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I came to this topic as an eater first. My partner and I fell in love through food. We met during the pandemic and got to know each other through long walks and home-cooked meals. On an early date, she put a glistening mound of pasta in front of me and I thought how lucky I was to have fallen for an Italian. (She was born and raised in Rome.)

Most Italians have a strident pride in their cuisine; a passion which occasionally verges on the maniacal. The food and beverage industry makes up a quarter of Italy’s GDP and a substantial portion of its tourist draw. Food is tightly bound with ideas of national identity and politicians often rely on a kind of gastronationalism. (When running for election, current Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni posted a video of herself making tortellini with a stereotypical Italian nonna.)

And it’s not just Italians who hold this enthusiasm—Italian cuisine is one of the most popular in the world. Home cooks love to prepare Italy’s dishes, and about one-eighth of restaurants in the U.S. serve Italian food. Shows like Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy and the Netflix series From Scratch highlight just how ravenous audiences are for luscious, almost erotic depictions of Italian food.

But in researching this list, I’ve learned that beneath the promotional language and tired clichés, Italian food has a complex and often contradictory history. Academics question the true origin of classic dishes like carbonara; migration from Italy to the U.S. makes it almost impossible to disentangle the two gastronomic traditions. 

Italians often obsess over this cultural purity. When Italian chef Gino D’Acampo appeared on morning television in the UK a decade ago, he was horrified by the suggestion that you could substitute ham in carbonara. “If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike,” D’Acampo responded incredulously. The clip went viral, bolstering the stereotype that Italians can be fussy about their food. But the history of Italian cuisine—like the food of any nation—is a melting pot of influences.  

But what of the future? Migration patterns, together with demographic trends and climate change, mean that the cuisine must adapt. Since 2003, Europe has experienced an unprecedented number of heatwaves, prompting Italy’s largest farmers’ union to estimate that almost a third of national agricultural production is now threatened by climate change. Italian food—so rooted in tradition and adamant in its authenticity—will have to change. 

But for now, I’m excited to visit Rome for the holidays and soak up the city’s culinary delights: creamy cacio e pepe, indulgent layers of tiramisu, and moreish slices of pizza. I’ll photograph the food, luxuriate in it, and come home with a suitcase full of olive oil and cheese. This time, I hope to enjoy the food while knowing more about the context that underpins it. Like the best Italian dishes, this topic is rich with complexity and nuance. So please devour this collection of articles that complicate the understanding of Italian food and what it means both within Italy’s borders and beyond.

Everything I, an Italian, Thought I Knew About Italian Food is Wrong (Marianna Giusti, Financial Times, March 2023)

In this fascinating piece, Italian journalist Marianna Giusti aims to uncover the truth about classic Italian dishes like carbonara, tiramisu, and panettone—which are celebrated for their authenticity despite being relatively recent inventions. She speaks with older family members and friends from across Southern Italy, asking about the food they ate as children (lots of beans and potatoes) and how it contrasts with the food on menus today.

Inaccuracies about the origins of Italian food may be considered harmless—if it wasn’t for how gastronationalism influences Italian politics and culture. She cites the example of the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggesting that pork-free “welcome tortellini” be added to the menu for the San Petronio feast. What was intended as a gesture of inclusion to communities that don’t eat pork, was slammed by far-right Lega party leader Matteo Salvini. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said. To me, food is one of life’s great unifiers. I love to bring people together around food, but just as often, food is used to divide people. This piece made me reconsider what I thought I understood about Italian food and think critically about who and what is welcome at the table.

It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says. 

There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food (John Last, Noema, December 2022)

In this provocatively-titled piece, journalist John Last examines how climate change and immigration patterns are changing food in Italy. It examines how ingredients from abroad and the labor of migrants were used to build one of the world’s most loved cuisines. It also cites a study that found that the role of immigrants in Italy’s farming and culinary sectors has been systematically ignored. Italian food is often celebrated for connecting eaters with unadulterated, authentic cuisine. The reality is much more complicated. I enjoyed how this deeply-reported essay challenges ideas of culinary purity and questions who that narrative excludes. I was interested to read how Italy’s microclimates produce regional specialities, and how they will be forced to adapt due to climate change. If you’re curious about the future of Italian cuisine, this is the essay for you! It has also been anthologized in Best American Food Writing 2023 for its examination of how food shapes our culture.

