The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.

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?

Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal—this could be any wife addressing any husband—that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.

“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said—in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”

In doing so, he is pushing back against an edifice of conventional wisdom. Thinkers as varied as Jewish theologians and postmodern theorists have conceived of the Holocaust as a singular, almost transcendent disaster—[Eli] Wiesel’s “ultimate mystery.” This impulse to sequester the Nazi Judeocide from the rest of human experience is understandable, but in the words of the historian Robert Jan van Pelt, it inadvertently consigns the death camps “to the realm of myth, distancing us from an all too concrete historical reality.” It is this concrete historical reality that The Zone of Interest seeks to recover.

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In this week’s edition:

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

1. When the Coast Guard Intercepts Unaccompanied Kids

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

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

2. To Catch a Catfish

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

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

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

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

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

4. The Hofmann Wobble

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

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

5. My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas

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

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

Eventually, Stipe revealed to Antonoff and Healy that he was at Electric Lady working on his first solo record. (Healy responded with a drawn-out and reverent four-letter word.) Stipe had no qualms about sharing how tough the process had been so far, and how slow-going. Later he’d tell me: “I’m wildly insecure. I have impostor syndrome to the [expletive] max.” Sometimes Instagram served him clips of R.E.M. concerts, and he wondered: Where did it come from, the audacity to do that in front of tens of thousands of people? He told Antonoff and Healy, “It’s hard to be in competition with your former self.”

He said this with disarming sweetness. Antonoff tried to buck him up. He explained that, when he’s making something, he finds he just needs a few songs he’s proud of to make the entire project start to feel sufficiently sturdy. “You can wear them as armor,” he said.

But Stipe disagreed — definitively. He could remember, as a kid, adoring certain records, then hitting some total stinker somewhere on Side B and not being able to forgive the band for it.

For him, one weak song could ruin a whole album. It stained everything else.

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

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If my visit to the “Superstore” set can be taken as representative, being closely involved with the production of popular TV commercials for large national brands is the best possible outcome for a human life. The scale and complexity of the operation at the center of Courtney’s work is eye-popping. Every fleeting football-game-interrupting Progressive ad is the product of hours of labor from more than a hundred people. On set, a cat wrangler stood just out of frame, ready to pounce with a backup cat if the primary cat failed. Trays of lickerish delights — crostini with prosciutto, cups of ethereal parfait — were discreetly proffered, at frequent intervals, to people scrutinizing monitors. Every lens, light and politely anxious face was turned heliotropically toward Courtney, in a rented living room, trying to remember, while delivering her line, that Progressive was offering deals “for new parents” rather than “to new parents” — a possibly meaningful distinction. This wasn’t a critically acclaimed Hulu series; there was actually a lot riding on this. It needed to be the same, but slightly different, and every bit as successful as the 200 that had come before it, so that everyone would be asked to return to this job — not necessarily, perhaps not exactly, the job of their dreams, but a better job than anyone could ever hope for, bolstered by friendly faces and fantastic catering and a sumptuous corporate budget — in perpetuity.

Since the case’s early days, law-enforcement officers have rarely spoken to the media. When I was reporting “Lost Girls,” my 2013 book about the case and victims, the police were largely silent. But after Heuermann’s arrest, some have been willing to discuss the investigation with a greater degree of detail and candor. Since July, I’ve conducted interviews with people close to the Gilgo case during every chapter of its bizarre 13-year timeline. (Several sources asked for anonymity, concerned that public statements by insiders might undercut the case against Heuermann before the trial.)

The story they tell—at times self-serving and at other times soul-searching—demonstrates, inadvertently and otherwise, how institutional rot helped contribute to the delays and paralysis of the investigation. What started out as indifference and apathy soon curdled into obstinance, willful ignorance and corruption. From the moment those women were found at Gilgo Beach, the law-enforcement culture of Suffolk County seemed so preternaturally ill suited to handle this case that a killer was allowed to roam free. Which was all the more galling, given what we know now—that everything the police needed to solve the case, they had almost on Day 1.

Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment. (This was a story common enough to have become a joke, another therapist told me: “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”)

The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth. Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.