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Before longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj works on his writing projects, he seeks inspiration by reading and sharing short stories that are freely available on the web. In 2023, he posted 256 stories to X, tagged with #Longreads, from “The Big Quit“by David Means at Harper’s Magazine to “Bitch Baby” by Helle Hill at Oxford American. Of that 256, here are the 10 he loved most.

“Make it Black” by Andre Dubus III (Narrative Magazine)

Andre Dubus III’s immersive novella is about a couple that lives separately in the densely forested acreage they co-own.

Through the screened windows of her bedroom she can hear them, hundreds, maybe thousands of them munching on the leaves of her oaks and maples and other trees she cannot name, even though she has lived in these woods for over twenty years. It’s after midnight, and beside her in the darkness Michael sleeps, his big hairless chest rising and falling. When they made love earlier, his smooth back had felt like rubber to her and she imagined that he was not real, that this man she’s been seeing for over a year now is just some device she bought to ease her loneliness, to ground her away from the nagging sense that she’s hanging as still in the air as a nightgown on a branch.

Some nights she asks him to go sleep at his own place, and she wished she’d asked him that tonight too. If only so can be alone as she listens to the gypsy caterpillars decimate her trees. Their tiny waste rains down through the branches, and she does not know why she wants to listen to this, but she does.

It is late May and the air coming through the screens is cool. She can smell her magnolias and cherry blossoms but also the broken green of leaves that had only just begun their season, and now a hot anger opens up in her at these tiny fuckers that her husband Kai had warned her were coming again. It had been almost nine years since the last generation of them, and Kai had missed the signs then but not this time.

“I Won’t Let You Go” by Hiromi Kawakami (Granta)(Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell)

Hiromi Kawakami has won several Japanese literary prizes and is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary authors. This story’s plot reveals her fascinating imagination.

I came by something strange while I was travelling. This was what Enomoto had said to me about two months ago.

Enomoto is a painter-slash-high school teacher who lives in the apartment directly above mine. We met when we both served on the local residents’ association, and have been friendly ever since. He would call me on the phone every so often and say, I’m brewing some nice coffee. I would traipse up the stairs to Enomoto’s apartment to enjoy his delicious coffee. We would make small talk and then I would trudge back down the stairs and return to my own apartment. That was the extent of our relationship.

Enomoto’s apartment is exactly the same layout as mine, but it has quite a different feel. It’s tidy, for a bachelor’s flat, but what with his painting supplies and his hobby cameras and his magazines on those subjects, there were things all over the place. Interestingly, though, his apartment gave the overall impression of being much more clearly delineated than mine.

Enomoto only ever referred to the coffee that he brewed as ‘nice’. He would grind the beans on a hand-operated coffee mill, and use a cloth filter. Then he would gently pour it into warmed coffee mugs. The aroma and the taste were both extremely sophisticated. Which is why, whenever Enomoto called me for coffee, I would abandon whatever I was doing and traipse up the stairs to his place.

Lately, though, there haven’t been any invitations from Enomoto for ‘nice coffee’. Ever since the call, two months ago, when he mentioned that he had come by something strange, he hasn’t invited me over.

“That Particular Sunday” by Jamel Brinkley (Guernica)

A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s first short story collection, was a finalist for a National Book Award. His 2023 collection, Witness—in which this story appears—has received strong reviews.

There are times when a family has an aura of completion. Remembering such a time feels like gazing at a masterpiece in an art gallery. You might find yourself taking one or two steps backward to absorb the harmonious perfection of the entire image. Or you may be lured by it, drawn to it, inching closer to study every fine detail of composition, the faultless poise with which each element confirms the necessary presence of the others. Take the figure of the son, who hurtles into the foreground of the picture, claiming his position in a web of femaleness, affixing himself to the very center of its adhesive heart, because he belongs there, or so he believes with the wild unblemished certainty of a boy’s imagination. Like everything else in the image, he never changes. Yes, that is my mother, his presence announces. And those are my aunts, he seems to say. And this—of the girl closest to him, her expression as breathless as his own—this is my cousin. My companion. My closest friend. Her soul is the identical twin of mine. The absence of the father doesn’t matter one bit. The absence of the siblings doesn’t matter much either, even though the son will love them hopelessly. Recklessly. They belong to a different elsewhere, a time yet to come, with another father to come, and the circumstances of their lives will frenzy the family, purpling it, cloying it until it is spoiled. Then it will be no different from any ordinary clan. Unpleasant to regard. An eyesore.

