Reported essays reflect the great craft involved in blending fact, anecdote, and personal observation to tell a compelling story. These are the pieces we can’t stop thinking about, the ones we will forever recommend to friends, the ones that surprised and delighted us—all drawn from our vast and deep pool of editors’ picks. Enjoy!

The Great Forgetting

Summer Praetorius | Nautilus | December 19, 2022 | 3,975 words

This piece by paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius, which is part memoir and part science writing, was published in mid-December last year in that overlooked period that made it too late to include in our Best of 2022 collection, yet technically ineligible for this one. But I’m making an exception. (As Praetorius notes about the Great Unconformity—the gap of a billion years of Earth’s unrecorded history between 1,600 and 600 million years ago—there’s much to be discovered about seemingly forgotten periods of time.) I’ve read many poignant climate stories on the melting of glaciers and the razing of ancient forests, but I keep returning to this one because of Praetorius’ vast understanding of the Earth’s history across hundreds of millions of years; she simplifies complex concepts about geological amnesia, resilience, and system collapse so they’re more accessible to a general reader. I love the beautiful way she describes the Earth’s memory, recorded in layers of sediment and held within its disappearing ice sheets, which she refers to as “the great brains of our planet.” But she also weaves a deeply personal account of her late brother Jebsen’s mental deterioration after a snowboarding accident, another example of a complex system pushed too far out of equilibrium to recover effectively. This parallel story helps to make the piece relatable on a more intimate scale. Recalling the ride home from the woods when she notices the first signs of Jebsen’s memory loss as he sat in the back seat, she realizes now that he was forever changed from that moment and never recovered. “I fixate on our immobility; on the lack of actions we took to assess the larger damages that may have been hiding beneath that hole in his memory,” she writes. It wasn’t that she and her mother didn’t care about his well-being, but perhaps they didn’t initially believe it was anything serious. As Praetorius shifts between her family’s story and scientific research, you can’t help but ask: How resilient is Earth? Are we seeing and acting on the warning signs? —CLR

The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

So many families, mine and likely yours, have things they just don’t talk about, experiences and events rooted in regret and shame, where everyone concerned wants to forget or remain silent. But does silence bring solace or does it ensure irreparable harm, perhaps greater than the pain of confronting the past? This is just one of the weighty themes Jennifer Senior considers in “The Ones We Sent Away,” a brilliant essay I have not stopped thinking about since reading it in August. At the heart of the piece is Senior’s aunt Adele, who was institutionalized in 1953 at 21 months old. Adele was diagnosed with microcephaly and removed from those who loved her the most in this world on the advice of medical doctors who meant well. This story is chiefly about loss and trauma, primarily the trauma Adele endured while institutionalized and the incalculable loss of not receiving enlightened care. Adele’s family suffered too, deprived of Adele’s lively spirit in their lives. With deep care and nuance, Senior examines the systemic and societal failures that deemed it best to separate Adele from her family. In writing this essay, she looks closely at the decision makers of the past and turns the microscope on herself: as a journalist writing about an aunt unable to give consent, Senior realized she faced an ethical dilemma not unlike the doctors who suggested Adele be institutionalized in 1952. She, like they, meant well. By sharing Adele’s story, Senior wants not just to avoid harm, but to do good, possibly for other families facing similar decisions today, possibly for anyone who sits in silence, afraid to face an unpleasant and painful past. Through Adele’s incredible story, Senior suggests that to do better as humans, we first need to be brave enough to talk about it. —KS

A Good Prospect

Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words

Here’s an endorsement: I am prone to ranting about Teslas not (only) because of the waste of space that is Elon Musk and the shoddy construction of his EVs, but also because of this essay. In March, writer Nick Bowlin attended an annual conference in Toronto, Ontario, where the “institutions that constitute the global metal-mining industry commiserate in the bad times and celebrate the good.” In a perverse twist, Bowlin found that 2023 is a decidedly good time for mining not in spite of climate change, but because of it. A world hungry for electric batteries, solar panels, and other essentials of a decarbonized economy means there is escalating demand for metals, and mining interests are seizing the moment to make over their image—and to make bank. “To stop global warming,” one conference speaker says, “you need us.” But boosting the profits of some of the world’s most notoriously exploitative concerns comes at a terrible cost: to the earth, to mine workers, to the inhabitants of metal-rich land. Bowlin doesn’t suggest that mining can’t be part of green solutions. Rather, his essay brilliantly illuminates the perils of trying to save the world by relying on the blunt tools and maximalist mindset of late-stage capitalism. —SD

The Horrors of Pompeii

Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words

Reported essays cover a broad spectrum, with historical reporting being oft-overlooked. It’s a difficult skill: conjuring events from hundreds—or even thousands—of years ago is no mean feat. But when it works, a history piece is engaging and fascinating reportage. In this essay on ancient Pompeii for Aeon, Guy D. Middleton grabs attention with a piece of graffiti scrawled on the vestibule wall of a well-to-do house owned by two freedmen, the Vettii: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” Explaining how “graffiti . . . comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society, ” Middleton leads us into the bowels of Pompeii to try and discover who Eutychis was. Expect back-stabbing brothels, brutal slavery, and sexual abuse. The meaning of every word of the crude advertisement is examined, along with writings, paintings, and artifacts that add further insight into this grim world. (Particularly revealing is a lead collar inscribed: “This is a cheating whore! Seize her because she escaped from Bulla Regia.”) Through clever tools, rather than dumbing down, Middleton makes history accessible—and Eutychis can call out to us from nearly 2,000 years ago. —CW

In Search of Lost Time

Tom Vanderbilt | Harper’s Magazine | March 20, 2023 | 5,339 words

Despite the fact that I’m one of those clean-but-messy people, I also love precision. Exactitude. The idea of a constant. That spills over into a fascination with measurement in general. It’s not a hobby—I don’t collect rulers or, like, assemble Ikea shelves with a torque wrench—just an abiding curiosity. And it’s one that Tom Vanderbilt seems to share, judging from his quest in Harper’s to find the ground truth of the second. Like so much of his writing, he sets about answering a question (in this case, what drives clock time?) as genially as possible. Characters don’t just talk, they do so “with weary resignation” or “[nodding] excitedly”; they call statistical noise “jiggly wigglies.” That seasoning, Vanderbilt knows, becomes all the more crucial when the rest of the recipe comprises chewy concepts like dematerialization or the ephemeris second. Who wouldn’t get the tiniest thrill knowing that researchers had to travel to France to compare their kilograms to the platinum-iridium cylinder once deemed the “official” kilogram? Who’s not just a little bit awed by the idea that the official second doesn’t actally exist, but is essentially spit out by a nine-billion-step Rube Goldberg machine made of cesium atoms? It’s science writing that reads like a travelog: Look to your left and see the world’s smallest ruler! If you’re going to guide readers through the world of the abstract, you’ve gotta make the concrete part fun. —PR

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Digging into the moral and environmental hazards of a battery-powered future. Reckoning with a family secret. Celebrating Diné cultural traditions. A deeply personal search in Pennsylvania, and Barbie’s complicated relationship with feminism.

1. A Good Prospect

Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words

The mining sector is having a moment. Due to people’s growing—if absurdly belated—concern about climate change, demand for alternative materials that can power the future is skyrocketing. We’re talking lithium, cobalt, and copper, the stuff needed to build electric-vehicle batteries, solar panels, and other items that are likely to be staples of a decarbonized economy. It’s no surprise, then, that mining interests are talking a big game about being on the right side of environmental history. Journalist Nick Bowlin heard it loud and clear while reporting on the world’s largest mining conference, which was held earlier this year in Toronto, Ontario. As Bowlin smartly details, in a story that never once gets boring despite being about—let me repeat—a mining conference, there’s an ugly underbelly to this touting of green bona fides. Extractive industries are notoriously and unrelentingly colonialist, and above all they’re eager for profit. They will strip land, exploit people, and smile as their rampant devastation earns them billions. If the mining sector were really serious about a green future, it would drop its maximalist mindset. Indeed, we all would. “The mining industry,” Bowlin writes, “benefits from the self-satisfied consumerism of the E.V. buyer. For all of its disdain for environmentalists, the industry needs green consumers who seek absolution for their carbon-intensive ways of life. With their complacent inattention to the injustices inflicted by the green economy, these consumers not only fund the industry’s expansion but give it moral cover.”  —SD

2. Emily Strasser Wrestles with a Family Secret

Rachel Priest and Emily Strasser | Bitter Southerner | July 11, 2023 | 3,069 words

