending fact, anecdote, and personal observation to tell a compelling story. These are the pieces we can’t stop thinking about, the ones we will forever recommend to friends, the ones that surprised and delighted us—all drawn from our vast and deep pool of editors’ picks. Enjoy!

The Great Forgetting

Summer Praetorius | Nautilus | December 19, 2022 | 3,975 words

This piece by paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius, which is part memoir and part science writing, was published in mid-December last year in that overlooked period that made it too late to include in our Best of 2022 collection, yet technically ineligible for this one. But I’m making an exception. (As Praetorius notes about the Great Unconformity—the gap of a billion years of Earth’s unrecorded history between 1,600 and 600 million years ago—there’s much to be discovered about seemingly forgotten periods of time.) I’ve read many poignant climate stories on the melting of glaciers and the razing of ancient forests, but I keep returning to this one because of Praetorius’ vast understanding of the Earth’s history across hundreds of millions of years; she simplifies complex concepts about geological amnesia, resilience, and system collapse so they’re more accessible to a general reader. I love the beautiful way she describes the Earth’s memory, recorded in layers of sediment and held within its disappearing ice sheets, which she refers to as “the great brains of our planet.” But she also weaves a deeply personal account of her late brother Jebsen’s mental deterioration after a snowboarding accident, another example of a complex system pushed too far out of equilibrium to recover effectively. This parallel story helps to make the piece relatable on a more intimate scale. Recalling the ride home from the woods when she notices the first signs of Jebsen’s memory loss as he sat in the back seat, she realizes now that he was forever changed from that moment and never recovered. “I fixate on our immobility; on the lack of actions we took to assess the larger damages that may have been hiding beneath that hole in his memory,” she writes. It wasn’t that she and her mother didn’t care about his well-being, but perhaps they didn’t initially believe it was anything serious. As Praetorius shifts between her family’s story and scientific research, you can’t help but ask: How resilient is Earth? Are we seeing and acting on the warning signs? —CLR

The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

So many families, mine and likely yours, have things they just don’t talk about, experiences and events rooted in regret and shame, where everyone concerned wants to forget or remain silent. But does silence bring solace or does it ensure irreparable harm, perhaps greater than the pain of confronting the past? This is just one of the weighty themes Jennifer Senior considers in “The Ones We Sent Away,” a brilliant essay I have not stopped thinking about since reading it in August. At the heart of the piece is Senior’s aunt Adele, who was institutionalized in 1953 at 21 months old. Adele was diagnosed with microcephaly and removed from those who loved her the most in this world on the advice of medical doctors who meant well. This story is chiefly about loss and trauma, primarily the trauma Adele endured while institutionalized and the incalculable loss of not receiving enlightened care. Adele’s family suffered too, deprived of Adele’s lively spirit in their lives. With deep care and nuance, Senior examines the systemic and societal failures that deemed it best to separate Adele from her family. In writing this essay, she looks closely at the decision makers of the past and turns the microscope on herself: as a journalist writing about an aunt unable to give consent, Senior realized she faced an ethical dilemma not unlike the doctors who suggested Adele be institutionalized in 1952. She, like they, meant well. By sharing Adele’s story, Senior wants not just to avoid harm, but to do good, possibly for other families facing similar decisions today, possibly for anyone who sits in silence, afraid to face an unpleasant and painful past. Through Adele’s incredible story, Senior suggests that to do better as humans, we first need to be brave enough to talk about it. —KS

A Good Prospect

Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words

Here’s an endorsement: I am prone to ranting about Teslas not (only) because of the waste of space that is Elon Musk and the shoddy construction of his EVs, but also because of this essay. In March, writer Nick Bowlin attended an annual conference in Toronto, Ontario, where the “institutions that constitute the global metal-mining industry commiserate in the bad times and celebrate the good.” In a perverse twist, Bowlin found that 2023 is a decidedly good time for mining not in spite of climate change, but because of it. A world hungry for electric batteries, solar panels, and other essentials of a decarbonized economy means there is escalating demand for metals, and mining interests are seizing the moment to make over their image—and to make bank. “To stop global warming,” one conference speaker says, “you need us.” But boosting the profits of some of the world’s most notoriously exploitative concerns comes at a terrible cost: to the earth, to mine workers, to the inhabitants of metal-rich land. Bowlin doesn’t suggest that mining can’t be part of green solutions. Rather, his essay brilliantly illuminates the perils of trying to save the world by relying on the blunt tools and maximalist mindset of late-stage capitalism. —SD

