The rollercoaster of losing your health. Analyzing the film The Zone of Interest. An unusual con artist. Calculating love versus genetics. Recalling a dark childhood. All that—and more—in our first edition of 2024.

1. My Unraveling

Tom Scocca | New York Magazine | January 2, 2024 | 6,677 words

Sometimes it feels like medical mystery stories are everywhere. Long COVID. Rare disorders. The New York Times’ ever-popular “Diagnosis” column. It’s a genre to itself, and by now we know that genre’s beats: onset, frustration, revelation, closure. Tom Scocca’s own experience, though, enjoys no such arc. From the moment he notices symptoms—innocuous at first, but not for long—uncertainty is his only constant. “I’ve told the story over and over, to various doctors, till it almost sounds like a coherent narrative,” he writes. It’s not a coherent narrative, of course. That’s not how these things work, no matter what similar stories may suggest. But Scocca meets the incoherence head-on with spare, even wry, prose: “I started buying five-pound bags of rice from H Mart instead of ten-pound ones. Then I just started getting rice delivered.” His malady takes root during a professional down period, and financial dread lurks in the background here, making each new physical issue that much more harrowing. He finishes a recruiting call before going to the ER; he has a phone interview hours after he wakes up from a muscle biopsy. All the while, his body betrays him in novel and confounding ways. That’s not to say he doesn’t find some measure of relief. He does. What he doesn’t find is answers, which is exactly what makes this piece so destabilizing. “This is what disability advocates have said all along,” he writes, “not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” —PR

2. How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?

Giles Harvey | The New York Times Magazine | December 19, 2023 | 4,710 words

I have seen The Zone of Interest, the film that this article is about, twice now. It is a hypnotizing, unnerving masterpiece. For the unacquainted, a quick description: the movie is about Rudolf Höss, the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, who lived in a home that shared a garden wall with the camp. Director Jonathan Glazer never shows audiences what goes on inside the camp—though you hear it; god, do you hear it—choosing instead to focus his lens on the quotidian existence of Höss, his wife, and their five children. The effect of this bifurcation of sight and sound is extraordinary, as writer Giles Harvey explains in this essay. “The average viewer is unlikely to see himself in the figure of a death-camp C.E.O., but a family that sleepwalks through their own lives, heedless of the suffering that surrounds them, may feel closer to home,” Harvey writes. “To a greater or lesser extent, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, including—perhaps especially—when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on designated enemies.” It is fitting that such an astonishing movie is the subject of one of the best pieces of film criticism I’ve read in ages. Harvey pulls from philosophy, history, and conversations with Glazer and his team to situate The Zone of Interest both in the canon of Holocaust films and in our present moment. See: Trumpism. See also: Gaza. “When I first started on this, I genuinely couldn’t get my head around how a society could have gone along with these hideous ideas,” Glazer tells Harvey at one point. “During the time of making the film, it’s become blindingly obvious.”—SD

3. Meet the Con Artist Who Deceived the Front Range Tech Community

Chris Walker | 5280 | December 29, 2023 | 6,863 words

As I browsed links I’d missed over the holidays, André Carrilho’s colorful illustration for this 5280 story caught my eye. I’m glad I clicked. In my post-holiday COVID haze, not many stories have held my attention, but this piece by Chris Walker, about a con artist named Aaron Clark, was easy to read and enjoy. Clark was a rising star in Colorado’s tech scene in 2020: a promising Black businessman who could spark change at a time when companies pledged to invest more in DEI efforts. But the only thing Clark brought to the table, in any venture, was financial chaos. As Walker follows the trail of breadcrumbs into this mysterious man’s past, he finds a history of business scams in California and abroad in Nairobi’s emerging tech community and a man with a habit of disappearing, changing identities, and starting fresh. But why would someone with the ability to really make an impact resort to this? “In key ways, he never fit the mold of a classic con man,” writes Walker. Ultimately, Clark’s deceit seeded distrust in Colorado’s startup world, now making it harder for Black entrepreneurs and DEI consultants to get buy-in and attract investors. A curious tale of grift. —CLR

4. Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease

Krithika Varagur | Harper’s Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 8,133 words

