Google’s outsized influence on how we find things has been 25 years in the making, and the people running businesses online have tried countless methods of getting Google to surface their content. Some business owners use generative AI to make Google-optimized blog posts so they can turn around and sell tchotchkes; brick-and-mortar businesses are picking funny names like “Thai Food Near Me” to try to game Google’s local search algorithm. An entire SEO industry has sprung up, dedicated to trying to understand (or outsmart) Google Search.

The small, behind-the-scenes changes site operators deployed over the years have made browsing the web — especially on mobile — more frictionless and enjoyable. But Google’s preferences and systems don’t just guide how sites run: Search has also influenced how information looks and how audiences experience the internet. The project of optimizing your digital existence for Google doesn’t stop at page design. The content has to conform, too.

But no matter what happens with Search, there’s already a splintering: a web full of cheap, low-effort content and a whole world of human-first art, entertainment, and information that lives behind paywalls, in private chat rooms, and on websites that are working toward a more sustainable model. As with young people using TikTok for search, or the practice of adding “reddit” to search queries, users are signaling they want a different way to find things and feel no particular loyalty to Google.

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

What it’s like to be a child of war, a school-shooting support group for principals, a 1981 feature on rodeo queens, on becoming a woman in NYC in 1978, and the San Francisco donut shop that hasn’t closed in over 50 years.

1. ‘I Remember The Silence Between The Falling Shells’: The Terror of Living Under Siege as a Child

Zarlasht Halaimzai | The Guardian | October 31, 2023 | 3,572 words

In the last few weeks, the Israel-Gaza war has amassed horrific statistics: the number of hostages, the number of refugees, the number of injuries, the number of deaths—and the number who were children. Yes, the number who were children. As Zarlasht Halaimzai states in this extraordinary, harrowing piece for The Guardian, “Children bear the brunt of war.” Writing of her personal experiences—of another war, at another time, with the same consequences—Halaimzai pulls us down from lofty statistics into the raw reality of being bombed, day after day. She was 10 years old when US-funded mujahideen bombarded her home city of Kabul. Ten years old when “bedtime, schooltime, playtime, and dinnertime all vanished.” Small things make her retelling incredibly powerful: How, after the rockets stopped, her granny would “produce a jar of honey and feed us children a spoonful, trying to wash the taste of terror out of our mouths.” How Halaimzai “couldn’t look at my little sister and my little brother because somehow, I felt ashamed that this was their childhood.” And how “The sound of a rocket hitting a solid object enters your body and lives there forever.” Sentences to pierce your psyche. This essay reminds us of the many conflicts that have come before; Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine—to name a few. It reminds us of the many children who have suffered. Of the many killed. The many to learn the same life lesson as Halaimzai: “that there are no monsters in the dark. Only adults who are terrified enough to kill.” If you want to restore your faith in humanity, this is not the piece for you. If you want to understand the humanity beneath the bombs, it is. —CW

2. The Club No School Principal Wants to Join

Gloria Liu | Men’s Health | November 1, 2023 | 5,411 words

After reading Gloria Liu’s piece on the support group for principals whose schools have experienced gun violence, I realize that most news stories about school shootings cover the victims, the survivors, and the shooters. Rarely do I read pieces focused on the school leaders who are left to pick up the pieces; we expect such individuals to be strong and resilient enough to carry their communities through such traumatic events (or, in some cases, expect them to take the blame). Liu recounts the formation of Principal Recovery Network (PRN) in 2019, which has since grown to 21 members, including former and current principals of Columbine, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (Parkland), and Sandy Hook. After a school tragedy, PRN reaches out to the principal, offering advice and simply letting them know they’re not alone. You don’t even know what you need right now, one of them will say, but here’s my number—call anytime. The fact that this club needs to exist is heartbreaking. But it does. Through this outlet, these individuals have given each other emotional support and a much-needed space for self-care and healing. —CLR