The Horrors of Pompeii

Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words

Reported essays cover a broad spectrum, with historical reporting being oft-overlooked. It’s a difficult skill: conjuring events from hundreds—or even thousands—of years ago is no mean feat. But when it works, a history piece is engaging and fascinating reportage. In this essay on ancient Pompeii for Aeon, Guy D. Middleton grabs attention with a piece of graffiti scrawled on the vestibule wall of a well-to-do house owned by two freedmen, the Vettii: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” Explaining how “graffiti . . . comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society, ” Middleton leads us into the bowels of Pompeii to try and discover who Eutychis was. Expect back-stabbing brothels, brutal slavery, and sexual abuse. The meaning of every word of the crude advertisement is examined, along with writings, paintings, and artifacts that add further insight into this grim world. (Particularly revealing is a lead collar inscribed: “This is a cheating whore! Seize her because she escaped from Bulla Regia.”) Through clever tools, rather than dumbing down, Middleton makes history accessible—and Eutychis can call out to us from nearly 2,000 years ago. —CW

In Search of Lost Time

Tom Vanderbilt | Harper’s Magazine | March 20, 2023 | 5,339 words

Despite the fact that I’m one of those clean-but-messy people, I also love precision. Exactitude. The idea of a constant. That spills over into a fascination with measurement in general. It’s not a hobby—I don’t collect rulers or, like, assemble Ikea shelves with a torque wrench—just an abiding curiosity. And it’s one that Tom Vanderbilt seems to share, judging from his quest in Harper’s to find the ground truth of the second. Like so much of his writing, he sets about answering a question (in this case, what drives clock time?) as genially as possible. Characters don’t just talk, they do so “with weary resignation” or “[nodding] excitedly”; they call statistical noise “jiggly wigglies.” That seasoning, Vanderbilt knows, becomes all the more crucial when the rest of the recipe comprises chewy concepts like dematerialization or the ephemeris second. Who wouldn’t get the tiniest thrill knowing that researchers had to travel to France to compare their kilograms to the platinum-iridium cylinder once deemed the “official” kilogram? Who’s not just a little bit awed by the idea that the official second doesn’t actally exist, but is essentially spit out by a nine-billion-step Rube Goldberg machine made of cesium atoms? It’s science writing that reads like a travelog: Look to your left and see the world’s smallest ruler! If you’re going to guide readers through the world of the abstract, you’ve gotta make the concrete part fun. —PR

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Personal essays are as much about the readers as the writers. While all the essays in this list demonstrate exceptional writing—each piece struck a distinct chord with the editor who chose it. For Seyward, it was an essay on grief. For Krista, a piece on community experience. Peter was drawn to video game writing (Red Dead Redemption 2!), Cheri to the immigrant experience and caring for loved ones, and Carolyn to the fear of missed opportunities as we age (and a vicious jungle tick).

We hope you find a piece to resonate with you as you read these beautiful personal stories.

Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words  

Grief is unpredictable. Sometimes it stabs you, sometimes it suffocates you; when it isn’t making you weep or scream, it’s leaving you numb. Grief is also unfathomable: we cannot see, much less reach, the edges of the permanent absence of someone we love. “Grief may be the knowledge … that the future won’t be like the past,” Kamran Javadizadeh writes in this exquisite essay about the death of his sister, Bita. “Like water to the page, it spreads in all directions, it thins the surface, it touches what you cannot touch.” Javadizadeh reflects on his grief through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience of losing Bita: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from college; a Hafez verse that Bita texted to him one day. The best poetry is not unlike grief: it is vast, complex, elusive. And in reading verse, Javadizadeh shows, we can find lessons for mourning. I’ve thought about this essay countless times since I read it last summer, and I suspect I will reread it many times in the years to come. —SD

