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

In this week’s edition:

• Interracial persecution in 1960s Michigan
• The cruelty bred into the chickens we eat
• How Photo Shuffle helped one man through loss
• Navigating life not knowing you’re neurodivergent
• The deep craft in forging a handmade knife

1. In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.

Zack Stanton | Politico Magazine | December 22, 2023 | 17,959 words

The starting point for this mammoth feature by Zack Stanton is a little-known incident from the summer of 1967: a white mob tried with all their might to drive Carado and Ruby Bailey, an interracial couple, from the suburban Michigan neighborhood where they’d recently bought a new home. Drawing on interviews, public records, and press accounts, Stanton describes the horrors the Baileys and their daughter endured, including a cross burning, racist graffiti, and harassment by vigilante PTA moms who sound a whole lot like the women trying to ban books and marginalize transgender youth in schools today. But that’s not the whole story, or even half of it. In cinematic detail, Stanton shows how the battle over the Baileys’ home reached all the way to Washington, DC, where it might have shaped federal policy for the better if not for profound conservative backlash that instead helped usher in Republicanism as we know it today. I gobbled up this thick slice of forgotten history and was moved by the turn at the end when Stanton lets his sources directly address Ruby, now 95, a widow, and still living in the home she refused to leave. One source “admires your principle in the face of imminent danger,” Stanton writes. Another “wants people to understand that America isn’t simply a story of bad things that have happened; it’s the story of people trying to make things better.” Then there is the neighbor who watched from her window in ’67 and did nothing—today, she is ashamed. “When I asked what she would say to you if given the chance,” Stanton tells Ruby, “she broke down in sobs, a half-century’s worth of pain tumbling out.” —SD

2. The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

Boyce Upholt | Noema | December 19, 2023 | 3,954 words

Last week I roasted a chicken. I’ve eaten chicken probably three times since then. I’m careful about the chicken I buy and cook and eat, and as a one-time vegetarian I like to think that I do so mindfully, but even as I do I harbor a suspicion that something is irrevocably broken. That phrases like “free range” and “heritage breed” and “regenerative practices” add up to very little. Boyce Upholt’s Noema story did nothing to disabuse me of that suspicion, and I mean that as a compliment. The quest he refers to in the headline isn’t one that’s currently underway; it’s something that happened long ago. And while we certainly need “better” in the way we raise and slaughter animals for consumption—sorry, fellow meat-eaters, but there’s no use for euphemisms here—”better” here is meant in an industrial sense. It means bigger. Much bigger. So much bigger that decades of exhaustive and meticulous cross-breeding have led to a domesticated chicken that is virtually unable to live on its own. PETA videos exposing factory-farming practices are all well and good, but as Upholt writes, the true atrocity lies well upstream: “The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.” He’s not trying to guilt you about eating meat; he does so himself. (Besides, as he lays out ably, there’s not really a viable solution to the current situation.) Rather, by tracing the arc of the chicken from its initial domestication to its current fate, and by doing so with an engagingly nonjudgmental writing voice, he’s just making sure you know exactly what’s happened. Winner, winner, thought-provoking dinner. —PR

3. A Second Life for My Beloved Dog

Charlie Warzel | The Atlantic | January 5, 2024 | 1,500 words

I am the sort of person who, when watching a disaster film, will anxiously ask: “But, is their dog alright?” So—normally—I avoid any story where the dog might not, in fact, be OK. However, I conquered my fear to tackle Charlie Warzel’s essay about the death of his dog, Peggy (also the name of my dog, for extra potential trauma), and was rewarded with a beautiful, heartwarming piece. As any pet owner knows, the arrival of an animal means clogging your phone with endless photos: The pet sleeping. The pet playing. More sleeping. Charlie Warzel’s iPhone camera roll was no exception, and two-thirds of the way through 2015, it became “infused with a new vitality.” Peggy had arrived. When the time then comes for her to leave, Warzel descriptions of his grief are powerful. To remember Peggy, he tries Photo Shuffle on his phone, a feature that automatically changes the wallpaper to different photos from the camera roll. Setting a parameter to “Pets,” Peggy became his wallpaper star. Photo Shuffle is undiscerning—it may choose an Instagram-worthy shot but is just as likely to pull from the reams of outtakes, offering “chaotic, blurred streaks of fur and tongues.” The dynamic shots. The real ones. As Warzel explains, “Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle.” Every day he remembers a different trip with Peggy, or just an “ordinary Wednesday.” In this way, his phone, instead of a constant distraction, becomes a source of reflection and a teacher in grieving. Reading this lovely little essay, I realized that sometimes the dog dies—and that is OK. —CW