I had missed this piece when it was originally published by Harper’s in August, but, luckily, it caught my attention after The Guardian published an edited version in December. Nkechi and Subomi first met at work. They first spoke while doing community service together. They first went for a drink at a dive bar, and Nkechi first revealed her genotype after a few days. From the beginning, they knew they had “no business” dating. Subomi had two abnormal S genes for hemoglobin, meaning he had sickle cell disease. Nkechi was a carrier—with one abnormal S gene and one normal A gene. There was a 50 percent chance their children would have the disease. Opening with their love story, Krithika Varagur instantly pulls you into a world where sharing genotype screening is typical, and a social norm is consolidating against two people with sickle cell genes from dating. Perhaps understandable in a society where nearly six million people carry the disease (Nigeria is the sickle cell capital of the world). But what about when love happens, “like a coconut dropping on your head while you’re walking down the street?” Varagur meticulously delves into the people behind the stats, talking to many disease carriers: single, married, separated, parents, and non-parents. But Nkechi and Subomi’s story is the constant thread, and the investment in their tale sheds the most light on how devastating genotype calculations can be. —CW

5. On Beauty and Violence

N.C. Happe | Guernica | December 11, 2023 | 5,021 words

It can be appealing to try to blow the dust off the old you and reinvent yourself in a place where you’re a stranger. As N.C. Happe recounts her move to Canada in this beautiful but sometimes difficult read for Guernica, she recalls her Minnesota childhood and her father’s dark moods and explosive temper alongside the casual—and sometimes invited—violence of the playground. Cinematic details make this essay an immersive read. You can hear a dying deer bleat and imagine its accidental and untimely death. You can feel the author’s cracked dry lips; you can taste the copper when they bleed. “The realization dawned: violence runs in the blood of everything, everywhere,” she writes. “For me, it took leaving the country to learn this. For the doe from my childhood home, it had been as simple and as quietly done as jumping a fence.” What Happe shows us through this thoughtful piece is that while sometimes you can jump the fence and leave home, you might be surprised by what you’re unable to leave behind. —KS

Audience Award

What was our first editor’s pick winner of the year?

I stopped leaving the apartment. The project of washing left me needing to lie down. One morning, or possibly afternoon, it took me four or five tries to shrug my way into my bathrobe, nearly overcome by the weight and friction. I gave up on shaving, and the rattiest stubble of my life took over my chin. The kids were put in charge of the cat box because I couldn’t reach that corner of the bathroom anymore, but one night I got down on the floor to help and when we were done I couldn’t stand up. I didn’t even know how to start to try. Eventually, my wife grabbed me under the armpits from behind and hauled me most of the way upright while I gabbled warnings about my legs giving way.

Two different realities or images stood superimposed in my mind. There was the body I’d occupied two months ago — my body, as I understood it — walking over to Broadway for pizza, taking the younger boy to the basketball courts, ducking into Central Park to climb the Great Hill. And then there was Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, a gaunt figure dragging her useless legs along the ground. If this was histrionic or self-pitying, it seemed less so on the days when I couldn’t raise my hips up off the floor. The only thing that still felt more or less normal was sitting at a desk, doing the work I was trying to get someone to pay me to do.

Profiles dig deep, assembling original details to convey the essence of a person or place—and sometimes both—as you’ll see. These are the stories that gave us keen insight into the lives of others, drawn from hundreds of editors’ picks selected in 2023.

