But if Maggie was sheltered from the onslaught beyond her small town, her mother was not. Erika has also struggled with her weight her entire life and feels the experience defined her; she has done everything she can to reassure Maggie that she is beautiful as she is and to protect her from the casual cruelty of people she encounters. But she also knew from the time her daughter was young that there was something different about her. In a small, dark part of herself, Erika feared that, because of her parenting or her habits or her own history with food, she was the one at fault. Even now, after all the interventions — the doctors, the fighting with insurance companies, the overhaul of the family fridge — this worry has not left her. It has only evolved, because Erika knows her neighbors and people in the world beyond have things to say not just about Maggie’s body but about the treatments she has chosen for it, too.

A short plane ride away from the FEMA event, the girls bobbed in the water beneath their towels. Three hours passed. Still no rescuers. Isabella knew there was a vast military force in Hawaii. Why had no one showed up yet? Had the fire wiped out the entire island? she worried. Had all of the firefighters perished too? Where were they?

From her vantage point, Isabella could peek from beneath the towel and see Lahaina’s historic banyan tree on fire. The harbor was engulfed. Boats burned. A giant piece of sheet metal from a nearby restaurant’s roof hurtled into the water, scratching Isabella. Every car that caught fire or exploded brought more black, suffocating smoke.

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

1. My Unraveling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease

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

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

5. On Beauty and Violence

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

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

Audience Award

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

Steinberg was skeptical that anyone could accurately judge the health of a relationship between, say, an 18-year-old and a 30-year-old without intimately knowing the people involved: “For all we know, the 30-year-old is immature and maybe they’re perfectly matched to each other.” One friend of mine, a 41-year-old woman I’ll call Claire, admitted she was drawn to dating a younger guy precisely because she felt less grown-up than her peers. She met her boyfriend on Hinge a year and a half ago, when he was 26. “I had this fear of being with dudes who were really adulting,” she told me. “I see myself as somebody who is completely dysfunctional in romantic relationships and in terms of my career direction.” She currently works in communications at a museum, but for years prior, she’d been drifting from profession to profession, never sure what she wanted to do with her life. She has accrued a lot of debt. “I could not imagine not feeling self-consciousness about those things in an intimate relationship with somebody my own age who seems to be on track,” she told me.

Let me be as clear as I possibly can: Erykah Badu is not like your aunt, not even your favorite one. I’ve met presidents, mayors, billionaires, Dallas Cowboy Hall of Famers, Holy Land juice healers, TED Talkers — a lot of people, all over the world, and Badu is one of the few who holds up after close inspection. I don’t mean she is perfect. I don’t mean she is better than you or anyone else. I mean she is who she says she is; she is trying to be better than she’s been. Most of all, she seems to truly like, or at least accept, herself. When I learned and saw that she walks barefoot nearly everywhere, and wondered how in the world she keeps her feet clean, she answers, “I don’t. They be black as hell!”

One Fourth of July, in my early 30s, I went upstate to spend the day with a college friend, her newborn, and one of her neighbors who had just had twins. Four new-new parents, three new-new babies, and me. Looking back, I think it was significant that my friend invited me into her life during a moment of total insanity. But at the time, I remember feeling like I suddenly had no idea who this person was anymore. She tried to engage with stories about my life but was clearly preoccupied. Meanwhile, she and her friend couldn’t stop discussing newborn bowel movements. Even if she didn’t necessarily want to be talking about poop, and was self-conscious about how much she was talking about poop, she needed to talk about her new baby, and all of the mysteries and anxieties, and feel understood by someone. I realized that I could nod and smile but never relate or soothe. I had a panic attack and left before the hot dogs got off the grill. I’m sure she was baffled by my reaction. And seven years later, I’m sure she’s still baffled, while I still have no clue what it felt like on her side of things.

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The finest romances have the messiest stories. Not messy as in poorly written; au contraire, a good romance hits all the highest points of storytelling  — the meet cute, the ecstatic joy of turning enemies into lovers, the inevitable wrench in the works, middles full of will they-won’t they tension, and a resolution that’s either a happily ever after, happy enough for now, or a bittersweet goodbye.