3. Cowgirls All the Way

E. Jean Carroll | Outside Magazine | April/May 1981 | 2,910 words

One of the week’s nicest surprises was Outside digging into its formidable archives to republish this 42-year-old E. Jean Carroll feature about that year’s Miss Rodeo America competition in Oklahoma City. New Journalism had been around for nearly two decades by the time the piece first came out, but Carroll’s vignette-first approach fits snugly into the form. (In a companion Outside interview about her career, Carroll cops freely to this: “There’s a lot of Joan Didion in that piece.”) The pleasure here is more cumulative than linear: you’re there to soak up Carroll’s scenework and side-eye as much as you are to learn anything about the actual competition, and the piece oozes with both. These rodeo queens are caught between impossible expectations—subjected to “cosmetic sessions” and paraded in front of the press in skimpy nightgowns, while also expected to deliver congenial speeches and display horsemanship. That Carroll captures all of this without a giant flashing neon sign is marvel enough; that she does so in vivid detail in her first published story makes clear that her trajectory was all but inevitable. It may clock in at fewer than 3,000 words, but like the very best magazine writing, it will stay with you well beyond the time it takes you to read it. —PR

4. 1978

Amy Margolis | The Iowa Review | Spring 2023 | 3,478 words

I love it when a personal essay can take me to a time and place I’ve never visited. Amy Margolis does just that in “1978,” for The Iowa Review. Enter, stage left, a young woman leaving Kansas City to become a dancer and make a home in New York City. Margolis, naive but ambitious, clad in leotards and Lee jeans, is going to live with a sister she barely knows who aspires to be an actress. In this essay though, the women are not the stars of the show. It’s the gay men in Amy’s life—Paul and Phillip—who steal it, as they befriend her and, in her own words, teach her “how to be a woman.” “Paul was long and lean and attenuated, like a dying note,” she writes. “It was the year my whole life started.” Paul and Phillip feed her, both literally and figuratively, give fashion advice, and teach her about sex. (Dear reader, fair warning: we are not in Kansas anymore.) Above all, the men model what it means to love oneself. “In New York, I am always afraid, but never with Paul and Philip. Paul and Philip are men, especially Philip. They’re towering figures both, and unabashed, and at home in their skin,” Margolis writes. With friends like these, indeed, there’s no place like home. —KS

5. San Francisco’s 24-Hour Diner Stops the Cosmic Clock

Chris Colin | Alta Online | September 25, 2023 | 3,736 words

I did not expect a feature on an iconic restaurant to start out in a “small potato-farming village in the Arcadia region of Greece’s Peloponnese.” But then again, this—like many stories of the American dream—starts out somewhere else. For Alta Online, Chris Colin introduces us to proprietors George and Nina Giavris, but this profile focuses on the Silver Crest Donut Shop, a 24-hour diner they bought in 1970 that has been open every moment since, where the “new gal” has 30+ years on the job as a waitress. Time has stood still at the Silver Crest, and Colin lovingly documents the artifacts of the past that make up the diner’s interior. What’s a little more difficult to capture—and what Colin does best here—is highlight the intangible: the je ne sais quoi of the atmosphere that, along with George, Nina, and the Silver Crest, is the fourth character in this piece. “You could do worse than to age as the Silver Crest ages—no struggle, full acceptance,” writes Colin. “Once again, I find the Silver Crest a reprieve from something. Outside those doors, San Francisco teeters, democracy teeters, the ice caps teeter, sense itself teeters. . . . But here there’s no room for nonsense. You order your food, you eat your food.” With this piece, you might come for the food, but you’ll stay for the feeling. —KS

Audience Award

Here’s the piece our readers loved most this past week:

At first, law enforcement seemed concerned about S.’s behavior. Police issued alerts about S. and offered to relocate professors to an area of the school that had more security and locked doors. At one point, officers offered to install a panic button inside of Umamaheswar’s office. This did little to soothe Sinha’s worries about his wife and their children’s safety. As police seemed to take the situation more seriously, it made him even more cautious. He installed a security camera at home.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

A close look into a Texas murder. The annotators who train language models. A profile of the man who rode this year’s biggest wave. A personal essay that deep dives into the wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, and an ode to U.S. Army’s new tactical bra.

