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I don’t talk about my Horse Girl era much.

Maybe it’s because of the assumptions I fear people will make about me based on the cultural stereotype. Maybe it’s because I feel other childhood obsessions — sled dogs, Greek mythology, the Redwall series, various Nintendo franchises — had a more formative impact on the adult I became. Maybe it’s because my time as a Horse Girl felt so brief and casual compared to the denim-jacketed diehards that define said stereotype; as if I was merely a pony poseur, not a true Horse Girl. 

But I cannot deny that from the ages of roughly 7 to 10, I was fully, unapologetically, a Horse Girl. 

Here’s what I remember: Listening to the audiobook (back when they truly were “books on tape”) of Misty of Chincoteague on a family road trip. The trail ride in Estes Park, Colorado when I was 7 — probably the happiest day of my life. The sirenic allure of the bright pink and blue Grand Champions collectible boxes. The thick Dorling Kindersley breed guide I read over and over again, cover to cover, memorizing every detail; I could tell you the difference between a Russian Don and a Budyonny, although I definitely couldn’t today. The one summer I attempted a riding camp, with the mustiness, the satisfaction of cleaning the muck from a hoof, and Coley, the small, curmudgeonly black mare who kicked if you didn’t approach her right and who I loved with every fiber of my head-in-the-clouds being. 

Over the past several years, there’s been plenty of writing exploring our cultural obsession with the idea of the Horse Girl. This identity holds so much — in examinations of Horse Girls, we find odes to untamed femininity, searing indictments of insularity and privilege, and a swinging pendulum between romantic nostalgia and reality. She is both the awkward and O-M-G-relatable Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burgers and a stirring voice in the poetry of Ada Limón. In 2021, Electric Literature executive editor Halimah Marcus edited a collection of essays reclaiming and recasting the stereotype; two pieces from that collection are included on this list, along with some other favorites that explore the idea of the Horse Girl and the bond at its center. So saddle up and enjoy.

An Autistic Girl’s Guide to Horses (Katie Rose Pryal, Catapult, December 2022)

Katie Rose Pryal was diagnosed with autism in 2020, at the age of 44. Upon receiving her diagnosis, she writes, much of her childhood “came into focus,” particularly her special interest in horses. Around the same time as she recognized her autism, she was learning how to ride again, with her horse, Leroy. Her bond with Leroy intertwines with her further understanding of her own self and experiences. The resulting reflection is introspective and healing. 

For an autistic person, to be able to communicate, to touch, to care, all without fear, is a gift. Too often, our words, our very actualities, are rejected. With Leroy, I could share all of my secrets, spoken or unspoken, and he would listen with one fuzzy ear cocked in my direction. I could drape my body across his back and rest my head on his side, listening to the slow beat of his heart, steady as the dirt beneath our feet. Even when his coat was glossy, I could brush him, aligning each tiny red hair across his flank.

Black Californians Have Long Celebrated Cowboy Culture. We’re Just Catching Up. (Tyrone Beason, Los Angeles Times, December 2022) 

Beason profiles riders of all genders for this gorgeous feature for the Times’ “My Country” series, so I’m choosing to count it for this list. This piece takes readers on a journey from the bucking thrill of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, an event celebrating Black cowboys and cowgirls, to a peaceful morning at the end of a trail ride on a Northern California farm —  a painful past being reclaimed to the celebratory current zeitgeist of Lil Nas X and Beyonce. Come for the stories of Black joy and community; stay for Jason Armond’s stunning photos. 

It originated as an epithet used to demean Black cattle drivers and ranch hands, who made up as much as a quarter of all such workers in the Southwest in the late 1800s, says Boyd-Pates. When Black men call themselves ‘cowboys’ and Black women refer to themselves as ‘cowgirls,’ Boyd-Pates says, they take pride in being able to transform a painful history into something they can glorify.

Finland’s Hobbyhorse Girls, Once a Secret Society, Now Prance in Public (Ellen Barry, New York Times, April 2019) 

Barry’s dispatch from Helsinki is not the first exploration of the community around hobbyhorsing, a sport in which adolescent girls trot, hurdle, and race astride wooden toy horses. The hobbyhorse girls of Finland have been the subject of viral videos, documentaries, and trend pieces — both praised as unique confidence-builders, and derided for being too childish, or worse, cringe. 

What happens when the hobbyhorse girl grows up, though? One of the key voices in Barry’s exploration is Alisa Aarniomaki, a spokeswoman for the sport who is now in her early twenties. Through profiling those who have stuck with the hobby, even as they grow into teenagers and young adults, Barry highlights the importance of the community to its members and how we may all need a space to safely rekindle our sense of childlike joy. Cringe is dead, the earth above it tamped by thousands of imagined hoofbeats. Long live the earnest pursuit of wonder. 

Once, she was invited to a party in France where adult guests were given hobbyhorses, provided as a way, she said, ‘to run away from your boring and maybe exhausting normal life.’ The one thing that drives her crazy, she added, is when people describe her hobbyhorse pursuit as playing. ‘If someone says we are playing, it strips away everything we made, it strips away the reality.’

Horse Girl (Heather Radtke, The Believer, February 2019)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is a Horse Girl, one must have a favored Horse Girl book or series. These are often pillars of the genre, standalones like Black Beauty or series like The Saddle Club, Pony Pals, or Thoroughbred. 

As a former Marguerite Henry girlie (if you were also a big King of the Wind fan as a child, know that I see you and I love you), I was thrilled to see a dispatch from the famed Chincoteague Island Pony Swim, an event that has captured the imaginations of Horse Girls ever since its appearance in the iconic Horse Girl novel Misty of Chincoteague. 

In its encapsulation of the wild, murky, and sometimes uncomfortable space between two ideas, Radtke’s reflection on her visit to Chincoteague feels like the pony swim itself. As the horses make their perilous journey between islands, we find ourselves in the messy middle space between hazy nostalgia and harsh reality, wonder and horror, the desire for something to exist in our imaginations as both unclaimable and wild, and as an accepting friend. 

Watching the scene asked me to hold two truths at once. The ponies are wild creatures that, like deer or raccoons, need to be managed. But in the mythology of the swim, the ponies are also presented as transcendent companions, animals who might offer up their manes for braiding and their backs for riding. Here, the ponies were both docile pets and feral beasts, animals that need to be convinced to swim so they might be ridden by little girls.

Horse Girl: An Inquiry (Carmen Maria Machado, excerpted for Them from Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, August 2021)

The Horse Girl stereotype is associated with privilege — whiteness, wealth, thinness, hyper-femininity — despite, as Carmen Maria Machado points out, a multitude of non-white riding cultures and traditions. Typically, when thinking of Horse Girls, we project our collective assumptions about what a Horse Girl is or isn’t, and mix in our own desires or insecurities. 

Machado’s contribution to Marcus’s anthology explores identities and desire — those we cultivate, like the author’s wish to be around horses and burgeoning queerness, and those projected onto us as an assumption, fetishization, or other intrusion. (In one section, she notes she is “exasperated” that this essay includes, among other things, inappropriate comments from older men and sexual innuendo.) In a stunning personal inquiry, Machado tracks that desire, from a covert moment with a coveted toy horse to briefly revisiting riding as an out queer adult. 

There are so many moments that will stick with me from reading this that it’s hard to pick just one, but a particularly intriguing parallel she makes is between horses having barn names and show names and the magic people find in names for drag or roller derby.

Are Unicorns Horses? Unicorns are horses that can only be ridden by virgins. 

Are Horses Unicorns? Horses don’t care what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you.

What Are Horses? A species of odd-toed, ungulate mammal, primarily domesticated, belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. Useful, expensive, dangerous. Beautiful.

How Horses Helped My Ancestors Evade Colonizers, & Helped Me Find Myself (Braudie Blais-Billie, excerpted for Bustle from Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, July 2021)

Braudie Blais-Billie’s connection to horses derives from both sides of her family: She describes the thrill of watching barrel racing at the Seminole rodeo with her paternal grandmother and feeding apples to her maternal grandparents’ horses at their home in rural Québec. Her great-grandfather, she learns, was a prominent Seminole cattleman. 

In addition to reflecting on her family’s deep connection to horses and how it shaped her identity, Blais-Billie digs deeper into the history of Seminole resistance to colonization, and the role that the shared knowledge of horses and cattle husbandry played in their survival. It’s a reminder that the bond between humans and horses has been about more than childhood fantasy as displayed on Trapper-Keeper stickers — it’s been a means of resistance and resilience, of deep connection to one’s history, culture, and community. (Also, at a time of attempts to repress teaching histories of non-white and other marginalized peoples in the U.S., it’s a reminder of the power that comes in keeping those histories and stories accessible.) 

Tia and I have settled on the loose term ‘Seminole horse girl.’ It seems simple, but the specificity allows just enough space for the intricacies of our biracial identity. Like the Seminole peoples, ‘Seminole horse girls’ originates from a conglomeration of cultures adapting to their environment; sometimes not belonging to one group exclusively can be empowering. I’ve found that, in our family, horseback riding is more than show titles and prestigious stables — horses are how we survive.

I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won (Lara Prior-Palmer, Longreads, May 2019)

The Mongol Derby is a test of will for even the most experienced rider, a grueling 1000-kilometer (621-mile) run recreating the messenger route of Genghis Khan through a variety of terrain on semi-wild horses. Riders change horses every 40 km, which means less exhaustion for the horses but an even greater challenge for the riders, who switch horses just as they’ve grown accustomed to the quarter-ton beast under them. In 2013, British equestrian Lara Prior-Palmer became the first woman to win this equine gauntlet, which she writes about in her memoir, Rough Magic, excerpted here for Longreads.

Those looking for the visceral awe of the race itself will have to read Prior-Palmer’s memoir in its entirety, but what makes this section so engrossing is the strong sense of place. We’re with her as she finds herself lost in the “concrete nowheres” of London, then in the green expanse outside Ulaanbaatar, and inside her mind as she longs for the adventure and freedom so often romanticized within the Horse Girl canon. As she trains by riding bareback through a field of ragwort — at full gallop, gripping the horse with all her strength — it’s hard not to feel that dangerous thrill, that reminder of why these animals have such a chokehold on our imaginations. 

I was expecting quite the holiday — a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to… By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.

My Little Pony Broke All of the ‘Girl Toy’ Rules (Seanan McGuire, Polygon, November 2020)

As there is for all the semi-universal phenomena of millennial and Gen-Z childhoods, there’s a TikTok about this. In a clip that has been seen more than 1.5 million times, user @funkyfrogbait compares how people think girls play with toys (bubbly, idle chat about shopping) with how they actually play with toys, wherein wide-eyed plastic critters become players in a harrowing trial before a shadowy council. The comments are full of affirmations, memories of Barbies in divorce court, Polly Pocket murder mysteries, and even re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic with Littlest Pet Shop toys. 

It’s difficult for a child of the ’80s or later to imagine this kind of narrative-heavy pretend play, full of high fantasy and even higher stakes, as being out of reach. My own childhood memories are spotted with dramatic courtroom scenes with stuffed animals and battlefield epics with Beanie Babies. But in this essay for Polygon’s “Horse Girl Canon” package, Seanan McGuire explores how My Little Pony, a fantasy-focused toy line “for girls,” shaped the way we still play today. It’s a fascinating look at the cultural significance of the toys, and their evolution from a realistic companion for horse girls with aspirations of stables to juggernaut — a rainbow-tinted powerhouse that sparked imaginations at a time when only “boy toys” were centered on this kind of fantastical play. (Of course, as McGuire correctly notes, the American toy industry still enforces a rigid gender binary, but kids of all genders have always enjoyed “girl toys” like My Little Pony.)

The 1980s were a time of fantasy adventures for children, with little attention paid by the censors to anything that had been preemptively dismissed as an attempt to sell toys… Death was generally off-screen, but it was present, and dangers were both real and manifest in the worlds we were told our toys and imaginary friends inhabited. But at the time of My Little Pony’s launch, all the grand, sweeping adventure was reserved for the blue side of the toy aisle, intended for the male** audience. Toys aimed at girls were much more likely to be domestic in nature, filled with baby dolls and pretend kitchens — in other words, training them for adulthood.

People Ask Me to Write About Horses (Adrienne Celt, Tin House, June 2018)

Author Adrienne Celt achieved what most Horse Girls only manifest in fantastical notebook scribblings: owning a real live horse. But like most things romanticized from afar, reality can be bumpy — horse ownership is messy, expensive, and can be heartbreaking. Celt tenderly reflects on what draws “rational adults” to horses, and on her emboldening bond and uncertain future with her own horse, Lady. 

Celt admits that reflecting on the pain points of horse ownership sounds like #ChampagneProblems, but it’s, as always, about more than that. It’s an essay on horses and their romanticization, but also an essay about seeking and pursuing joy, digging your heels in and spurring it on, chasing it cantering into the wind. 

Of course, when I say that horses are romantic, I mean for people who don’t spend much time with them. To most actual horse people, the animals lose their mystique rather quickly. On farms and ranches they’re beasts of burden, livestock of the same order as cows or pigs or dogs or goats. To a pleasure rider like me, they’re funny and corporeal: they fart in your face when you try to pick their back feet, and get scared when they see things out of the corners of their eyes, thinking that any abandoned truck tire or garden hose is about to kill them.

Who Gets To Be an Equestrian? (Rita Omokha, Elle, October 2020) 

As millions of people took to the streets following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, so began a reckoning over anti-Black racism in many sectors and communities, including equestrians. In June 2020, teen equestrian Sophie Gochman wrote an essay for The Chronicle of the Horse, calling out the race and class privilege of the community; a white trainer responded in the same publication with defensiveness and condescension while quoting MLK. Rita Omokha continues this necessary conversation, speaking with Black women equestrians about the discrimination they face — both overt and systemic — and how they are working to make the sport more welcoming. 

Omokha’s thoughtful profile of Black equestrians serves as a reminder that should undergird conversations about representation in any community or sport. Behind this discourse, you’ll find real people with real passion and expertise, paying a real human cost (be it financial, emotional, or otherwise) that they should never have had to pay. Omokha takes care to discuss the struggle of being “one of the few,” and the conflict between excelling in the world you love, and, as equestrian Shaquilla Blake puts it, “whitewashing [yourself]” to do so. 

Under the shade, the air thick with the scent of manure, they take a moment to catch their breath before the day’s trail rides begin. As Blake cools off, she feels a tug at her dreadlocks. “Can you feel that?” a giddy voice says from behind her. It belongs to a 13-year-old girl whose profile matches what Blake calls “your typical equestrian”—namely, wealthy and white. Can I feel that?? Of course I can! You just yanked the hell out of my dreads!

Lindsay Eanet is a Chicago-based writer, editor & performer. Her writing has been featured at Polygon, Longreads, Serious Eats, Block Club Chicago & others. But enough about her, let’s talk about you. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

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

The finest romances have the messiest stories. Not messy as in poorly written; au contraire, a good romance hits all the highest points of storytelling  — the meet cute, the ecstatic joy of turning enemies into lovers, the inevitable wrench in the works, middles full of will they-won’t they tension, and a resolution that’s either a happily ever after, happy enough for now, or a bittersweet goodbye.

I am feeling particularly entranced with the genre right now having just watched La La Land. Okay, look — it’s not going to be a movie for everyone. But me? I love a good musical. I love a good homage. And I love a good love story. The prospect of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone maybe not ending up together because of the calls of their differing careers, but agreeing they will always love each other … well, let’s just say I needed several moments. 

My husband is a working musician, and I’m a writer. This May, we will have been together for 16 years — eight in sin, eight married, and all 16 sharing creative careers that don’t always align. Ours has been a romance of nights apart, beautiful Sundays together, opposite schedules, and ships passing in the night. 

There is a montage in La La Land that shows this all-too-familiar lifestyle of two artists — Gosling lands a big gig and is gone nights, while Stone is wrapped up in writing her one-woman play, rising early and going to bed early, so over the course of their days they end up sharing only bed space. This is the moment I shout to my husband, in the bedroom preparing for his Friday night gig: “Oh shit, La La Land just got too real.” 

I go to the bedroom and tell him about the scene. He listens to me, buttoning his shirt and smiling his sad smile. We agree that his current Friday and Saturday night gig schedules are not ideal. He wraps me in a hug and we stand there, as I watch the time on our alarm clock over his shoulder. He is late.

That image of a long-haul couple eating breakfast together, sharing a morning coffee, splitting a bottle of wine after a long work day, reading books together in bed before falling asleep in each other’s arms — that has never been our reality. Do I wish it was? Certainly. But he will never ask me to give up my writing, and I will never ask him to stop playing music. The messier our lives, the more years we have together, the more we realize the value of writing our own story. Will we, won’t we make it? We’ll just have to wait and see. 

This is where the great, messy love stories come in handy — I don’t need our marriage to look a certain way to have hope. Because if I’ve learned anything from these stories, it’s the messiness, not the ideal, that strengthens a relationship. Our marriage survives because we appreciate the possibility that it may not. 

So don’t give me any of that happy ending bullshit. Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love. 

My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage (Mary H.K. Choi, GQ Magazine, March 2021)

Anyone who has actually experienced marriage knows that the saying “marriage is bliss” is woefully incorrect. Not because marriage is about petty arguments or seeing sides of your spouse you’d rather not see (think the Seinfeld episode where Jerry dates a nudist and then opines on the difference between “good naked” and “bad naked.”) The truth of the matter is that marriage is a little bit of good naked and a whole lot of bad naked, especially during a pandemic when fears run high and aging in-laws who live across the country are deteriorating. 

Choi’s essay takes a singular comment from her husband and encapsulates it as a defining “bad naked” moment in their marriage. And, as she says, “I have never loved him more than in that moment.” As someone who has had her share of “bad naked” marriage moments, I can attest that this essay rings with glaring honesty. 

Everything he’d done in support of me and my family was noble. Selfless. Bodies are a constant fucking betrayal, and that he’d strapped himself to another one that was in turn attached to a whole human centipede of decrepitude was deeply affecting. But then he’d admitted not only his reservation but his scorn. How it ran counter to his most primal instincts of self-preservation. Were he alone, with his discipline, his self-sufficiency, his precious solitary walks on Far fucking Rockaway, he’d survive this. Meanwhile, I’d demanded we head to the airport. I dared him to say no, because I knew he couldn’t. This was marriage.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro (Stephanie Clifford, ELLE, December 2020)

Just stick with me on this one. We all remember that one guy, Martin Shkreli, who became universally known as the biggest asshole on the face of the earth for raising the price of a life-saving pharmaceutical by 5,000% overnight. Top this objectively awful-for-humanity move with his love of trolling, his shit-eating grin, and his obscenely expensive purchase of a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album — because of course, a Wall Street Bro would spend an inordinate amount of money on that. Now add in a journalist who is damn determined to humanize him. Or is she also being trolled? 

I’m not saying this story is a great love story. But it will enrage you, confuse you, and make you question the patriarchy. (In a follow-up, Smythe, the journalist, insists she is acting of her own accord and that it is sexist to imply that she is in any way a “victim.”) Is she being used by the Pharma Bro to recoup his image? Is she using him to get a big-money book deal? Are they actually in love? Or has she, in the words of one of her journalism professors, ruined her life? Settle back with some popcorn for this one. 

When Shkreli found out about this article, though, he stopped communicating with her. He didn’t want her telling her story, she says. Smythe thinks it’s because he’s worried about fallout for her. While she waits to hear from him, she monitors Google Alerts for his name, posts in support groups for loved ones of inmates, and—because inmates must place outgoing calls and can’t accept incoming ones—hopes one day he will call or reply to one of her emails. “It’s completely out of her control,” Haak says; all she can do is “sit around and wait and hope.”

Smythe has only one photo of the two of them, propped next to her bed. Shkreli, his arm around Smythe, has a wide-open smile. “Doesn’t he look human there?” Smythe says, laughing. 

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Tinder Hearted (Allison P. Davis, The Cut, August 2022) 

God, there are so many good lines in this one, it’s difficult to figure out what I want to highlight the most. Davis, a wickedly funny writer, recounts her decade of Tinder dating and how the longest relationship she’s managed to be in from it is with Tinder itself. She downloads, has great sex, has terrible sex, falls hard with men who ghost her, ghosts men who fall hard for her, deletes the app, tries traditional dating, and re-downloads it again and again in a vicious but unrelenting circle of who gives a shit. As one of the “smug couples” who “sigh with relief when they say, ‘I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps,’” let me just say … I’m glad I met my partner before there were apps, but part of me has always wondered what it would be like to have the world as your sexual oyster in the way Tinder allows, delicious or rotten as it may be. If romance is messy, then Tinder romances take the cake. What is most apparent: Davis has a wealth of great stories to tell. 

I first downloaded Tinder in the spring of 2013, seven months after it launched. I’d heard about it as a concept (Grindr for straights) but felt exempt from needing it until one evening at the tail end of a drawn-out breakup with someone I’d told myself I would marry. We were at a restaurant in San Francisco, having one of too many brutal good-bye dinners that led to this-is-the-last-time-I-swear sex, and I put the app on my phone in front of him. He stoically chugged his negroni while I marveled at the hundreds, presumably thousands of men who were waiting for me on the other end, should he decide to go through with the breakup. “Look!” I said, waving my iPhone 5 in his face. (I didn’t mention that at this early point in the app’s history, it was mostly populated by 20-year-old college students and S.F. tech bros who exclusively wore free T-shirts from start-ups.) By June, my boyfriend had gone through with the breakup and moved on — quickly and not via app — to a woman he’d met through mutual friends. I wanted to die. But instead of the sweet relief of death: Tinder.

Taking The Knife* (Randa Jarrar, Gay Mag, October 2019)

“In kink, consent is queen,” thus you need to understand what you’re going to get into before you read this essay. The piece centers around Jarrar’s visit to a queer kink club where the first thing we see/read is Mx. Cele enjoying a knife in intimate spaces. At the club, everyone is asking permission to touch, taste, and harm. It’s a mind warp to think of harm and consent working with, not against, each other in the same sentence, but that is what this entire essay does. I loved it for its deft balancing act — the daily negotiations of asking for what we want, not being asked before something is taken, and the sexual freedom and safety of owning our own bodies in a culture that feels entitled to it.  

I didn’t have a lock on my door until I moved away from my parents’ house. The last time I was abused, I was sixteen years old, and my father chased me around the house with a knife. I ran outside and he came after me. I ran back inside, and he finally put the knife down. But afterwards, I called the police. I’ve written before about what happened when the police came- how I smoked a cigarette with the cop who drove me to the station; how that cop later told me that my father being Arab would be a problem. I understood that this meant it would be a problem for my mother, and for me. I dropped the charges against him a few weeks later. But that didn’t change that I had been very afraid of my father and very afraid of that knife.

They Found Love, Then They Found Gender (Francesca Mari, Matter, October 2015)

And to round out this reading list, I have for you a beautiful love story. Not traditional, definitely fluid, but more romantic than most of the other narratives out there. Boy, born biologically female, meets girl, born biologically male. It’s love at first sight. They throw caution to the wind to be together in the most honest way they can — genderqueer, fluid, trans, and finally, the first queer couple legally married in the state of Texas. Grab your tissues for this one. (And for you journalism nerds out there, enjoy a conversation in the comments about the editorial choices in names and pronouns as one character, Johnny, transitions over the course of the piece.) 

Now that there is marriage equality, they want to get married again, with a license that better reflects who they are — not husband and wife — but partner and partner. “When you give sexual consent, you cannot give a blanket consent at the beginning of an evening or for the rest of your life,” Johnny explains. “And we feel the same way about marriage.” So they continue to propose to one another nearly every day. Once Johnny fingered the question into the soot on Ashley’s back windshield. Just last month, Johnny wrote, “Will you marry me?” “Yes” and “No” in backwards cursive in different places on their body so that Ashley could snuggle up to her answer, letting it legibly transfer onto her skin. They write it in each other’s notebooks and songbooks to discover who knows how long later. With each proposal, they affirm their love and devotion to their partner in their current identity. For they know more than anyone else how fluid one’s identity can be.

***

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: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

After WWII, Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s grandmother foraged and grew whatever food she could to feed her young daughter, Kazuko. Kazuko lived and learned to forage to survive, too. After she moved to the US, food forged a similar bond with her daughter, Marie Mutsuki. As Marie Mutsuki Mockett suggests in an essay for Elle, preparing food for other people nourishes bonds as well as the body, and these connections endure for generations. “Unlike so much in our lives that’s now transactional,” Mockett writes, “the making of food is elemental. It makes the cells that constitute the body and keep us clinging to life. I wonder how many problems in the world can be attributed to this lack of understanding: To make food for others from start to finish is to follow through in our commitment to each other.” Now the pandemic has shut Mockett’s mother’s facility off to visitors, and cut off her deliveries of food, she assesses how to live without shared meals and the role they have played in their lives.

When I was 19, I had pneumonia and was hospitalized for a week. While my fever raged and the antibiotics fought to clear my lungs, I refused to eat. The spaghetti and lasagna cooked up by the hospital kitchen turned my stomach. All I wanted was rice and seaweed: Japanese soul food.

After the final fever broke, my mother arrived with three plastic containers. One had rice. Another held pickled sour plums she had made with fruit grown in her garden. A third held ground beef carefully seasoned. “You’ll get better now,” she grinned as she fed me by hand. And I did. My body reconstituted itself out of her nourishment. Even now, when I am sick, I yearn for those flavors.

Back at the nursing home, before the world shut down to combat a pandemic, the social worker talked to us about how we might plan for my mother’s return home: “You’ll need to either use an assisted living facility, or hire care,” she said to my mother, “That way, you can keep your relationship with your daughter as mother and daughter.” This is what people in the medical field tell the elderly and the dying. It’s a way of suggesting that our bonds with our loved ones should remain purely emotional, as though two people can distill the most important aspects of how they interact, the way cream is spooned out from milk, and leave the rest of the work for others to do. But while it’s one thing to accept help with incontinence, bathing, and medication, I stumble over the idea of letting someone else decide what my mother will eat.

Read the story

This week, we’re sharing stories from Emily Bazelon, Alex Ronan, Justine Harman, Emily Harnett, and Sam Leith.

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1. Shadow of a Doubt

Emily Bazelon | The New York Times Magazine | January 16, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)

In 2011, Michael Shannon was wrongly convicted of murder, even though two jurors voted to acquit him—a result of a Louisiana law rooted in discrimination. For defendants like Shannon and the holdout jurors who believed in their innocence, it has left a bitter legacy.

2. Her Sorority Sisters Suspected She Was Pregnant. What Did Emile Weaver Know?

Alex Ronan | Elle | January 16, 2020 | 36 minutes (9,000 words)

In April 2015, Emile Weaver gave birth alone in the bathroom of her sorority house at a small liberal arts university in Ohio. Sorority sisters who’d suspected the pregnancy for months discovered her baby that night in the garbage, dead. Alex Ronan investigates what happened to Weaver, the campus response to rumors and confirmation of Weaver’s pregnancy, and how her community reckoned with questions of blame and responsibility before and after the baby’s discovery.

Content warning: This story covers neonaticide, “when a parent kills his or her baby in the 24-hour window after birth.”

3. The Baron of Botox Is Gone, But His Face Lives On

Justine Harman | GEN | January 14, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,970 words)

A profile of late celebrity face master Dr. Fredric Brandt, who revolutionized cosmetic dermatology with the use of Botox and fillers, before dying by suicide in 2015.

4. Smoke from Underground

Emily Harnett | The Baffler | January 7, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,875 words)

“But the fire will outlive them all, and me. It will outlive my grandchildren and perhaps the human species. It has been burning for so long that it’s possible to forget that it started at the town dump. Centralia is the site of a disaster that sounds too stupid to be real, a trash fire that will inherit the earth.”

5. William Gibson: ‘I was losing a sense of how weird the real world was’

Sam Leith | The Guardian | January 11, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,120 words)

William Gibson talks to Sam Leith at the Guardian about how he got into writing science fiction, how his breakout novel Neuromancer was possible because he knew nothing about computers, the subtle, yet striking similarities that make London and Toyko great settings for his work, and the fact that even in science fiction, you’re lost without your phone charger.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Brittany Packnett, Rahima Nasa, Jordan Smith, Scott Korb, and Chris Heath.

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1. You Owe Me An Apology

Brittany Packnett | Elle | September 12, 2018 | 6 minutes (1,604 words)

“I’m a black woman in America. I have been owed plenty of apologies. I just never believed I deserved to demand one.”

2. The Imam’s Widow

Rahima Nasa | ProPublica | September 4, 2018 | 12 minutes (3,187 words)

As part of ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate” project, Rahima Nasa profiles the wife of a Queens imam who was murdered in 2016. Although there appeared to be no other possible motive, prosecutors failed to try the case as the hate crime it likely was.

3. What Happened at the Lake

Jordan Smith | The Intercept | September 8, 2018 | 41 minutes (10,312 words)

Wendell Lindsey is serving life prison for murdering his daughter. Maybe he did, or maybe he’s also a victim — of junk science, personal vendettas, weak investigation, and bad attorneys.

4. Culture Shock

Scott Korb | Oxford American | September 4, 2018 | 17 minutes (4,278 words)

Scott Korb reflects on his white privilege, and the state of Florida and its racist history — a state in which his life was irrevocably changed at age 5, when his father was killed by a drunk driver in May, 1982.

5. The Untold Stories of Paul McCartney

Chris Heath | GQ | September 11, 2018 | 58 minutes (14,5480 words)

Paul McCartney, the type of man who washes out his one pair of socks after the gig, is polite, profanity-averse, and still a prolific performer. He talks to Chris Heath about getting mugged with Linda while recording Band on the Run in Nigeria, killing frogs on his childhood estate to “toughen himself up,” and collaborating with Kanye West.

It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that my parents admitted I was a decidedly terrible five-year-old ballerina. It was no great blow to learn I sucked at something I hadn’t attempted in two decades; as I grew older, I was burned by athletic endeavors generally and found my confidence in books and academic success instead. But if my loving parents observed my lack of grace onstage, that meant my teacher, my classmates, and the entire audience at our ballet recital definitely noticed, and that stung a bit.

There’s something enticing about the rigorous structure of the ballet world, the gamble of hard work paying off. With ballet, you have an identity, inside jokes, long hours, and people who get you — camaraderie. I craved that sense of belonging, from the first day of kindergarten through my failed sorority rushes in college. It’s the seduction of security, of always having someone to sit with, always having someplace to be. I wanted to rest in the knowledge that I was accepted and validated, especially by talented women.

These days, I love absorbing ballet via pop culture and the occasional live performance. I obsessed over Dance Academy on Netflix, and Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild is one of my all-time favorite books. If I could pick one magic power, forget flight or invisibility — I’d choose dance.

1. “The Afterlife of a Ballerina.” (Alice Robb, Elle, October 2016)

Alice Robb’s profile of Alexandra Ansanelli chronicles her meteoric rise onstage and offers a fascinating inside look at how her personality and psyche were shaped by her rigorous and often isolating training. From online dating to her day job, Ansanelli shares how she struggled to assimilate into civilian life after retiring from ballet at age 28.

2. “Talent Isn’t Enough When You’re a Fat Ballerina.” (Olivia Campbell, Catapult, May 2018)

I know how tough it is to live with regret, how easy it is to get sucked into the “what if” depression spiral. Olivia Campbell’s “what ifs” swirl around her past as a “semi-professional dancer” and which bodies are deemed acceptable and beautiful in ballet. Hers wasn’t.

3. “The Ballerina Who Accused Her Instructor of Sexual Assault.” (Jessica Luther, BuzzFeed News, December 2016)

Over a year before #MeToo permeated the international conversation, journalist Jessica Luther reported on ballerina Lissa Curtis’ exceedingly brave decision to hold her rapist — her former ballet instructor — accountable in court. I was moved by Curtis’ openness in discussing her PTSD and her healing process, especially her changing relationship to dance.

4. “Raising a Ballerina Will Cost You $100,000.” (Abby Abrams, FiveThirtyEight, August 2015)

Whew, the pointe shoes ALONE. $29,000?!

This assumes the student starts wearing pointe shoes in sixth grade — around the time that most ballet schools allow students to try them out — and buys shoes priced at about $80 per pair.⁴ My estimate assumes that a sixth-grader goes through a pair of shoes every three months. By seventh grade, she needs a new pair of pointe shoes after one month; by ninth grade that need increases to one each week; and by the time she is in 10th grade, I’ve accounted for her buying two pairs per week. That might sound like a lot of shoes, but dancers have assured me that these high numbers are about right.

On a more hopeful note, this piece offers insight into programs like Dance Theatre of Harlem and Project Plié make ballet more accessible to students from diverse backgrounds.

5. “Body on Fire.” (Amy Jo Burns, Tin House, November 2017)

As I read “Rust Belt ballerina” Amy Jo Burns’ essay, I felt the tug of something familiar. I wracked my brain, then I remembered: I’d encountered her writing in Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, an anthology edited by Roxane Gay. Though I read several pieces from Not That Bad during a quiet half-hour at work, Burns’ stuck with me especially; I’d like to write like her one day. I admired her clear-eyed, unsparing observations of how her attacker received few consequences and how her fellow survivors were vilified by their small town. In “Body on Fire,” Burns intersperses her own relationship to ballet with a powerful meditation on the life, art, and sexist biographing of Emma Livry, a young French ballerina who died after suffering burns from the stage’s gaslights.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lili Loofbourow, Rachel Monroe, Benjamin Weiser, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and Megan Greenwell.

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1. The Male Glance

Lili Loofbourow | Virginia Quarterly Review | March 5, 2018 | 23 minutes (5,980 words)

The male glance is what we do to art by women: it’s a look that is quick, it judges, it supposes, and it moves on. It’s what makes art by men serious, and art by women dismissive. “We’ve been hemorrhaging great work for decades,” writes Lili Loofbourow, “partly because we were so bad at seeing it.”

2. The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t

Rachel Monroe | The Atlantic | March 5, 2018 | 27 minutes (6,786 words)

Con man Derek Alldred met women on a dating site and swindled them out of more than a million dollars. The women found that there was little law enforcement could do to help them, so they banded together to take him down.

3. A ‘Bright Light,’ Dimmed in the Shadows of Homelessness

Benjamin Weiser | The New York Times | March 3, 2018 | 31 minutes (7,864 words)

Nakesha Williams’ promising life was derailed by mental illness. She resisted help from friends, family members, and social workers and died on the street.

4. The Costume Immigrants Wear

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio | Elle | March 7, 2018 | 5 minutes (1,400 words)

A DREAMer discusses her daily beauty and fashion routine: the clothes she wears to the airport in case she gets screened, the nail polish she wears with a short manicure in case she’s fingerprinted, the waterproof mascara she uses in case she cries.

5. Ball Breakers

Megan Greenwell | Topic | March 1, 2018 | 12 minutes (3,166 words)

Despite the fact that women have been playing billiards since it became a hobby for European royals in the 15th century, they still have to endure cheap shots from men who can’t resist critiquing their game.