4. Flight Risk

Emily Stoddard | The Kenyon Review | January 8, 2024 | 5,463 words

As a child, Emily Stoddard was called gifted, the “most invisible curse you can a put on a child who already feels she does not belong.” For The Kenyon Review, Stoddard reflects on what it was like to navigate life before an ADHD diagnosis in her mid-30s, and how challenging it can be to have conversations, to work, to walk down the street in her shoes. In some of my favorite parts of this piece, her artful and intentional prose mimics the constant chatter of a feverish mind; she also uses third-person perspective to detach from her own self, stepping outside of her body in times when she’s felt it’s all been too much. This is a deeply personal piece about being (and not knowing) you’re neurodivergent—the need to always mask, the feeling that it’s all in your head, the “at-times maddening, at-times inspired” way your interior motor never stops. —CLR

5. A Knife Forged in Fire

Laurence Gonzales | Chicago Magazine | January 9, 2024 | 6,814 words

“What makes a good knife?” In trying to answer what appears to be a simple question, former chef Sam Goldbroch was “swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force” in becoming a bladesmith in Skokie, Illinois. In this gorgeous profile for Chicago Magazine, writer Laurence Gonzales commissions a knife from Goldbroch and invites us to shadow the master at work. Gonzales does what few writers can; he uses keen observation to recast an industrial space into a place of magical transformations. Read this piece and see the tangerine flame. Hear the forge roar, feel its heat, and revel in the alchemy of your tiny 6,000-word bladesmith apprenticeship. “A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes. ‘This is the moment of truth,’ Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. ‘This is when it becomes a knife.’” You’ll enjoy the science and history rendered in detailed scene work, but the most beautiful thing about this story is that it celebrates and exemplifies dedicated craft—in forging handmade knives and in revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. —KS

On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.

Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

Michael is one of dozens of material handlers—the official job title—at the Inmar Intelligence returns-processing center in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania. Inmar is a returns liquidator, which means that popular clothing brands and all kinds of other retailers contract with the company to figure out what to do with the stuff that customers end up not wanting. Much of that process involves complex machinery and data analysis, but the more than 40 million returned products that the facility sifts through annually still must pass in front of human eyes. Material handlers are charged with determining a return’s ultimate fate—whether it goes back to the retailer to be sold anew, gets destroyed, or something in between.

Beyond the behemoths—Amazon, Walmart—very few retailers undertake the messy, fiddly work of evaluating the deluge of products themselves. Instead, the prepaid shipping labels you print out guide most of your returns to third-party facilities like Inmar, where they’re stacked six feet tall in palletized bins known as gaylords, along with thousands of other retaped cardboard boxes and poly mailers, all waiting to be ripped open, eyeballed, and searched by hand.

Reported essays reflect the great craft involved in blending fact, anecdote, and personal observation to tell a compelling story. These are the pieces we can’t stop thinking about, the ones we will forever recommend to friends, the ones that surprised and delighted us—all drawn from our vast and deep pool of editors’ picks. Enjoy!