It’s this obsessive focus on the intersection of food and local identity that defines Italy’s culinary culture, one that is at once prized the world over and insular in the extreme. After all, campanilismo might be less charitably translated as “provincialism” — a kind of defensive small-mindedness hostile to outside influence and change.

What the Hole Is Going On? The Very Real, Totally Bizarre Bucatini Shortage of 2020 (Rachel Handler, Grub Street, December 2020)

The early months of the pandemic were characterized by lockdowns, widespread anxiety, and a national pasta shortage. In this funny, engaging piece written by the self-described “Bernstein of Bucatini,” I learned why some pasta shapes were especially difficult to find due to production challenges. This piece is an enjoyable, twisty romp that points to the sensual delight of pasta during a dark time. 

I’d like to go a step further and praise its innate bounciness and personality. If you boil bucatini for 50 percent of the time the box tells you to, cooking it perfectly al dente, you will experience a textural experience like nothing else you have encountered in your natural life. When cooked correctly, bucatini bites back. It is a responsive noodle. It is a self-aware noodle. In these times, when human social interaction carries with it the possible price of illness, bucatini offers an alternative: a social interaction with a pasta.

America, Pizza Hut, and Me (Jaya Saxena, Eater, March 2016)

I really enjoyed this thoughtful personal essay about a young girl’s obsession with Pizza Hut and the influence of food on her identity. The author questions her intersecting heritage: she’s a mixed kid with an Indian father and a white mother, a New Yorker who craves stuffed crusts in Pizza Hut rather than an “authentic” dollar slice, and a pre-teen who wants to eat “white food” while her family enjoys soupy dal and potatoes flavored with cumin and turmeric. This piece is also a useful primer on the history of Italians in America, tracing the path from “other” to mainstream acceptability. 

I was half Indian, half white, and all New Yorker. In simple assimilation calculus, going to Pizza Hut with my Indian grandparents in Fort Lee should have earned me points for eating in real life what the cool kids were eating in commercials. And yet, I was still a New Yorker: My ideal sense of self was white, but worldly, opinionated, and judgmental.

Finding Comfort and Escape in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (A. Cerisse Cohen, Lit Hub, November 2022)

I loved this essay about how the author learned to cook during the pandemic and the comfort she found in the reassuring, authoritative voice of Marcella Hazan. The piece vividly describes the flavors of Italian food (“mellow, gentle, comfortable”) and the solace found in cookbooks at a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Before learning to cook, the author considered it a domestic task inextricably linked with traditional notions of femininity and heterosexual marriage. But Hazan, who is widely considered to be the doyenne of Italian cuisine, teaches her that cooking for herself and her chosen family is an essential element of survival, not only literally but existentially. This essay brought me back to the early days of 2020. As the pandemic spiraled out of control, I found my equilibrium through brisk morning walks and the comfort of a pot bubbling on the stove. I still cook most days. Sometimes, it’s a pleasure. More often, it’s a chore. For me, this beautiful essay evoked the visceral, bodily demands of appetite and how satiating them can provide not just culinary satisfaction, but a feeling of peace and wellbeing.

Hazan helped me see that nourishing oneself, and sharing a family meal, is simply foundational. To privilege invention and labor outside the kitchen, but not inside it, is to play into patriarchal distinctions of value.

Hazan herself was a cook, an educator, and an incredible creative success. She remains influential for many contemporary cooks. Her adoration of the anchovy—“Of all the ingredients used in Italian cooking, none produces headier flavor than anchovies. It is an exceptionally adaptable flavor”—foreshadows the long reign of Alison Roman. Her careful ideas about layering flavors and her scientific approach to the kitchen find their echoes in the methodologies of Samin Nosrat (who, in her blurb for the new book, also credits Hazan with beginning her obsession with the bay leaf).