1. Everyone in Stephenville Thought They Knew Who Killed Susan Woods

Bryan Burrough | Texas Monthly | June 20, 2023 | 15,736 words

Looking back over the past couple of years, I realize I don’t often recommend true-crime investigations. Make no mistake: I like a killer-on-the-loose podcast or docuseries as much as the next media omnivore, but the explosion of the genre has sent a lot of true-crime writing into that uncanny valley of journalism that I internally call Please Option This Story and Make Me Rich, Hollywood. All that said, Bryan Burrough’s lengthy cover story for Texas Monthly falls into no such traps. It’s a curveball that you know is a curveball, yet still dips and weaves and otherwise stymies your expectations. There’s not much I can say by way of synopsis that distills more or reveals less than the story’s headline, so I’ll leave it there; however, know that part of the piece’s excellence lies in its reserve. Another writer might have made Susan Woods’ murder more lurid. Another magazine might have tried to tell the tale in half the length, robbing the characters of their depth. And another form—like the aforementioned podcast or docuseries—might have overweighted the narrative with ominous music cues or hacky video transitions. (Don’t worry: the story also exists as a podcast.) Instead, you get what true-crime journalism can and should be: unsparing, revelatory, and human. A monster’s death doesn’t undo the damage they inflicted, but Burrough’s reporting manages to wring a measure of redemption from the unseemly proceedings. —PR

2. AI Is a Lot of Work

Josh Dzieza | The Verge / New York Magazine | June 20, 2023 | 7,123 words

I love my work: There’s a singular thrill in discovering excellent writing and/or a new writer and sharing that work with others. It’s like stumbling on a secret. (A former colleague once told me that within 10 years I’d be replaced by a bot able to evaluate great writing at a far faster pace than any human ever could. Then I was skeptical, but now I’m not so sure.) What is certain is that with the rise of AI, jobs are changing. You need actual humans to train the bots so that the bots can become more proficient at what they do. The problem with this work—mostly identifying things in photographs, a process called annotation—is that it’s dull, repetitive, and extremely low-paid. What I loved about Josh Dzieza’s piece at The Verge (in partnership with New York Magazine) is that Dzieza just doesn’t talk to annotators for the story, he becomes one to experience the job for himself. What emerges is a very satisfying read about a particularly unsatisfying aspect of AI’s ever-changing influence on humans and their work. —KS

3. Casual Luke Rides the Big Wave

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

Gabriella Paiella opens her profile with, “The most remarkable day of Luke Shepardson’s life started in traffic. So much traffic.” With that, Shepardson becomes instantly relatable. We’ve all been there. Most of us don’t beat traffic into work and then go on to win The Eddie, the most prestigious big-wave competition on the planet. Shepardson won it during his breaks, still working his job as the beach lifeguard. This down-to-earth approach suffuses Paiella’s heart-warming piece. While her tender accounts of Shepardson’s family life do not shy away from reality—the family struggles to make ends meet on the expensive North Shore—the focus is on the joy they take in each other. She delights in finding that Shepardson truly appreciates what he has, and remains content with his present successes rather than continually searching for his next big thing. Many of us could benefit from a day at the beach with Casual Luke. —CW

4. The Day the Lake Took the Edmund Fitzgerald

Martha Lundin | Orion Magazine | October 25, 2022 | 2,874 words

When I originally stumbled across Martha Lundin’s piece, I had been hoping for a mention of the late Gordon Lightfoot. The celebrated Canadian musician wrote an epic song to commemorate the wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in a storm on Lake Superior on November 9, 1975. Lightfoot gets no mention but this piece does not disappoint. Lundin turns Lake Superior into a character by deftly weaving facts and observations about the lake and the ship’s many ill-fated portents, clove-hitched together with the often foreboding female nomenclature used with ships and sailing: “There were omens from the start. At the christening, Elizabeth Fitzgerald had trouble with the champagne bottle. She swung and swung and the bottle would not break. Then the Fitz refused to launch.” What you get is one part education, one part lyrical personal essay in which all hands will find something to savor. —KS