“Splashdown” by Jonathan Escoffery (Oprah Daily)

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You—short-listed for the Booker Prize and long-listed for a National Book Award—is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami.

The summer he turned thirteen, Cukie Panton set out for the Florida Keys to meet his father for the first time. By then, Ox meant little more to Cukie than a syllable spat from his mother’s lips. What he knew of Ox was that he was American— the catalyst for Cukie having been born in Baptist Hospital, right on Kendall Drive—and that Ox had stuck out the first two months of fatherhood, then bounced, leaving to Cukie the dried ink on his birth record that spelled out Lennox Martin.

More than a dozen years after this abrupt departure, Cukie’s mom answered the phone to hear a remorseful Ox, saying he should know his boy. By this time Cukie felt ambivalent. It didn’t help that Daphne Panton figured that the drink or else some brush with death must have resuscitated Ox’s conscience to bring him calling. Perhaps Andrew had inspired Ox’s reemergence, the hurricane having wiped away so much that would have to be rebuilt, not even a year ago. Whatever the affliction, Cukie’s mother assumed it was ephemeral. The calls continued, though, and when plans grew specific, she told Cukie to pack his duffel and they departed Kendall for Smuggler’s Key.

“The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” by Kelly Luce (Colorado Review)

A new short story by the author of the novel Pull Me Under and the collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail.

After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. I wanted to learn something I never would have learned in Jacksonville while married to Carl. To feel like the person I’d once been, a person I’d liked being. The first trade that came up was in Happy, Texas, a town of 603 souls outside of Amarillo. The carrier there was eager to move to Florida to be near his twin grandsons. My new route consisted mostly of cluster boxes I could drive right up to.

Happy’s motto was “the town without a frown.” I set up a bank account at Happy Bank, got my Texas driver’s license at Happy City Hall, and waited for a line of pickup trucks to follow a hearse into Happy Cemetery. I found an apartment on Happy’s main street, Main Street, above an event hall called Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion. The apartment had two bedrooms—plenty of space for my equipment. The stove didn’t work and there were no closets, but the ceilings were high and there was a filthy skylight in the kitchen that Randall, the property manager, told me was put in after a meteorite came through the roof in 1999. The meteorite sold me on the place.

“The Pink House at the End of the Street on the Other Side of the Town” by Manuel Muñoz (Virginia Quarterly Review)

Manuel Muñoz is the author of the story collections Zigzagger, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, The Consequences, as well as the novel What You See in the Dark. He received a 2023 MacArthur fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American community of California’s central valley.”   

Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo, had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when the fields ran muddy and no one else would brave the kind of cold that would lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves. By spring, he’d return to a pueblito called Pozos, which made everyone ask why he’d go back to a hole in the ground. A frog crawling under the mud to wait out the heat. That was El Sapo, leaving sometime in early April before the heat came. And then the others would arrive. Fidelio and his twin brother, Modesto, who for some reason was several inches shorter than him. Jerónimo, quiet and stark, who claimed to know Silvio, but nobody knew for sure. Baldomero El Mero Mero, who boasted that he was the one who had shown the others how to start with a bus in Celaya, take it to the outskirts of Tijuana, and, right over there, at a llantería owned by his old friend Raimundo, you could sneak through the dust yard of Raimundo’s old tires and cross to the other side, get to the highway on foot, and, if you were smart enough to hide your money, catch a Greyhound to a place called Goshen, where you’d go to the phone booth outside of the station, look out at the cotton fields as you dialed a number and told a man named Poldo that you’d made it across. A cousin by way of another cousin. A friend of the family. From Celaya. From Ojo de Agua. From La Cuevita. From Charco Blanco. Yes, yes, of course. A third yes if you promised you had the money to pay a little rent for a month. That’s how Eliseo showed up. And poor Casimiro, who wore thick glasses and peered into the fruit trees with his whole face to see what he was picking. But you’d have to know Spanish to know why all the other men laughed at his name.