Eating the Arab Roots of Sicilian Cuisine (Adam Leith Gollner, Saveur, March 2016)

My partner and I recently returned from a holiday in Sicily. The island is considered to be a melting pot of North African, Arab, French, Spanish, and other cultures—which for me, was best understood through the food. We enjoyed regional delicacies like deep-fried lasagne, cookies made with beef and chocolate, and cremolata, a sherbet-like dessert that originated in Arab cuisine. It was a delight to remember the trip while reading this mouth-watering travel essay which aims to disentangle how Italian and Arab culinary history mixes on the island. What begins as an academic question quickly becomes a catalog of exquisite meals as the author explores the island’s rich, colonial past through its food. He traces the ingredients that are core to Italian cuisine—including the durum wheat used to make pasta—to migrants who arrived on Sicily’s shores and “gifted this land with what’s sometimes known as Cucina Arabo-Siculo.”

Sicily has had so many conquerors, and there’s simply no way to pull apart all the intermingling strands of culture in order to ascertain what is precisely “Italian” and what’s “Arab” and what’s not anything of the kind. At a certain point—ideally sometime after having a homemade seafood couscous lunch in Ortigia and sampling the life-changing pistachio ice cream at Caffetteria Luca in Bronte—you have to give up trying to isolate the various influences and accept that countless aspects of life in Sicily have been informed by Arab culture in some way. It’s deep and apparent and meaningful, but it’s also a cloud of influence as dense and intangible as the lemon gelato sky that greeted me upon my arrival.

Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes about food (among other things) for her newsletter and is working on her first book.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

 Twelve US presidents — Washington, Jefferson and Clinton among them — lost fathers early in life. From the start of the 19th century to the outbreak of the second world war, 67 per cent of British prime ministers lost a father before their 16th birthday. “That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class,” writes Gladwell.

Perhaps these public figures, behind whatever resilience was forged in their early misfortune, wrestled with the same paradox. Bereaved children carry with them a mark of exception. But to live in the shadow of a lost parent is to also live with a pervasive feeling of absence and abandonment. In the decades after my father died, I often sensed a thin line between purpose and futility. It would never be possible to emulate the taintless ghost I held in my mind, and so the line between self-belief and self-loathing often felt thinner still.

Despite a dedicated fan base and hard-won media career, Pope is by no means a universally beloved presence in ufology’s complex ecosystem. For some, the very fact of his previous employment is enough to render him a figure of permanent suspicion. To others, it boils down to a very different question: what if Pope’s claim to have run the UK’s alleged UFO project wasn’t as clear cut as made out. What if, they ask, it isn’t quite true?

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A former plantation turned into a source of pride. The freedom of a street dog. The heavy toll of a gambling addiction. The strained lives of South African copper thieves. And an uplifting profile of a rock icon. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.

1. Reclaiming a North Carolina Plantation

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

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

2. The Free Dogs of India

Krithika Srinivasan | Aeon Magazine | May 4, 2023 | 2,800 words

India has the world’s largest population of street dogs, historically labeled as “pariahs” and “strays” by the British and viewed as a symbol of the decline of India. British colonialism spread the idea that dogs are only legitimate if they belong to a breed; any others are dirty, inferior creatures meant to be culled. As Krithika Srinivasan argues in this insightful piece, dogs existed before breeds, before fancy dog shows, before the upper class groomed them. Shouldn’t the country’s street dogs be free to live in public places? Despite the need to find their own food, water, and shelter — and their exposure to mostly human-made harms like traffic and cruelty — these free-living dogs live mostly autonomous and peaceful lives. Srinivasan challenges us to reconsider the long-held idea that dogs are meant to be human companions, and to rethink how humans can coexist with other beings on the planet. —CLR

3. I Placed my First Wager When I was 10. I’ve Gambled More than $1 Million Since.

Noah Vineberg | Maclean’s | May 10, 2023 | 5,098 words

In my city, the climate wreaks havoc on infrastructure. Potholes abound. Curbs crumble to dust after a single brutal winter. But guess what has a shiny sparkle? The newly renovated and expanded casino, located within walking distance from some of the most impoverished postal codes in town. The government insists gambling proceeds help fund “healthcare, education, social services, housing and infrastructure.” I’m not against gambling, but for some, it extracts a much greater cost than it could ever repay in helping fund community and social services. At Maclean’s, recovering gambling addict Noah Vineberg recounts how he spiraled into gambling addiction from sports betting as a teen and the steep non-monetary price he’s paid ever since. —KS