At Quaker school, Emily Strasser notes, they weren’t allowed to keep score at recess soccer games because it was considered a form of violence. Imagine learning that for 30 years, your grandfather worked as a chemist at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility that helped make the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Like everything to do with family, it’s complicated. In this nuanced Q&A from Bitter Southerner, Rachel Priest speaks with Strasser about her ten-year search to understand not only more about her grandfather’s work, including why he chose it and the affect it had on him, his family, and his mental health, but most importantly the horrific legacy of the U.S.’ nuclear weapons program. Priest’s tough, necessary questions and Strasser’s thoughtful responses make for reading that transcends the average Q&A. “It started off as a way of thinking about how to be in the world where I came from, my own origin story, and then grew into confronting this vast legacy of nuclear weapons in our country and in the world,” Strasser says. How does one reckon with immeasurable harm, a toll that defies reckoning? What becomes clear is that while the most important questions are often the toughest to answer, Strasser demonstrates that this is the only way we as humans will ever learn to do better in this world. —KS

3. In the Glimmer

Rachel Yoder | Harper’s Magazine | June 20, 2023 | 7,350 words

As Rachel Yoder points out early in this searching, personal piece, there are many names for the phenomenon she’s writing about. “Powwow” and “Braucherei” are simply two of the most common, though “pulling pain” and “natural healing” are also popular. What they all refer to is an Amish folk ritual that Yoder calls “one of the more compelling corners of my Amish and Mennonite heritage.” That heritage, and Yoder’s uneasy relationship with it, propels one of the most beautifully written pieces I’ve read all year. She’s come to Pennsylvania in search of a spell book, but also for answers to the existential aches plaguing her—and, crucially, accompanied by her father, who himself drifted from an Amish upbringing into modernity many years ago. There’s tension everywhere you look, from the father-daughter dynamic to Amish reluctance to Yoder’s halting embrace of the culture that birthed her. There’s also love, particularly between Yoder and her father; his equanimity and humor leavens what might otherwise become sodden, and provides delightful counterpoint to her indelible, rhythmic prose. “It’s comforting to imagine that things go away if you leave them alone long enough,” she writes. They don’t, of course. But in looking for a piece of herself, to use one healer’s phrase, Yoder is kind enough to bring us all along. —PR

4. The Butchering

Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words

Every once in a while, I stumble on an essay that not only teaches me, it feeds me with something good and genuine, and gives me a sense of hope. Jake Skeets’ recent essay for Emergence Magazine was a deeply satisfying journey of cultural discovery as he reflects on butchering a sheep to help celebrate Kinaałda, the Diné puberty ceremony for a young relative. Skeets revels in the cycle of stories and knowledge passed from generation to generation. At points he is a child and a learner, at other times an educator passing on his deep love and respect for animals and the land. His prose is spare as he describes the influence that food and story have had on him in his lifetime, but there is a profound beauty in his minimalism. “Stories have a unique ability to collapse time,” he writes. “Food does, too. Stories move through time differently than we do. They can move between times, slow time, or even stop time. Food operates similarly carrying metaphors, images, and memories.” Skeets’ keen attitude and commitment to educating himself in traditional ways and passing that on to others is like a helping of nutritious comfort food: something to savor and something to celebrate. —KS

5. Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job

Willa Paskin | The New York Times Magazine | July 11, 2023 | 6,671 words

After the barrage of Barbie-related content that has preceded Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming film, I was not sure I was ready for another 6,000 words on the subject. Luckily, I succumbed and read Willa Paskin’s thoughtful discussion with Greta Gerwig on the Barbie film she is bemused she was allowed to make. Paskin gets why she was: “[T]he fizzy marriage of filmmaker and material would break through the cacophony of contemporary life and return a retirement-age hunk of plastic to the zeitgeist.” Smart, Mattel. (And the snippets of the film Paskin describes do sound pretty good.) But what I most enjoyed was the reporting that went beyond the film. Is Barbie a feminist, or really, really not? Why did her creator, Ruth Handler, refuse to allow Barbie to have a child? How did Mattel reinvent Barbie in 2015? Read and find out. As someone who grew up with classic Barbie—the one whose proportions meant she wouldn’t be able to stand up in real life—I was intrigued to learn about her evolution. But as evolved as she may now be, this remains my favorite quote from the piece: “A psychological study found that after playing with Barbies, girls thought themselves less capable of various careers than they did after playing with a control Mrs. Potato Head.” Go, Mrs. Potato Head. —CW

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Even the most optimistic version of the future, involving reduced demand and robust recycling, will still require some mining. What this ought to look like increasingly preoccupies Patrick Donnelly, who works for the Center for Biological Diversity in Nevada. I know Donnelly—as do a lot of other journalists in the West who cover extractive industries—as a ferociously dedicated conservation advocate. A few years ago, Donnelly realized that no one was tracking all of the American lithium projects and decided to do so himself. His map now shows more than 115 potential mines, clustered in his home state. “It’s the biggest mineral rush of our lifetime,” he told me over the phone. 