“Love Machine” by Nic Anstett (Passages North)

In a doomed world in which robots are taking over, a lonely transgender woman explores her sexuality.

The robots have taken Seattle and I am on the apps again. I can no longer sleep in my half empty queen bed without another body. More than India, I miss her dog, Binky, who diagonally draped himself across the mattress every night. Whether it was a soggy July evening or one of Baltimore’s cruelly dry winter nights, I could count on a furry dog blanket. Now, my nighttime hands grab only limp fabric and empty air. I miss the warmth and I miss having something living to pull towards me, which in the last several months had always been Binky. Even before she left, I could tell India was pulling away. So, now I’m spending my nights during the machine uprising swiping through the singles of the greater Chesapeake Bay area.

I’m not alone in this at least. It turns out that the oncoming annihilation of organic life makes loneliness even more lonely.

“You picked the right time to start messing around,” Krista told me over bloody marys two weeks back. “Even the straightest of straight guys are sleeping with transsexuals now. There’s no room for pickiness.”

“Is it Too Late?” By Pegah Ouji (Isele Magazine)

An Iranian immigrant remembers a retirement community resident she cared for during her early years in in the United States.

The first time I met you, I thought you looked like a dried peach, sweet but aged. Please forgive my crude description. I’d just turned seventeen and oddly enough, a young girl’s imagination sometimes defies delicacy. I close my eyes and imagine you now after all these years. It has become an old game. How much of you can I still remember? Your hands, wrinkled, slender fingers with soft tips which had typed up many articles on your old typewriter and hardly ever had held anything heavier than a ball-point pen. Your honey-colored eyes, marble-like, in the folds of your wrinkled eyelids. By the time I met you, you had barely any hair left, the remaining survivors white and fuzzy. You see now why the peach was an apt metaphor?

We met during my first week at Hillside Retirement Community, a place you had already been calling home at that point for more than five years. Being so young and naive and having immigrated from Iran with my mother and grandmother only a year before that, I felt alive to have a job of my own. Life in America was finally beginning to pay off, I’d thought. Despite my shaky grasp of the English language, Mrs. Hazelwood had hired me for four hours every day after school as a dining room server. The trick to getting hired had been to appear like I understood more than I actually did, achieved chiefly this through vigorous head nods and readily dispensed yes replies.

“Different” by Sindya Bhanoo (The Masters Review)

Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. “Different” appears in this collection.

For three decades, Chand gave his Indian graduate students his house keys when he and Raji left town. He told them to relax and use his spacious home as a place to rest and study, to use the hot tub in the back, and the grill, as long as they did not put beef on it. “Sleep in the guest bedroom,” he said. “Escape your dreary apartments.” It gave him pleasure to offer comforts that graduate student stipends could not afford. In his home, students could watch satellite channels like Zee TV and TV Asia and catch up on episodes of Koffee with Karan and Kaun Banega Crorepati. Before Skype and WhatsApp and FaceTime, some students made long distance phone calls from his landline. Chand never charged them for it. He treated them like family, because their own families were so far away.

He had been a graduate student once, in a small town in Montana, tens of thousands of miles away from Vellore, his hometown in South India. Things were different then. When he moved to America, he called his parents once every three months, and was careful to think through what to say before dialing. Back then, calls cost three dollars for the first minute and one dollar for every minute thereafter. He remembered the loneliness, the immense sorrow that came from going months without uttering a word of Tamil. There was no way for him to express certain thoughts, certain feelings, in the English language. He remembered the warmth he felt when the one Indian professor on campus, a Punjabi chemical engineer named Dr. Gupta, occasionally invited him to his home for dinner.

“Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li (The New Yorker)

For Pravesh, this story was love at first read.