4. Life Inside the South African Gangs Risking Everything for Copper

Monica Mark | Financial Times | May 10, 2023 | 4,823 Words

Sausages, Mafia, and TwoSix: Three men at the bottom of a supply chain sourcing stolen copper for international syndicates. Monica Mark uses their story to explain how the South African gangs stealing copper have reached an industrial scale — causing outages in water, sanitation, and hospitals, and even train crashes. She sets the personal tale of these men against the larger backdrop with intricate skill: Copper thieves are widely despised (vigilantes even beat a suspected thief to death), but Mark’s account evokes empathy for those driven by poverty to this crime. Yes, they often use the money to buy drugs, but Mark explains how “Heroin helped numb everything: the chill seeping through the thin walls, the stomach cramps from hunger.” It is skinny, softly spoken TwoSix who — after weeks of negotiation — Mark manages to spend time with. TwoSix will wrench your heart. This essay does not shy away from the devastating effects of these thefts, but it also shines a fierce, unflinching light on the plight of the people committing them. As ever, it’s complicated. —CW

5. The Dave Matthews Guide to Living and Dying

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

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

Audience Award

And now for the big one — the piece our readers loved the most this week.

Those of us who are concerned see two paths to disaster. One harms specific groups of people and is already doing so. The other could rapidly affect all life on Earth.

The latter scenario was explored at length by Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. In a 2021 Reith lecture, he gave the example of the UN asking an AGI to help deacidify the oceans. The UN would know the risk of poorly specified objectives, so it would require by-products to be non-toxic and not harm fish. In response, the AI system comes up with a self-multiplying catalyst that achieves all stated aims. But the ensuing chemical reaction uses a quarter of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. “We all die slowly and painfully,” Russell concluded. “If we put the wrong objective into a superintelligent machine, we create a conflict that we are bound to lose.”

This week, we recommend pieces about homelessness, mountaineering, geological memory and amnesia, critical health care in a post-COVID world, and fathers and stepfathers.

1. No Way to Live

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

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

2. Three Falls in the Alps

Xenia Minder | Financial Times | December 21, 2022 | 4,475 words

At the end of this essay, there is a note stating that Xenia Minder told this story to her brother, Raphael Minder, the Financial Times’ central Europe correspondent. I imagine the support from her sibling enabled Minder to tell her extraordinary story with such honesty and thoughtfulness. Formerly a Swiss judge, a series of catastrophic falls in the mountains leads her to reevaluate her life and realize that while we may think we are choosing our direction, “the key events in our lives are unknown to us.” In the three falls detailed in this essay, she loses — for a time — her ability to move from her neck to her waist and two partners who she loved very much. It is an incredible amount of loss. Yet, Minder does not look for sympathy in this piece, instead telling her story with acceptance rather than complaint, displaying an inspiring resilience and ability to look within herself. It is a beautifully written personal essay that gripped me with every word. —CW

3. The Great Forgetting

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

“It takes time to build memory, but it can be erased in a geological instant.” I didn’t read much the past few weeks, but paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius on geological and human memory at Nautilus cut through the holiday noise and held my attention. Praetorius writes about what Earth knows and records over time by way of tree rings, ocean sediments, and other physical markers of time. (“Ice sheets themselves are some of the best memory banks,” she writes, and “mile-high mountains” are the “great brains of our planet.”) She also writes about geological amnesia, “resilience debt” and the planet’s inability to recover when its ecosystems have been pushed over the edge, and what’s been lost. Praetorius weaves this research with poignant personal insights about her late brother, whose health and memory deteriorated after a snowboarding accident, and by doing so, creates a beautiful piece on loss and resilience. —CLR

