Finding beauty in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The marmot’s early wake-up call. A long-form comic on sinking prisons. An ebullient character with the power to manipulate TikTok. And the reasons for a good scare.

1. I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself

Zefyr Lisowski | Electric Lit | October 26, 2023 | 3,553 words

Apparently, this month marked the 49th anniversary of the seminal horror film Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (That odd-number-ness might explain why you haven’t been bombarded with oral histories, retrospectives, and inane listicles like “11 Times Leatherface Gave Glam-God Chic While Dismembering Hippies and We Can’t Stop Crying About It.”) I’ve never seen the movie, but that didn’t stop me from being mesmerized by Zefyr Lisowski’s essay about its outsized role in her life. Though the piece will linger with you, “haunting” is the wrong word here. Nothing about Lisowski’s prose is uncertain or vaporous; she shows the reader her scars from sentence one, and the next 3,500 words are equally stark and vulnerable. She came to Chain Saw in high school, a miserable adolescent desperate for the distraction of a watch-it-if-you-dare YouTube challenge. What she found was revelation: a brightness and beauty that helped her embrace her Southern roots, and ultimately her own self. “There are marks that are left on us, and there are marks we leave on ourselves, and I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between the two,” she writes. At multiple turns, she expresses a thought with such economy that it becomes nearly aphoristic, escaping the borders of an individual experience to become universal. That’s the mark of a great essay—whether you can stomach horror movies or not. —PR

2. The Broken Clock

David Gessner | Orion Magazine | October 11, 2023 | 1,997 words

I recently read that we’re in for an El Niño winter, which brings less precipitation and increases temperatures. I thought this was a cause for celebration—I’ll gladly take any relief from our brutal winters—until David Gessner helped me understand how global warming is altering the habits and habitats of birds and wildlife with his piece at Orion Magazine. “Consider the lowly marmot,” writes Gessner. (Up until this point, I had not considered the marmot at all other than being mildly amused at the screaming marmot meme, despite our recent move to its natural habitat.) All jokes aside, warmer winters cause marmots to emerge from hibernation earlier, before the green shoots they feed on sprout from the soil. “’The salad bar was open,’ is how Anthony Barnosky, a University of California paleoecologist, put it. ‘But now with warmer winters, they wake early and stumble out into a still snow-covered world. They starve.’” What I loved most about this piece—in addition to learning more about how habitats are stretching farther north—is how Gessner conveys that all is not doom and marmot gloom. Later hard frosts let marmots feed longer before hibernation, allowing them to put on more fat so that they’re better equipped to survive a shorter winter. “We humans have changed the basic cycles of the years. We have altered the clock of the world. . . .Noticing, it turns out, matters.” Now, if only we could turn back time. —KS

3. In Harm’s Way

Susie Cagle | The Marshall Project, in partnership with Grist | October 24, 2023

In the ’80s, a prison complex was constructed in Corcoran, a poor community in California’s Central Valley, in the dry Tulare lakebed. (Historically, Tulare Lake has been the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi.) The Department of Corrections convinced lawmakers to exempt the facility from environmental law. Fast-forward several decades, and the two prisons now house 8,000 people, the largest incarcerated population in the state. California’s very wet 2022-23 winter resulted in a record-high Sierra snowpack—great for drought conditions, but a threat to the state’s agricultural interior, bringing epic flooding to the region. In this engaging long-form comic, the first of its kind at The Marshall Project, Susie Cagle chronicles how decades-old decisions to hastily build the prisons has put thousands of incarcerated people at risk. (If you enjoy this piece, I also recommend Cagle’s illustrated Longreads feature about another rural Central Valley community, “After Water,” which offers a different angle on California’s climate and water crisis in a similarly engrossing way.) —CLR

4. Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era

Brendan I. Koerner | Wired | October 19, 2023| 6,959 words

Brendan I. Koerner’s splendid, exuberant piece took me a long time to read. For starters, it’s nearly 7,000 words—but then there are the links. So. Many. Rabbit holes. Although not one to usually click on every link on offer, after becoming engrossed in how Ursus Magana’s company, 25/7, elaborately manipulates algorithms to link music with TikTok videos, I needed to see the wrestler videos that launched YoungX777’s “Toxic” and the teens twerking to Syko’s “#BrooklynBloodPop!” (No, I was not previously familiar with these works.) Despite the time invested, I remained fascinated throughout this deep dive into the creator economy—a mystical world that Magana can weave to his will like a magician. (Probably less mysterious for those who didn’t grow up in an era where a mobile phone’s greatest wonder was Snake.) The musicians and content creators are a diverse collection, being pulled out into the light from behind their bedroom doors, but they still pale against Magana, whose backstory demonstrates true entrepreneurship in the face of adversity. His frenetic, joyful character is what repeatedly pulled me back in from the wilds of the TikTok video vortex. —CW

5. The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses

Athena Aktipis, Coltan Scrivner | Scientific American | November 1, 2023 | 3,137 words

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a Halloween event. It was a big deal, with different haunted houses built in old farm buildings. As someone who jumps a mile if a piece of paper blows across my path, I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect—but my niece and her friend dragged me along. I’m not proud of how tightly I gripped the hands of those teens, or that I made them lead the way through rooms where witches and ghouls jumped out of the shadows (different teenagers, dressed up and trading their dignity for holiday money, but still terrifying). So why exactly did I do this to myself? Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner know. Their absorbing essay details how this is all a part of our evolutionary past. A morbid fascination with danger is widespread amongst all animals—we inspect threats to know how to face them in the future. I was subconsciously rehearsing for when a real witch came to whisk me away. (Spoiler: she’d get me.) The modern decline in risky play has even led to increased anxiety in children. Full of such intriguing facts, Aktipis and Scrivner’s exploration into the psychology behind the scare will keep you on your toes—and inspire you to go out for some proper frights this Halloween weekend.  —CW

Audience Award

Who won the most sets of eyes this week?

After you’ve known a place for a while, you can see one season in another. It’s not mystical or even that hard. I find it reassuring, or at least it was reassuring. These comings and goings of birds and other animals feel like rituals, but that is not really an accurate description since they are the thing itself, not a reenactment, their lives depending on getting the timing right. These timetables have been fine-tuned over millions of years. In the cocoons of our virtual and electronic worlds, it is easy to ignore these primal timetables, but we lose something when we do.

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The true price of nuclear power. The nation’s longest-imprisoned man. A man takes on a stealthy global scourge. Competitive eating’s colorful characters. A filmmaking legend’s younger years. All that and more in this week’s installment. Read on!

1. The Atomic Disease

Rachel Greenley | Orion Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 3,504 words

Despite medical science’s many advances, anyone who has ever supported a loved one through a catastrophic illness knows that science has much farther to go. Where you need answers, often there are only questions. For Orion, Rachel Greenley considers America’s love affair with nuclear bombs and nuclear power—a race for supremacy in the name of war and science that has killed countless, both directly and indirectly, as those who live downwind and downstream endure water and soil contaminated by toxic waste and the cancers that ensue. “It’s clear as thirst when life leaves a body,” she writes. “The heavy vessel left behind is void of the personality and warmth that brightly colored the world. My world…He was thirty-five years old.” It’s not that Greenley doesn’t believe in science; rather, as she so poignantly notes in this gripping essay, she cannot trust fallible officials in charge of managing nuclear projects and disasters, those who deflect concern and downplay the danger of a threat that cannot be seen with the naked eye, one that may have taken her husband and the father of her children. Is ignorance to blame, or ambivalence, or perhaps a combination of both? For Greenley and so many others, it’s a question that deserves to be answered. —KS

2. Frank Smith Was Locked Up for Eight Decades. At 98, What Would It Mean to Be Free?

Annalisa Quinn | Boston Globe Magazine | July 5, 2023 | 4,693 words

Sometimes a passage in a story hits me in the solar plexus. It hurts, but it’s also a gift, because the pain means that what I’m reading is very, very good. In the opening of Annalisa Quinn’s story, we meet a man named Frank Smith on the verge of his execution—the eighth time the state of Connecticut has tried to kill him, and the second time it came close enough to doing so that prison staff shaved his head, before the Board of Pardons and Paroles decided at the last minute to spare him. Then we learn that this all happened in 1954, and that Smith was only recently paroled; at 98 years old, he is likely America’s longest-serving prisoner. The passage in question comes later in the piece, when Quinn asks an administrator at the secure nursing home where Smith is now housed if talking about his life, including the eight times the government tried to end it, might upset him. The administrator assures her that it’s fine. “But in our conversations,” Quinn writes, “he would return again and again to the electric chair, still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear all this time later. ‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’” I can’t wrap my head around what it means to carry that kind of fear for so long. But I know that no one should bear that burden. —SD

3. The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure

Amit Katwala | Wired | August 22, 2023 | 4,403 words

Every year, the elementary schools in my area would take students on field trips to a preserved one-room schoolhouse; we’d drink from a well, substitute our usual classes with teachings from McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer, and glumly play with the saddest collection of 19th-century toys you can imagine. It was on one of those trips when I realized I had no godly idea what the teacher was writing on the chalkboard. So: glasses at age seven, contact lenses at 13, and a life spent with high myopia. But I had no idea I was a trendsetter until I read Amit Katwala’s fascinating Wired feature. Nearsightedness has swept the globe, but it’s particularly endemic to East Asia. In China, South Korea, and Taiwan, 90% of young adults are myopic. It’s the leading cause of blindness in those countries, and represents a very real (if very slow) public health threat. Enter eye surgeon Pei-Chang Wu, whose journey of discovery serves as the spine of the piece. This is a mystery story, as all good science writing is, and Katwala gives Wu’s search the perfect balance of history and specificity so that lay readers like you and me can appreciate its evolution without being conversant in cyclopegic autorefraction. (By the way, I highly recommend saying that phrase out loud. It makes you feel very smart.) Wu’s ultimate solution, as so many do, has a healthy dose of common sense to it, but that’s kind of the point—and, as Katwala’s kicker makes clear, it’s also a bit of a panacea. Before you take his advice, though, read the piece. It’s worth the eyestrain. —PR

4. Everything You Never Knew About Competitive Eating

Jamie Loftus | The Takeout | July 14, 2023 | 3,483 words

I didn’t know I needed to consume 3,500 words on the world of competitive eating until I read Jamie Loftus’ piece in The Takeout. As a reader, you feel like Loftus has handed you a bib and after a few paragraphs, you’re ready to tie it on and take your seat at the table as she introduces us to the fascinating characters (with surprising causes) who inhabit the world of Big League Eating. You’ll get to meet “Megabyte” Ronnie Hartman, a.k.a. “The People’s Hot Dog,” a military veteran and indie pro wrestler who uses his plate—er, platform—to advance the cause of veterans’ rights. Then there’s Mary Bowers, a Korean American project manager for the Department of Homeland Security who hand-crafts food-themed outfits and uses her profile to highlight human trafficking. (Mary learned that she was kidnapped as a child and illegally trafficked out of South Korea.) What I loved most, though, is that in addition to the warmth and respect they have for each other, Hartman and Bowers both champion gender inclusivity at the competition. “It doesn’t matter what your pronouns are,” says Hartman. “Once you step on that stage, you’re an eater.” Come for the carnival atmosphere, stay for the camaraderie. —KS

5. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Werner Herzog | The New Yorker | August 21, 2023 | 3,482 words

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Every Man From Himself and God Against All, Werner Herzog reflects on his time spent in Pennsylvania’s westernmost city. I’ve watched Herzog’s films, but this was my first experience of him conjuring pictures from a page. Unsurprisingly, he is very good at it: a keen eye for detail, astute character observation, and the ability to tell a good yarn make this a riveting piece. His prose knocks up another notch when he meets the Franklins, a family that takes him in during his studies at Duquesne University. His love for them is apparent in the warm descriptions of the hustle and bustle of the busy household, complete with twins, grannies, a dog, and a failed rock musician named Billy, who would only emerge from bed in the afternoon, “stark naked, stretching pleasurably.” Throughout, Herzog notes inspiration for his films—fascinating tidbits that included the dancing chickens in Stroszek deriving from a hallucination while traveling from Mexico with hepatitis. He can’t resist a bit of name-dropping and grandiosity, as might be expected, but these well-crafted scenes more than compensate.  —CW

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.

Here is the narrative on the atomic bomb: It was created out of urgency. The United States and our Allies were losing the war. Thousands of young American men had died. Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Intel reported that the Germans had discovered fission, the process used to break apart an atom’s nucleus and release its energy. Hitler could not win. Hanford’s B Reactor was built within a year and produced plutonium just a few months later. It was a secretive project. Most workers and the surrounding communities did not know the full extent of what they were working on or living by or exposed to. They were simply proud to be contributing to the war effort.

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

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

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

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

2. AI Is a Lot of Work

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

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

3. Casual Luke Rides the Big Wave

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

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

4. The Day the Lake Took the Edmund Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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

Audience Award

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

It starts snowing hard in the afternoon, and the Fitzgerald is seventeen miles ahead of the Anderson, visible only on radar. A wave crashes over the deck and breaks one of the fences. The water drags the screeching, twisted metal into the mouth of her, swallows it. Superior presses against the belly of the ship, pushes her sideways. McSorley radios Anderson captain Bernie Cooper: “I have a fence rail down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list. I’m checking down. Will you stay by me till I get to Whitefish?” The Fitz slows down, lets the Anderson gain on her again. There is a sense of safety in proximity.

I found early that, given my limited talent, one way I could reliably make drama was to manufacture some hardship for my character. In (sometimes) exaggerating that state (no sunlit days, at all, ever), the whole thing tips over into the comic and, in the process, the meaning seems to sharpen.

The short story, I’m learning, can do anything. But I do feel that there’s something innately cautionary about the form. The story states Truth A and immediately we are waiting for…well, for change. So the story you’re suggesting might start with one model for “rebuilding” but then, because it would be human beings doing the rebuilding, there would, no doubt, be a complication. That’s what makes it a story.

After nine months of traveling around Ukraine, I have come to understand that war feels inconceivable in its entirety. Too epic to contemplate as whole. So I have instead begun to seek the truth about existence during wartime by examining familiar objects snatched by explosions from their habitual context. As reality shatters into a million senseless shards, the meaning of one’s life is rearranged and reassessed midflight, constantly changing.

You don’t forget your first bombing. The stench of things burning. For a moment, all your senses are overwhelmed. Then, it’s scarily mundane.

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

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1. The Price of Admission

Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker | March 28th, 2022 | 10,600 words

I’ve started writing this blurb, erased my attempt, and started again a few times now. The difficulty of summarizing Rachel Aviv’s latest feature is a testament to how good it is, and how complex. What starts as the story of a teenager escaping an abusive parent, navigating foster care, and making a life for herself in the form of a full ride to the University of Pennsylvania, a Rhodes scholarship, and even a new last name pivots at a certain point to something else entirely: an examination of the narrow frameworks that powerful institutions impose onto trauma and suffering, an indictment of the unforgiving expectations society has of abuse victims, and a study in human resilience. Just read it. Then talk about it. We need to talk about it. —SD

2. ‘In my 30 Years as a GP, the Profession has Been Horribly Eroded’

Clare Gerada | The Guardian | February 22nd, 2022 | 3,707 words

This essay tells the story of two days: one in 1991, the other in 2021. On both days, Clare Gerada was on-call as a General Practitioner in London, but 30 years have brought immense change to life as a community doctor. This comparison offers a simple yet incredibly effective story-telling technique. Gerada made three house calls on her first day on call in 1991. Each person’s story was very different — from an addict with pneumonia to a little girl with an earache — but the care and time Gerada was able to take with each of them remained the same. Fast forward to 2021, her very last day on-call, and Cohen finds herself juggling numerous visits arranged through a call center, part of a “gig economy, as impersonal as the driver delivering a pizza.” Her patients have also changed, and she explains that “with advances of medicines and technology, patients are living longer, often with three or even four serious long-term conditions.” It has stretched the system into something thin and fragile. Gerada used to see the same patients for decades but “each patient I saw that day was a stranger, and each contact an isolated encounter. We would never meet again.” This piece paints a concerning picture, but one that warrants discussion. Gerada offers a clear-eyed, first-person insight into the healthcare debate in the UK. —CW

3. Plovers Quarrel: A Tiny, Endangered Bird Returns to Sauble Beach to Find Sunbathers Dug Into the Sand

Fatima Syed | The Narwhal | March 26th, 2022 | 5,029 words

Sauble Beach, a lakeside community and tourist destination on Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula, is currently the backdrop of a lengthy, expensive legal battle. The Town of South Bruce Peninsula was fined $100,000 for destroying the habitat of the piping plover: a tiny endangered bird that had vanished from the Great Lakes region for 30 years, until a pair suddenly returned to the beach in 2007. The community has since actively protected these birds, calling themselves “plover lovers.” But some people, including the town’s mayor, want a pristine shoreline of smooth sand for sunbathers and vacationers — and have raked and bulldozed the beach, scraping away the natural dunes and vegetation that plovers need to nest, breed, and live. So, who is this beach for? Can humans and plovers share the sand? This is a well-reported story from Fatima Syed on the battle within this community — and what it means to “damage” a habitat — accompanied by gorgeous photographs. (You’ll love the unexpected plover puns, too.) —CLR

4. Bright Passage

Leslie Jamison | Orion Magazine | March 11th, 2022 | 5,501 words

At Orion Magazine, Leslie Jamison explores her experiences in hospital and the necessary indignities and frustrations of being vulnerable. She recounts the heightened and dulled sensory experiences of recovering from surgery, a place where pain and numbness merge, a place where the patient is struggling to make sense of the world around her and the boundaries of a body now irrevocably changed: “Each time, I felt part of a world—just briefly, in passing—that was structured by a series of contradictory intensities: the simultaneous exposure and anonymity of sharing cramped spaces with strangers; the vulnerability and disconnection of needing strangers so badly; the intimacy and tenderness of bodily care alongside the brisk assembly-line necessities of caring at scale…Private lives become public. The nurses know your business, the other patients know your business, the doctors know your insides. The surgeons see your insides. Extreme emotion—whether desperation or relief—becomes impossible to contain, visible for all to see.” —KS

5. My Friend Goo

Deb Olin Unferth | The Paris Review | March 28th, 2022 | 3,463 words

“In March 2020 the entire human world was out walking,” begins Deb Olin Unferth’s charming, tender essay. We all remember that time; in those earliest days of terrifying mystery, the only thing we could do was find whatever unoccupied bit of the planet we could, and move through it. While most of us did so to avoid anyone and everyone, however, the writer found connection — with a massive goose she names Goo. There’s more to this story, as she reminds us throughout: a long-dead older brother, a strained relationship, the hostile vagaries of the natural world. Above all, as she recounts her growing intimacy with Goo, the essay serves as a paean to the idea of difficult friendship. There’s less of a wallop here than a prolonged, low-grade emotional ache; Unferth draws you through her life and loss with an unerring sense of pace, and from the very beginning you sense that there’s only one place this path can end. It does, of course, at least in a way. But that doesn’t mean you won’t hold your breath waiting for the punch to the gut. —PR

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

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1. The Man Who Paid for America’s Fear

Jason Fagone | The San Francisco Chronicle | March 2nd, 2022 | 14,500 words

This is the definitive story of Hamid Hayat, a man wrongfully convicted of terrorism, sentenced to prison on his 25th birthday, and finally set free after 14 years behind bars. It is a profile, yes, but it is also a deep, unflinching examination of just how ugly and far-reaching Islamophobia became in America after the 9/11 attacks. True to form, author Jason Fagone — whose work was featured in our Best of 2021 collection — offers readers a master class in structure. When I read the closing anecdote, I said aloud, to no one in particular, “Damn.” —SD