The Butchering

Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words

Consider what it means to truly feel full—with a full stomach and a full heart—when your physical and spiritual hungers are satiated for a time. Diné poet Jake Skeets mulls these layers of resonance in his beautiful essay “The Butchering,” in which he prepares to kill a sheep for “the Kinaałda. . . .loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony.” For Skeets and members of his Indigenous community, story is wonderfully entangled with preparing the food that will nourish his family both physically and spiritually. Community members teach and learn interchangeably, switching roles naturally in a space of safety, free from shame. Skeets meditates on the open mindset needed to fully participate; sometimes he is a child, earning knowledge passed on from family and sometimes he is an uncle, offering an example for others. There’s a slowness to savor in Skeets’ writing, a gentle quickening you observe in the essay as he educates you on what it takes to sustain his community and their Indigenous way of life. “The next time I butcher I’ll have my own story to tell, my own memory to share, knowledge to offer. One more voice to add to the chorus on those nights when you’re out in the desert under the night sky, no sound for miles, just the moon and the ground beneath you, reminding you it’s all real. That and your full stomach. Generations heard through wind, the air, the stirring gleaming stars. All that knowledge, all that story, all that beauty,” he writes. Be sure to make time for this piece; it will ignite your sense of wonder and spark your curiosity, feeding you in a way that’s truly satisfying. —KS

We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Not long after I started at Longreads, I put together a reading list detailing some of my favorite pieces of video game writing over the previous decade. If people could enjoy reviews of movies they haven’t seen, I reasoned, then they could do the same with gaming criticism and journalism—even if they’d never held a controller. That conviction hasn’t wavered in the years since; however, this year brought a piece powerful enough to vault back through time and land on that list. Hanif Abdurraqib’s Paris Review essay (which also appears in the newly published collection Critical Hits) is nominally about the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ critically acclaimed title set in the American West in 1899. The word “nominally” carries more weight than usual, though. In Abdurraqib’s able hands, the game instead becomes a portal to grief and salvation, futility and loss. Some characters can’t be redeemed by virtue of their programming. Others can. The trajectory of the character of you is another story altogether. “If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say,” Abdurraqib writes. “I don’t think about it, until I do.” As with the very best of arts writing, this meditation teases apart its medium’s limitations to find the universal truths and questions embedded within. No virtual revolver necessary. —PR

A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future

Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 5, 2023 | 6,197 words

Jiayang Fan was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with ALS. She writes: “The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones.” This was the first personal piece Fan wrote after her mother’s death; it’s a devastating tale of the immigrant experience in America, of illness, of the intimate and complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. Fan’s descriptions of her bedridden mother range from exquisite to grim to satisfyingly peculiar. She is “shipwrecked in her own body,” with skin like “rice paper” that will inevitably tear. Even a line detailing how literal shit excretes out of her mother’s body—a “rivulet” down the “limp marble of her thigh”—manages to read beautifully. Fan writes with vulnerability about caring for an elderly loved one, love and sacrifice, the intertwining of two lives, and the story about them that’s ultimately written. I had to pause and collect myself a number of times as I thought about my own aging mother, and the decisions made over the course of our lives that have made us who we are. “One creature, disassembled into two bodies,” Fan writes of their shared life. This is extraordinary writing that hit me in a spot deep within. —CLR

How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words

A key sentence in this essay goes as follows, “Behold my nightmare: a tick has bitten my vagina.” The incident—relayed with “the gravitas of Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the destruction of planet Alderaan”—occurs in 2017, while Melissa Johnson is enduring a five-day trek in northern Guatemala to attend the wedding of two ex-military women. (She reflects on how during the days of Trump America, the middle of the jungle felt a safer spot for such nuptials.) Johnson embarks on this quest fresh from harvesting her eggs. Single at the age of 39, she is not only wrestling ticks from her “holy garden” but with her fear of missing out on love and motherhood. Trudging along the soggy trails, Johnson dwells on her cloudy future with trepidation. But, by the time she is released from the jungle’s insect-infested innards, she has come to terms with the fact that she is an adventurer—someone comfortable with the unknown. This piece has many layers: an adventure story, a character study of people with names such as “Tent Dawg,” and a thoughtful take on aging and motherhood. It’s also just plain funny. I loved going through the jungle with Johnson, and I also loved the last sentence of her bio: She had a baby girl in March. —CW

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