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for . . . Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled.

All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been cancelled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.

She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would cancelled trains only lead to more cancelled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

Check out all of Pravesh’s previous story recommendations:  2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

Pravesh Bhardwaj wrote and directed “Baby Doll,” an Audible Original podcast in Hindi (featuring Richa Chadha and Jaideep Ahlawat).

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

A push for slavery reparations. The dilemma of wild cows. A complicated racial heritage. How bees require a balanced diet. And the joys of swimming in the slow lane.

1. Inside Barbados’ Historic Push for Slave Reparations

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

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

2. The Republic of Cows

Jude Isabella | Hakai | August 15, 2023 | 5,525 words

Last year, our sister publication, The Atavist, published one of my favorite features in recent memory: a story about feral cows who were washed away in a storm surge, only to resurface miles away, perfectly fine. I don’t think I’d thought about feral cows before that point. In my mind, conditioned as it was by cheese companies and weird college mascots, “bovine” was synonymous with “domesticated.” Even after reading it, my image of feral cows remained indistinguishable from the archetype of the placid ruminant. But as Jude Isabella points out in her visit to Alaska’s uninhabited Chirikof Island, the truth is udderly different. “Trappers on Chirikof have witnessed up to a dozen bulls at a time pursuing and mounting cows, causing injury, exhaustion, and death, especially to heifers,” she writes. Troublesome rutting is only one of the issues plaguing Chirikof; the 2,000 cattle there are federally protected, but everyone else is torn about whether that’s a boon or a bane for the island’s ecosystem. One wildlife biologist Isabella talks to points out that Chirikof’s shape—either a T-bone steak or a teardrop, depending on who’s describing it—neatly embodies the tension at hand. At its heart, this is a nature piece, one that transports you (by seaplane) to a land of wind-rippled meadows and majestic untamed beasts. But it’s also a challenge to our very conceptions of cows. Yes, we can imagine Chirikof as a utopia for its massive herd—but what of the many other species that call Chirikof home? —PR

3. My Time Machine

Arthur Asseraf | Granta | July 25, 2023 | 3,029  words

Arthur Asseraf became a historian in part to overcome the confusion of his ancestry: his paternal grandmother was born in Morocco and eventually returned to France, for reasons undiscernible to Asseraf as a child. As he gains context and knowledge, Asseraf carefully confronts his grandmother’s distaste for Arabs and her unwillingness to see them as equal to her as an Algerian Jew. The more he learns about her past, the more distant he becomes to her. “I never told my colleagues the truth: that I knew colonialism not only through reading books, but also because its representative served me fish fingers after school,” he writes. Things change as Assaraf’s grandmother develops dementia and she reveals the anti-semitism she encountered as a Jew after the Second World War. This piece is a beautiful read about a grandson’s desire to understand a heritage mired in racist colonialism, coupled with the discovery that his grandmother, over the course of her life, was both oppressor and victim. —KS

4. America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem

Lex Pryor | The Ringer | August 3, 2023 | 6,482 words

Nearly 6,500 words on the state of bees in America? Yes, please. Lex Pryor’s piece is the bee’s knees—one part education, one part entertainment, and replete with fascinating characters—a piece that just might inspire you to do what you can for your local pollinators. It is well known that bees help produce many of the foods we eat, and keepers Andrew Coté and Bill Crawford are among those who tote hives to farms across the US to ensure that there are enough pollinators buzzing around for crops to thrive. But, did you know that monoculture farming is partly to blame for dwindling bee colonies in America? “It used to be that I could put down my bees somewhere and they’ll get a nice diversity of nectar and they’ll be healthy,” says Coté. “But now if I put them down in almonds, it’d be like if you or I ate kale. Kale is good, kale is healthy…But if we eat kale only for six weeks, like the bees have almond nectar only for six weeks, at the end of it, we won’t be dead—we may wish we were—but we’ll just be unhealthy and then susceptible to other health problems.” It turns out that a balanced diet isn’t just good for you, it’s good for the bees, too. —KS

5. Epiphany at the Y

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

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

Audience Award

Here’s the piece that stood out for our audience this week.

Belafonte wants to tell me about a movie he never made, probably never could have made.

Amos ’n Andy. Not like Bamboozled, Spike Lee’s postmodern riff on blackface, but Amos ’n Andy as a history of minstrelsy going back to the beginning. It was the director Robert Altman’s idea. A movie of a minstrel show. White men in blackface who mimicked every brilliant song, every joke, every true story ever told by a black woman or man: stole it all and played it again, as both tragedy and farce, tragedy because it was farce.  

“It’s about the mask,” Belafonte says, speaking in the present tense like he’s talking strategy and tactics, sipping Harvey’s Bristol Cream. “It’s about how much time people spend being false, how often we façade our behavior. Nobody’s better at that than the minstrels. And in them I see all of us. Everybody’s in the minstrel show. Behind the mask, you can say and do anything. The Greeks did it. Shakespeare used it when he wrote the jester. Those he could not give the speech to, he created the jester to say it. All of America’s problems are rooted in the fact that we’re all jesters. Not one of us truth tellers. So how do you get to the truth? Well, how do Amos ’n Andy do it? What’s behind the mask?” 

This: In the mimicry and the falsehood, you can still find the roots of the song. “The art for me is how do you bend it your way?” 

Maybe it couldn’t be done. He told Altman, “You’re going to get us both fucking killed. Black people gonna be completely outraged. Don’t go to black people with blackface. And white people know it’s politically incorrect. There’s no audience.” 

Altman said, “Except everybody.” 

Belafonte’s quiet. Then: “But Altman left me here all alone.” Altman died in 2006. His last movie was A Prairie Home Companion. Belafonte shakes his head, talking to no one now. “Everybody’s in the minstrel show. Everybody’s a minstrel act.”

First published in 1940, Caravan ceased operations in 1988 and was relaunched in 2010 by a new set of ambitious staffers as India’s only magazine dedicated to narrative journalism. For Virginia Quarterly Review, writer Maddy Crowell profiles the monthly magazine and its driven executive editor, Vinod Jose, who she describes as ”one of India’s more subversive journalists,” ”practically inseparable” from his journalism. She knows. She interned at Caravan six years ago. She explores the magazine’s unique identity, its history, and its inspiration.

For India’s young intellectuals, the magazine quickly became an essential venue, cutting an anomalous figure in a media environment rife with sensationalism and government flattery. “Caravan is this lonely but incredibly brave beacon in this unending toxic sewage, fake news, social media violence,” said Deb. “It has been going it alone as far as Delhi is concerned.” It was neither entirely a literary magazine nor a newsweekly nor just a book review, but a combination of all three in the form of a periodical that, as Mishra put it to me, “analyze[d] the news with adversarial politics.”

She also examines its future. Revisiting it in 2020, she finds a magazine facing dangerous challenges to its existence and freedom. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the powerful Hindu-nationalist organization, is building its New Dehli headquarters outside the magazine’s headquarters. Caravan and RSS have a tense adversarial relationship, partly due to the magazine’s frequent investigations into the organization, partly due to the magazine’s defense of Indian democracy. Threats of violence are taken seriously. ”Living under a constant, simmering threat is, for Jose, evidence that he’s doing something right as a journalist,” Crowell writes. The situation is worsening.

As tense as the atmosphere was for India’s free press following Modi’s first election, things have only worsened since. A number of editors claim to have been bullied by Modi loyalists seeking to remove online coverage that was critical of the BJP; newspapers that have published negative stories have been penalized financially, often through the loss of government-funded advertisements. At the same time, journalists at mainstream outlets have become ever more explicit, if not boastful, about their political connections. When Arun Jaitley, the BJP’s finance minister, died in August 2019, a reporter from one of India’s largest television channels, Times Now, tweeted: “I’ve lost my Guiding Light my mentor. Who will I call every morning now?”