5. Is the Army’s New Tactical Bra Ready for Deployment?

Patricia Marx | The New Yorker | June 19, 2023 | 3,735 words

Who wouldn’t be grabbed by this title (combined with its cartoon illustration of a female soldier hanging from the air by her bra straps)? I certainly was, and Patricia Marx delivers on the promise of fun with her slightly tongue-in-cheek account of all things female military uniform. I could not help but envision Edna Mode (superhero fashion designer from The Incredibles) as Marx heads into the Design Pattern Protype Shop at the Soldier’s Centre in Massachusetts. After all, the designers she meets are in “chic black civvies,” there are areas designated to the Tropics and to the Arctic, and projects “have included a uniform that can change color and one that would enable troops to leap over twenty-foot walls.” These projects make a fire-resistant bra seem a touch tame, but the designers are as earnest about this brassiere as they are reluctant to let Marx squeeze herself into a prototype. (Spoiler: She persuades them.) Marx intermixes her snoop around the center with a deep dive into the history of military uniforms—which is surprisingly fascinating, full of bizarre (and sexist) tidbits such as the fact that in 1943 “[t]he government asked Elizabeth Arden to concoct a lipstick to match the red piping on women’s Marine Corps uniforms.” Neither clothes nor the military usually captures my attention, but I am glad I got sucked into this piece: A thoroughly entertaining read. —CW

Audience Award

Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week:

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.

In many ways, a16z created the playbook for the boom times in tech. During the era of fawning tech journalism and low interest rates, valuations of private companies exploded. Founders were “geniuses” and “rockstars”; it was easy to raise and easy to spend. There were herds of “unicorns,” companies that are valued at more than $1 billion. (This is to say nothing of “decacorns.”) Startups stopped running lean and instead got fat, attempting to outspend their competition.

This strategy is now at least two vibe shifts behind.

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

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Never mind my terrible grades in all things science. Never mind that I decided this in my second year of college, after deciding that the music school that I’d wanted for years wasn’t for me. It was 2006. It was the age of Dr. Gregory House. 

I love a good medical drama. My mother, a nurse, raised me on ER and General Hospital, always pointing out all the plot lines that “would never happen in real life” but were really cool to watch on TV. My mother credits ER with pushing her toward her decades-long career in the operating room. So when I, a poor lost college sophomore who had gone to school to play French horn (French horn!) and found it wasn’t what I thought it would be, I did what I knew best to do and turned to TV. And on TV, I found House. 

House had it all: a painkiller-addicted doctor with a smart mouth and a slap-worthy face, medical mysteries solved via CSI-style case-of-the-week format, and a beleaguered crew of sidekick physicians whose instincts were never quite as good as House’s. I would spend each episode studying the setup and trying to unravel what the medical culprit could be before the ultimate reveal. Instead of realizing that what I might want to be was a writer with a good plot, I missed the mark and decided I wanted to be a doctor. 

Reader, I did not become a doctor. (That fizzled out after one year of biology classes and a stint working in a local nursing home.) But I remain a lifelong medical mystery buff. Here, then, are a few of my recent long-form favorites — enjoy the game of whatdunnit. 

Swamp Boy (Kris Newby, Now This News, October 2022)

One day, a 14-year-old boy with no previous physical or mental issues informs his parents that he is the “evil, damned son of the devil” and he needs to kill himself before he destroys them all. Thus begins the onset of a massive medical manhunt to uncover exactly what is causing the boy’s psychosis and physical symptoms, which include OCD, shortness of breath, chronic pain, frequent urination, intense headaches, the belief that he had green vines growing under his skin, the belief that he was a bird, and the belief that the family cat was ordering him to kill everyone around him — including the family fish. 

Complete with vivid graphic-novel-styled art illustrating some of the reported hallucinations, this piece has it all, including a father’s fight against the medical establishment and an ending you’ll never see coming. In other words, it’s about as close as one can get to a real-life episode of House. 

Meanwhile, back at home, now more than seven months after his son’s first psychotic breakdown, Scott could finally clear his mind, and began to focus his analytical skills on Michael’s case.

To the medical experts, his son had been a ten-inch-tall stack of paper annotated with clinical notes. Each expert had examined one piece of Michael—his brain, his stomach, his heart, his immune system, his gut, his spine, his skin, his eyes. Scott, meanwhile, was determined to analyze Michael as a whole. “I knew I had to figure out what was wrong, or I’d lose my son,” he said.