In an ideal world, Donnelly said, the U.S. government would put a moratorium on speculative claims and instead survey all of the country’s mineral deposits in order to identify the least harmful places to mine. This isn’t happening and won’t anytime soon. In May, the U.S. fast-tracked a manganese and zinc mine in Arizona, the first mining project added to a program designed to expedite the clean-energy transition and other infrastructure developments. But Donnelly also fears that anti-mining sentiment is turning people against electric cars—and against lithium extraction altogether. “There is zero chance we can recycle our way out of the problem,” he said. This is true. There isn’t enough lithium on the market for battery recycling to realistically meet present demand, let alone the expected increase.

“There is an element of the mining resistance movement that opposes not just particular mines but all lithium and all electric vehicles,” Donnelly went on. “Unless we’re talking about deindustrializing society, which I don’t think appeals to most people, we need to be thinking about how and where we’re getting our lithium, and critically examine our own use of these minerals, like the cell phone I’m speaking to you on now, with minerals from South America, where locals say the mines are destroying their environment and community.”

Such are the paradoxes of the globalized green economy, in which blocking a mine in one place means shifting extraction somewhere else. We want to decarbonize, yet our lives require ever-increasing supplies of energy. And so climate-minded consumers and the mining industry are locked in a self-justifying embrace. We buy an E.V. and think we are doing right by those vulnerable to rising temperatures and tides. But in trying to continue consuming as we are used to, buying stuff and zipping down the highway, we have exposed many of those same vulnerable people to another threat—the market’s readiness to kill, poison, and displace them to get minerals and metals. The mining industry, meanwhile, benefits from the self-satisfied consumerism of the E.V. buyer. For all of its disdain for environmentalists, the industry needs green consumers who seek absolution for their carbon-intensive ways of life. With their complacent inattention to the injustices inflicted by the green economy, these consumers not only fund the industry’s expansion but give it moral cover. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

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I don’t love January for the usual reasons: holiday festivities are over, work resumes, and the weather is gray and cold and depressing. In January the year in front of me feels like a void. Confronted with a blank calendar, my instinct is to fill everything in, to make it mean something, to schedule my life into being busy and full and loud.

I’m trying to cope with my January existential crisis, and the way I cope is to read. Lately, my favorite author is French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. I’d always had a book or two of hers lying around, always meant to read her in earnest, but it took me until this fall to get into her work — and now I’m obsessed. As she explores her memory and its reliability, Ernaux relaxes my melancholy into something closer to curiosity. As Sheila Heti writes in the New York Times: “Most memoirs operate as if the past were right there and can be looked at, like a painting on the wall. But Ms. Ernaux understands that one’s 18-year-old self is a stranger to one’s 70-year-old self.” 

In Happening, Ernaux is haunted by an illegal abortion during her youth. She sets out to transcribe “an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” She writes, “I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.” Ernaux’s works foreground the difficulty of writing about the self, showing memory as just another way to cope with the void: the blank page, the unknown future, the open calendar squares that haunt me. Reading her work exposes the futility of my efforts to force things to mean something just to stave off the blankness of a new year. But there’s a glimpse of hope for me: Ernaux reminds me that sometimes things find their meaning only in hindsight, not in the present. You can relax and return to something later, able to see anew what it was all about. 

This reading list brings together essays that question the stories we hold about ourselves, how we make our lives meaningful. There’s love, sex, heartbreak, returns to childhood, and deep grief that structure how we see ourselves and our lives. These writers, like Ernaux, travel into their own memories and sensations, confronting old versions of themselves and dredging up hidden habits, to see what makes sense. 

Controlled (Noor Qasim, The Drift, 2022)

Of course there’s one thing that makes our lives so meaningful: desire. Noor Qasim’s essay considers the narrative potential of desire — the stories we tell ourselves about it — by placing Annie Ernaux alongside the genre of the millennial sex novel, including books by Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, and Alyssa Songsiridej. Qasim contrasts Ernaux’s novel Simple Passion, which appeared in 1991, with her recently published journals, Getting Lost, which she kept during the same period. What emerges is a picture of how desire moves us, how it makes our mind work, and how we might start to write about it.