Most sinister of all, the censorship of Modi’s critics has escalated into violence. Since he first came into office, twelve journalists have been killed because of their work, and at least nine have been imprisoned. In 2017, the prominent journalist and editor Gauri Lankesh was gunned down in the early evening in front of her estate in Bangalore. Lankesh, an outspoken feminist and human-rights activist famous for her left-wing tabloidesque attacks on Hindu-nationalist figures, was a close friend of Jose’s—the two had worked together covering contentious riots in Goa in 2005. Her death confirmed the seriousness of what Indian journalists were up against under the new regime. Not long after, a right-wing nationalist followed by Modi on Twitter posted: “One bitch dies a dog’s death all the puppies cry in the same tune.”

After Lankesh’s murder, Jose began implementing protocols for Caravan’s staff to follow: All communications are now handled on encrypted channels, such as ProtonMail or Signal (WhatsApp, he believes, is compromised in India), and reporters working on sensitive stories are instructed to be especially vigilant in protecting their sources. And yet, like almost everyone else I spoke with at Caravan, Jose wasn’t all that interested in talking about the government’s intimidation. “You can’t slow down your work just because something has happened. There are certain requirements of the job.” Rather, he was eager to know whether I’d been following their coverage of the mysterious death of Indian special-court judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya (twenty-eight stories and counting), or whether I’d read their cover story about how the RSS had been systematically infiltrating India’s intellectual spaces.

Read the story

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lili Loofbourow, Rachel Monroe, Benjamin Weiser, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and Megan Greenwell.

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1. The Male Glance

Lili Loofbourow | Virginia Quarterly Review | March 5, 2018 | 23 minutes (5,980 words)

The male glance is what we do to art by women: it’s a look that is quick, it judges, it supposes, and it moves on. It’s what makes art by men serious, and art by women dismissive. “We’ve been hemorrhaging great work for decades,” writes Lili Loofbourow, “partly because we were so bad at seeing it.”

2. The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t

Rachel Monroe | The Atlantic | March 5, 2018 | 27 minutes (6,786 words)

Con man Derek Alldred met women on a dating site and swindled them out of more than a million dollars. The women found that there was little law enforcement could do to help them, so they banded together to take him down.

3. A ‘Bright Light,’ Dimmed in the Shadows of Homelessness

Benjamin Weiser | The New York Times | March 3, 2018 | 31 minutes (7,864 words)

Nakesha Williams’ promising life was derailed by mental illness. She resisted help from friends, family members, and social workers and died on the street.

4. The Costume Immigrants Wear

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio | Elle | March 7, 2018 | 5 minutes (1,400 words)

A DREAMer discusses her daily beauty and fashion routine: the clothes she wears to the airport in case she gets screened, the nail polish she wears with a short manicure in case she’s fingerprinted, the waterproof mascara she uses in case she cries.

5. Ball Breakers

Megan Greenwell | Topic | March 1, 2018 | 12 minutes (3,166 words)

Despite the fact that women have been playing billiards since it became a hobby for European royals in the 15th century, they still have to endure cheap shots from men who can’t resist critiquing their game.

This week, we’re sharing stories from May Jeong, Leslie Jamison, Irina Dumitrescu, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Matt Wake.

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1. The Final Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus

May Jeong | WIRED | February 15, 2018 | 20 minutes (5,044 words)

Kim Wall went for a ride on a submarine, hoping to write a story about a maker of “extreme machines.” She never did. In a search for answers, May Jeong traveled to Denmark to investigate the tragic and senseless murder of her friend — a young journalist in the prime of her life.

2. The Breakup Museum: Archiving the Way We Were

Leslie Jamison | Virginia Quarterly Review | February 14, 2018 | 27 minutes (6,793 words)

Essayist Leslie Jamison visits the Breakup Museum in Zagreb, Croatia — created in 2003 after founders Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić ended their relationship — and considers what stories are told by the objects we shared with former loved ones.

3. The Kid Is All Right: In Defense of Picky Eating

Irina Dumitrescu | Serious Eats | February 13, 2018 | 11 minutes (2,915 words)

Kitchen karma comes for Irina Dumitrescu when her son turns into the picky eater she used to be.