I am feeling particularly entranced with the genre right now having just watched La La Land. Okay, look — it’s not going to be a movie for everyone. But me? I love a good musical. I love a good homage. And I love a good love story. The prospect of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone maybe not ending up together because of the calls of their differing careers, but agreeing they will always love each other … well, let’s just say I needed several moments. 

My husband is a working musician, and I’m a writer. This May, we will have been together for 16 years — eight in sin, eight married, and all 16 sharing creative careers that don’t always align. Ours has been a romance of nights apart, beautiful Sundays together, opposite schedules, and ships passing in the night. 

There is a montage in La La Land that shows this all-too-familiar lifestyle of two artists — Gosling lands a big gig and is gone nights, while Stone is wrapped up in writing her one-woman play, rising early and going to bed early, so over the course of their days they end up sharing only bed space. This is the moment I shout to my husband, in the bedroom preparing for his Friday night gig: “Oh shit, La La Land just got too real.” 

I go to the bedroom and tell him about the scene. He listens to me, buttoning his shirt and smiling his sad smile. We agree that his current Friday and Saturday night gig schedules are not ideal. He wraps me in a hug and we stand there, as I watch the time on our alarm clock over his shoulder. He is late.

That image of a long-haul couple eating breakfast together, sharing a morning coffee, splitting a bottle of wine after a long work day, reading books together in bed before falling asleep in each other’s arms — that has never been our reality. Do I wish it was? Certainly. But he will never ask me to give up my writing, and I will never ask him to stop playing music. The messier our lives, the more years we have together, the more we realize the value of writing our own story. Will we, won’t we make it? We’ll just have to wait and see. 

This is where the great, messy love stories come in handy — I don’t need our marriage to look a certain way to have hope. Because if I’ve learned anything from these stories, it’s the messiness, not the ideal, that strengthens a relationship. Our marriage survives because we appreciate the possibility that it may not. 

So don’t give me any of that happy ending bullshit. Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love. 

My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage (Mary H.K. Choi, GQ Magazine, March 2021)

Anyone who has actually experienced marriage knows that the saying “marriage is bliss” is woefully incorrect. Not because marriage is about petty arguments or seeing sides of your spouse you’d rather not see (think the Seinfeld episode where Jerry dates a nudist and then opines on the difference between “good naked” and “bad naked.”) The truth of the matter is that marriage is a little bit of good naked and a whole lot of bad naked, especially during a pandemic when fears run high and aging in-laws who live across the country are deteriorating. 

Choi’s essay takes a singular comment from her husband and encapsulates it as a defining “bad naked” moment in their marriage. And, as she says, “I have never loved him more than in that moment.” As someone who has had her share of “bad naked” marriage moments, I can attest that this essay rings with glaring honesty. 

Everything he’d done in support of me and my family was noble. Selfless. Bodies are a constant fucking betrayal, and that he’d strapped himself to another one that was in turn attached to a whole human centipede of decrepitude was deeply affecting. But then he’d admitted not only his reservation but his scorn. How it ran counter to his most primal instincts of self-preservation. Were he alone, with his discipline, his self-sufficiency, his precious solitary walks on Far fucking Rockaway, he’d survive this. Meanwhile, I’d demanded we head to the airport. I dared him to say no, because I knew he couldn’t. This was marriage.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro (Stephanie Clifford, ELLE, December 2020)

Just stick with me on this one. We all remember that one guy, Martin Shkreli, who became universally known as the biggest asshole on the face of the earth for raising the price of a life-saving pharmaceutical by 5,000% overnight. Top this objectively awful-for-humanity move with his love of trolling, his shit-eating grin, and his obscenely expensive purchase of a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album — because of course, a Wall Street Bro would spend an inordinate amount of money on that. Now add in a journalist who is damn determined to humanize him. Or is she also being trolled? 

I’m not saying this story is a great love story. But it will enrage you, confuse you, and make you question the patriarchy. (In a follow-up, Smythe, the journalist, insists she is acting of her own accord and that it is sexist to imply that she is in any way a “victim.”) Is she being used by the Pharma Bro to recoup his image? Is she using him to get a big-money book deal? Are they actually in love? Or has she, in the words of one of her journalism professors, ruined her life? Settle back with some popcorn for this one. 