4. The Power and Peril of the ICU

Adam Gaffney | The Baffler | December 13, 2022 | 5,282 words

Having a loved one in the ICU is both hopeful and excruciating. You hold out hope that the most highly trained people and the most advanced technology must somehow tip the balance in their favor, buying crucial time their body needs to heal. But what happens when the most tragic outcome is almost certain? How do families and hospitals cope when hopes are slim and the costs of keeping a patient alive mount, perhaps even prolonging certain death? At The Baffler, Boston physician Adam Gaffney suggests that having all the training and technology at your disposal doesn’t mean that it’s always the most ethical and compassionate choice to use it. At what point does care become a horrific ordeal for the patient and their nurses? To what end? “I have seen family members overwhelmed by the magnitude of the decision: letting go might make sense (and they may realize it and even say so), but making the decision feels impossible because it threatens a lifetime of guilt over having been the one to say: ‘Stop the machines.’” —KS

5. Fighting the Tree

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

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

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Still, it is not a job with universal appeal. While Q branch now has more women than men at senior levels, they are under-represented in the department as a whole. Ada is keen to change this, but the wider shortage of women in science and engineering makes recruitment more difficult. She is not from a technical background herself. Her strength is operational expertise honed on a series of overseas postings, where she learnt Arabic and ran agents, including in war zones. For some of this time she was also raising a family, which presented unusual practical problems. At the start of one posting, she was given an armoured car and became the first officer in the service to ask where the Isofix points were so she could insert her baby’s carseat. “There was a lot of scratching of heads and people saying, we haven’t had a request for one of those things before,” she says. “And actually, it turns out it’s very difficult to do.” (They did, eventually, find a way.)

Here are five stories we recommend this week. Visit our editors’ picks to browse more recommendations, and sign up for our weekly newsletter if you haven’t already:

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1. I Spent 10 Days in a Secret Chinese Covid Detention Centre*

Thomas Hale | Financial Times | November 2, 2022 | 3,902 words

After visiting a bar in Shanghai where a COVID-19 case is detected, Thomas Hale is whisked away to a close-contact quarantine facility on an island somewhere north of the city — “the kind of place that finds you, rather than the other way around.” Hale stays in a small shipping container-like cabin with an iron bed and other basics. (Interestingly, the internet connection is 24 times faster than at his hotel.) Although he never tests positive, he remains there for 10 days, and keeps to a routine that includes language study, work, exercise, online chess, and streaming TV. When he’s able to open his door or wander around, he has conversations with workers and other “residents,” which are captured in the piece as unexpected moments of human connection in an otherwise eerie place. Hale offers a chilling look into China’s zero-COVID approach, which uses constant testing, contact tracing, quarantines, and lockdowns to stop community transmission. This particular facility, “P7,” is one among many, and just a glimpse into a vast monitoring system, workforce, and way of life that most of us outside of China cannot fathom. —CLR

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2. Locked Outside the Gates of Europe

Sam Edwards | Guernica | October 18, 2022 | 2,646 words

In leaving Algiers, Mohammed wanted to escape compulsory military service and seek adventure. He knew there would be danger along the way. “His life at home was bearable, he said. But he wanted something more.” What Mohammed didn’t count on was spending years in a makeshift migrant camp in Spain, as his paperwork winds through the byzantine asylum process. As Sam Edwards reports at Guernica, the delays are punitive and performative; some rich countries want to make it difficult to enter. “Melilla had become a de facto holding cell for asylum applicants — and a symbol of two increasingly common trends in how rich countries handle asylum cases. Refugees are detained ‘offshore’ while their applications wind through the system; wait times drag on as applications pile up, and ‘host nations’ seem to deter future migrants by making those who are already there more miserable.” —KS