It was during one of his many conversations with doctors about Michael’s potential treatment that Scott had an epiphany: Maybe no one could help their son because they were treating the wrong illness.

What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy (Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine, March 2012)

On an ordinary day in Le Roy, New York, a high school cheerleader begins twitching. Another cheerleader develops tics a week later. And another after that; and another after that. It spreads past the cheerleaders and on to the art kids, a boy, kids in neighboring schools. Is there something in the water? Is it those mysterious bins labeled with hazardous waste from a nearby factory? Is it that strange orange ooze coming up from the ground on the football field? Or is it all in their heads? 

Featuring media vans, Dr. Drew appearances, familial finger-pointing, women’s least favorite H-word (hysteria), and a cameo from legal crusader Erin Brockovich, Dominus’s reporting takes us into the mystery that consumed a small Northeastern town, while still making the science accessible to lay readers. 

How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.

The Pre-Pandemic Puzzle (W. Pate McMichael, St. Louis Magazine, August 2007)

No, not that pandemic. Pate McMichael looks back at the teenager who may have died of AIDS more than a decade before HIV gripped the nation. But where did the virus come from? How did a young boy who was not a drug user, had not left the state, and never received a blood transfusion contract a virus that wouldn’t be detected in the United States for another decade? Furthermore, why did the news break in the mainstream media before the scientists who first identified the strain even had a chance to understand what was in their lab?  

This piece combines two of my favorite things: a medical mystery and an ethical quandary. It pulls back the curtain on how the scientific establishment studies new diseases and how and when they release that information to the public. Add in that historical lens — doctors seeing a new and potentially terrifying disease in the 1960s, the echoes of Hurricane Katrina in Pate McMichael’s 2007 writing — and you’ve got a winner. 

A few years later, in 1973, Elvin-Lewis and Witte presented Robert R.’s case at a lymphology conference and published a journal article on his systemic chlamydia in The Journal of Lymphology. The paper they presented actually raised as many questions as it answered. Why had Chlamydia spread throughout the body, when it normally stayed near the port of entry? And why did this young man have these purplish, malignant lesions called Kaposi’s sarcoma, as the alert pathologist had discovered during the autopsy? Kaposi’s sarcoma was known as an old man’s skin disease, typically affecting Jews and Italians. The pathologist decided that Robert R. had an African variant that affected children and primarily targeted the lymphatic system. That decision suggested an intriguing question: How did a black 15-year-old from St. Louis acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma?

Doctor Donor Fertility Fraud (Kudrat Wadhwa, The Verge, June 2022)

A woman seeking her familial DNA for a clinical trial learns that not only is her father not her biological father, but her bio dad is actually her mother’s fertility doctor. All together, now: Yikes. Worse, she finds out that she is not alone; several other children conceived via fertility clinics have also discovered that their fertility doctors are their real fathers. One doctor, featured in the Netflix documentary Our Father, sired over 90 children. 

This piece grapples with ethical questions and hard-to-draw lines: Is it medical rape to inseminate someone with fraudulent sperm? Do these doctor-fathers owe their scores of children anything? Should these children, once the fathers are discovered, seek a relationship with their bio dads? And what if the bio dad wants nothing to do with them? What if these men fail to see their behavior as a violation? 

Not a mystery, but still riveting — and a good case study around the meaning of consent. 

Not everyone who is watching Our Father has a personal connection at stake, but they are drawn in regardless. Fertility fraud rivets audiences because it channels the mysterious allure of genetic inheritance, crossing it with the perverse power relations between a doctor and their patient. Conception — so often an intimate act — is made impersonal and medicalized in the context of the fertility clinic, and then made intimate again through the abuse of the doctor-patient relationship. 

Every child of fertility fraud is a baby who was desperately and deeply wanted by their parents. The exploitation of that desire is devastating; the fact that the body becomes evidence of the transgression is all the worse.

Sick To Our Stomachs: Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (Natasha Boyd, The Drift, June 2022)

If Rule 34 of the internet is that there exists porn for every possible interest, then Rule 35, according to Jo Piazza of the podcast Under the Influence, is that there exists an influencer for every topic — including diarrhea. 