The Great Forgetting

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

This piece by paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius, which is part memoir and part science writing, was published in mid-December last year in that overlooked period that made it too late to include in our Best of 2022 collection, yet technically ineligible for this one. But I’m making an exception. (As Praetorius notes about the Great Unconformity—the gap of a billion years of Earth’s unrecorded history between 1,600 and 600 million years ago—there’s much to be discovered about seemingly forgotten periods of time.) I’ve read many poignant climate stories on the melting of glaciers and the razing of ancient forests, but I keep returning to this one because of Praetorius’ vast understanding of the Earth’s history across hundreds of millions of years; she simplifies complex concepts about geological amnesia, resilience, and system collapse so they’re more accessible to a general reader. I love the beautiful way she describes the Earth’s memory, recorded in layers of sediment and held within its disappearing ice sheets, which she refers to as “the great brains of our planet.” But she also weaves a deeply personal account of her late brother Jebsen’s mental deterioration after a snowboarding accident, another example of a complex system pushed too far out of equilibrium to recover effectively. This parallel story helps to make the piece relatable on a more intimate scale. Recalling the ride home from the woods when she notices the first signs of Jebsen’s memory loss as he sat in the back seat, she realizes now that he was forever changed from that moment and never recovered. “I fixate on our immobility; on the lack of actions we took to assess the larger damages that may have been hiding beneath that hole in his memory,” she writes. It wasn’t that she and her mother didn’t care about his well-being, but perhaps they didn’t initially believe it was anything serious. As Praetorius shifts between her family’s story and scientific research, you can’t help but ask: How resilient is Earth? Are we seeing and acting on the warning signs? —CLR

The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

So many families, mine and likely yours, have things they just don’t talk about, experiences and events rooted in regret and shame, where everyone concerned wants to forget or remain silent. But does silence bring solace or does it ensure irreparable harm, perhaps greater than the pain of confronting the past? This is just one of the weighty themes Jennifer Senior considers in “The Ones We Sent Away,” a brilliant essay I have not stopped thinking about since reading it in August. At the heart of the piece is Senior’s aunt Adele, who was institutionalized in 1953 at 21 months old. Adele was diagnosed with microcephaly and removed from those who loved her the most in this world on the advice of medical doctors who meant well. This story is chiefly about loss and trauma, primarily the trauma Adele endured while institutionalized and the incalculable loss of not receiving enlightened care. Adele’s family suffered too, deprived of Adele’s lively spirit in their lives. With deep care and nuance, Senior examines the systemic and societal failures that deemed it best to separate Adele from her family. In writing this essay, she looks closely at the decision makers of the past and turns the microscope on herself: as a journalist writing about an aunt unable to give consent, Senior realized she faced an ethical dilemma not unlike the doctors who suggested Adele be institutionalized in 1952. She, like they, meant well. By sharing Adele’s story, Senior wants not just to avoid harm, but to do good, possibly for other families facing similar decisions today, possibly for anyone who sits in silence, afraid to face an unpleasant and painful past. Through Adele’s incredible story, Senior suggests that to do better as humans, we first need to be brave enough to talk about it. —KS

A Good Prospect

Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words

Here’s an endorsement: I am prone to ranting about Teslas not (only) because of the waste of space that is Elon Musk and the shoddy construction of his EVs, but also because of this essay. In March, writer Nick Bowlin attended an annual conference in Toronto, Ontario, where the “institutions that constitute the global metal-mining industry commiserate in the bad times and celebrate the good.” In a perverse twist, Bowlin found that 2023 is a decidedly good time for mining not in spite of climate change, but because of it. A world hungry for electric batteries, solar panels, and other essentials of a decarbonized economy means there is escalating demand for metals, and mining interests are seizing the moment to make over their image—and to make bank. “To stop global warming,” one conference speaker says, “you need us.” But boosting the profits of some of the world’s most notoriously exploitative concerns comes at a terrible cost: to the earth, to mine workers, to the inhabitants of metal-rich land. Bowlin doesn’t suggest that mining can’t be part of green solutions. Rather, his essay brilliantly illuminates the perils of trying to save the world by relying on the blunt tools and maximalist mindset of late-stage capitalism. —SD