4. Typing Practice

Barbara Ehrenreich | Granta | January 31, 2018 | 12 minutes (3,124 words)

In Typing Practice, an excerpt from her book, Living with a Wild God, Barbara Ehrenreich looks back to keeping a notebook to make sense of growing up female in a dysfunctional family. The lessons she learned offer some hope for these trying times: “But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.”

5. The Unsung Songwriters Who Helped Make Appetite for Destruction a Classic

Matt Wake | LA Weekly | June 17, 2017 | 13 minutes (3,493 words)

Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin weren’t the only ones whose songwriting contributions made Appetite for Destruction one of the biggest rock records in history. Thirty years after the album’s debut, here are the stories of the two Los Angeles musicians who co-wrote two of Appetite‘s songs and contributed to the band’s legacy.

While all happy couples might not be alike, each unhappy couple is surely unhappy in its own way. And when their relationships end, each leaves its own trail of uniquely meaningful detritus in its wake.

There’s a monument to this phenomenon — the Museum of Broken Relationships, in Zagreb, Croatia, created in 2003 after founders Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić ended their relationship. For the Virginia Quarterly Review, essayist Leslie Jamison visits the museum and considers what stories are told by the objects once shared between former loved ones. She also lauds the idea of memorializing relationships past, and not running away from the melancholy lingering from them.

I could summon my own lost loves as an infinite catalog: a pint of chocolate ice cream eaten on a futon above a falafel shop; a soggy tray of chili fries from the Tommy’s at Lincoln and Pico; a plastic vial of pink-eye medicine; twenty different T-shirt smells; beard hairs scattered like tea leaves across dingy sinks; the three-wheeled dishwasher tucked into the Iowa pantry I shared with the man I thought I would marry. But perhaps the deeper question is not about the objects themselves—what belongs in the catalog—but about why I enjoy cataloging them so much. What is it about the ache that I enjoy, that etched groove of remembering an old love, that vein of nostalgia?

After breaking up with my first boyfriend, when we were both freshmen in college on opposite sides of the country, I developed a curious attachment to the sadness of our breakup. It was easier to miss the happiness of being together when we were no longer together. It was certainly easier than muddling through what our relationship had turned into: something strained by distance, and the gap between the different people we were becoming. Rather than sitting through stilted phone conversations and the hard work of trying to speak to each other, I could smoke my cigarettes outside at night in the bitter Boston cold, alone, and miss Los Angeles, and what it had been like to fall in love there: warm nights by the ocean, kissing on lifeguard stands. I was more comfortable mourning what the relationship had been than I’d been inhabiting the relationship itself. I loved the way sadness felt pure and ascetic: smoking a lot and eating nothing and listening to sad songs on repeat. That sadness felt like a purified bond, as if I was more connected to that man in missing him than I’d ever been while we were together. But it was more than that, too: The sadness itself became a kind of anchor, something I needed more than I’d ever needed him.

Olinka believes that “melancholy has been unjustly banished from the public space,” and told me she mourns the fact that it has been driven into ghettos, replaced by the eerie optimism of Facebook status updates.

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Our neighbor accidentally drove over our lawn, dislodging a decorative boulder that I put in, but he never mentioned it. We could see the tire tracks from his side of our shared driveway. He probably saw me digging another hole to put the giant rock back in. It was just a boulder, but his un-neighborly silence irritated me. We avoided a feud because I decided an apology didn’t matter as much as our peaceful relationship. So I forgave him, and he kept being his painfully shy anxious self, gentle and unable to deal with the challenges of sharing a driveway. Forgive and forget, I figured. Not in the Balkans.

For Virginia Quarterly Review, Amanda Petrusich traveled to mountainous northern Albania to examine its culture of vengeance. For some Albanians, forgiveness is shameful. Someone must die to right a wrong, and families go on and on for generations, murdering the murderers or the murderers’ relatives, only to get shot themselves and continue the feud. Many blood feuds start over trivial acts, like refusing an alcoholic beverage. Feuds have killed an estimated 12,000 Albanians in the last 25 years. Traveling the region’s rough roads, Petrusich spent time with a negotiator whose job is to facilitate a détente between various parties. Some negotiators get murdered, too.

