When stuff gets out of hand, we don’t open disciplinary borders. We craft new disciplines: digital humanities, human geography, and yes, computer science (note that “science” glued to the end, to differentiate it from mere “engineering”). In time, these great new territories get their own boundaries, their own defenders. The interdisciplinarian is essentially an exile. Someone who respects no borders enjoys no citizenship.

All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.

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

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

1. Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures

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

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

2. Last Love: A Romance in a Care Home

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

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

3. How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.

In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.

True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.

Readywise’s best seller is a four-week, one-person bundle that retails for $300 and supplies 2,000 calories a day. It includes breakfast and dinner options, such as pancake mix, pasta Alfredo, and dried banana chips: “With a month’s worth of food, you get to put together a good plan,” Lawlor says. “And so that’s what most people want to do. But we do have a very big celebrity that is buying up to $50,000 worth of food—that’s five years.”

Nutrient Survival’s best seller is a 14-day emergency food kit that provides roughly 1,400 calories per day. It retails for $315 and includes mac and cheese, apple cinnamon oatmeal, and chocolate crunch. It is more expensive than Readywise, but not at the top end of the scale: A similar kit from Mountain House, which provides about 1,700 calories per day, costs $438.

“Our largest purchase ever from an individual consumer was $55,000,” says Christianson. “That’s a Mercedes-Benz. But preppers don’t just buy one set of food—they’re coming back every single month. It blew me away when I got into this business that our repeat rate is 40 percent. The reason is simple. They don’t have all the money that they need to buy all the food that they want. So they put a little away, just like you put away a little bit of savings. This is truly an investment for them.” He adds that the delivery addresses don’t have a specific regional pattern and are mostly “modest, middle American homes.”

The volume of work required to stay in the algorithms’ good graces can certainly be daunting. A 25/7 Media creator named Nixxi, who derives most of her revenue from her OnlyFans subscription fees, told me she is urged to post across multiple platforms every day, and that she uploads three folders’ worth of content to her manager’s server every Sunday so that posts can be scheduled in advance. Another client, an Oregon-based musician who goes by 93feetofsmoke, said that he was aiming to release around 50 solo songs this year and produce as many as 70 for other artists. “You can’t take weekends off,” he told me. “Like, I don’t take the weekends off, ever.”

A disturbing child psychiatric facility. The changing city of Cairo. An optimistic take on AI supremacy. The mystery of a cookie disappearance. And a joyful 51 years in the Smithsonian Zoo Panda House.

1. 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

2. Cairo Song

Wiam El-Tamami | Granta | July 20, 2023 | 5,860 words

Wiam El-Tamami was raised in the “the hushed, air-conditioned sterility” of Kuwait after her parents left Cairo, Egypt, for better job opportunities. Her beautiful Granta essay is a sensory study as she recalls the vibrancy of Cairo on her visits and compares it to the city she knows now, more than a decade after she and her mother protested Hosni Mubarak’s regime in the Egyptian Revolution. She recounts air tinged with smoke, car horns blaring, dogs snarling in the streets, and the shouts of protest: “Bread, freedom, social justice, human dignity! The people demand the downfall of the regime!” She juxtaposes this political unrest against memories of her father’s homemade flatbread, “dusted with bran, the top layer thin and speckled with dark spots, the bottom layer soft and moreish,” and the aubergines, tomatoes, and onions she “anoints with oil and spices” to make tagine with a friend. There are no scales of nostalgia covering El-Tamami’s eyes as she gazes at modern Cairo expanding outward in gated communities that delineate the ever-expanding gulf between rich and poor as inflation skyrockets and the value of the Egyptian pound plummets. In this lyrical essay, El-Tamami interrogates the pervasive undercurrent of her conflicting emotions. “There is such an inherent precarity woven into every day here, a sense of tenuousness, of the unknowability of even the most immediate future, of life always being lived on a knife-edge,” she writes. “I ate the things I had missed. I ate mahshi kromb, stuffed cabbage rolls. I ate my father’s fuul. I ate molokhiyya. I ate black-eyed peas with rice: Egyptian white rice, starchy and soft and buttery-sweet, cooked with little tendrils of vermicelli.” Even as she delights in memories of flavor, El-Tamami still hungers for a better Cairo, now a city in chaos that feels impossible to stomach. —KS