3. Braydon Bringhurst Versus the Beast

Kim Cross | Bicycling | November 3, 2022 | 6,878 words

Whether I’m on my feet or on a bike, I love climbing. Love it. (My wife hates this, especially when we’re hiking and I shift gears without realizing it.) It’s not the pain involved in the effort that attracts me; at least, not entirely. It’s more that the climb — or, rather, finishing the climb — in some way physically embodies the idea that hardship is temporary. It’s mindfulness in corporeal form. But all the lofty platitudes in the world don’t change the fact that I have no earthly idea how Braydon Bringhurst operates. Kim Cross’s profile of Bringhurst and his unfathomable quest to ride up one of mountain biking’s most brutally technical descents, known as The Whole Enchilada, makes that very clear. It’s partially his outlook, honed in part by taking the same sports-psychology class 10 times in college. It’s partially his otherworldly proprieception, which made him excellent at airborne sports from slopestyle skiing to pole vault. But there’s something else lurking in there too, and I suspect it’s the same something that fuels people like Eliud Kipchoge and Alex Honnold: the drive to do the impossible, paired with the absolutely certainty that you can. It’s never not fascinating to read about, and in this case Cross pairs it with an unerring descriptive eye that manages to turn the intricacies of the climb into something we mere mortals can understand. No matter the hill in front of you, you’re bound to take something from this. —PR

4. Bad Faith at Second Mesa

Jaq Evans | Truly*Adventurous | October 11, 2022 | 5,334 words

As it sets the opening scene, Jaq Evans’ essay reads like a thriller: As the light fades, two thieves search among the stones atop the Second Mesa on the Hopi reservation. It is a search that is fruitless until one of them sees an unnatural divot. A divot that affects the course of their lives for years to come. It marks the entrance to a cave where the pair find four figurines they later steal, planning to sell them on the black market. The figures are a family: Dawn Woman, Corn Maiden’s Husband, Corn Maiden, and Corn Maiden’s Daughter. Central to the religion of the Hopi, they are regarded as living entities. When they go missing, the Hopi priests hear them crying in the night, longing for home. After the theft, the essay gracefully morphs into a supernatural tale. The thieves see the faces of the figurines in their dreams and struggle with misfortune after misfortune. Desperate for a release from what they see as a curse, they sell the family of deities at a cut price — but still, remain haunted by them. I, too, found myself haunted, gripped by their story, hoping for an ending where they all return home together. Discovering their true fate was a gut punch. —CW

5. The Sweet and Sticky History of the Date

Matti Friedman | Smithsonian | November 7, 2022 | 5,377 words

I love visiting supermarkets while traveling, perusing aisles of foods both familiar and not. An Armenian grocery in the San Fernando Valley introduced me to pinecone jam. A store in Bishkek surprised me with its wide array of ketchup options. Then there was the supermarket in Abu Dhabi that boasted a bar filled with nothing but dates: big ones, small ones, stuffed ones, fresh ones — and in a rainbow of brown or orange hues. Until then, I’d had no clue there were so many varieties. Matti Friedman’s feature about the sumptuous fruit is equally surprising and instructive. It traces the date’s history from ancient times to the present and posits that the fruit tells the long, complicated story of the Middle East. Friedman takes readers on a tour of mythology, architecture, and empire; inside a Jurassic Park-style genetic experiment involving “resurrected” date palms; and into the halls of an agricultural conference about the future of the date in a fraught world and changing climate. By the end of reading this piece I felt enriched — and hungry. —SD

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The daily rhythm went as follows. Early in the morning, we awoke to a lawnmower-like noise, which was in fact an industrial-grade disinfectant machine spraying our windows and front steps. Meals were provided at 8am, noon and 5pm. Around 9am, two nurses in blue hazmat suits came by to administer PCR tests. Once, I asked if I would be taken somewhere else if I tested positive. “Of course you’ll be taken away!” one of the nurses said. “A new life!” she added in English.

By Kara Devlin 

It was only a few weeks ago that I found out cabin fever — the restlessness, irritability, and loneliness that a person feels when confined to one place for too long — was a genuine, medical term and not just a casual way of joking about isolation. I was on a hypochondriac mission, tasked with discovering exactly why I felt so completely out of my mind after only one week in COVID-positive solitude. When I searched my anxieties and fears, dozens of incredibly validating affirmations popped up: You are not alone; your symptoms are real; you can get better. I had never taken being alone that seriously. It was a common, unavoidable condition of being alive, so why would I? 

My discovery that cabin fever was a recognized ailment encouraged me to see isolation in a new way. The severity of the condition was now obvious. As a kid, one day inside had been enough to send me climbing the walls, searching for anything to do. What I didn’t realize as I grew older was that isolation crept into my brain in a much quieter way. Loneliness, shame, unhappiness, and impatience replaced the agitation and boredom I had grown up with. The more I read, the more I realize how universal, yet unique, this feeling is. Why does being alone make us feel this way? 

