At the time of this writing, Longreads editors have created nearly 650 recommendations in 2023, and just about every one of them can be considered a feature. However, you’ll find that the stories contained herein are features in the classic sense: marriages of deep reporting and indelible prose. Some are light, others emotionally taxing. Their subjects range from subcultures to ideas to life itself. And just as they do every year, they represent the very best that narrative journalism has to offer. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

When Wizards and Orcs Came to Death Row

Keri Blakinger | The Marshall Project | August 31, 2023 | 4,440 words

This piece by Keri Blakinger is an extraordinary look at how world-building, through the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, became a form of escape for incarcerated men in Texas. The story centers around two men, Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, both of whom land on death row as young adults and meet in the late ’90s in Polunsky, one of the most restrictive death row units in the US. Through D&D, the men transcend their utterly isolating circumstances to find both camaraderie and a therapeutic outlet. Despite death row’s restrictive conditions, D&D crews find a way to play—passing secret notes from cell to cell, constructing handmade game spinners in lieu of dice, and hand-drawing detailed maps and character sheets, the latter of which are included in the piece and offer a peek into the vast worlds they built, and the personas they developed and inhabited. (Wardlow’s magical alter ego, Arthaxx d’Cannith, was a better version of himself—one that had never shot and killed a man during an attempted robbery.) “Sometimes, through their characters, they opened up about problems they would never otherwise discuss,” writes Blakinger, “unpacking their personal traumas through a thin veil of fantasy.” Like the intricate worlds Ford and Wardlow imagined, Blakinger—herself formerly incarcerated—builds this world behind bars in a way only she can. I wondered at first whether to call this piece uplifting, given the fates of most death-row prisoners. But Blakinger beautifully illustrates here the transformative power of storytelling and play, and how humans can come together to spark a bit of hope in the most unexpected places. —CLR

Molly’s Last Ride

Peter Flax | Bicycling Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 8,136 words

Twelve-year-old Molly Steinsapir was riding an e-bike with her friend on a residential street in California called, of all things, Enchanted Way, when she crashed and suffered injuries she would not survive. Her parents sued the bike manufacturer, claiming it was liable for Molly’s death. Peter Flax tells this tragic story exceedingly well by all the traditional measures of feature-writing (excellent prose, delicate tone). But this piece has stuck with me all year chiefly for two other reasons: because it delves into Big Questions about the human toll of rapid innovation, ones that go well beyond the e-bike industry, and because it demonstrates the incredible value of niche magazines. Flax used to be the editor-in-chief of Bicycling, and he is himself an avid cyclist. His expertise and insight elevate the story. So does the fact that the magazine let him go deep on the mechanics and economics of e-bikes, as well as the community of consumers who know this increasingly popular equipment better than anyone else. Put another way, this is an insider’s story. But to this outsider—I am not a cyclist—it still feels both accessible and urgent. It changed the way I view the e-bikes zipping up and down my block. Maybe it will do the same for you. —SD

Three Falls in The Alps

Xenia Minder | FT Magazine | December 21, 2022 | 4,475 words

I first stumbled upon this piece last year, in that blur of days between Christmas and the New Year, when time is lost to endless cycles of family conversations and cheese. It made enough of an impression on me to not only cut through the haze of over-indulgence but to stay in mind for the whole year. (As it was published after our “Best of 2022” was released, it still qualifies for this year’s list.) Xenia Minder tells her story to her brother, Raphael Minder—the Financial Times Central Europe correspondent—and I do not doubt that the closeness of this relationship helped the Minders create such a vivid, candid account. As the title suggests, it is the story of three catastrophic falls. In one, Xenia breaks her back, resulting in months in a back brace, and in the other two, she loses men she loves—first Erhard Loretan, then Jean-François. I live near a mountain resort, where tales of big falls are part of the mantra, but not three, not with such consequences. Searing sentences pull the reality of such tragedy brutally to the surface, with Erhard being found “still tied to my waist. I never realized that he had been right there, within touching distance,” while “Jean-François died on the mountain that he knew like the back of his hand.” But while the descriptions of the events are powerful, Xenia’s thoughtful reflections—and her pragmatism and strength—struck me most about this piece. She reminds us “that key events in our lives are unknown to us, particularly the moment of our death” and comes to see herself as just a tenant inside her own body. Quitting her job as a judge in Geneva, she starts a new chapter feeling both “light” and “solid,” moving to a chalet on the outskirts of a village—in the mountains. Combined with some beautiful, otherworldly photography from Olivo Barbieri, it’s haunting, poetic, and inspiring. —CW