Amor Eterno

Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 8, 2023 | 7,531 words

Before May 24, 2022, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, a part-time local reporter and mother of six children living in Uvalde, Texas, was shy and quiet. After that horrific day at Robb Elementary School, when two teachers and 19 children were murdered—including her daughter, Lexi—Mata-Rubio was forever changed. She was overwhelmed with grief, but also felt compelled to speak, to do anything she could to fight for justice for Lexi. Shortly after the shooting, she testified in a hearing about gun violence. She then started to speak at rallies, at home and in Washington DC. She became a fierce advocate for gun control, even meeting with Ted Cruz to push him to support an assault weapons ban. (Not a spoiler: he didn’t.) In those months that followed, she realized that she had a voice. (Recently, in fact, she ran for mayor of Uvalde, though she lost the bid last month in a special election.) I’ve sat down several times to write why I picked this story by Skip Hollandsworth, but have scrapped numerous attempts. They all read hollow and repetitive, because I’ve written versions of them before. My Best of 2022 pick in this category was also a Uvalde profile, about student Caitlyne Gonzales, so it seems that I can’t help but return to this town, to this tragedy. Perhaps immersing ourselves in the narrative of tragedy is a form of emotional retreat, a way of numbing the constant onslaught of violence in the world. Hollandsworth’s piece reminds us that these stories do not end when the spotlight of our attention moves on, but continue to transform communities, families, and individuals. This is an emotional, difficult, but necessary portrait of a grieving mother finding meaningful ways to honor her daughter’s life, and perhaps help birth a better world for all of us. —CLR

Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story

Kerry Howley | New York Magazine | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words

For the second year in a row, my favorite profile was written by the inimitable Kerry Howley, one of the great chroniclers of America’s right-wing resurgence. Last year, I adored—and seethed over—her profile of anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser; this year, Howley turned her attention to Clarence and Ginni Thomas. The former, of course, is the conservative Supreme Court justice confirmed to the bench despite being credibly accused of sexual harassment—laying the groundwork for the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco a quarter-century later—who more recently was exposed for accepting expensive gifts from various billionaires. Ginni, Thomas’s wife, started a political consulting firm with money provided by one of those billionaires, and used her influential perch inside the Beltway to support the January 6 insurrection. In this profile, Howley illuminates how the Thomases’ almost alchemical bond as a couple makes them such a potent, ruinous force in the American project. The insight here is as sharp as the prose. “There was something in Ginni and Clarence that reinforced and refined a shared extremism, something beyond their shared intolerance for ambiguity,” Howley writes. “There was an interlocking set of beliefs, a fatalism born of the lived experience of racism and the entire heavily manned edifice of white ignorance.” When I got to the end of this piece, I whispered under my breath, to no one in particular, damn. —SD

Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana

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

The stories I love best are slow and savor-y, served with a love that can transcend pain. Wyatt Williams’s ode to his mother, the state of of Louisiana, and the songwriter Lucinda Williams is a piece I reread often. I return to remember how great writing disappears in serving a story, or when I’m struggling with how to get my point across just so. I’m rewarded with new resonance every time. Williams’s mother and Lucinda were born in 1953 in Louisiana, a place known most often for the destruction wrought by hurricanes; both families endured the stormy weather of violence, alcoholism, and generational trauma. When Williams writes, “She had been through crisis before. She had her ways of getting through it,” he’s talking abut his mother but alluding to Lucinda and the state of Louisiana, all three of which, on deeper inspection, reveal a special kind of resilience. Writers grapple with how to convey inchoate and entangled ideas and feelings but Williams creates beauty out of the chaos by sheer repetition, just like listening to a song on repeat and discovering something new with each spin. “It seems almost impossible that someone could spend 14 years writing 34 lines of poetry,” he writes. “But one of the things to understand about the work is that it isn’t as much about putting down words as it is about learning to see, reteaching yourself to look at the world, your own life, and find the shapes and patterns.” This story is about working hard to make something out of nothing, about naming things you don’t yet understand, about doing the work and paying deep attention in an attempt to find meaning and perhaps even earn a kind of peace. These are universal truths so bold, you know you can’t let go. —KS

Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul

Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words

When you ask people to name the profiles that have stuck with them, they nearly always point to pieces that hinge on proximity. That’s for good reason. Spending hours or days in deep conversation with a subject (or simply fishing) generally works to break down the walls of image maintenance, creating enough unvarnished moments for a good writer to plumb. But there are many other ways to write a meaningful profile, as Nate Rogers’ piece about Paul Dochney proves. Dochney is known by a large swath of the internet simply as Dril, a Twitter persona who for 15 years has polished satirical shitposting to a high sheen and in the process helped architect online culture’s dominant comic voice. It was a nearly uninterrupted piece of performance art, which makes the profile’s quotidian backdrop—an anonymous old-school L.A. greasy spoon—all the more delightful. Like any profile, Rogers gives you the broad beats of Dochney’s upbringing and CV, dutifully threading in secondary interviews for texture and context, but the profile’s real value lies in how he contends with the idea of art in the age of social media. Dochney/Dril isn’t a provocateur; he’s a guy who likes making stuff. It’s just that in a twist of fate, Twitter became the place where that stuff first connected with people. And with that platform teetering ever closer to obsolescence, Dochney’s next steps become even less certain. Amid a sea of stories that seek to examine the role of the “creator,” Rogers’ profile instead sets out to examine the creative urge—and is stronger for it. —PR