Technology doesn’t help. Most of us can have all our wants and needs met from the comfort of our rooms — food delivered, friends found in anonymous chatrooms, entertainment discovered on endless streaming services. Technology, ironically, has brought freedoms to confinement. We could spend our entire lives within one small space if we chose to, as the economy molds to serve our desires. The lazy day watching Netflix, the guilt-laden Uber Eats order, even the bold Instagram message, have all emerged around a generation spending more time by itself than any before.

Of course, isolation is not just found through a physical landscape. The most harrowing form of loneliness can occur in a crowded room. Edward Hopper famously explored the loneliness of living in the big city through paintings like “Nighthawks.” This ubiquitous depiction of urban isolation, a diner with no entrance and no exit, serves as a memorable illustration of loneliness. When you are inside of this feeling — the metaphorical diner if you will — there is no perceived beginning or end, and no consideration from those around you, as nothing exists beyond this world-swallowing experience.

During the pandemic, isolation transformed from a misfortunate occurrence to something so widespread it was impossible to avoid. Like most people, I spent weeks and weeks inside my house, with no contact with anyone except the members of my household. All aspects of isolation hit at once and were impossible to escape. I realized how easy it would be to continue living like this — perpetually isolated.

I wasn’t the only one who had this idea. The switch to working from home brought the overlapping isolations of technology and the pandemic together. However, this change was not an unavoidable curse cast upon working society: Only three percent want to fully return to the office now that we are able to. Solitude is not just wrought upon us; oftentimes, we choose it. The desire to be left alone by the bothers of the social world often overpowers the negative experience that isolation implies. 

I am drawn to the idea that reading can connect the isolated — that one story on loneliness can link together hundreds of confined minds to think, Maybe I’m not alone. The stories on this list do not just seek to analyze and dissect the effects of isolation; they serve as a powerful tool of connection.

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The Hikikomori couldn’t go outside for years. Then Covid-19 trapped them again (Ann Babe, Wired, March 2021)

Like many other people, the coronavirus lockdown was my first taste of prolonged isolation. It was a complete change from my regular lifestyle. But what was it like for those who were already isolated — people who had spent years of their lives locked in their rooms, having already chosen a lifestyle of reclusiveness? This describes the hikikomori, a unique subset of people, largely in Asia, who can live decades in almost complete isolation.

South Korean-based journalist Anne Babe thoughtfully explores the experience of these people during the pandemic. She sensitively lays out multiple, personal hikikomori narratives, displaying their anxieties, reservations, and fears, all without judgment. The effects of COVID on these people ran just as deep, despite the misguided thought that they should be used to it. Babe takes us into their worlds, reminding us that there’s not so much difference between us and them. 

Reflecting on the pandemic, Kim makes a comparison. “Someone who’s been living in the cold climate for a long period of time, like I have, is able to continue on in the cold weather,” he says. “But if that person is from a hot place, they will find it hard to adapt to the suddenly freezing climate. I would say I’m numb to the coronavirus situation because I am so used to being secluded in my room. But I wouldn’t say I’m completely indifferent to it, because I’ve experienced, briefly, the warmth of being part of society.”

The Future of Loneliness (Olivia Laing, The Guardian, April 2015)

As a Gen Zer, technology is an integral part of my life. It’s how I keep up with work, understand the daily happenings of the world, and, most importantly, how I talk to every single person I know. This reliance on social media for connection has potentially worrying effects, as Olivia Laing argues in her illustration of concerns for strictly virtual bonds. 

Written in 2015, Laing’s fascinating piece points out what we should have realized by then — that the internet is not the perfect tool for connection, that is just an illusion. We may believe it allows us to be seen while simultaneously supporting a level of privacy, but neither can truly be achieved. You will never be viewed for who you really are, just as you will never be concealed from prying eyes. Years later, her predicted anxieties have turned into daily reality. It is normal for every app to gather mountains of data on you, every mistake to result in a permanent “canceling,” and every relationship to spend at least half its time connecting through social media. Laing discovers the true nature of the online world and maintains tension to the last word as we discover more and more truths about our online activity. 