When Shkreli found out about this article, though, he stopped communicating with her. He didn’t want her telling her story, she says. Smythe thinks it’s because he’s worried about fallout for her. While she waits to hear from him, she monitors Google Alerts for his name, posts in support groups for loved ones of inmates, and—because inmates must place outgoing calls and can’t accept incoming ones—hopes one day he will call or reply to one of her emails. “It’s completely out of her control,” Haak says; all she can do is “sit around and wait and hope.”

Smythe has only one photo of the two of them, propped next to her bed. Shkreli, his arm around Smythe, has a wide-open smile. “Doesn’t he look human there?” Smythe says, laughing. 

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Tinder Hearted (Allison P. Davis, The Cut, August 2022) 

God, there are so many good lines in this one, it’s difficult to figure out what I want to highlight the most. Davis, a wickedly funny writer, recounts her decade of Tinder dating and how the longest relationship she’s managed to be in from it is with Tinder itself. She downloads, has great sex, has terrible sex, falls hard with men who ghost her, ghosts men who fall hard for her, deletes the app, tries traditional dating, and re-downloads it again and again in a vicious but unrelenting circle of who gives a shit. As one of the “smug couples” who “sigh with relief when they say, ‘I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps,’” let me just say … I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps, but part of me has always wondered what it would be like to have the world as your sexual oyster in the way Tinder allows, delicious or rotten as it may be. If romance is messy, then Tinder romances take the cake. What is most apparent: Davis has a wealth of great stories to tell. 

I first downloaded Tinder in the spring of 2013, seven months after it launched. I’d heard about it as a concept (Grindr for straights) but felt exempt from needing it until one evening at the tail end of a drawn-out breakup with someone I’d told myself I would marry. We were at a restaurant in San Francisco, having one of too many brutal good-bye dinners that led to this-is-the-last-time-I-swear sex, and I put the app on my phone in front of him. He stoically chugged his negroni while I marveled at the hundreds, presumably thousands of men who were waiting for me on the other end, should he decide to go through with the breakup. “Look!” I said, waving my iPhone 5 in his face. (I didn’t mention that at this early point in the app’s history, it was mostly populated by 20-year-old college students and S.F. tech bros who exclusively wore free T-shirts from start-ups.) By June, my boyfriend had gone through with the breakup and moved on — quickly and not via app — to a woman he’d met through mutual friends. I wanted to die. But instead of the sweet relief of death: Tinder.

Taking The Knife* (Randa Jarrar, Gay Mag, October 2019)

“In kink, consent is queen,” thus you need to understand what you’re going to get into before you read this essay. The piece centers around Jarrar’s visit to a queer kink club where the first thing we see/read is Mx. Cele enjoying a knife in intimate spaces. At the club, everyone is asking permission to touch, taste, and harm. It’s a mind warp to think of harm and consent working with, not against, each other in the same sentence, but that is what this entire essay does. I loved it for its deft balancing act — the daily negotiations of asking for what we want, not being asked before something is taken, and the sexual freedom and safety of owning our own bodies in a culture that feels entitled to it.  

I didn’t have a lock on my door until I moved away from my parents’ house. The last time I was abused, I was sixteen years old, and my father chased me around the house with a knife. I ran outside and he came after me. I ran back inside, and he finally put the knife down. But afterwards, I called the police. I’ve written before about what happened when the police came- how I smoked a cigarette with the cop who drove me to the station; how that cop later told me that my father being Arab would be a problem. I understood that this meant it would be a problem for my mother, and for me. I dropped the charges against him a few weeks later. But that didn’t change that I had been very afraid of my father and very afraid of that knife.

They Found Love, Then They Found Gender (Francesca Mari, Matter, October 2015)

And to round out this reading list, I have for you a beautiful love story. Not traditional, definitely fluid, but more romantic than most of the other narratives out there. Boy, born biologically female, meets girl, born biologically male. It’s love at first sight. They throw caution to the wind to be together in the most honest way they can — genderqueer, fluid, trans, and finally, the first queer couple legally married in the state of Texas. Grab your tissues for this one. (And for you journalism nerds out there, enjoy a conversation in the comments about the editorial choices in names and pronouns as one character, Johnny, transitions over the course of the piece.) 