The Horrors of Pompeii

Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words

Reported essays cover a broad spectrum, with historical reporting being oft-overlooked. It’s a difficult skill: conjuring events from hundreds—or even thousands—of years ago is no mean feat. But when it works, a history piece is engaging and fascinating reportage. In this essay on ancient Pompeii for Aeon, Guy D. Middleton grabs attention with a piece of graffiti scrawled on the vestibule wall of a well-to-do house owned by two freedmen, the Vettii: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” Explaining how “graffiti . . . comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society, ” Middleton leads us into the bowels of Pompeii to try and discover who Eutychis was. Expect back-stabbing brothels, brutal slavery, and sexual abuse. The meaning of every word of the crude advertisement is examined, along with writings, paintings, and artifacts that add further insight into this grim world. (Particularly revealing is a lead collar inscribed: “This is a cheating whore! Seize her because she escaped from Bulla Regia.”) Through clever tools, rather than dumbing down, Middleton makes history accessible—and Eutychis can call out to us from nearly 2,000 years ago. —CW

In Search of Lost Time

Tom Vanderbilt | Harper’s Magazine | March 20, 2023 | 5,339 words

Despite the fact that I’m one of those clean-but-messy people, I also love precision. Exactitude. The idea of a constant. That spills over into a fascination with measurement in general. It’s not a hobby—I don’t collect rulers or, like, assemble Ikea shelves with a torque wrench—just an abiding curiosity. And it’s one that Tom Vanderbilt seems to share, judging from his quest in Harper’s to find the ground truth of the second. Like so much of his writing, he sets about answering a question (in this case, what drives clock time?) as genially as possible. Characters don’t just talk, they do so “with weary resignation” or “[nodding] excitedly”; they call statistical noise “jiggly wigglies.” That seasoning, Vanderbilt knows, becomes all the more crucial when the rest of the recipe comprises chewy concepts like dematerialization or the ephemeris second. Who wouldn’t get the tiniest thrill knowing that researchers had to travel to France to compare their kilograms to the platinum-iridium cylinder once deemed the “official” kilogram? Who’s not just a little bit awed by the idea that the official second doesn’t actally exist, but is essentially spit out by a nine-billion-step Rube Goldberg machine made of cesium atoms? It’s science writing that reads like a travelog: Look to your left and see the world’s smallest ruler! If you’re going to guide readers through the world of the abstract, you’ve gotta make the concrete part fun. —PR

I don’t mean to discount the delight and power of a transcendent hallucination. Many people who’ve tripped on psychedelics describe the experience as among the most meaningful of their life. And in several studies of psilocybin for depression, the intensity of the trip correlates with the magnitude of the therapeutic effect. A trip is an extraordinary, consciousness-expanding experience that can offer the tripper new insight into her life and emotions. It also feels pretty damn good. But it’s far from the only effect the drugs have on the human brain.

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

In this edition, we recommend:

• A journalist’s essay about her childhood—and finding a voice through words.
• A story about a drug overdose prevention hotline operator who saves lives.
• A look into whether we can harness AI to communicate with whales.
• A portrait of Louisiana and singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.
• A glimpse into sumo wrestling, a sport that’s becoming more popular in America.

1. I Never Called Her Momma

Jenisha Watts | The Atlantic | September 13, 2023 | 11,129 words

Journalist Jenisha Watts was raised in Kentucky, in part by her mom Trina Renee Watts, and in part by her granny. At one time, Trina was a promising track star. She loved words and was accepted to Western Kentucky University. But when she became pregnant with Jenisha, she dropped out. Soon, Trina was addicted to drugs, with five children from five different fathers, often leaving the kids alone when she left to get high. How did everything go wrong, seemingly so suddenly? Jenisha, a senior editor at The Atlantic, unravels a tangled family history skein by skein, discovering that Trina was sexually abused by her stepfather, Big Dishman, childhood trauma that became generational when Trina spiraled into addiction. Jenisha goes to Florida to live with relatives; her siblings went into the child welfare system. They never gained a stable living situation, causing damage that spurred their own addictions. This is a very tough read. It is a master class in craft, a bold testament to courage in the face of repeated humiliation. The final line of this piece is the most triumphant and inspiring sentence I have read this year. I won’t spoil it for you. It speaks to a truth: that we come into this world with part of our story written for us unless we can stand up, take the pen, and start to write the story for ourselves. —KS

2. The Woman on the Line

Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris | Slate | September 10, 2023 | 3,418 words