This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgment and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal that increases loneliness. With this has come the slowly dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.

Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture? (Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, March 2009)

I spent my lockdown days in Scotland, under the daily COVID guidance of Boris Johnson, who created laws that only permitted going outside once a day, for exercise. For years, like most other countries around the world, we could not meet anyone outside our “bubble” — the small group of people designated as our close contacts. These restrictions on freedom led to societal concerns about the power of government to forbid even the most basic forms of contact, such as a hug, and led many to come back to the fundamental question: Is socialization a human right?

Gawande delves into this concern in this piece, which focuses on the emergence of solitary confinement as a regular form of punishment within the American incarceration system. He draws us in with stories of monkeys and prisoners of war, creating a compelling argument for the inhumanity of isolation from the get-go. He keeps this level of focus throughout, putting you through the experience of solitary confinement with his illustrative depictions. By the end, you’ll be writing to your local representative, asking them to reconsider their position on this brutal prison punishment. 

This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets]) (Sarah Fay, Longreads, March 2020)

There is an implied difference between solitude and isolation. Solitude is a choice, your own rejection of the world, your own contentment with being alone. With isolation, the rejection flips; you are pushed out of society, no matter how much you want to climb back in. This peculiarity is just one that Sarah Fay explores in this piece. Subtle contradictions are her strong suit, as she walks the line between being alone and being lonely, the various subtleties between autophobia and eremophobia, and the distinction between interaction and connection. Ultimately, Fay’s personality is the driving force of this article, compelling us to read on to uncover her personal revelations on solitude.

The key to connection was not to be needy of connection with others. We have to give freely of ourselves, act as social philanthropists who donate anonymously expecting no plaques or appreciation in return. (Turkle and others have pointed to this as the reason why social media doesn’t make us feel connected. Each tweet, post, or friend request is made with the expectation of a response: a retweet, a repost, a like, an accepted request.) 

Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness (Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post, March 2017)

Isolation can often be interlinked with identity. People who are perpetually alone may come to the conclusion that this feeling is an inherent feature of who they are. This is particularly true with minorities, as each member finds themselves intrinsically different from the people surrounding them. Michael Hobbes reflects on this experience within the gay community, almost a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Hobbes meets each man he interviews with a deep understanding — he is a gay man himself — as he intertwines his personal narrative with that of his community. He allows their revelations to propel the article, using his own logic to back each reflection. 

I’m always drawn to pieces that effectively communicate an experience I will never personally understand. Hobbes’ depiction is painful; it is raw; but, importantly, it is thoughtful. Each sentence takes care not just for its audience, but for the subjects it depicts. The level of consideration put into each word creates a simultaneously welcoming and challenging reading experience.

You grow up with this loneliness, accumulating all this baggage, and then you arrive in the Castro or Chelsea or Boystown thinking you’ll finally be accepted for who you are. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race. “The bullied kids of our youth,” Paul says, “grew up and became bullies themselves.”

Loneliness and Me (Claire Bushey, Financial Times, November 2020) 

Is loneliness shameful? Does it function as a reflection of who we are as people? These are the integral questions considered by Claire Bushey as she investigates the hows and whys of her own personal loneliness, which started long before the restraints of COVID. To Bushy, being alone is neither a curse nor a blessing: It is simply a way of being. She presents her findings as a blunt response to the ideas that surrounded isolation at the start of the pandemic — that this was a new, torturous experience for all. What draws me to this piece is its honesty: Bushey doesn’t hide behind convention and expectation; she lays out everything she feels and experiences as if it were essential. 

Lonely as a cloud? I am as lonely as an iceberg, an egg, a half carafe of wine. I am lonely as the body is hungry three times a day, hollowed again and again by an ache that does not ease except with the sustenance of connection. The feeling differs from the peace of solitude, which many enjoy, including me at times. Instead, it is a gnawing sadness. Even before the pandemic, a combination of circumstance and choice left me with fewer close ties than I wanted. Every day I forage for connection, and some days I go hungry.

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Kara Devlin is a writer and student based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her writing has appeared in Her Campus, Medium, and others.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands