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Poetry as a salve. What grief can teach. Dinner and theatrics in Branson, Missouri. The pleasures of learning a musical instrument and a behind-the-scenes look at The Fugitive.

1. Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words

Writer Kamran Javadizadeh’s sister, Bita, died a slow, agonizing death from cancer. Here, he writes about losing her through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from her reading of it in college; a Hafez verse that Bita herself texted to him one day. I adored this essay, a mix of personal history and literary analysis, and I also found it achingly familiar. Exactly 17 years ago this week, when I witnessed the sudden death of someone I loved, I was thrust into a private hell, a netherworld of despair. I struggled to connect with friends and family, and they with me. It was like I was trapped underwater, screaming, and they were looking down at me, unable to hear, much less help. Poetry, though, could breach the surface, offering me what I so desperately needed: a sense of empathy. I analyzed poems about death and mourning, pondering the words, meaning, and mechanics that made me feel the verses so deeply. Poems, as Javadizadeh reminds us in his essay about Bita, can be portals—to other people, to other planes, and even to ourselves. —SD

2. Mount Fear Diary

Joshua Hunt | The Believer | July 26, 2023 | 7,388 words

Struggling with how to grieve his Uncle Bill while on assignment in Japan, Joshua Hunt travels to Mount Fear, a place where the human and spirit world meet and one can go to console, pacify, and communicate with the dead. On the journey, Hunt begins to process his deep love and respect for the man who helped him navigate the trauma of his extended Tlingit family, a family Hunt distanced himself from while pursuing his writing career. Hunt’s faith and conviction in working through loss in words gives this piece life. He gives shape to the amorphous, ethereal, ever-shifting complexity of grief and grasps what it offers him: A chance to embrace his extended family in a new way. “Damp with sweat and rain, I wondered if the bus passengers could perceive the spirit walking with me,” he writes. “It had been there for eighty-five days, mute, but so real to me that I addressed it aloud. So real to me that the following week, while caught in a sudden downpour on the streets of Tokyo, I would burst into tears and thank it for the last gift it gave me: a sorrow deep enough to draw me back for the next funeral, and the next birthday, and all those other occasions when being together is more important than being free from pain.” At its core, this beautiful essay is not just about what grief takes, but what more importantly, what it can give. —KS

3. Dinner Theater and Loathing in Baptist Vegas

Amy McCarthy | Eater | August 2, 2023 | 3,258 words

I had never heard of Branson, Missouri, but after Amy McCarthy describes it as “either the Live Music Capital of the World or Baptist Vegas,” I wanted to know all about it. In Branson, “dinner theater” thrives, a phrase that for me conjures up shoveling down pasta at 5 p.m. before running to catch a show. But not in Branson. In Branson, show tunes come alongside your carbonara. McCarthy throws herself into this world, slurping soup in a 35,000-square-foot arena while watching “Dolly Parton’s Stampede,” complete with flashy costumes adorned with rhinestones, beautiful horses, and some problematic depictions of Native Americans. McCarthy is brilliant at conjuring the sights (and smells) that confront her, and I enjoyed her tepid reviews of the shows and food (particularly a desert that tasted “like the inside of a refrigerator”). But the essay really shines by analyzing what Branson actually is. Selling itself as a place for wholesome entertainment, this pretense of a “white, Christian, conservative utopia” is as thin as the cheerful veneer of the serving staff. Underneath Branson is a “huckster’s paradise” that sells God, guns, and country. I have now heard of Branson, but I don’t think I’ll go. —CW