Per ancient edicts, the avenging family should hunt only an able-bodied adult male (the elderly, women, or boys who are too young to carry arms are excluded), though in recent years those dictums have relaxed, and it is no longer unusual to hear about the retaliatory murder of a young boy or girl. Feuds can begin over most anything, though a high percentage seem to involve property disputes. Despite earnest intervention by the church and the government, reconciliation between feuding families is rarely (if ever) brokered without blood, and the object of a feud—and his family members—are forced to spend decades barricaded inside their homes, hiding. To venture beyond the property line could mean a forceful and immediate death: sudden bullets from on high. Children are pulled from school; jobs are lost. Untethered from the rhythms of a regular life, and unable to conceive of a peaceful future, people drift into depression. Life is at once terrifying and terrifically boring. Families rely on donations to survive. Maybe friends bring food, boxes of groceries. Everyone watches a lot of television. Suicide is not unheard of.

That sounds like a horrible way to spend your life, and for what? Vengeance  seems to only bring more pain. Petrusich looks deeper to understand why this practice exists here and what retribution gets people. Albanian vengeance isn’t lawlessness. It’s an ancient code, so was there something in the exchange that made sense, something that connects back to humanity’s most basic collective unconscious? Most people don’t want to discuss resolution. They want revenge, and targets, as one told Petrusich, just wait for the bullets.

Despite believing these feuds to be barbaric and philosophically flawed—savage by any Western standard—I wondered if the blood feud was also the purest distillation of justice as practiced by a modern society, the least complicated restoration of some essential psychic balance. Blood let for blood let. By any accounting, it was a cathartic reckoning, to avenge a crime properly. It surely facilitated a particular kind of healing. Besides, what did it mean to witness and absorb something wicked, but not to correct for it yourself? Intellectually, I understood it was a mark of maturation and empathy and civilization to defer justice to a court, to some impartial entity separate from the family. But I thought, too, of the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel and his book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? “The conviction that justice involves virtue as well as choice runs deep,” Sandel writes. Was justice not, at heart and freed from any attendant subtext, simply a faithful restoration of equity?

Vengeance is not merely prevalent in rural enclaves here; the notion of vigilante justice is threaded into Albanian culture. In 2015, Armando Prenga, a Socialist lawmaker and an elected member of Parliament, was arrested after getting into a barroom scrap with a sixty-six-year-old fisherman named Tom Cali. When members of Cali’s family went to local police to report the incident—Cali had been badly pistol-whipped—Prenga burst into the station with his brother and a cabal of associates, discharging several rounds of gunfire and hollering, “We will eradicate your tribe!”

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The Virginia Quarterly Review has a personal essay by Meghan Daum in which she discusses the recent reissue of her 2003 debut novel, The Quality of Life Report. Daum is nervous about the book’s reception the second time around. Fourteen years after publication, the book is entering a different kind of political climate: A satire about a New York television reporter who moves to the midwest, it pokes fun at overly sensitive liberals, coastal elites, and P.C. culture, and makes jokes about gender, race, and class.

The book can be buffoonish and broad (for better or worse, I was reading a lot of John Irving the time) but I’ve never in my life had so much fun writing anything. I remember sitting in my chair during those years and at times practically falling out of it from laughing out loud. This is not a regular feature of my creative process.

Last year, after not having looked at the book for a very long time, I reread it and found myself laughing all over again. I also found myself utterly shocked by some of the content. Though the reviews back in 2003 had been mostly positive and, moreover, made little if any mention of the risky humor around things like race, class, and gender (or the political undertones of sexually irrepressible farm animals) the humor seemed to me by today’s standards to be something bordering on unacceptable. Were the novel to be published for the first time today (and I suspect it might not be) there’s a good chance it would be the target of such excoriation on social media and elsewhere that its fundamental message—that liberals can be the most illiberal of all, just as urban coastal types can be the most provincial—would be dismissed as irrelevant, if not lost altogether.

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