“Alive is better than clean.” This belief guides the operators who talk to drug users who dial the Never Use Alone (NUA) hotline, a service they can call while they use alone. If they become unresponsive during the call, the operator then sends help. This moving story by Aymann Ismail—a companion piece to Mary Harris’ This American Life episode—follows Jessica Blanchard, one such operator in Southwest Georgia, who takes these calls from her cellphone. Blanchard, a former nurse and NUA’s education director, is also a mother to an addict; she has a “mama spirit,” a sixth sense, and knows within a few minutes of talking to someone whether she’ll need to call EMS. Critics ask: Does this approach to overdose prevention enable drug use? Isn’t supplying your own daughter with a clean needle a step in the wrong direction? Blanchard is nonjudgmental, caring, and quite literally an angel, giving each person on the other end of the line another chance. As Ismail shows, the work of NUA makes a strong case for harm reduction, and how treating others with dignity is not only compassionate, but life-saving. —CLR

3. Can We Talk to Whales?

Elizabeth Kolbert | The New Yorker | September 4, 2023 | 8,276 words

David Gruber is the kind of man who contemplates such questions as “What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark?” He’s the kind of man I want to read about. One of the founders of the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short—Gruber is currently trying to decode sperm whale click patterns. In a nutshell: he wants to talk to whales. (I presume he has questions for them, too.) Animals having language can be a fraught topic in the scientific community, but Gruber has gathered an impressive group that includes big names from the artificial intelligence field. The theory is that with enough data machine learning, algorithms could be taught to understand whale clicks. However, getting the data requires sticking a recording device on a suction cup to the back of a whale—no mean feat, particularly with a reporter watching. Despite the odd wayward recording device merrily bopping about the Caribbean Sea, the team is persevering. I am glad. A lot is at stake with the development of AI models, but a better understanding of nature would be in the plus column. This piece gives you a lot to think about but rewards you with some incredible scenes I will let you read to discover. —CW

4. Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana

Wyatt Williams | The Bitter Southerner | September 4, 2023 | 6,303 words

When I opened the email from The Bitter Southerner on September 5, I saw that they were sharing a new piece about Lucinda Williams. They had my attention. Then I noticed the author: Wyatt Williams (no relation). I sat up straight. I remembered Williams from “Eating the Whale” at Harper’s Magazine, a piece I savored, start to finish. That feeling when you know something is going to be good, so very good? I had it. I ingested this piece over a few days because I didn’t want it to be over. Williams’ mother and the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams were born a few months apart in Louisiana in 1953, though this is no mere profile of Lucinda or a survey of the author’s personal history. Williams traces her voice through his life from childhood car rides to porch evenings spent listening to her songs with his mother, songs that evoke the “idea of Louisiana,” a waterlogged place slowly being washed away, populated by people trying to get by despite poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. What captivated me about this piece is that Williams by no means comes to terms with his mixed feelings about his home state, even after a deep study of Lucinda’s work, saying, “But if you asked for an explanation why I love this place, the only answer would be just the same as why I hate it.” What you end up with is a profound portrait of a place and a family, where if you look hard enough, beauty still resides if you choose to see it. —KS

5. “I Shall Not Be Moved”: Inside a New York City Sumo Wrestling Club

Jackson Wald | GQ | September 13, 2023 | 2,725 words

When you first meet James Grammer, the central character of this underdog sports tale, you’d be forgiven for thinking something along the lines of this again? The seeming disconnect of a white sumo wrestler, or any athlete in a sport that tradition (or racism) has deemed “not theirs,” has fueled many a glib fish-out-of-water piece. Thankfully, Jackson Wald’s story fully ignores that trope, and Grammer becomes one of the most interesting people I met this week. While sumo has grown in the U.S. over the past few years, it’s still a curiosity; when Grammer and his fellow enthusiasts began practicing in a Brooklyn park, they had to deal with onlookers asking to join or even betting on their matches. Grammer wants to be a champion, but the charm of his story lies less in his quest for greatness than in his human complexity. Before a match, most sumos think about their opponents’ weakness. Not Grammer. “As a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism,” Wald writes, “he believes in a series of deities, including ones that are fierce and wrathful, and that as he’s staring his opponent directly in the eyes, he imagines he and his opponent as two forearm hairs on one of the evil deities, blowing against each other in the wind.” Yes, you’ll find the hallmarks of a good niche sports piece—a giant boa constrictor, a guy who seems to want to be a samurai, Wald sparring with the 340-found Grammer to predictable results—but it’s Grammer himself you’ll remember, and particularly the man he is outside the dohyo. —PR