Now that there is marriage equality, they want to get married again, with a license that better reflects who they are — not husband and wife — but partner and partner. “When you give sexual consent, you cannot give a blanket consent at the beginning of an evening or for the rest of your life,” Johnny explains. “And we feel the same way about marriage.” So they continue to propose to one another nearly every day. Once Johnny fingered the question into the soot on Ashley’s back windshield. Just last month, Johnny wrote, “Will you marry me?” “Yes” and “No” in backwards cursive in different places on their body so that Ashley could snuggle up to her answer, letting it legibly transfer onto her skin. They write it in each other’s notebooks and songbooks to discover who knows how long later. With each proposal, they affirm their love and devotion to their partner in their current identity. For they know more than anyone else how fluid one’s identity can be.

***

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Every week, we highlight our favorite stories in our weekly Longreads Top 5, and at year’s end we spend much of December reflecting on the pieces that most stuck with us. But our readers have long been a source of inspiration as well, sharing their favorite stories on social media with the #longreads hashtag and even emailing or DMing us recommendations. So last year we made the Longreads community part of our annual Best Of package, reaching out to them to see what stories they most enjoyed. We’re delighted to keep our newest tradition going, and to showcase eight gems from the year that our readers loved — along with their own words why.

A Black Woman’s Search for Her Place in White, White Vermont

Sheena Dare Romero | Delacorte Review | October 11, 2022 | 7,882 words

A moving study of the mutability of the idea of home; how the word itself can ring so differently from place to place. This piece has such an interesting take on race in America, both from afar — when the author spent time in Germany — and from deep within, at the snowbound confines of a university campus in the middle of Vermont. Romero deals with it in such a tactile, subtle way that I felt like I was coming to the subject completely fresh, feeling her confusion, hope, and frustration almost viscerally. —Rohan Kamicheril

Genuine Risk, Winning Colors, and Regret at the Kentucky Derby

Jamie Loftus | Gawker | May 24, 2022 | 2,550 words

Loftus’ essay is ostensibly about a sporting event, but ultimately, it’s a grotesque glimpse into the psyche of America at a particular point in time. Loftus’ roots are in comedy, so it’s also a darkly funny piece of writing, but it never loses its focus on the violence and excess of the event. When the essay came out, Loftus shared it on social media and joked, “please say no one has done this before,” obviously referencing Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” This may draw the ire of MFA lit bros, but I’ll just say it; I like her essay better than Thompson’s. The description of the winning horse is chilling, beautiful, and unforgettable: “After he won, Rich Strike bit a pony over and over, taking what any underdog believes should be their reward, the flesh of their competitors and oppressors served raw. Instead, he got a slap to the face and a rumbling on Twitter, one almost immediately buried by Mother’s Day photos, which got buried by essays about How We Discuss Abuse, which got buried by news of three mass shootings.” —Krista Diamond

Krista Diamond’s essay “That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed” was one of our most-read originals of 2022.

Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

Jonathan Haidt | The Atlantic | October 11, 2022 | 8,362 words 

I’ve watched with growing horror how divided the U.S. has become, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. As someone who grew up in an age before the internet, it’s hard to understand how this happened. When I read this article, it seemed like everything fell into place. The Atlantic probably does the best job in all of the media in terms of covering the ramifications of social media on our society, and this was their best story of the year. —David Hirning

How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?

Rozina Ali | New York Times Magazine | November 12, 2022 | 11,674 words

A harrowing, intimate story with incredible details. Most importantly, it connected one baby’s tragic journey with the biggest stakes of the U.S. in Afghanistan, a year after the withdrawal. — Jonathan Guyer

What White Men Say in Our Absence

Elaine Hsieh Chou | The Cut | March 24, 2022 | 2,625 words

I loved Elaine Hsieh Chou’s essay — it’s an unflinching, powerful examination of the writer’s experiences with racism and misogyny, and it speaks to the fear and rage felt by so many Asian American women, myself included. It confronts the cultural forces that continue to feed anti-Asian hate and reminds me of the power and ferocity of our collective voice. —Yuxi Lin

Yuxi Lin’s essay “Love Song to Costco” was also one of our most popular originals of 2022.

