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In this week’s edition:

• An immigration story on the rise of Haitian refugee children traveling alone by boat
• A dive into the intricate world of romance fraud
• A profile on beloved former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe
• A hybrid of memoir, fiction, and essay on Wikipedia, knowledge, and truth
• A writer’s love letter to restaurants in the South that serve gas

1. When the Coast Guard Intercepts Unaccompanied Kids

Seth Freed Wessler | ProPublica | December 7, 2023 | 8,359 words

Since summer 2021, the US Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people at sea, including an alarming number of Haitian refugee children traveling alone. Immigration policy offshore is different than on land—asylum doesn’t apply at sea—and the system in place, reports Seth Freed Wessler, is opaque and dangerously inconsistent. Coast Guard immigration patrols are often closed off to journalists, but Wessler obtained internal documents about one boat detained in March that carried a group of Haitians, including three unaccompanied children: a 10-year-old boy and two sisters, 8 and 4. Wessler tracked down these kids, along with 18 others from the boat. He does an incredible job recounting the experience from the boy’s perspective: Tcherry started his journey at a smuggler’s house in the Bahamas and endured 12 hours inside the packed cabin of a shabby boat. The plan was to land in Florida, and then somehow make his way to Canada to join his mother. (There are many heartbreaking details in this story, but one I can’t get out of my head is that some kids on these boats are so young, they don’t even know their parents’ names or the country in which they were born.) After five days at sea, the Coast Guard has no choice but to send Tcherry and the two girls back to Haiti. As Wessler notes, detainments at sea aren’t just scarring for refugees: the work has taken a toll on Coast Guard members, too, such as the conflicted officer who encounters Tcherry and the girls on the boat—and later wonders what has become of them. A gut-wrenching look into the immigration crisis at Florida’s maritime border. —CLR

2. To Catch a Catfish

Stuart McGurk | The New Statesman | December 7, 2023 | 6,664 words

Online dating is a daunting world. There are many questions to consider about the person an app plucks from the ether and plops down onto your screen as a potential partner. Will we connect? Are you funny? Are those your actual teeth? But nowadays, one question has become paramount: are you real? As Stuart McGurk explains in this fascinating piece, romance deception is the fastest-growing category of fraud. It increased by almost a third last year, and now a staggering “two in five online daters have been asked for money, and half of those gave it.” (These types of stats seem destined only to grow with the rise of AI.) McGurk profiles Constable Rebecca Mason, a detective so dedicated to tracking down online fraudsters she puts in 20-plus-hour investigative shifts. I can see why she cares so much: when she meets the victims, it is heartbreaking. In the case of Alan Baldwin, the need to believe is so strong that when Mason breaks the news that the person he has loved—and sent money to—for 15 years does not exist, he won’t believe it. The targets of these scams are the emotionally vulnerable, longing for a connection, and desperate to help the person they care for. Particularly chilling is the pithy description of the scamming network’s WhatsApp group chat; like a gaggle of young girls discussing the best response to send a crush, the scammers talk about what replies will keep their targets on the hook. It’s a sickening thought. McGurk distills Mason’s meticulous work—and the reams of online messages—into a clear, sharp piece that, satisfyingly, goes all the way to a trial and conviction. (For further reading on dating fraud, I also highly recommend a feature from our sister publication, The Atavist: “The Romance Scammer on my Sofa.”) —CW

3. Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.

Jon Mooallem | The New York Times Magazine | December 3, 2023 | 7,960 words

To say that I was excited to read this profile is a ridiculous understatement. R.E.M. is my favorite band. (“Nightswimming” is my favorite song—a sentimental choice, but whatever, I own it.) And I wasn’t disappointed. There are delightful appearances by Taylor Swift, Stipe’s 87-year-old mother, and best of all Patti Smith, who is one of his closest friends. The story of how Smith and Stipe met is one for the ages: he got her number from a friend and called her from a bar in Spain on the first Valentine’s Day after Smith’s husband died, because he thought it might be nice. “I wouldn’t be calling except that I’m completely drunk on absinthe,” he told her. Little did he know that Smith had a crush on him, just from watching MTV. (Same, Patti.) But the best part of this profile is how author Jon Mooallem captures Stipe’s unique energy, which is at once radiant and humble. One of the greatest frontmen in the history of pop music is working on his first solo album, and that means harnessing an eternally restless mind, transcending self-doubt, and forcing himself to step away from a life populated by friends and family to whom he’s fiercely devoted. “He knew he’d have to isolate himself in one of the buildings on his property,” Mooallem writes, “walk in circles for six or eight or 10 hours at a time, effect a trancelike meditation and wrench out the rest of the lyrics, line by line.” For now, Stipe’s songs-in-progress live on his laptop in a folder called “Master file. Solo album.” That pop you just heard? It’s my heart exploding. —SD

4. The Hofmann Wobble

Ben Lerner | Harper’s Magazine | November 20, 2023 | 8,414 words

To be completely honest, I don’t know if this qualifies as nonfiction—the eyebrow “Experiment” sitting above the headline gives you some clue what you’re in for—but I do know it’s far and away the most daringly executed thing I read all week. On its face, it’s a memoir detailing how Lerner moved across the country in his mid-20s to work as a progressive think tank’s “new media fellow” and ended up creating a disinformation campaign via Wikipedia. There’s just one issue: he destabilizes our experience at every possible turn. His memory is faulty, he tells us. He’s lying. The details are wrong. Lerner is best known for his literary fiction (autofiction, really) and poetry, both of which beat at the heart of this piece. It’s a dizzying, disorienting read, but it’s also so smartly constructed and beautifully written that you can’t help but press on. It all still holds true, even if he’s making up or misremembering the details. At least, it seems to, and that’s the point. We’ve constructed a system in which establishing fact is simply a function of building the right illusion. Unreliable narrators come and go, bringing with them the intermittent uproar of a philosophical debate. What debt do writers owe the truth? But at this moment of transition, with the black box of artificial intelligence beginning to reshape the textual web, it’s far more troubling to realize that it’s not just the narrators who are unreliable—it’s the architects, too. —PR

5. My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas

Kiese Laymon | The Bitter Southerner | December 6, 2023 | 1,914 words

The Bitter Southerner just published Kate Medley’s Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South, a “photographic road trip” documenting service stations, convenience stores, and pit stops across the South. This essay by Kiese Laymon is the book’s foreword. At one point I seriously considered writing a recommendation for this piece that simply read: “Kiese Laymon. That’s all you need to know.” But that would have robbed me of the opportunity to reread and savor the bounty of this essay. If you do not know Laymon’s work, do yourself a favor and read this piece. Here, he takes us back to his childhood in 1984 and the Friday nights spent with his grandmama and her boyfriend Ofa D at Jr. Food Mart: a diner, convenience store, and gas station in Forest, Mississippi. “I loved everything about where we were going,” he writes. “I loved the smell of friedness. I loved the way the red popped in the sign. I loved how the yellow flirted with the red. I loved that the name of the restaurant started with Jr. instead of ending in Jr. Like, Food Mart Jr.” It’s a captivating read about anticipation, finding joy in a place you might not expect, and the long hours worked at minimum wage that made that joy possible. At Jr. Food Mart, Laymon, his grandmama, and Ofa D got oh so much more than fried fish and ‘tato logs for a yummy Friday night supper; they got a hefty helping of love and care and history served up to go. —KS

Today’s Best of 2023 list honors five notable investigations we read in 2023. Below, our editors recommend deeply reported stories about child laborers working overnight, migrant boats lost at sea, the preservation of historical records, the criminalization of pregnant mothers, and penile enhancement surgery.

The Kids on the Night Shift

Hannah Dreier | The New York Times Magazine | September 18, 2023 | 7,705 words

One mark of a great investigation is that it leads to regulatory or legislative change. The other is that the target of said investigation tries to erect a wall of silence. The first happened earlier this year, when Hannah Dreier began her New York Times series on migrant child labor; the second happened while reporting this stirring, heartbreaking exposé. “Soon slaughterhouses around the country began passing out fliers with my photograph,” Dreier writes. Of course they did. When a 14-year-old Guatemalan migrant named Marcos nearly loses an arm to an industrial accident on an overnight shift at a Perdue-run chicken processing plant, it’s hard to claim innocence. When the incident report leaves out Marcus’ age, and the state investigation takes less than two weeks to attribute the tragedy to “poor training” without ever visiting the plant, it’s hard to claim innocence. When a rural Virginia community is filled with so many night-shift kids that teachers arrive in the morning to find students sleeping in their cars, fresh from the plant, it’s hard to claim innocence. There’s plenty of innocence here—it’s just being stolen from those who are only trying to help their families. Dreier’s reporting is as human as it is probing, making clear that the children she profiles are far more than tales of adversity or damning statistics. They’re children. No matter what Perdue and Tyson allow themselves to think. —PR

Adrift

Renata Brito and Felipe Dana | The Associated Press | April 12, 2023 | 4,351 words

One morning in May 2021, fishermen in Tobago spotted a strange boat offshore. To their horror, they discovered a dozen dead men on board. Among the objects left behind: Tattered clothes. Prayer beads. A water bottle labeled with Arabic writing. A phone, through which local authorities eventually pull a list of contacts. All of these items and more would offer evidence about this doomed journey. In this immersive feature, Renata Brito and Felipe Dana use video storytelling, photography, and interactive graphics to reconstruct what happened to these men. Part of a group of 43 migrants that left Mauritania 135 days earlier, they intended to sail to Europe, along a treacherous Atlantic route via the Canary Islands, to start a better life. As is the fate of other boats like it, the pirogue lost its way and washed up in the Caribbean. For two years, Brito and Dana followed a trail of clues, piecing together a narrative that spans three continents. Their investigation, drawn from police documents and interviews with forensic experts and disappeared migrants’ loved ones halfway across the world, led to the identification by name of more than three-quarters of the people on the boat; DNA testing also confirmed the identity of one man, bringing closure to at least one family. “These migrants are as invisible in death as they were in life,” they write of these men—and the larger African refugee crisis. “But even ghosts have families.” These “ghost boats” are vessels of hope for these men, but many of them vanish and are forgotten at sea; with exceptional and empathetic reporting, Brito and Dana tell a very moving human story of one. —CLR

The Night 17 Million Precious Military Records Went Up in Smoke

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

As line by line of this piece’s lede unfurled, I leaned a little bit closer, already riveted. In 1973, a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed 17 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF), service records that unlock “home, business, and educational loans; health insurance and medical treatment; life insurance; job training programs; and other perks the country has long considered part of the debt it owes its veterans.” For reporter Megan Greenwell, one personnel file was personal. Her grandfather, who died in 2012, had served in the Army in 1943. Could his OMPF have miraculously survived the devastating fire? Greenwell completed “Standard Form 180, ‘Request Pertaining to Military Records,’” in a bid to find out. This piece, dealing with the US Federal Government, could have easily been bogged down by a bureaucracy unwilling to share its secrets about the blaze. But Greenwell brings us fascinating humans who lovingly apply surprising science and technology to restore and decipher records damaged by fire, water, and humidity. For these technicians, each record—each person—is precious, an identity revealed. But did Greenwell find her grandfather’s personnel file? Was his among the few that survived the fire or was carefully restored? I couldn’t possibly spoil that for you; you’ll have to read the piece to find out. —KS

They Followed Doctors’ Orders. Then Their Children Were Taken Away.

Shoshana Walter | Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting | June 29, 2023 | 7,167 words

Sometimes an investigation begins with a single word. In 2016, as part of legislation expanding government support for the prevention and treatment of opioid addiction, Congress amended existing child-welfare policy. “Federal law had long required newborns vaguely identified as ‘affected by’ illegal drugs to be flagged to child protective services,” Shoshana Walter explains. “In this new iteration, lawmakers removed the word ‘illegal.’” The change was intended to help infants exposed in utero to prescription opioids, but in practice, it created a devastating dragnet. Drawing from meticulous research, Walter reveals instances of new mothers being reported for taking antidepressants and run-of-the-mill cold medicines, and for testing positive for the fentanyl found in epidurals (a particularly gobsmacking detail, which I have repeated aloud many times, including to my own doctor). Others were reported for using Suboxone, a drug prescribed to help recovering addicts stay clean, and had their children taken away as a result. “It’s like a sick game,” one mother told Walter. “They don’t want you on illicit street drugs, so here, we’re going to give you this medicine. But then if you take this medicine, we are going to punish you for it and ruin your family.” It would be simplistic to say that this phenomenal story, published in partnership with The New York Times Magazine, is about the unintended consequences of a government policy. On a deeper level, it is about the American impulse to marginalize and punish women who don’t fit into culturally ordained boxes. —SD

Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement

Ava Kofman | ProPublica, co-published with The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words

Once upon a time, I produced a documentary on cosmetic surgery. Having stood in a few operating rooms while silicon got wedged into various crannies, I have retained a morbid curiosity about this field. However, I was still not quite sure what to expect when I decided to join Ava Kofman “inside the secretive world of penile enlargement.” Certainly not something quite so dark—or graphic. Kofman does not shy away from describing what is involved in inserting urologist James Elist’s invention, the Penuma (a silicone implant, “shaped like a hot­dog bun”) under the skin of the penis to increase its girth and flaccid length. Having also made it into the operating room, she is fully equipped to assault the senses by describing the sights and smells involved with surgery on an inverted penis. She has done her homework in other ways too, talking to 49 enlargement patients—a high tally for an area notoriously wrapped in shame and secrecy. Her meticulous investigation pays off when she discovers the post-procedure horrors some men have endured: implants becoming infected or detached, buckling at the corners, or even breaking through the skin. The trust she gains from her case studies is impressive, as is the access given to her by Elist himself, who allows her into his inner sanctum to witness his godlike complex firsthand. Kofman is fair in pointing out that all pioneering surgeries involve some trial and error at the start, but what I found shocking was that most men “had been of at least average size before going under the knife.” (Not much education on body dysmorphia seems to make it into the rushed intake process.) This enlightening piece may not be for the faint of heart, but it’s a great piece of journalism. —CW

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.”

Smartphones and social platforms existed long before the homicide spike; they are obviously not its singular cause. But considering the recent past, it’s not hard to see why social media might be a newly potent driver of violence. When the pandemic led officials to close civic hubs such as schools, libraries and rec centers for more than a year, people — especially young people — ­were pushed even further into virtual space. Much has been said about the possible links between heavy social media use and mental health problems and suicide among teenagers. Now Timpson and other violence prevention workers are carrying that concern to the logical next step. If social media plays a role in the rising tendency of young people to harm themselves, could it also be playing a role when they harm others?

On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.

Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.” On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging “hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”

The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.

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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.

Soon afterward, the pandemic began fueling a boom in the male ­augmentation market — a development its pioneers attribute to an uptick in porn consumption, work-­from­-home policies that let patients recover in private and important refinements of technique. The fringe penoplasty fads of the ’90s — primitive fat injections, cadaver­-skin grafts — had now been surpassed not just by implants but by injectable fillers. In Las Vegas, Ed Zimmerman, who trained as a family practitioner, is now known for his proprietary HapPenis injections; he saw a 69% jump in enhancement clients after rebranding himself in 2021 as TikTok’s “Dick Doc.” In Manhattan, the plastic surgeon David Shafer estimates that his signature SWAG shot — short for “Shafer Width and Girth” — accounts for half of his practice. The treatment starts at $10,000, doesn’t require general anesthesia and can be reversed with the injection of an enzyme. In Atlanta, Prometheus by Dr. Malik, a fillers clinic, has been fielding requests from private equity investors.

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The past few years have drastically changed how we think about our relationship to work, perhaps permanently. However, they haven’t changed the fact that billions of people on this planet spend about half their waking hours exchanging labor for money in order to secure food and shelter. As such, work has remained an inescapable part of one’s identity. “What do you do?” is still a small-talk question not because the answer is usually interesting, but because the answer tells you something about the skills and knowledge that person has amassed. And when the answer is interesting, it’s hard not to feel some measure of admiration for someone whose experience falls so outside your own.

I’ve always been fascinated by those whose daily occupations carry meaning, promise adventure, or are in any way out of the ordinary. Of course, everybody’s dream job is different, but imagine swapping sitting at a computer or working on a production line for clearing landmines, dodging tornadoes, or braving the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Not for everyone, of course—but what astonishing ways to earn a living. 

The examples you’ll encounter below range from the inspirational to the unfathomable. Who would want to toil 18-hour days, or climb to dizzying heights with little to no protection? For some, that sort of life holds a deep appeal, and herein lies the hook that draws you into these stories: In attempting to understand the motivations of others, we are by reflex attempting to understand ourselves. Each of these pieces moved me in some way, and I hope that they move you also.

Chasing Tornadoes (Priit J. Vesilind, National Geographic, April 2004)

As this mesmerizing article points out, it was the 1996 film Twister that first brought the occupation of “tornado chaser” to widespread public attention. Twister was a big deal upon its release, and I can vividly recall being spellbound by the then-cutting-edge special effects: dark and furious tendrils reaching down from the sky to pluck people, cars, and houses into the sky, spinning like toys, seemingly cut adrift from gravity itself. That film, as all movies do, exaggerated the hazards faced by its protagonists—but, judging by this primary account, not by very much. That meteorologists are still throwing themselves at deadly storms nearly 30 years on tells much of the complexity behind this destructive and spectacular weather phenomenon. 

In order to study tornados, you have to get close enough to manually drop heavy probes in their path, sometimes less than 100 meters from an approaching maelstrom. In a way, it’s comforting to know that, for all our technology and sophistication, we are in no way removed from the natural systems that surround us. Nature can always outdo us, will always win. That’s not to minimize the human cost, however, nor the bravery and determination of the tornado chasers. From the very beginning, in which an entire village is sucked into the air, this piece delivers mind-boggling drama, immersing us in a disparate group of specialists who race across the United States to seek out something most others would sooner avoid—all in the interest of furthering our understanding of an uncontrollable phenomenon.

But we’re late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won’t have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to “punch the core” of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the “bear’s cage,” an area between the main updraft and the hail. It’s an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.

And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour (97 kilometers an hour) on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. “The hail in the bear’s cage smashes windows and car tops,” he shouts, grinning. “The smaller stuff is kept aloft by the updraft, and only the large chunks fall. It’s like small meteorites banging down. Ha-ha-ha!”

In The Race For Better Cell Service, Men Who Climb Towers Pay With Their Lives (Ryan Knutson and Liz Day, ProPublica, May 2012)

Once again, we encounter a piece that draws aside the invisible curtain to glimpse the grueling efforts that enable our everyday creature comforts—in this case, the world of mobile communications networks. If you’ve ever shuddered at a TikTok video of a worker balanced precariously atop a tower at vertigo-inducing heights, this article probably isn’t for you. Yet, for such a dangerous job—cell tower climbing routinely claims up to 10 times the number of human lives as the conventional construction industry—it pays a relatively modest wage. What is it, then, that drives people to take up such work?

As a project manager quoted in the piece says, “You’ve got to have a problem to hang 150 feet in the air on an eight-inch strap.” Yet the workers featured in this piece, despite some suffering horrible injuries, clearly love their jobs. It’s not hard to understand the buzz that must come from routinely doing something that most people could not (and would not) do, along with sense of freedom that must come with climbing aloft to look down upon the world. As with the cobalt mining industry—itself the subject of another story in this list—there is a dark underside to this business, as sub-contractors routinely cut corners and take risks in the quest for a few extra dollars.

The greatness in Knutson and Day’s article, as with others collected here, lies in its ability to bring to life the stories and personalities of the people whose hard work makes life easier for us all. If you’re reading this on your smartphone, take a moment to consider the often-obscured reality behind mobile technology—a technology that, by its very nature, is largely invisible.

The surge of cell work forever altered tower climbing, an obscure field of no more than 10,000 workers. It attracted newcomers, including outfits known within the business as “two guys and a rope.” It also exacerbated the industry’s transient, high-flying culture.

Climbers live out of motel rooms, installing antennas in Oklahoma one day, building a tower in Tennessee the next. The work attracts risk-takers and rebels. Of the 33 tower fatalities for which autopsy records were available, 10 showed climbers had drugs or alcohol in their systems.

The Cobalt Pipeline (Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post, September 2016)

This is where mobile technology begins: the dangerous and dirty business of mining for cobalt, a mineral essential to the construction of smartphones and laptops. As a species we are finally becoming aware that every modern amenity carries an ecological price, and that price is often paid most dearly (and ironically) by nations that are monetarily poor but resource-rich. In our relentless drive “forward,” it is often the most vulnerable who pay the price. Mining is not a calling for these men; it is a necessity.

However, there is hope to be found in this troubling story—specifically, the very fact of its existence. The best journalism reduces global issues to a human scale, and by taking us into the lives of Congolese miners risking life and limb in pursuit of the rare metal, writer Todd C. Frankel forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.  

But Mayamba, 35, knew nothing about his role in this sprawling global supply chain. He grabbed his metal shovel and broken-headed hammer from a corner of the room he shares with his wife and child. He pulled on a dust-stained jacket. A proud man, he likes to wear a button-down shirt even to mine. And he planned to mine by hand all day and through the night. He would nap in the underground tunnels. No industrial tools. Not even a hard hat. The risk of a cave-in is constant.

“Do you have enough money to buy flour today?” he asked his wife.

She did. But now a debt collector stood at the door. The family owed money for salt. Flour would have to wait.

Mayamba tried to reassure his wife. He said goodbye to his son. Then he slung his shovel over his shoulder. It was time.

Making Our Home Safe Again: Meet the Women Who Clear Land Mines (Jessie Williams, The Observer, January 2021)

War leaves scars on every country it touches, sometimes literally: one of its most insidious instruments is buried explosives, set to trigger at the touch of a human foot. Land mines have been a topic of discussion for many years, catapulted to the front of the news in 1997, when Princess Diana raised awareness by walking through a field of live explosives in Angola. (She was a guest of the Halo Trust, an organization that undertakes the arduous and dangerous task of clearing such places for the local populace.)

Little can be more terrifying than the knowledge that each step you take could be your last. It’s a sudden, senseless, death, one without discernment or mercy. But in this inspiring story, life comes full circle, as Hana Khider returns to her ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq. When Khider was a child, her mother told her stories of the family homeland they were forced to flee; now, as an adult, she works as part of a team of deminers, making that homeland safe once again. As meaningful as this work is, it also carries with it the deadliest of dangers: an average of nine people a day still fall victim to these terrible remnants of conflict.

At the start of this month, a 24-year-old man working for MAG was killed in an explosion at a munitions storage facility in Iraq’s Telefar district – a reminder of the dangers these deminers face every single day. Iraq has around 1,800 sq km of contaminated land (an area bigger than Greater London) stemming from multiple conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, and the Isis occupation of 2014. The Iraqi government has a target deadline of February 2028 to clear the country, which Morgan thinks is optimistic. “Last year, operators cleared just over 15 sq km,” he says. Covid-19 hasn’t helped. This year MAG has managed to disarm 1,200 mines; usually it would be 6,750 mines.

Dispatches: Life on an Alaskan Crab Boat (Andy Cochrane, Men’s Journal, April 2021)

We have always projected a certain romance onto the idea of working on the high seas, and a dignity upon those individuals brave enough to do so. For this piece, journalist Andy Cochrane signs up for a week’s work on the fishing boat Silver Spray, one of just 60 such vessels responsible for supplying all of North America with snow crab. Facing long hours, rough water, and freezing conditions, the work is as grueling as could be imagined, but surprisingly Cochrane encounters only good humor, pragmatism, and an inspiring sense of brotherhood amongst the crew.

This is work that is as fundamental to human existence as can be found. People have to eat, after all. But what really strikes me about this piece—and is a sentiment echoed by its author—is the remarkable positivity of the fishermen, which surely can’t be put down to a sense of pride and decent wages alone. Perhaps it’s the extreme conditions and the hardships that help foster such a sense of togetherness and wry determination. Whatever the cause, this is another absorbing peek into a job few of us would wish to undertake.

I was curious how these guys found their way to the industry and how they hadn’t burned out. Attrition is incredibly high, for obvious reasons—freezing temperatures, rough seas and long, exhausting hours. All three laughed off my greenhorn question, and we returned to tips on how I would survive the week.

Jose, an immigrant from El Salvador and father of two, has lived in Anchorage since the ’90s. Quiet, always smiling, and always working, he’s fished his entire career. Leo, raised in Samoa and now living in Vegas, also has two kids. Even with frozen fingers and toes, he never stopped making jokes. Jeffery, who lives half the year in the Philippines with his wife and three kids, would often give me a fist bump and say “you’ll be all right, everyone goes through this” after I puked, which happened 11 more times the first day.

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Carolyn Wells

The problem of stalled trains and blocked crossings has existed for decades, but as ProPublica and InvestigateTV report in this investigation — with shocking video and photography — it’s gotten worse.

Lamira Samson, Jeremiah’s mother, faced a choice she said she has to make several times a week. They could walk around the train, perhaps a mile out of the way; she could keep her 8-year-old son home, as she sometimes does; or they could try to climb over the train, risking severe injury or death, to reach Hess Elementary School four blocks away.

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This edition features stories about:

• U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his GOP-donor-funded fancy travel.
• One man’s obsession with profiling Robert Johnson, blues genius.
• What you should know before you allow your dog off-leash at the beach.
• Life as a woman working as a long-haul trucker.
• A love letter to kitschy cookie jars.

1. Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire

Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski | ProPublica | April 6, 2023 | 2,936 words

No matter where you get your news, you’ve likely seen this story sometime in the last 24 hours. It’s a bombshell investigation that reveals how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has received lavish gifts from a billionaire Republican donor named Harlan Crow, likely in violation of federal law. Said gifts include international cruises on a staffed superyacht, a Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass, flights on a private jet, and annual vacations to Crow’s luxury compound in upstate New York. Anyone with an iota of respect for democracy should be appalled — albeit unsurprised, given everything we already know about Thomas’s associates, including his wife. Read it and rage. But also read it and admire the craft that went into telling the story. It is rich in detail, yet precise. Its tone is finely tuned. The selection and placement of quotes are [chef’s kiss]. The writers dole out gobsmacking information throughout the piece, right down to the kicker. This is top-notch reporting and delivery. A+ all around. —SD

2. Hellhounds on His Trail: Mack McCormick’s Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Real Robert Johnson

Michael Hall | Texas Monthly | April 4, 2023 | 8,672 words

The legend of Robert Johnson dwarfs the man himself in many ways. Johnson wasn’t the first recorded blues musician, nor the most prolific of his era. Yet, his brief career and early death shrouded him in mystery and mythology, ultimately influencing the evolution of popular music itself — and confounding would-be biographer Mack McCormick. McCormick, who spent much of his life chasing down the stories and music of men like Johnson, is the focus of this remarkable story, but he’s by no means a hero. He may have been once, when Texas Monthly executive editor Michael Hall first profiled him 20 years ago; that was before his obsession overwhelmed his clarity, and his remarkable research into Johnson’s life turned into something far more toxic. Now, Hall revisits McCormick’s life after his death, teasing the truth from hagiography and telling the long, twisting tale of a man crushed by his own masterwork. Having helped titans like Lightnin’ Hopkins find the spotlight, McCormick long ago achieved his own legendary status. The question that persists is whether a legacy like his can be tainted by a flawed final act. —PR

3. Gone to the Dogs

Ben Goldfarb | Hakai Magazine | April 4, 2023 | 2,400 words

A reported essay on the intricacies of dog-leashing rules could have felt like a real slog. But Ben Goldfarb’s piece lifts off the page. In the opening paragraphs, we meet Kit, Goldfarb’s dog, as she runs along the beach with the wind flying through her floppy ears. It’s an image I could instantly relate to: Like all dog owners, I love watching my own dog dash around off-leash. (Well, meander around. She isn’t the speediest.) But, sometimes, there can be an environmental cost. Goldfarb meticulously takes us through the problems of letting dogs off-leash on a beach, raising some concerns I had never considered. I felt for the shorebirds trying to rest after a long migration; as a contributor eloquently puts it, “Imagine you’ve just gotten home from work and want nothing more than to chill on the couch with a beer — and then a pack of barking dogs tears into the house and chases you outside, over and over again.” Combined with some horrific facts about little blue penguin deaths, this piece will make you think about when to unclip that leash. —CW

4. Highway Star

Meg Bernhard | n+1 | March 2, 2023 | 3,367 words

This week, Meg Bernhard’s piece hit the sweet spot for me as a reader, offering insight into a world I know nothing about: what it’s like to be a female long-haul truck driver. I’m fascinated by the minutia of others’ jobs and this piece delivered. You’ll meet members of REAL Women in Trucking, a rights advocacy group for women drivers, and get to know Jess, age 39, who escaped an abusive relationship to see America behind the wheel of her rig dubbed “The Black Widow.” “Jess kept a secret credit card,” Bernhard writes, “and left their home only with the clothes she was wearing. She went to her stepdad’s, applied for a trucking job, and was on a bus to a training facility in Indiana four days later. Halima spent fifth grade on the road. They solved math problems with dry erase markers on the truck’s windows and played catch in warehouse parking lots.” —KS

5. How Cookie Jars Capture American Kitsch

Angela Burke | Eater | March 24, 2023 | 1,533 words

At an early age, I had mastered a critical skill in our house: lifting the lid on our humongous cookie jar to pilfer a treat, then replacing that lid in complete silence. As a cookie burglar, I was an apple that hadn’t fallen far from its tree. My Dad was always there first. And when my mom complained about dwindling stock, dad pointed the finger directly at me and my brother. (The nerve!) That cookie jar (a brown ceramic wooden stump with a creepy, grinning gray squirrel on top) sits on their kitchen counter to this day. At Eater, in this love letter to the kooky cookie jar, Angela Burke introduces us to artist and vintage ceramic cookie jar maker Hazy Mae. Her custom jars, in homage to Dolly Parton, Andy Warhol, Elvis, and Madonna (among others), can run $800 or more. That may feel steep, but can you really put a price on a vessel that could eventually contain fond memories, too? —KS

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