Audience Award

The story our audience loved this week:

My deficiencies haunted me: my childhood, my accent, my lack of knowledge. Silly things, like the fact that I’d never seen the movies that well-off Black kids had all watched: Coming to America, Harlem Nights. I asked “Where you at?” instead of “Where are you?” I talked quietly because I was never certain I was saying the words correctly. When I said “picture,” people heard “pitcher.” Eventually, I trained myself to always say “photo.” I even found an acting coach online who agreed to give me voice lessons to try to change my accent, and we practiced on monologues in her studio.

Ultimately, Wirecutter’s mission to “tell you what the best particular product in a category is at any given moment” has become a herculean, if not impossible, task; the internet is too big, and it’s filled with too much stuff. And, as many online shoppers learned during the height of the pandemic, purchases don’t always follow the cold, rational logic of a Wirecutter recommendation. We panic-buy; we impulse-buy; we buy to fill a hole in our lives. “The ideal review is that you test everything and then there’s one product that works well for most people,” a former Wirecutter editor, who asked to speak anonymously because they still work in media, told me. “But who is ‘most people’?”

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

The incalculable human cost of institutionalization. An homage to rappers gone far too soon. A profile on the trans son of an anti-trans zealot. A summer camp that helps children to process grief, and bearing witness to the survivors of the 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut.

1. The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

Fair warning, dear reader: This will be among the best stories you read this year. Prepare yourself to be wrecked. In this masterpiece of longform journalism, Jennifer Senior reports on her aunt Adele, a woman later diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12, a genetic condition that manifests in intellectual disability and physical delays. Adele was institutionalized at 21 months old on the advice of doctors who insisted that a care placement was the best thing for her, leaving her older sister Rona bereft “as though she’d lost an arm or a leg.” At its core this story is about trauma and loss, suffered chiefly by Adele who was deprived of her family and early chances to expand her intellectual capacity, warehoused in the notorious Willowbrook State School. The shockwaves of loss extend outward to Adele’s mother, father, and sister, deprived of Adele’s presence in their lives, and to society at large, deprived of Adele and the person she could have become had she received more enlightened, loving care much earlier in life. Glimpses into Adele’s psyche, including her need for order, her penchant for needlepoint, and delight in matching her clothing, hint at the contours of Adele’s personality. Senior, in trying to name her aunt’s condition to attempt to understand the scope of loss, confronts the many ethical concerns of writing about someone who is not able to give consent. Tracing her aunt’s living conditions and likely treatment at Willowbrook makes for extremely difficult, but absolutely necessary reading, to ask and attempt to answer a vital question: How do you comprehend the cost when, despite the best of intentions, we fail to provide essential care to the most vulnerable among us? —KS

2. Remembering the Rappers We Lost

Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | August 8, 2023 | 4,548 words