Family Membership

Christopher Soloman | Esquire | July 29, 2022 | 2,225 words

A lovely, and sometimes funny, story about a male friendship told narratively while shopping at Costco. — Monica Prelle

The Way We Lose Black Men Never Makes Sense. Losing My Father to COVID Is Another Example

Marissa Evans | Los Angeles Times | March 25, 2022 | 2,603 words

Marissa Evans’ essay, written in the thick of her grief after her father passed suddenly at the beginning of this year, is a time capsule of her father’s dreams, which included his children’s prosperity, a refreshed hairline, and something increasingly rare: living a long, healthy life as a Black man. As the life expectancy for Black men shrinks, we continue to witness even the monied and privileged among them leaving this earth too soon. Evans writes: “My father’s death, particularly as an older Black man, is considered an inevitability we must live with. I can accept my father’s death, but I refuse to accept that the number of Black men we are losing is normal.” —Ko Bragg

Look Who’s Stalking: The Black Leopards of Gloucestershire

Jem Bartholomew | The Economist | July 28th, 2022 | 4,795 words

This investigation into Britain’s big cat hunters is thoughtful, surprising, and, at turns, oddly touching. Jem Bartholomew’s adroit exposition of his subject, Frank Turnbridge, left a lasting effect on me. When reading this article, I felt like I was traipsing through woodlands and winding country roads with Frank and Jem, nervously anticipating the impossible. This is not an investigation into big cat hunters. It is an investigation into those obsessed with the ever-encroaching beast of urbanization. —Christian Hill 

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Today’s list compiles our editors’ picks for personal essays. While our team is small, we have a wide range of interests and are drawn to very different types of personal writing. It’s often hard for each of us to select a single “favorite” for these lists, but we enjoy coming together each December to look back on all the stories we’ve picked to create these year-end lists.

Similar to last year, we asked our writers, featured authors, and readers to share their favorite stories across categories. You’ll see their recommendations alongside ours in this list and others to come this month. Enjoy!

Does My Son Know You?

Jonathan Tjarks | The Ringer | March 3, 2022 | 2,738 words

Jonathan Tjarks was 33 years old when he learned he had cancer. Thirty-three. He had a wife and a baby son and a sportswriting career that was humming along, and then he had cancer. What he didn’t have was the willingness to go gently into that good night. So he wrote about his fear, and he wrote about his faith and his friendships; how difficult those things were, how important they were. He’d lost his own father when he was young, and he wanted more than anything for his son to avoid the slow erosion of community that he had known in the wake of his dad’s death. “I don’t want Jackson to have the same childhood that I did,” he wrote. “I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them.” Jonathan Tjarks was 34 years old when he died of cancer just a few short months after this essay was published. He’d done what he could to fight, and he’d done what he could to make sure that the friends he’d made would help his son navigate the world. To the rest of us, he left this spare, frank, moving essay. —Peter Rubin

On Metaphors and Snow Boots

Annie Sand | Guernica | May 23, 2022 | 2,821 words

“Only sometimes will the ice hold my weight,” writes Annie Sand in this powerful essay at Guernica, in which she considers the meteorological metaphors she uses to understand and cope with mental illness. “Metaphor rushes in to fill gaps, to make meaning, and to conceal,” she says, as she attempts to assess the cost of a bout of anxiety in “hours of writing lost, hours of grading lost, hours of exercise lost, hours of sleep lost, hours of joy lost.” While metaphor can be a convenient way for us to attempt to understand the pain of others, language in all its power often comes up short, diminishing the complexities of human perception and experience with inadequate comparisons. “When we use metaphor to conceal the unknowable, we make symbols out of human beings and allegory out of experience. We reduce our own pain to a precursor, a line item, a weather report,” she says. The key, Sand suggests, is to define pain and suffering for yourself: “I wonder instead if the answer is not to abstain from metaphor, but rather, each time society tries to wheat-paste an ill-fitting metaphor over our lives, to offer one of our own.” If you’ve ever tried to explain how you really feel — mentally or physically — to someone, you’ll appreciate Sand’s thinking. —Krista Stevens

20 Days in Mariupol

Mstyslav Chernov | Associated Press | March 21, 2022 | 2,400 words

We tend to think of personal essays as marathons rather than sprints, feats of the written word that require time, training, and endurance to complete. But sometimes a brilliant essay is a mad dash because it has to be. Case in point, this harrowing piece that begins, “The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.” Video journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s account of witnessing and escaping the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine, is an essential first draft of history, penned in collaboration with Lori Hinnant, an AP colleague, and punctuated by photographer Evgeniy Maloletka’s chilling images. In spare, unflinching language, Chernov describes Russia’s campaign to suppress the truth about its brutal assault on civilians. What lingers most vividly in my memory, though, are the essay’s interior parts, where Chernov conveys a raw mix of shock, fear, anger, and guilt about what, as a journalist, he saw, did, and couldn’t do. These moments are what make such an otherwise immediate piece timeless: Chernov captures the essence of both conflict reporting and what it means to be the person doing it. —Seyward Darby

To Live in the Ending

Alyssa Harad | Kenyon Review | July 29, 2022 | 6,113 words

When it was time to select an essay for this category, I immediately knew the type of piece I wanted to highlight. Week after week, it’s so easy to get lost in #sadreads, especially about the state of the planet. I’ve found some comfort in writing about the Earth and the climate crisis that, while urgent and often dismal, ultimately challenges me to think in new ways — and which helps me see a path toward a better future. I count Alyssa Harad’s gorgeous braided essay about the end of the world and the language of the apocalypse as one of this kind of piece — I’ve kept thinking about it for months. Instead of relying on catastrophe narratives or thinking of the end as a singular event, Harad considers life as a series of “nested crises,” and explains that “worlds end all the time.” I love the way she artfully weaves her observations about the world with musings that trace her own thinking since she was a child, and reflects on how she’s come to make sense of the uncertain times in which we live. It’s an essay, but it’s also a journey, and it deeply inspired me, as both a writer and a human. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands

14 Hours in the Queue to See Queen Elizabeth’s Coffin

Laurie Penny | British GQ | September 18, 2022 | 3,415 words

The Queue to see Queen Elizabeth’s coffin seems particularly bizarre now that the moment has passed. Looking back at it is akin to waking up after too many beers and analyzing the deep connection you thought you shared with the bartender. Laurie Penny found it awkward even at the emotional height of the time, and she approaches the Queue with a healthy amount of cynicism (and snacks). However, within the Queue, she finds incredible camaraderie and a shared sense of loss, not just for the Queen, for, as Penny states, “almost everyone I speak to turns out to have recently lost someone, or something important.” The loss from COVID-19 is also apparent as the Queue shuffles past the National COVID Memorial, naming the people who succumbed to the pandemic, and Penny realizes, “about as many people queued past that wall as there are names on it.” The passing of Elizabeth II created something that, for a brief moment, allowed people to come together and mourn and grieve in solidarity. Mourn and grieve for many things after some difficult years. With barriers down — for whatever reason — there can be tremendous release in shared emotion. This essay made me think about many things beyond the Queen: community, loss, and loneliness, to name a few. It also made me laugh, which is the splendid thing about Laurie Penny’s writing — she can make you ponder through a chuckle. —Carolyn Wells

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

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1. Saying Goodbye to My Chest

Naomi Gordon-Loebl | Esquire | October 10, 2022 | 3,875 words

Tuesday was National Coming Out Day, making this a fitting week for Naomi Gordon-Loebl’s essay about top surgery to make its debut. The piece operates in multiple registers, juxtaposing humor and gravity, hope and elegy, romance and pragmatism. The result is a brave, moving, and defiant piece of writing, one that quietly urges readers to set aside their assumptions about trans identity and much more. “I never hated my chest. It’s a perfectly fine chest; a good one, and I’m fond of it, even,” Gordon-Loebl writes. “It needs to go now, not because it is wrong, or something worth despising, but simply because it is standing in the way of a life I can no longer postpone.” —SD

2. I Once Fell for the Fantasy of Uploading Ourselves. It’s a Destructive Vision.

Jean Guerrero | Los Angeles Times | October 10, 2022 | 1,764 words

I was drawn to three reads this week, all of which touch on the promise or peril of technology in different ways: a tour of Meta’s VR social network, a glimpse into a gentler alternative to space tourism, and a piece that explores, and ultimately rejects, the fantasy of uploading ourselves to the metaverse. This third read, by Guerrero, introduces the beliefs of longtermism, a view that prioritizes the lives of faraway future generations over the Earth’s existing ecosystems and the billions of people alive today. Guerrero had once fallen for the idea of digital immortality, which she recounts beautifully, but she now sees the techno-utopian visions of the Musks and Zuckerbergs of society as destructive and dangerous, rooted in eugenics, white supremacy, and capitalism. This is a short yet thought-provoking piece that has urged me to consider my own views in a fast-evolving world. —CLR

3. Humans Are Overzealous Whale Morticians

Ben Goldfarb | Nautilus | August 10, 2022 | 2,635 words

What’s the best thing about a dead whale? This isn’t the start of a bad joke, it’s the primary question Ben Goldfarb poses in his fascinating piece at Nautilus. When whales have washed up in the past, we’ve buried, incinerated, and even detonated them. “In 1970, the Oregon Highway Department infamously dynamited a gray whale, flattening an Oldsmobile beneath a chunk of flying blubber and leaving 75 bystanders flecked with putrescent meat.” Gory mishaps aside, Goldfarb suggests that while it’s not always practical, simply allowing a dead whale to decompose naturally allows legions of creatures to feed on the carcass and flourish. “Lately, some researchers have begun to pay closer heed to the value of stranded whales, and to encourage coastal managers to let carcasses lie. Granted, not every beach is an appropriate resting place for a reeking, 50,000-pound corpse. When circumstances allow, however, permitting dead whales to decompose in situ may be preferable to disposal.” For more on how the Longbranch whale found a home in Eaton Hall at Seattle Pacific University, read Peter Wayne Moe’s “Bones, Bones: How to Articulate a Whale.” —KS

4. Rod McKuen Was the Bestselling Poet in American History. What Happened?

Dan Kois | Slate | October 10, 2022 | 6,485 words

A few months ago, I recommended a Dan Kois piece about OXO, both because of the writing and reporting but also because it was just straight-up enjoyable. (And believe it or not, I got an angry email about that.) Well, Kois is back at it again with the white Vans another Very Pleasant Reading Experience. This time, it’s a deep excavation of a person virtually nobody younger than Generation Jones has any real memory of: pop poet and seemingly pathological liar Rod McKuen. Once upon a time, McKuen was one of the most famous and prolific creatives in the world. Sixty million books sold. One hundred million albums sold. He pumped out multiple volumes of text and sound each year, all of them utterly, irredeemably anodyne. What happened? Why doesn’t his legacy endure beyond the bargain bin at used record stores? “McKuen’s whole deal does not exactly fit into my sense of the tumultuous late ’60s and early ’70s,” Kois readily admits.” But, driven by curiosity — that most endangered of journalistic impulses — he dives into McKuen’s life and catalog, and surfaces with both empathy and an arched eyebrow. Are you not entertained? —PR

5. The Haunting of a Dream House

Reeves Wiedeman | The Cut | November 12, 2018 | 9,365 words

Netflix loves a true crime miniseries and yesterday released yet another one: The Watcher. Yet to see it, I am hopeful it will be more nuanced than the endless parade of horrific murders dominating this genre. After all, the story it is based on is more spooky than gory. First detailed in 2018 by Reeves Wiedeman in his essay for The Cut, it is classic “idyllic suburbia turns creepy,” with the Broaddus family buying their dream home, only to begin receiving alarming letters to “The New Owner.” With a strong horror vibe, these letters explain the writer has “been put in charge of watching” the house and asking questions about “the young blood” living there. Wiedeman deftly builds up the suspense but also focuses on something more mundane: neighborhood politics. Fearing for their children, the Broadduses never move into the house, but this does not stop them from investigating their neighbors to find out who “The Watcher” may be. Suspicions run high, with tensions overspilling in lawsuits and town council meetings. Managing to combine mystery with paperwork, Wiedeman creates a compelling story that you won’t be able to stop reading. I hope Netflix does it justice. —CW

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