2. The Airport

Shannon Gormley | March 7th, 2022 | 15,807 words

“I say I’ll get them out. I mean this, too. But in Afghanistan whatever we meant turned to sand; what we did is the only trace we left behind. In time our actions, also, will be subsumed by the actions of others, like the wind moves tracks across a desert plain.” Shannon Gormley self-publishes a breathtaking narrative about her friend’s escape from Afghanistan as Kabul fell to the Taliban. Gormley weaves her own personal story of her time in the country, as well as the backstory of her friendship with Asghar, in this meditative piece. Through exquisite yet gripping writing, Gormley conveys the gravity of the situation on the ground as she calls on colleagues to help Asghar get his wife Zahra, his 4-month-old son Farhan, and himself to safety once they reach Kabul’s international airport. I read this slowly and steadily one evening, gasping at times. It’s a long read — even by Longreads standards! — but well worth the dive. —CLR

3. On Memory and Survival

Nickole Brown | Orion Magazine | February 9th, 2022 | 2,348 words

In this deeply moving essay at Orion Magazine, Nickole Brown relates how routine dissociation and an inability to form memories helped her cope with childhood trauma. While dissociation protected Brown from memories of childhood abuse, it also left her unable to recall moments of beauty. In one instance, she struggles to remember an aggregation of monarch butterflies seen from a New York City high-rise not long after 9/11, a kind of random yet all-encompassing beauty that helps fend off despair amid the ongoing horrors of climate change and worldwide human suffering. After encountering the body of a vulture that died entangled in fishing line and willing her brain to remember the bird, Brown discovers that remembering is more important to survival than forgetting: “So what is it I need to learn well enough to recite by heart? Why work so hard to verify a cloudburst of butterflies migrating so long ago through the busiest part of one of the busiest cities on Earth? Why struggle to memorize a vulture who likely starved upside down? Because survival has to do with remembering what you most do not want to face. It has to do with not turning away, in believing your own testimony, in writing it down. We must keep remembering in case one day another needs that memory to survive.” —KS

4. Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation

Jason Kehe | Wired | March 9th, 2022 | 3,518 words

True story: When I started working here, the very first thing someone asked me was “What do you think of simulation theory?” What I said to him then is what I’m saying again now: I’ve always thought of it in the same way as the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. In other words, the idea that our reality is in fact some gargantuan digital illusion may sound nuts, but it’s nearly impossible for it not to be the case, even if that truth never touches our lives in a perceptible way. That also happens to be the perspective of Wired‘s Kehe, though he unspools it in delightfully loopy fashion in this essay that’s part provocation, part book review (of David Chalmers’ recent Reality+), and part excuse to play with language like a young Stephen Fry. There’s an argument in here, and an interesting one, but there’s also a real joy — which is seldom the case in tech criticism, or technophilosophy, or whatever you want to call that realm of rhetoric concerned with teasing out the implications that we’re all actually inside a video game. This is unlike anything else you’ll read this week, and it may just be the thing you remember most. —PR

5. The Great American Antler Boom

Abe Streep | The New Yorker | March 7th, 2022 | 5,307 words

I found myself engrossed in Abe Streep’s account of a subculture I knew very little about — didn’t know existed, in fact — the world of the shed hunter. Initially, I suspected a shed hunter was someone who ambles into the woods to take a casual glance about to see if a deer antler catches their eye. I was wrong. Streep illuminates me with vivid descriptions of shedder social media stars, furious bidding wars, and the May hunt — which sounds more like an intense endurance race. At 6:00 a.m. on May 1st, public lands in Jackson are opened up to antler seekers, and Streep describes the ensuing mad scramble, where people “raced across the water and ascended into tawny meadows. One rider was bucked off his horse and injured himself. A teen-ager from Montana alleged that someone stole an antler he had spotted first.” This story made me consider both the foibles and ingenuity of the human race; it was fascinating to learn of the obsessions and livelihoods formed around a bone that another animal discards as waste. It is very human of us. —CW