Things don’t always match up as neatly as this: Exactly 50 years ago tonight, a young woman named Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party in their Bronx apartment building’s rec room. The DJ was her older brother, known as Kool Herc; the ensuing soirée would come to be known as the night hip-hop was born. If you’ve been on the internet anytime this week, of course, you probably already know the broad outlines of this story; celebrating the culture’s golden anniversary has become the most ubiquitous editorial peg in recent memory. Every outlet imaginable has done every story imaginable—and NYT Mag’s special issue has some of my favorites, from Tom Breihan’s Too Short profile to Niela Orr’s exploration of the norm-breaking current generation of female artists. But Danyel Smith’s elegy delivers something altogether different. Death has long lurked within hip-hop, as it does within most creative pursuits; however, given this country’s systemic ills that face the culture’s overwhelmingly Black artists, the actuarial tables here tip ominously askew. Lives cut agonizingly short by violence, by health, by drugs, by flukey tragedy. Smith contends with all of these in turn, saying the names of the people who matter to many of us, but are anonymous to many others. This is a tally I’ve been keeping and a story I’ve been telling — conversationally, journalistically, eulogistically, bitterly, in novel form — since the late 1980s, she writes. Her three-plus decades as a journalist and a fan have given her a cruel proximity to these tragedies, and you feel the accrual of that pain in her writing. Yet, as Smith so often does, she manages to end the piece by embracing life; the final act is so buoyant, so transcendent, so defiant, that you’ll likely run it back just to re-experience the frisson it causes. In another piece of synchronicity, this essay was published on the death day of one of my favorite artists, Sean Price, and I’d woken up that morning with hip-hop’s mortality on my mind. Even if he and the rest of these dearly departed never get the credit they so richly deserve, pieces like Smith’s give me hope that they’ll never be forgotten. —PR

3. He’s the Son of an Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn to Speak.

Christopher Mathias | Huffington Post | June 30, 2023 | 7,864 words

This is how you write a story about a moral panic: You call it dehumanizing and terrifying, you don’t entertain even an ounce of both sides-ism, and you center the targets of the panic without stripping them of agency. Kudos to Christopher Mathias, one of the best reporters covering right-wing extremism in America, for his profile of Renton Sinclair, the trans son of a zealous anti-trans advocate. Renton’s mother, a former Miss America contestant, has used him to advance her odious agenda. Here Mathias lets Renton tell his story, on his terms. It contains chapters about his mother putting him in conversion therapy, overlooking his suicide attempt, cursing the testosterone that sustains him, and humiliating him before national audiences. But Renton’s story is also about resilience, respect, and joy. He has a message for trans people afraid to come out because they fear a loved one might abandon them. “That is 100% not on you,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you’re fucking bad. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean there’s something broken with you. That is someone else being fucked up.” Amen. —SD

4. Notes from Grief Camp

Mitchell Consky | The Walrus | August 9, 2023 | 3,500 words

At Camp Erin, a group of boys from the same cabin name three caterpillars Gerry, Larry, and Harry. It’s one of several small details sprinkled throughout this beautiful essay that is incredibly affecting. These boys are having fun—rolling down hills, dancing on stages, naming caterpillars—despite having recently lost their dads. Camp Erin recognizes that children process grief differently from adults, that they can transition from devastation to joy in a moment, and that joy is still worth celebrating. I loved that these kids had the respite of naming caterpillars, that grief didn’t weigh them down every second, and that “grief camp” encouraged this. The boys form a close bond with Mitchell Consky, their counselor, and his first-hand account of how he steers them into realizing they all share the loss of their fathers (Consky included) is gentle and touching. I expected an essay on child grief to be gut-wrenching, and while I did wipe away the odd tear, I came away feeling that Camp Erin was a special place. The children realize they are not alone and can talk about their grief. They also just have a summer camp. —CW

5. Beirut, at Sunset

Tamara Saade | The Delacorte Review & Literary Hub | August 3, 2023 | 3,971 words

When a disaster strikes affecting thousands, the only way you can possibly begin to understand the toll is to learn the stories of survivors. On August 4th, 2020, 218 were killed and 7,000 injured in an ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut. Through personal accounts, and as a way to confront her own trauma over the event, Tamara Saade bears witness to those that were there. “I had thought that telling the stories of other people would make writing about August fourth easier for me,” she writes. “But I came to see that it was as hard, if not harder, to do justice to these people and their stories of that day.” In this beautiful braided essay, Saade processes her own thoughts, reactions, and feelings, alongside those of the citizens she profiles in the aftermath of the explosions. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, Saade’s measured prose makes cogent the post-blast chaos and confusion, creating order out of disorder, in a bold attempt to find peace where once was pandemonium. —KS

Audience Award

Here’s the piece our audience loved most, this week.