Why yes, Hot Girls do have IBS, and you can hear all about it on TikTok, Instagram, and pretty much anywhere else there is to make money off of “bloating positivity.” (Truly, if there was ever a sign that we really are in late-stage capitalism, this has to be it.) But really, why do so many hot girls (and other mortals) have IBS these days? This essay takes a look at the history of digestive discomforts, all the way back to the 1700s when The Gentleman’s Magazine examined why all the “well-to-do Ladies” complain of stomach “[d]iagnosticks … neither visible or certain” and to our new era of “normalizing bowel function” (finally!).

It has a name, but not much else. IBS is a so-called “functional disorder,” meaning that it is a condition without identifiable cause. Unlike with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, patients diagnosed with IBS have no medically detectable signs of damage or disease in their digestive tracts. Essentially, IBS is diagnosed when tests come back normal; it’s what’s written down on a chart when there’s nothing else left to identify. Many people with IBS struggle with the implication that their symptoms are made up — especially as IBS both relies on self-reporting and presents differently from patient to patient. It is a catch-all term for a variety of gastrointestinal ailments, including cramping, bloating, intestinal gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Statistically, it affects more women than men, and is most common in people under 50. Regular exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, and meditation have all been shown to alleviate symptoms. Even so, “IBS is not a psychiatric illness,” says Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, “though stress and depression can make symptoms worse.” Despite its growing prevalence — IBS is the most frequently diagnosed gastrointestinal disorder — some doctors and digestive specialists question its utility as a medical construct, since the diagnosis does not elucidate anything about patients’ physiology or the causes of their discomfort. It is, however, very profitable: in the United States, the annual medical costs associated with IBS exceed $1 billion.

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

Mike quickly matched with a woman named Ky. She seemed cute, if somewhat inscrutable, with no biographical details and photographs that included only a mirror selfie and a snapshot of her butt in a bikini. “I am the sweetest person you will ever meet,” she would later tell him. Mike had never used Tinder before; he told Ky that he’d be happy to get together.

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. Dead Man Living

Elizabeth Bruenig | The Atlantic | October 2, 2022 | 4,221 words

When it comes to ensuring humane treatment of those set to die by lethal injection, the Alabama Department of Corrections would like you to keep your seat and remain quiet. The signs in the witness room of the Holman Correctional Facility execution chamber say as much. Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff reporter at The Atlantic, has found that department officials are as impervious to important questions about the safety and dignity of the lethal injection process as the witness room’s cinderblock walls. This is a hard but necessary read about the lack of communication and transparency in Alabama’s capital punishment process and the egregious and completely unnecessary harms the state can cause to those condemned and the loved ones who endure the needless suffering of delayed or botched executions. “Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an educational nonprofit organization, told me that Alabama’s latest failure to carry out an uncomplicated execution represented an endemic problem. ‘This is the third execution in the last five years that Alabama has botched by virtue of their own incompetence in setting IV lines,’ offering Joe Nathan James and Doyle Hamm, who survived a 2018 lethal injection attempt in the state, as the two prior examples. ‘Each time, ADOC has denied the obvious and claimed nothing went wrong. They say they’ve followed their protocol. One of these things must be true: Either they’re unreliable, or their protocol is unreliable. Neither one is acceptable when a person’s life is on the line.’” —KS

2. Mike Conner v. The Pain

Joshua St.Clair | Esquire | October 5, 2022 | 4,377 words

Esquire, the magazine that first made me fall in love with longform journalism, is at its platonic best when it gets inside someone’s head. I don’t mean the reader’s head, though that’s often a result; I mean it gets inside the head of the people at the heart of its features. And here, that person is Mike Connor, who nine years ago fell five stories onto concrete, feet first. This is the story of his survival. Of his refusal to accept his shattered bones and pulverized body as a forever state. There’s little dialog here, because while Mike Connor has children and a family, his journey started within. It’s sparely written, though it finds beauty in that austerity. It doesn’t linger on descriptions of the outside world. Instead, it sits patiently ringside to the fight of Mike Connor’s life: his battle with an agony so ever-present that, as St. Clair writes, it’s like “an emotion … like rage, like afternoon sadness.” I can’t lie: it’s been a while since I read something like this in Esquire. But it feels like coming home. —PR

3. Departures

Tan Tuck Ming | Kenyon Review | October 3, 2022 | 5,407 words

In this essay, Tan Tuck Ming reflects on what’s gained and what’s lost for the hundreds of thousands of Filipina workers who come to cities like Hong Kong for work as domestic helpers, leaving their loved ones and entire lives at home to become embedded in new families abroad. Tang writes from the perspective of an employee who conducts intake interviews with workers seeking new jobs, but also as someone who grew up in a household with maids. (His Auntie Mel is the maid he remembers the most, and the woman he associates with love.) Tang tells the heartbreaking story of one woman, Daisy, who’s given up so much. “What is the Filipina brand of love?” asks Tang. “It is to love your family to the degree that to provide for it you would become contracted to another. It is to love a child by leaving and loving other children with the same hardness, because while the intensity of love is undeniable, the value of its currency is what flickers and grows across a border.” Sadly, this is the story for so many. —CLR

4. The Storykeeper: A Conversation with Svetlana Alexievich

José Vergara | Los Angeles Review of Books | September 27, 2022 | 4,420 words

I was 15 when disaster struck the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant in 1986. Over 35 years later, I still struggle to comprehend the accident’s human and environmental toll. For the original edition of Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich interviewed countless survivors to give voice to those affected, attempting to create “a kind of temple made of human lives and human voices.” In this deeply personal interview at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alexievich talks about the revised edition of her book, an account made deeper by subjects who “found new memories, new bravery,” and added to their original stories, feeling less vulnerable about revealing their full experiences in a post-Soviet era. “People start talking in the style of what they read. I try to get at what is real and understand what people experienced and really felt in the moment. The most amazing thing was when somebody told me, ‘I didn’t even know what I knew and felt before [our conversation].’ We process the experience together, the interviewee and myself. We think about the world together.” —KS

5. Inside One Of The World’s First Human Composting Facilities

Eleanor Cummins | The Verge | October 3, 2022 | 2,457 words

We all die, though when someone you love passes and you’re mired in grief, reducing the environmental impact of your loved one’s body isn’t generally top of mind. Burial and cremation are standard options, but both pollute the environment. Embalming fluids can leach through a casket and contaminate the soil. Cremation requires a lot of fuel and releases carbon dioxide into the air. But, what if we could actually give back to the earth after we die to help trees, plants, and flowers to flourish? Enter natural organic reduction (NOR), or human composting, which is now legal in four states and counting. In this insightful piece at The Verge, Eleanor Cummins reports on how NOR started off as an idea in Katrina Spade’s 2013 graduate thesis and has since become a cost effective and environmentally friendly way for families to say goodbye to their loved ones. —KS

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. ‘These Kids Are Dying’ — Inside the Overdose Crisis Sweeping Fort Bragg

Seth Harp | Rolling Stone | September 4, 2022 | 5,798 words

One hundred and nine. That’s the shocking number of soldiers who died in 2020 and 2021 while assigned to Fort Bragg, the U.S. Army’s largest base. In this important investigation, Seth Harp reports on the unprecedented wave of deaths at the military facility: homicides and suicides, and an alarming number of accidental overdoses on fentanyl, with soldiers dying in similarly “quiet” ways — slumped over in their bunks or in parked vehicles. But the Army continues to downplay this crisis, sweeping fatalities under the rug: the deaths of soldiers not even made public, their families left wondering what happened. “Military leaders will deny it and say that morale is high,” writes Harp, “but there is a palpable sense of purposelessness and disillusionment hanging over bases like Fort Bragg,” especially among men who’ve experienced combat and have been deployed to Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq multiple times. A heartbreaking and infuriating read about the military justice system, and the lack of support for soldiers. —CLR