4. What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

Jaron Lanier | The New Yorker | July 22, 2023 | 3,794 words

In the opening of this essay, Jaron Laniers sketches a scene of deep intimacy: His mother teaching him to play piano with her hands above his on the keys. I can imagine the touch of her hands on his, the pure and clear tones of the piano, and the joy that these moments of closeness, learning, and beauty must have brought him as a child before she was taken from him, killed in a car accident. These experiences formed a man with an insatiable appetite for musical instruments and the study of music itself, enjoyed in brief respites from other tasks throughout his day. “Holding an oud is a little like holding a baby,” he writes. “While cradling an infant, I feel pretensions drop away: here is the only future we truly have—a sacred moment. Playing the oud, I am exposed. The instrument is confessional to me.” As Lanier surveys his large instrument collection, he delights in the singular joy each invokes, recalling the muscles involved and the physical sensations that translate into their individual music. What I loved most about this piece is how Lanier thrills at moments of discovery in learning to make sounds, unshackled from expectation. “When I played my ‘U’/’V”’ xiao for the first time, I made the futile blowing sound familiar to beginning flutists,” he writes. “Eventually, though, I managed a few weird, false notes. I was surprised but also delighted. Some of my favorite moments in musical life come when I can’t yet play an instrument. It’s in the fleeting period of playing without skill that you can hear sounds beyond imagination.” You need not be a musician or rare instrument aficionado to love this story. Your heart will tell you it’s a piece that hits all the right notes. —KS

5. ‘I Didn’t Kill My Wife!’ — An Oral History of ‘The Fugitive’

Andy Greene | Rolling Stone | July 29, 2023 | 12,243 words

If you’ve watched The Fugitive more times than you can count—and let’s face it, you have—you probably think of the 1993 movie as a perfectly crafted thriller. Not so much, it turns out! As Andy Greene’s oral history makes clear, the classic result belies the seat-of-the-pants execution. A star who was convinced the film would tank his career. A screenplay that never got finished. An ensemble actor who constantly found ways to maximize his screen time. A cast member who fell out after most of the movie had already been shot (and, consequently, a janky fake beard). A climax that was plotted on set. Dialogue that, seemingly more often than not, came straight from the ever-fizzing brain of Tommy Lee Jones. As much as I usually despise the word, this story officially qualifies as “rollicking.” Harrison Ford may not have participated, but Greene’s reporting ensures that his presence is still felt, whether laughing over the movie’s impending dud status or inviting Sela Ward to improv their scenes together on the fly. At this rate, every movie is going to get an oral history on every major anniversary, and I regret to inform you that next year marks 30 years since Ernest Goes to School and 3 Ninjas Kick Back. Then again, as long as those inevitable pieces aim to replicate the good vibes and rich details of this one, there’s no such thing as too many. —PR

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Here’s the piece our readers could not resist this week:

I was meant to visit him three weeks after he left that message, but on the morning of my flight to Juneau, Alaska, I tested positive for COVID-19. I’d contracted the virus while working on a story in New Mexico—my first profile for the magazine I hoped to impress by flying halfway around the world to interview a novelist. While listening to old messages from my uncle, I dwelled bitterly on two unfulfilled promises I had made when calling to say I couldn’t make it home in January: the first was that I would get to Alaska and see him again soon; the second was that he was going to love the profile I had been working on in New Mexico. It ended up being published ten days after he died.

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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

In the time of COVID, the right to invite death into your home and to spread it around to others became, somehow, the context of a presidential election. As far as I can tell, Americans love killing one another, and always have, but serial killers make us look a little better. The United States was built on the bones and blood of endless murder, of slavery, and of genocide; crucially, the FBI’s current classification of a serial killer stipulates “unlawful” killings, because otherwise, a lot of cops and federal agents would be serial killers too.

Before it hunted serial killers, the FBI busied itself with projects like trying to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into suicide, and to call that anything other than attempted murder seems pretty academic; to look at the FBI’s collaboration with the Chicago Police Department in the killing of Fred Hampton and call it anything other than murder would just be a lie. That I grew up thinking of the FBI as the good guys who caught serial killers, rather than as the organization that tried to stamp out the civil rights movement, is the result of many things, the limits of my own education chief among them. But serial killers — both the ones who were caught and the theoretical ones we could imagine were still out there — had a lot to offer the FBI, and the American legal system as a whole. David Schmid writes in Natural Born Celebrities that the serial killer is “the figure that, in a sense, [was] the FBI’s greatest ally.” A champion needs a monster to fight.

These are real crimes, and so are the people who commit them; what I wonder is why we focus so relentlessly on just one corner of the picture, as awful as it may be. In America, the most common cause of death for pregnant women is homicide. Isn’t this just as horrifying? Isn’t it worse? But to develop a cultural fixation on men who kill their pregnant partners is to acknowledge a problem bigger than a few inhuman specimens, born beyond redemption. It is to acknowledge that serial killers terrify us not because they are so different from normal people, but because they are so similar to normal men. They exonerate “normal” American violence because they will always be worse. They drive women back in from the open road and into the arms of a more probable killer.

In our last Top Five of the year, we are bringing you some fantastic stories from a broad range of publications. We begin with a powerful piece on gun violence, written by a reporter who embeds herself for a year in a high school. We then go back in time to the heady days of Silicon Valley in the 90s, before taking a look at the increasingly disturbing abilities of AI. A delve into the world of audiophiles follows before we finish on a seasonal note, with a lovely essay on the Christmas tree trade. Enjoy reading and happy holidays!

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The Safest Place

Noelle Crombie | The Oregonian | December 11, 2022 | 3,274 words

If you need a reminder of why we need strong local newsrooms, look no further than this powerful project. Reporter Noelle Crombie spent a year at Rosemary Anderson, an alternative high school in Rockwood, a neighborhood in Gresham, Oregon, buffeted by racism, poverty, and COVID-19. Her goal: to document the impact of skyrocketing gun violence on the students, teachers, and support staff. The result is a four-part series, of which this article, about the death of student Dante McFallo, is the first entry. “Five students, including Dante, have died in shootings in the past 2½ years,” Crombie writes. “Another student died in a stabbing and two died in car wrecks. All were young men of color, just 18 or 19. Gunfire wounded at least two other Rosemary Anderson students; both survived.” Make sure to spend time with the photos and videos that accompany the story. —SD

Aristocrat Inc.

Natalie So | The Believer | December 9, 2022 | 12,558 words

Computer chips were “the dope of the ’90s.” And during those years, Silicon Valley, changing dramatically from the personal computing boom, was the Wild West. In this splendid piece for The Believer, Natalie So takes us back to a dark, frenzied time in the Bay Area’s history: when computer-related crime was on the rise, and a new generation of organized crime, run by Asian gangs as part of a large-scale heroin operation, targeted businesses for hardware, especially microchips. But what makes this story special is So’s exploration of her family’s — and particularly her mother’s — place within ’90s Silicon Valley. She traces her parents’ trajectories as immigrants working in technology in the Bay Area before the dot-com boom. As she unearths the past, she is in awe of her mother: street-smart, fearless, and an anomaly in a culture that portrayed Asian American women as docile and passive. In a story that has it all — from true crime to history to memoir — So uncovers a chapter of the computer industry’s past that’s been largely forgotten. “Who writes the Silicon Valley story?” asks So. “And who is excluded from it?” This brings to life a seminal period in the Bay Area’s tech industry, but even more, it’s an epic piece of family history. —CLR

Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?

Keith Holyoak | MIT Press Reader | December 2, 2022 | 3,335 words

Artificial intelligence has fascinated me ever since 2017, when someone told me (in all seriousness!) that I’d be replaced by it within the decade, my editorial experience and skill first duplicated then surpassed by a machine that eats knowledge for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 24/7, 365. Happily, this hasn’t happened — yet — but as Keith Holyoak says in this piece adapted from his book The Spider’s Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry, computers have long surpassed our ability to do math calculations. Could artificial intelligence eventually eclipse our creative abilities when it comes to language? Holyoak suggests perhaps not: “Though I remain officially agnostic, for the purpose of the specific question that presently concerns us — can AI write authentic poetry? — the preponderance of evidence leads me to answer “no.” AI has no apparent path to inner experience, which I (and many others) take to be the ultimate source of authentic poetry. A major corollary of this conclusion deserves to be stated: Inner experience can’t be defined as a computational process.” —KS

Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon

Sasha Frere-Jones | Harper’s | November 9, 2022 | 5,206 words

Perfection is a lie, but try telling that to someone with a newfound hobby. The apparatus of want — single-topic Instagram accounts, subreddits, fan forums — can turn a passing interest into an all-consuming obsession with the “endgame,” a nirvana in which all dreams are realized. For some, it’s mechanical keyboards. For others, it’s quilting. For the community that Sasha Frere-Jones explores in this fascinating piece, it’s audiophiles. (Or the “triode horn mafia,” as a subset of them is known.) But while there’s plenty of subculture gawking to be done here, what with the six-figure speaker prices and jargon-laden schisms, Frere-Jones threads the piece with an emotional honesty that turns it into something special. He entered this world because he loves music, and he wanted to hear the music he loves as truly as he could. Those moments where he manages to do just that, and to render the experience with the clarity that’s given him a long career as a music critic, are the ones that turn this piece into something else entirely. Discount the audiophiles all you want. But if this piece doesn’t make you want to throw your favorite piece of vinyl on a turntable and throw your smartphone into the sea, then I don’t know what to tell you. —PR

Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade

Owen Long | Curbed in partnership with Epic Magazine | December 7, 2022 | 6,374 words

Who knew the business of Christmas trees could be completely wild? Just read Owen Long’s entertaining story about the Christmas tree industry in New York City. Here, there are no quaint family tree farms or small neighborhood pop-ups — this ruthless industry is run by a few eccentric businessmen, called “tree men,” who spend most of the year preparing for the holiday season. There’s George Nash, an old hippie who sells trees to much of Harlem; Kevin Hammer, known as the “Keyser Söze of Christmas” and the man responsible for shaping NYC’s industry into what it is today; and Greg Walsh, who is Long’s boss (and looks exactly like Santa Claus). I don’t want to say too much — just sit down with a hot drink and dive into this festive and fascinating piece. There are some pretty hilarious lines, so be careful not to spit out your eggnog. —CLR

Not until twenty years later would I learn just how frequently these robberies were taking place. Even though millions of dollars’ worth of computer chips were stolen, this era of Silicon Valley would largely be forgotten. Computer hardware would eventually give way to the dot-com bubble, after which social media, the cloud, big data, and later, Bitcoin, NFTs, and other increasingly intangible technologies would come to the fore. But for a time, the boom of personal computing transformed Silicon Valley into the Wild West, a new frontier that drew every kind of speculator, immigrant, entrepreneur, and bandit, all lured by the possibilities of riches, success, and the promise of a new life. The Silicon Valley of the ’90s was in many ways an expression of the quintessential American story, but an unexpected one: one that involved organized crime, narcotics trafficking, confidential informants, and Asian gangs. It is also part of my family history. Grace, as it turns out, is my aunt. And the company being robbed? It was my mother’s.

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By Pardeep Toor 

English was the first language my newborn heard after his birth in October 2021, probably something medical the midwife said, or congratulations from a nearby nurse. My wife and I were speechless, focusing only on our son’s blue skin, piercing screams, and block of black hair that overwhelmingly confirmed he was indeed ours.

As first-time parents, our son instantly became the exclusive lens through which we viewed our world. I should’ve gotten new windshield wipers to make sure we reached home safely. Next time, I will take my elevated bilirubin levels seriously. My wife swore to get the spot on her retina checked again. She couldn’t remember the last time we’d dusted underneath our bed. We’d prepared nine months for this shift, but it still shook us. Our lives were only necessary to sustain his life.

We couldn’t stay speechless for long. The nurses eventually checked on us less frequently. Poking and prodding clinicians dissipated, leaving us with the humming overhead tube lights and beeping in the hallway. It was our turn to talk to our son, but what would we say? 

English wasn’t the first language for either of us. My wife is a native Spanish speaker and I exclusively spoke Punjabi for the first six years of my life. We both acquired English through our respective educations in Colombia and Canada. We promised to give our son both our languages, despite failing to acquire them from each other. 

English is our essential language, a primary means of communication that allows us to thrive as a couple, while simultaneously pulling us away from our native languages and cultures. Each spoken syllable of English is a leap away from our rolling “Rs” in Punjabi and Spanish. I’m not demonizing English, rather recognizing the challenge of its dominance in our lives. 