Casual Luke Rides the Big Wave

Gabriella Paiella | GQ Sports | June 13, 2023 | 5,175 words

Everyone loves a good underdog story, and this one is particularly delightful. The Eddie Aikay Big Wave Invitational is a surf contest that relies on the whims of nature—the waves in Waimea Bay must reach a butt-clenching height of a minimum of 40 feet for it to go ahead. When conditions are right, competitors race across the world to get there. For North Shore local Luke Shepardson, the commute was less of an ordeal (although he still got caught in traffic, leaving his wife in the car and running down the road). It also happened to be his commute to work. That’s right: Luke worked as a lifeguard at the event, taking his turn to ride the waves between patching up other competitors. He won the competition after riding a wave the size of a four-story building, beating the world’s greatest surfers without even being a professional on the circuit. After the win, Luke finished his shift and headed home to watch The Lion King with his kids. As Gabriella Paiella explains in her enchanting profile, this was all very Luke, who “is known as ‘Casual Luke.’ In Hawaii. Which is like being called ‘Neurotic Matt’ on the island of Manhattan.” Luke’s down-to-earth nature pervades this piece, with Paiella clearly coming to respect an attitude so different from other sports stars. Luke got some money from the Eddie, but not enough for his life to be easy. Living with his wife and two kids in a one-bedroom apartment—in an ever more expensive area—he dreams of “descending back into obscurity” and buying his own home in this little slice of paradise. Nothing more. You can see why, with Paiella painting a lovely picture of family life in this beautiful surf town. Sure, it’s expensive, but the height of elegance is a flip-flop, and everyone knows everyone. (“As Luke’s mom put it after the Eddie: I changed first- and second-place’s diapers.”) This profile oozes sun, sand, salt, and joy. Everyone loves an underdog story, and everyone loves Casual Luke—after all, he has all the big stuff figured out.  —CW

Wojnarowski and Charania have become so dominant in the race for scoops that most other reporters who cover the league told me they have stopped trying. “I talk to the same agents, the same GMs, but I never even try to break news,” another ESPN reporter told me. “I know it’s already promised to one of them — like they’re a wire service.” In an attempt to keep up, Ken Berger, who was a national NBA reporter at CBS Sports, started using Google Voice to send texts because it allowed him to send separate identical messages to five people at once. “I could text three agents and two front-office people in five seconds, and I’m still getting beat,” Berger said. He eventually left NBA media for good to run a fitness studio in Queens. To help his old colleagues, he started a personal-training program tailored to helping NBA journalists survive the unhealthy lifestyle the job entailed.

On an October morning, Monson went to her first appointment with Hadden, and they proceeded from a get-to-know-you chat in his office to an exam room. Monson knew immediately that the breast check, prolonged and whole-handed, was not normal; she asked Hadden if he’d felt something concerning. She remembers that during both the breast and pelvic exams, the medical assistant turned her back to face the counter as if she had something to do there. But the counter was empty. As soon as Hadden left the room, Monson felt the assistant’s eyes boring into her. “I felt like she was telling me, ‘Don’t come back,’” Monson says. She did not fully process that she had been sexually assaulted until hours later, sitting alone on her sofa. “It was like a revelation,” she says. “I just suddenly knew. I was just sobbing. I understood what had happened.”