2. Bioacoustics: What Nature’s Sounds Can Tell Us About The Health of Our World

Alanna Mitchell | Canadian Geographic | August 12, 2022 | 3,792 words

This essay hooks you from its opening lines, with descriptions so adept you can hear “the chirps, warbles, tweedles, whistles and clicks of the dawn chorus.” The auditory feast continues, and I defy you not to imagine Sebastian the crab twirling his baton at his marine orchestra when Alanna Mitchell explains that “coral reefs are underwater symphonies with shrimp snapping out the beat.” After making you appreciate the sounds of the earth, Mitchell switches to her stark message: We are silencing nature’s voice. In our ecosystem’s choir, not only are humans destroying the harmony by singing the loudest, we are throwing everyone else out of tune by loading so much carbon into the atmosphere that it is changing the air, altering sounds. Water is not faring any better and Mitchell explains that, in the oceans, there is no respite from the constant hum of ships, nudging me to imagine what it would be like to be plagued by the buzz of a construction drill wherever I went. A particularly heartbreaking example comes from a study of St. Lawrence Estuary, where young beluga whales are getting lost, unable to hear their mothers above their highly industrialized world. Mixing vivid descriptions with scientific reports is a powerful blend, and I came away from this essay feeling disturbed. However, Mitchell does give us one positive note — things could still recover. Studies have shown that playing healthy soundscapes in degraded marine ecosystems can help restore them: “The phantom sounds of lost habitats, piped from speakers onto the seabed, are cues for oyster larvae, encouraging them to fasten to the abandoned shells of adult oysters and rebuild.” —CW

3. Human Trafficking’s Newest Abuse: Forcing Victims Into Cyberscamming

Cezary Podkul with Cindy Liu | ProPublica | September 13, 2022 | 7,559 words

“Hello! I’m Jonah, who are you?” says one text. “Hi, I’m back in San Francisco, how’s it going?” says another. I receive WhatsApp messages like these regularly, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who may be behind them as I read this harrowing story by Cezary Podkul about so-called pig butchering scams. As the phrase suggests, fraudsters plump up their targets, forming online relationships with them and gaining their trust before manipulating them into depositing money into an investment platform. But the scammers themselves, tens of thousands of people from across Asia, have been coerced into participating in these schemes. Podkul’s investigation takes us deep into both sides of the operation: He follows Fan, a young man from China who was lured by a phony ad, held captive in a Cambodian scam compound in Sihanoukville, and forced to engage in cybercrime. He also shares the devastating story of Yuen, a man living near San Francisco, who ultimately lost $1 million in a scam that began with a seemingly harmless WhatsApp text from a stranger named Jessica. This is a gripping, excellently reported piece that clearly shows how no one wins in these schemes — except the crime syndicates behind them. —CLR

4. The Disappearing Art of Maintenance

Alex Vuocolo | Noema | September 22, 2022 | 4,173 words

“Repair is when you fix something that’s already broken,” Alex Vuocolo writes near the beginning of his reported essay. “Maintenance is about making something last.” Tension needn’t exist between those two sentences; yet, as he ably illustrates, too many nations have ensured that it does. Starting with the New York City transit system’s most ancient subway cars, Vuocolo unpacks how maintenance may in fact be our most direct line to environmental salvation — or at least mitigation. For decades, sustainability efforts have focused on repair rather than renewal; at the same time, technological progress has plundered natural resources with increasing rapacity, and labor costs have outpaced material costs. The result, he posits, is a broken system in which the most efficient practices are somehow the most wasteful ones. And until something undoes this brokenness, we’re left to take that responsibility on ourselves. Hope you’ve got your screwdriver at the ready.  —PR

5. Rocketland

Loren Grush | The Verge | September 13, 2022 | 7,100 words

I dislike Elon Musk. Like, a lot. I know I’m not alone in this. So it was admittedly with horrified curiosity that I embarked on reading Loren Grush’s feature about people who’ve uprooted their lives, moved to middle-of-nowhere Texas, and dedicated their time, energy, even money to waiting for Musk’s SpaceX to bring humankind closer to setting foot on Mars. Grush quickly set me straight: The horror that colored my curiosity was wrong. She encounters a community of seekers, believers, dreamers. There’s nothing else like it on earth, and in that there’s poignancy, even hope. “Maybe inhabiting Mars will happen in our lifetimes. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it will never happen at all,” Grush writes. “In the end, you just have to have a little faith. And in this dry, flat patch of Texas, you’ll find no shortage of that.” —SD