In the past four months, we’ve obsessed over speaking our respective languages to our son. It’s turned into a game: My wife will say something to him in Spanish, I’ll ask what she said, she tells me in English, and then I translate it into Punjabi and say it louder and faster back to our son as if his comprehension is a race we’re each trying to win. It’s partly in fun — but also stems from a sincere apprehension. We’re trying to pass down our languages while preserving them in our own lives.   

Regardless of our efforts, English will inevitably become the common language that my wife and I share with our son. It’s the only way we can talk to him without isolating each other. In doing so I’m afraid I’ll continue to lose my native Punjabi and our son will forever lose something he could have had. 

This struggle isn’t exclusive to our family. The loss of language has been extensively explored in the following essays. 

The Pain of Losing Your First Language (Kristin Wong, Catapult, December 2021) 

This essay outlines the suffering Wong endured since foregoing her native language as a child for the sake of assimilating into America. Wong does a phenomenal job of incorporating linguistic research in her analysis, giving academic weight to her regrets. The balance of personal narrative and analysis of English language adoption and native attrition flows through the essay as studies confirm Wong’s feelings, yet don’t free her from longing for her first language. “I wonder what Cantonese words my brain pushed out when I started speaking mostly English at age six. And is attrition limited to words? What else did I lose to assimilate?”

During her pregnancy, Wong commits to re-learning her native Cantonese so she can pass it on to her child. However, despite her efforts, she feels the impossibility of her task. 

Like learning how to spell only, the more I look at Jyutping, the more the words start to make sense. But part of me knows better. I’ll never speak Cantonese the same way I would have if I’d never stopped speaking it to begin with. Like a phantom limb, the memory of my first language stays with me even with it gone, but that’s all it is: a memory. It occurs to me that trying to relearn this language is the embodiment of my bicultural identity. The American in me is determined to reclaim the Chinese part of myself.

Why Do I Write in My Colonizers’ Language? (Anandi Mishra, Electric Literature, March 2021)

Part of the struggle with English has always been its foreignness. The language either forcefully invaded foreign lands or immigrants willingly chose to move west. Mishra addresses the colonial legacy of English and how that makes her feel “queasy,” while also recognizing the language’s modern dominance in India. 

For my family, friends, relatives, and teachers, English was seen as a language of access. It could land you better jobs, remove limitations, and open up avenues. English speakers were high achievers, often conflated with the colonizers who ruled over us for about 200 years. It was ironic that the language of our colonizers was seen as aspirational, something that could lift us out of the discomfort that our parents’ mid-level jobs put us through. In reading all the subjects at school in English, we were made to understand that English was the language of possibilities. 

Mishra reluctantly accepts the realities of the English language in India and her own life. But acceptance can also be an acknowledgment of adaptation — it’s not one or the other, English or Hindi, but hybridity that can hopefully be respectful to native languages and English’s injection into them. 

Translation as an Arithmetic of Loss (Ingrid Rojas Contreras, The Paris Review, June 2019)

Rojas Contreras opens this essay by acknowledging, “When you live between languages, the conversion of meaning is an arithmetic in loss.” Thoughts generated in one language come out awkwardly in English, or sometimes not at all. This ultimately leads to a feeling of “being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.”

This loss between languages catalyzed Rojas Contreras to write her debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, in English, even though she thought of it in Spanish. She constructed the sentences in Spanish in her mind but then immediately translated them into English on the page. 

Why didn’t you write the novel in Spanish? This is a question I get all the time. Language is one of the things you sacrifice when you migrate. I wanted to be true to the toll of that sacrifice by making visible what exactly was being lost.

My wife loves Rojas Contreras’s writing. She sees both her own Spanish and English in the syntax. It’s how she sees the world, in a constant state of translation from one language to another. By seeing Rojas Contreras’s translated language on the page, my wife sees her worldview being expressed as a reality and feels understood as an immigrant in the United States. 

Teaching Yourself Italian (Jhumpa Lahiri, The New Yorker, November 2015) 

Lahiri, an internationally renowned fiction writer, started writing from scratch in Italian to escape the personal weight of the English language. 

Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who wants to restrain me?

The most obvious answer is the English language. But I think it’s not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolized for me. For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.

Lahiri opted not to re-engage with her native Bengali, which she spoke with an accent and admitted to not knowing how to read or write. She started anew with Italian, placing herself in a linguistic exile, far removed from her familial past in Bengali and professional life in English. Native languages, and the projected cultural expectations that come with them, can be as burdensome as chasing a distorted and romanticized memory or history. Lahiri’s fresh start in Italian vanquishes the obligation of chasing ghosts from her past and allows her to forge a novel identity in a new language. 

Ghosts (Vauhini Vara, The Believer, August 2021)

What happens when all languages fail? When you’re unable to express yourself no matter how many languages you can speak? That’s where the future comes in. Vara, unable to express grief after losing her sister, turned to an algorithm to complete her thoughts. 

I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing. When I carried my computer to bed, my husband muttered noises of disapproval. We both make our livings as writers, and technological capitalism has been exerting a slow suffocation on our craft. A machine capable of doing what we do, at a fraction of the cost, feels like a threat. Yet I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them.

What followed was an experiment in human-computer interactions. Vara feeds words into Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3)  and the remaining text is predicted, with the details Vara provides about her sister determining how the narrative ends — technology offering a borderless universal language with infinite memory.

The nine stories completed by artificial intelligence in this piece are something new, void of human attachment. Culture in an algorithm. Is this how people will one day express themselves and understand their upbringing? Then what remains of the cultural nuances embedded in our native languages? Are one or two or three languages enough for our son? Are they the right languages? What if they all fail him? The fear of losing our language and culture to algorithms and English inspires us to transmit what we have left amidst our loss. 

***

Pardeep Toor‘s writing has appeared in the Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize, Catapult, Electric Literature, Southern Humanities Review, Midwest Review, and Great River Review.

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. The Radicalization of J.D. Vance

Simon van Zuylen-Wood | The Washington Post Magazine | January 4, 2022 | 6,044 words

Five years ago, J.D. Vance was enjoying the success of his acclaimed 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Today, he’s running for Senate in his home state of Ohio, bankrolled by tech-con icon Peter Thiel, and competing with Ted Cruz to tweet the most abrasive MAGA platitudes. How we ended up here isn’t the primary goal of van Zuylen-Wood’s intellectually driven feature, though; instead, it’s an attempt to answer the question of where “here” actually is. Watching Vance preen for prospective voters and explain his equivocations is maddening, sure, but it allows van Zuylen-Wood to tease apart the philosophical paradox at the heart of Vance’s attempted makeover. “Vance’s media strategy seems to be that by playing Don Jr. on the Internet, he can push for more substantive populism in real life,” he writes. “The success of that tactic may depend on how far removed he truly seems from the Brookings Institution-to-Netflix pipeline he was riding until recently.” Inside (beltway) baseball? Perhaps. A crucial preview of the next few years of so-called culture wars? Definitely. Don’t say you weren’t warned. —PR

2. This Isn’t the California I Married

Elizabeth Weil | The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica | January 3, 2022 | 6,115 words

I recently drove up the Pacific Coast, from Venice Beach to the Bay Area. It took 10 hours to get home, but it didn’t feel long, even with a 3-year-old in the back seat. We drove up Malibu’s coast in relentless rain before dawn, watched the sun rise in Santa Barbara, spotted rainbows against green hills near San Luis Obispo, and felt the sun on our faces as we reached San Jose. But for every beautiful bit of coastline and landscape I saw out of the window that day were sights I did not see, nor wanted to think about: the drought-stricken reservoirs, the scorched old-growth forests, the lands scarred by the one-two punch of fire and torrential rain. Yet, despite California’s climate crisis, there’s still no place in the U.S. I’d rather live. I was reminded of this road trip as I read Elizabeth Weil’s poignant, eye-opening piece on the state’s wildfire problem, and what it means to live in California now. “Did choosing to stay here mean a life defined by worry, vigilance and loss?” she asks. Weil also speaks with climate futurist Alex Steffen, who explains we’re living in trans-apocalyptic times: “We have this idea that the world is either normal and in continuity with what we’ve expected, or it’s the apocalypse, it’s the end of everything — and neither are true.” Yes, the world’s in bad shape, and loss and grief are inevitable, he tells her, but it still might be possible to build a better future. It’s a bleak but necessary read, and a call for us to wake up, to recognize that the California we once knew is gone, and to face the world as it exists. —CLR

3. How Plastic Liberated and Entombed Us

Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | Dec. 29, 2021 | 5,500 words

To say that we’re losing the war on plastic is to flatter ourselves with a lie. The fact is that we’re not even fighting it. As Jeannette Cooperman details in this lyrical essay, humans are addicted to plastic despite knowing — despite always knowing — that the stuff is dangerous. “Is it self-hatred, to embrace with abandon a substance you know to be cheap, tacky, often garish, and entirely synthetic?” Cooperman asks. “A substance that, when made into a bag, had to be imprinted with warnings, lest a child think it a toy and suffocate?” Weaving history and philosophy, poetry and science, Cooperman offers insight into how and why we got to this point. Her essay is also an elegy for the natural world and our appreciation of it. “We try so hard to fake beauty, just so it will last longer,” she writes. “We miss nature’s point.” It’s hard to read this piece without looking up, taking stock, and wishing for a war. —SD

4. The Long Afterlife of a Terrible Crime

Ryan Katz | The New Yorker | January 3rd, 2022 | 4058 words

Regina Alexander’s mother Elizabeth was murdered in 1971 by the McCrary family, just two months after Regina was born. The McCrarys were ramblers, linked to the murders of at least 10 other women. Decades later, when Regina comments on a blog post about the killings, she unwittingly starts a conversation among the friends and families of the victims, one that would eventually include replies from ensuing generations of the McCrary family. Ryan Katz’s New Yorker story examines the horrific, insidious toll that violent crime exacts on the follow-on generations of both killer and victim, those who, because of their family ties, are forced to pay for the crimes for the rest of their lives. —KS

5. Fall Risk

Madeleine Watts | The Believer | March 25, 2020 | 5746 words

Madeleine Watts’ essay was published in March 2020, but the dis-ease she describes from unexplained fainting episodes is very relatable as the pandemic endures. As she examines her life and experiences leading up to and after being declared “weak with no known cause,” Watts suggests that “Our bodies are the containers for our thoughts…” It’s only by considering life stresses in hindsight (terminal family illnesses, immigration concerns, and fear for her own health) that it becomes easy to see why her body would suddenly shut down from sheer overload: “…the body sometimes articulates things that the mind cannot.” —KS

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. They Went to Bible College to Deepen Their Faith. Then They Were Assaulted—and Blamed for It.

Becca Andrews | Mother Jones | September 30, 2021 | 8,500 words

“But you drank the alcohol, right?” he asked. “What did you do to deserve to be hit?” That’s what Dean Timothy Arens of Moody Bible Institute asked student Anna Heyward when she described abuse, including rape, perpetrated by her boyfriend, who was also a student. That’s just the tip of the iceberg: Becca Andrews’ investigation into the impact of “purity culture” on MBI’s response to reports of sexual abuse and harassment on campus is deep and far-reaching. It’s enough to make your blood boil. Andrews exposes a robust culture of blaming victims and side-stepping accountability, all in the name of God. She describes the weakening of Title IX protections at religious institutions under Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, which makes future Anna Heywards more vulnerable to judgment, humiliation, or worse at MBI, Liberty University, and other evangelical colleges. “All the women I spoke to who were survivors of sexual violence at Moody say they experienced … difficulty in finding the language to express what had happened, because it was impossible to see beyond the constraints imposed by Moody’s specific interpretation of Christianity,” Andrews writes. “It can be hard to recognize harassment when it is at the hands of a brother or a sister in Christ.” —SD