As Ernaux lived the affair, she was aware of the sort of novel one might write — perhaps one rather similar to the novels of desire examined here. But she chose, instead, to craft a different story of desire, one based in fact, yes, though not in the particularities of her fraught and ultimately commonplace experience. In eschewing the logics of narrative, in refusing to even attempt to pin down the object of her desire and opting instead for something that might resemble a ‘testimony,’ Ernaux abdicates any responsibility to plot and its repetitive motions, freeing herself to focus fully on the phenomenon of desire instead. Getting Lost evokes the experience of desire through the mess of life; Simple Passion pares away context to reveal desire’s shape. And while the journals’ primary interest is as a supplement to the novel that arose from them, they also help to preserve a sort of elemental agony, the anxious movements of a mind that desires, and desires seriously.

Crush Fatigue (Alexandra Molotkow, Real Life Magazine, 2018)

I credit this essay by Alexandra Molotkow for introducing me to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, whose 1979 book Love and Limerence was quite a read. “Limerence” names an obsessive infatuation, and Molotkow examines how this infatuation can both bring us out of ourselves — “Limerence is a program running in the background of your days and nights, arranging your impressions in the shape of your fixation” — and how it also operates as a form of selfishness. We get drawn out of ourselves into the idea of another, but we only know that person through our own mind. Molotkow takes the messiness and ambivalence of a crush seriously, paying attention to how much we want to pay attention to someone.

I was born limerent, and my relationship to limerence itself is ambivalent. Crushes map life over with meaning and joy, and I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom. They can also gain on me like a frightening, unpredictable force that lifts me out of my life and drops me back, months later, with a lot of mess to clean. They feel disruptive and wasteful — a misallocation of emotional energies, a source of outsize pain for stupid reasons — and, though it’s partly the point, they alienate me from myself: crushing involves adopting a set of hypothetical standards against which I’m necessarily lacking.

A Glass Essay (Sarah Chihaya, The Yale Review, 2022)

Sarah Chihaya writes about reading Anne Carson in the wake of a devastating breakup. Every day for one summer in Oxford, she reread Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” in the same spot every day. Her experience of rereading makes her question her own investment in reading as an academic and as a self-described “professional reader.” The practice of rereading Carson is both comforting and challenging, alienating and unifying all at once: It makes a stretch of time make sense, and Chihaya’s account of her own story reminds us what reading can do when it knits into the fabric of our lives.

After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.

Aftersun (Kate Raphael, The Overshare, 2022)

I love this Substack newsletter by Berkeley journalism student Kate Raphael, which reflects on the uncanny experience of being in your childhood bedroom, brushing up against the many past versions of yourself. Like Ernaux, Raphael’s access to the past is more complicated, more difficult to reach — until it’s not. She writes “I keep my distance from my younger self; I return home with my guard up,” but after sliding back into her past self, Raphael leans in. She rereads her childhood journals alongside watching the film Aftersun, which is set mostly within a child’s perspective and highlights a fragmented memory. Both the film and Raphael’s experiences foreground what returning to the past can give us, what meanings we can find there.

When I slip back into myself as a kid, when I snap at my parents or fall into an old pattern, I often think I am reverting to someone worse. I expect to react better and understand more now that I’m older, and I find that much of the time, I do not. In so many ways, I am still my younger self—a girl who surprises me by how much she understood, how deeply she felt things, while my current self surprises me by how much she still doesn’t understand.

Minor Resurrections (Elisa Gonzalez, The Point, 2022)

In this essay for The Point, Elisa Gonzalez reflects on the death of her brother alongside artwork depicting resurrections, meditating largely on the biblical story of Lazarus. She considers the difficulty of writing about the dead, the pull the story of resurrection has on us, and the way grief reorders a life. Her attention to the way mourning morphs time takes on a distinctly Ernaux-like quality, Gonzalez reflecting that “Time, I suspect, will never move as it did before, even after I step back into it.”

Being thrown out of time or immured in a fixed point within it is a way of dying with the one who has died, an unwilled and yet welcome journey that brings us nearer to being dead. My brother was shot in the chest three times, and every day I shape a gun out of my hand and press it three times to my chest. This ritual is a way of entering the event that I can never live, though I survive it: his dying, not mine. That I go on living while he does not still surprises me. Yet I now think the living hasn’t been continuous. If I have found any resurrection for sure, it’s mine, not my brother’s: as soon as I said, to another sister, “Stephen is dead,” it was as if I, like Barthes, were one dead—and then I came back to life, changed, like Lazarus always and probably until my final death glancing at that vast distracting orb beyond.

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Bekah Waalkes is a writer and PhD candidate at Tufts University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Cleveland Review of Books, Bon Appétit, and more.

Editor: Krista Stevens