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

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

By now, most people have read Ted Chiang’s brilliant work about artificial intelligence in The New Yorker, and the metaphors he’s introduced have entered common parlance: it’s a JPEG of the web, it’s the new McKinsey. But Virginia Heffernan’s delightful feature about Cicero, an AI model that plays the strategy game Diplomacy, is the most surprising, most optimistic, and most enjoyable piece I’ve read about the technology since ChatGPT turned the tech world on its head last November. AI has already conquered Go, the strategy game once considered the last bastion of human ingenuity (at least after Deep Blue mopped Kasparov on the chessboard). Diplomacy is a very different beast, however; gameplay and negotiation are one and the same, and the world’s best human player, Andrew Goff, dominates by being kind rather than cutthroat. Yet, somehow, the bot quickly became more than competitive through similar tactics. Is it perfect? Not even close. It says “awesome!” too much for anyone’s liking, and it still struggles with hallucinations. Still, as Heffernan writes, its approach raises the prospect of a very different AI future than the brutal takeover doomsdayers imagine (or the utopia that tech bros evangelize). What truly recommends this piece, though, is how Heffernan suffuses an intrinsically inhuman story with a beating heart. Opening the piece at a Smiths cover band concert arms her with the perfect anti-Chiangian metaphor; relating her pre-teen son’s weekend-long Diplomacy parties grounds you in the game’s earnest DNA; interrogating her own kneejerk reactions on the page rather than in the editing makes you trust her even more. I don’t share her professed outlook on what this means for tomorrow—”[w]e really liked working with you, robots, and are happy you are winning”—but it’s also a vintage Heffernan provocation, the kind of thing that tells you you’re being challenged and indulged at the same time. Some people are great critics; others are deep thinkers; still others are memorable stylists. Heffernan is fortunate enough to be all three, and this story finds her at the height of her sneaky-smart prowess. —PR

4. A Baker’s Secrets

Dave Denison | The Baffler | September 21, 2023 | 5,180 words

In the 1970s, baker Ted Odell created and sold the guerrilla cookie, “a dense, moist granola cookie,” through small stores and cooperatives in Madison, Wisconsin. The cookies were famous and beloved locally until they suddenly disappeared from store shelves around 1990. “I think they contained rolled wheat flakes, but others say cracked wheat,” writes Dave Denison for The Baffler. “I remember raisins, and shredded coconut, and a mixture of honey and molasses. They were sweet enough to be addictive, but not in the way commercial cookies are, where you eat one and then another and another.” Denison—who worked for Odell as a baker’s assistant one summer—became determined to solve the mystery. Why did the cookies disappear? Why did Odell refuse to share his recipe with the world? Denison’s piece is a chewy, satisfying blend of detective work and food nostalgia. As he learns more about Odell, Denison comes to understand the baker’s wholesome ambition: to educate children about good food and the honest work that goes into it, deftly revealing that guerrilla cookies were far more than sweet confections; they were but a small sample of one man’s deeply held convictions. —KS

5. 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

Audience Award

Now for the big one. The piece our readers most enjoyed this week.

It’s Not Just You. LinkedIn Has Gotten Really Weird.

Rob Price | Business Insider | September 25, 2023 | 2,937 words

Blame the pandemic’s deprivations and our collective need for personal connection. Or maybe blame Gen Z as generational oversharers, but LinkedIn has evolved from a place where people not only post promotions and business and industry-focused content to a platform for revealing the overly personal, leading to—of course—public mockery, because some cannot resist the chance to be funny on the internet.—KS

If Cicero’s aura of “understanding” is, behind the scenes, just another algorithmic operation, sometimes an alignment in perception is all it takes to build a bond. I see, given the way your position often plays out, why you’d be nervous about those fleets. Or, outside of Diplomacy: I understand, since living alone diminishes your mood, why you’d want to have a roommate. When the stock customer service moves—“I can understand why you’re frustrated”—figured into Cicero’s dialog, they had a pleasing effect. No wonder moral philosophies of AI lean heavily on the buzzword alignment. When two minds’ perceptions of a third thing line up, we might call that congruity the cognitive equivalent of love.

In my opinion, GPT-3 had produced the best lines in “Ghosts.” At one point in the essay, I wrote about going with my sister to Clarke Beach near our home in the Seattle suburbs, where she wanted her ashes spread after she died. GPT-3 came up with this:

We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.

My essay was about the impossibility of reconciling the version of myself that had coexisted alongside my sister with the one left behind after she died. In that last line, GPT-3 made physical the fact of that impossibility, by referring to the hand—my hand—that existed both then and now. I’d often heard the argument that AI could never write quite like a human precisely because it was a disembodied machine. And yet, here was as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read. Artificial intelligence had succeeded in moving me with a sentence about the most important experience of my life.