2. Reporter’s Diary: Finding Forgiveness in Burundi’s Mass Graves

Désiré Nimubona | The New Humanitarian | September 14, 2021 | 3,921

I live in Canada, and Thursday September 30th marked our first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a new statutory holiday introduced to reflect on Canada’s history of abuse against Indigenous people — made particularly poignant by the recent discoveries of mass grave sites at former residential schools. Sadly, Canada’s troubled history is far from unique and this piece is about a small and often overlooked African country called Burundi — a place only just starting to peer down dark roads with its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Désiré Nimubona, a new writer to Longreads, spent 2020 following this Commission as they explored atrocities which started in the 19th century, when Burundi was first colonized by a European power, to 2008. It’s not comfortable reading. Nimubona literally watches mass graves being uncovered, with search teams holding up “belts, shoes, clothes, and other items pulled from the ground in the hope that residents would recognize who they belonged to.” In 1972, somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Hutus were killed in Burundi. Nimubona was born six years after this bloodshed, but his life was shaped by it, displayed in the matter-of-fact way he tells us that in 1996, Tutsi soldiers made him and some friends lie in front of an armored truck: his friends were crushed to death. Still, amazingly, Nimubona does not seek pity in this essay, nor retribution. Rather, he finds hope in seeing Hutus and Tutsis uniting to inform the Commission. Where possible truth and reconciliation is, after all, about healing. —CW

3. I Had a Chance to Travel Anywhere. Why Did I Pick Spokane?

Jon Mooallem | The New York Times Magazine | September 21, 2021 | 5,138 words

I’ve never been to (or have any interest in visiting) Spokane, Washington. I’m not into minor-league baseball, either. So I read Seattle writer Jon Mooallem’s essay with no expectations, yet was surprised to come out the other side with a slight ache in my heart. On his first real trip after 17 months inside a pandemic bubble with his wife and two young daughters, Mooallem visits and experiences Spokane — a place he’d been genuinely curious about for years — at a baseball game of the city’s minor-league team, the Spokane Indians. With the Delta variant causing a surge in cases in the city, the idea of sitting in an open-air stadium seemed like “a manageable, belated step into the mid-pandemic lifestyle that people were calling post-pandemic life.” Mooallem’s piece explores the unique history of the team, and its special partnership with the Spokane Tribe of Indians (“we are not their mascot,” says the Spokane Tribal Business Council’s chairwoman). But, even more, it’s an unexpectedly lovely meditation on reentering the world: an anxious parent navigating life with an unvaccinated child; dealing with everyday stressors like wildfire smoke, COVID spikes, and survivor’s guilt; and pushing through pandemic lockdown inertia — which I’m personally trying to overcome. —CLR

4. Crash

Jesse Lee Kercheval | New England Review | June 21, 2021 | 1,925 words

This essay from Jesse Lee Kercheval at New England Review is a piece of writing that does not allow you to look away. Imagine you’re a child, eating deliciously salty, forbidden French fries after a swim at the beach on an idyllic summer day. Suddenly, you’re witnessing a horrific split-second car accident when someone fails to stop at a stop sign. Decades later, as Kercheval recounts this experience, she is unable to recall the most horrifying visual details from the scene, yet she cannot escape the sound. “I remember this. I can close my eyes and feel that metal on metal in my body,” Kercheval writes. The words she chose are simple, but their power teleported me to a car accident I was in in my late teens. The crunch of metal on metal is something I’ll never forget. This piece reminds me that writing has the power to connect us all across time and culture when it comes to what the body remembers from extraordinary experiences. —KS

5. An Interview With Chuck Palahniuk

Kathryn Borel | The Believer | September 27, 2021 | 5,659 words

I may not be a Chuck Palahniuk superfan, but I am 100% a smart-conversation-with-smart-people superfan, so this Believer Q&A had me from moment one. The last few years have been tough on the Choke novelist (and newly minted Substack writer), as they have been on so many of us; in addition to the usual psychic burdens, he went bankrupt after losing millions to an embezzling accountant. But prompted by knowing, empathic questions from Borel, he delves into his own regrets and coping mechanisms — both pre- and post-sobriety — and adds to our ever-accreting sense of a writer who’s as protective as he is prolific. “You know, I will stand on my head and whistle Dixie and do all these crazy things,” he says at once point, “because to me, being a genuine writer means that you’re able to shed all human dignity in a moment. People depend on you to express something that they can’t express. But I don’t want to betray people I love.” The first rule of a great interview is you share that great interview. —PR