Isaacson is a particular type of biographer. His book is driven by listen-to-everyone-he-can access. It is not the Robert Caro approach with granular, yearslong reportage on the nature and implications of Musk’s power. Washington Post’s Will Oremus wrote in his September 10 review that “the larger concern is whether Isaacson’s heavy reliance on Musk as a primary source throughout his reporting kept him too close to his subject. Swaths of the book are told largely through Musk’s eyes and those of his confidants.” The book is scrupulously unsnarky — don’t expect the tone of the book Joe Hagan wrote on Jann Wenner. “It is pure narrative storytelling; there’s not preaching in there,” says Isaacson. “People will come away from this book, if they admire Musk, with more evidence that they would like. If they hate Musk, they’ll come away with more evidence to reinforce their dislike of him. Hopefully, there will be a large group of readers who’ll say, ‘Wow, I get it, it’s more complex, and there’s not simply one way to look at it.’”

Let me be as clear as I possibly can: Erykah Badu is not like your aunt, not even your favorite one. I’ve met presidents, mayors, billionaires, Dallas Cowboy Hall of Famers, Holy Land juice healers, TED Talkers — a lot of people, all over the world, and Badu is one of the few who holds up after close inspection. I don’t mean she is perfect. I don’t mean she is better than you or anyone else. I mean she is who she says she is; she is trying to be better than she’s been. Most of all, she seems to truly like, or at least accept, herself. When I learned and saw that she walks barefoot nearly everywhere, and wondered how in the world she keeps her feet clean, she answers, “I don’t. They be black as hell!”

But despite Rotten Tomatoes’ reputed importance, it’s worth a reminder: Its math stinks. Scores are calculated by classifying each review as either positive or negative and then dividing the number of positives by the total. That’s the whole formula. Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers.

If a review straddles positive and negative, too bad. “I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off,” says Schrader, a former critic. “To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.”

On Memorial Day, Broccoli drove to his property in Fishkill, where a crowd was gathering to protest his planned development. These were the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the town’s Revolutionary War history and, in Broccoli’s view, to making his life hell. For more than a decade, the Friends have argued—based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like—that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States. Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes—with some evidence, but not as much as he would like—of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is.

“Is Domenic Broccoli here?” Keith Reilly, a co-president of the Friends, asked the protesters through a microphone. “Mr. Broccoli, we dare you to be a profile in courage.” The crowd included a half-dozen Revolutionary War reenactors with muskets and several people Broccoli has sued, including Bill Sandy, the archaeologist who found the first dead body. The protesters marched up and down the edge of the property—careful not to trespass lest Broccoli call the police—while honks came in from passing cars.

Broccoli had told me that he had planned to crash the protest with “guns a-blazing” but ultimately thought better of it. “If I go there and then my Bronx comes out, it’s not gonna go well,” he said. His Bronx had come out plenty in his campaign to build the IHOP as part of a Colonial-themed strip mall he was calling Continental Commons. The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot are a group of history buffs and retiree volunteers, and yet Broccoli claimed he had found it necessary to spend more than a million dollars battling them with archaeologists, lawyers, and the private investigators he hired as “spies” to infiltrate the Friends. As it happened, one of his spies was at the Memorial Day protest holding up a STOP CONTINENTAL COMMONS sign while surreptitiously recording the group in case anything might help the RICO case Broccoli was building.

Broccoli insists that he’s not anti-history. He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance; his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried.

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Sifting through the aftermath of a disastrous blaze. The romance that launched a thousand Supreme Court opinions. A poetic ode to a simple life, well lived. Tracing the arc of food writing. And examining the hidden costs of a particularly sensitive surgical procedure. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.

1. The Night 17 Million Precious Military Records Went Up in Smoke

Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words

Megan Greenwell’s piece does what the best longform features do: It mesmerizes you with an opening so powerful and a story so compelling that you deliberately read it slowly, just to make it last. This piece—about a devastating fire at a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration that happened to contain records belonging to Greenwell’s grandfather—is nearly 8,000 words long, but the prose is so sharp and cinematic that you’ll wish it was longer. “The National Personnel Records Center fire burned out of control for two days before firefighters were able to begin putting it out,” she writes. “Photos show the roof ablaze, a nearly 5-acre field of flame. The steel beams that had once held up the glass walls jut at unnatural angles, like so many broken legs.” Even were it not set against a backdrop of the U.S. government, this would be a fascinating mystery: What or who started the fire and how do workers attempt to uncover precious facts from seriously damaged files? Did Greenwell’s grandfather’s records survive the blaze? Be sure to take it slow and let this story smolder. I’m certainly glad I did. —KS

2. Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story

Kerry Howley | New York | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words

My husband sent me this story while I was reporting in Idaho last week, with a message that said, “Isn’t this by that writer you like?” The answer, reader, is yes. Kerry Howley’s 2022 story about anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser was rightly named a finalist for a National Magazine Award—one of several nominations Howley’s work has received in the last several years—and I suspect this piece about Clarence and Ginni Thomas will be in the running for many, many honors. Whereas with Dannenfelser, Howley was shedding light on a powerful person who isn’t a household name, here she tackles two of the better-known political (yes, SCOTUS justices are political) figures in America. She does it without access to them, instead surveying pre-existing material on the Thomases with remarkable facility, mustering everything she needs, and nothing she doesn’t, to tell the story of their marriage. Take the seemingly mundane detail of Ginni telling a bunch of right-wing youth that her favorite charm on a bracelet Clarence gave her is a pixie because, to her husband, she is “kind of a pixie…kind of a troublemaker,” which Howley convincingly positions as a metaphor for the havoc Ginni has wreaked on American democracy. Consider this brilliantly constructed sentence: “They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift.” And that’s just in the first section! This piece is one for the ages in both substance and style. I mean, damn. —SD

3. Obituary for a Quiet Life

Jeremy B. Jones | The Bitter Southerner | June 6, 2023 | 1,580 words

I have never before picked an obituary for our Top 5, but Jeremy B. Jones’ ode to his grandfather deserves recognition. At just over 1500 words, it’s not a particularly long piece, but it’s a particularly poetic one, and is enough to get to know—and respect—Jones’ Papaw. Ray Harrell lived a simple life on a little bit of land in Fruitland, North Carolina. To many, it would not be enough; for Harrell, it was plenty. After all, as Jones writes, he had “a reliable tractor and a fiery woman.” It was a good life because he appreciated what he had, was contented with his lot. Jones notes that these quiet lives often slip past unnoticed, “yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.” A small essay about a simple life that I found hugely moving. —CW

4. Mother Sauce

Marian Bull | n+1 | June 15, 2023 | 3,978 words

In reviewing Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires, Marian Bull looks at how infusing recipes with introspection and experience begat the cooking memoir. What I loved about about this piece—besides spurring me to pick up Small Fires, which also appeared in our recent feature “Meals for One”—is that while Bull surveys chef memoirs, she hails Johnson’s book as one for the home cook, the self-trained enthusiast. “Johnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a ‘memoir’ with recipes,” she writes. Johnson looks at cooking as translation and recipes as a form of performance, which is comforting for someone like me who views a recipe as a guide: “The unpredictable ‘I that cooks,’ who resists the recipe again and again, generates new translations.” How inspiring and affirming to be invited to take a seat at this generous table where nothing is lost and everything is gained in translation. —KS

5. Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement

Ava Kofman | ProPublica and The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words

It’s easy to think that “men trying to upgrade their dongs” is a journalism cheat code of sorts. Having written about them myself many years ago, I can assure you that it’s not. Pitfalls abound. Tone is everything. Jokes are easy; reserve is hard. (So is avoiding double entendres.) Yet, Ava Kofman manages to thread every needle in her stunning examination of the state of penile-enlargement procedures, which focuses primarily on issues surrounding the popular Penuma implant. She writes compassionately about the patients, not dismissing the complex psychological situations that led them to pursue surgery. She writes unblinkingly about the doctor who popularized the procedure, and whose practice seems at times to operate with all the care of a 30-minute oil change joint—and about the surgeon who “was doing such brisk business repairing Penuma complications that he’d relocated his practice from Philadelphia to an office down the street.” And speaking of unblinking, I dare you not to wince as she plays fly on the wall during an implantation; you may never hear the phrase “inside out” the same way again. This story may have drawn you in with its imagined salaciousness, but it delivers something far better: truth. —PR

Audience Award

What piece did our readers love most this week? One that makes clear that the kids are not all right.