Hitting Zero

Jana G. Pruden | The Globe and Mail | June 2, 2023, | 3,231 words

Jana G. Pruden takes us into the frenzy that is the Canadian National Cheer Championships, a space blaring Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, arcing with the energy of sparkly young heroines who “compete by performing short, highly technical acrobatic routines in unison at the highest energy, with scores based on execution, difficulty, creativity and showmanship.” Pruden goes behind the sequins to discover that while cheer requires much from those who compete, the sport welcomes every body shape and size including “small flyers, lithe tumblers,” and “powerful bases” who each have their own precise and perfect role to play in helping their squad to “hit zero”—cheer speak for an error-free performance. “There is nothing quite like cheer, which combines the hyper-feminine aesthetic of a pageant with the posturing and swagger of boxing, the performative flair of pro wrestling, the tribal fandom of football and the raucous atmosphere of a rock concert,” writes Pruden. Streamers and glitter aside, cheer is serious—and dangerous—business. Participants get injured, sometimes severely, while performing their physically and mentally demanding routines. Vomit buckets stand ready and a clean-up protocol is in place should the intensity of performance press the buckets into service. Pruden fortifies you with this and oh, so much more necessary (and fascinating!) background information to prepare you for an intense, high-flying finale that will leave you cheering for more. —KS

What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

Virginia Heffernan | Wired | September 26, 2023 | 3,874 words

Quick, name the topic you got most tired of reading about in 2023. Assuming you didn’t mention a certain musical artist who managed both a #1 tour and a #1 movie, I’m gonna go ahead and guess your answer involved two letters: A and I. (Sure, said musical artist’s name also involves those two letters, but let’s not get caught up in technicalities.) It’s been just over a year since ChatGPT became available to the general population, and in those 12 months we’ve seen everything from “AI will save the world” to “AI could destroy humanity,” with nearly every flavor of equivocation in between. But none of that makes for a good story, and that’s exactly why Virginia Heffernan’s Wired feature was a lock for my pick in this category. Nominally about Cicero, an AI model created to play the strategy game Diplomacy, the piece contends with AI’s potential less than it does human psychology. Heffernan correctly pegs that much of our discomfort with chatbots lies in their ersatz personalities. “An entity that feigns human emotions is arguably a worse object of affection than a cold, computational device that doesn’t emote at all,” she writes. Enter Cicero, and its programmers’ quest to make it unbeatable at a game that is, at its heart, about negotiation. Not deception or guile, but finding a path forward so that both sides benefit. Diplomacy isn’t an end in itself, but rather a means: how can AI relate better to people, and how can we reach a state of allyship and even trust, something more R2-D2 than HAL? (That Cicero is a Meta project goes only lightly acknowledged here, but it certainly makes Cicero’s victory over the world’s best Diplomacy player feel just a touch more ominous.) Heffernan is the perfect writer for this kind of piece—she’s long found the joy in everything from semiconductors to particle physics—though it also may just be that this wouldn’t be a piece in another writer’s hands. Either way, consider it the one AI story this year that’s not just thought-provoking, but narratively satisfying. —PR

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?

(The excerpted text below is integrated and displayed within illustrations in the story.)

We can be prepared.

That’s a choice the state can make and it is choosing not to.

Emily Harris is Co-Director of Programs at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and advisor on a report on climate hazards facing California prisons.

A lot of the California prisons are located in remote areas, they have aging infrastructure, and a long history of overcrowding.

It’s very clear that people in prison are distinctly vulnerable.

Corrections says it has plans in place to deal with climate emergencies at its facilities.

As the incarceration rate drops, the department says it is prioritizing prisons for closure based on factors mandated by state law.

Those factors do no include environmental hazards or climate change.

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

How two incarcerated men bonded over Dungeons & Dragons. The wonders of parasitic fungus. Greenwashing egg yolks, the Arctic search for Sir John Franklin’s tomb, and the hunks of hip-hop.

1. When Wizards and Orcs Came to Death Row

Keri Blakinger | The Marshall Project | August 31, 2023 | 4,584 words

A great longread educates, and in doing so, offers an unexpected poignancy. Keri Blakinger’s profile of Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, two men who bonded over games of Dungeons & Dragons while incarcerated in Texas, does just that. She gives us a glimpse into death row, where there are no educational or social programs because the men will never return to society, where the isolation is so extreme that the United Nations has condemned these conditions as torture. For Ford and Wardlow, Dungeons & Dragons gave them purpose. The men were incarcerated as teens, well before they had to earn a paycheck or pay rent, and D&D helped them learn to manage money. But most of all, as Blakinger so deftly reveals, Dungeons & Dragons gave them something to look forward to, a simple yet necessary form of hope. Ford and Wardlow built not just a friendship, but a deep connection in a place where the only human contact comes when the guards handcuff you. In a stroke of journalistic brilliance, Blakinger uses details from Wardlow’s D&D character Arthaxx d’Cannith, a magical prodigy, to deepen our understanding of Wardlow and his true character. “Every day, Arthaxx used his gifts to help the higher-ups of House Cannith perfect the invention they hoped would end a century of war. At night, he came home to his wife, his childhood sweetheart,” she writes. If only this Dungeons & Dragons dream could have come true. —KS

2. The Last of the Fungus

Zhengyang Wang | Nautilus | August 30, 2023 | 4,497 words

Molecular phylogenies and caterpillar fungus are not topics I expected to find riveting until I read Zhengyang Wang’s essay. His story bounces along like a thriller: Mountaintop expeditions, dodgy deals, and even death are part of this fungal world. However, the most gripping thread is Wang’s PhD. Yes, that’s right: He makes his PhD research project on parasitic fungus sound fascinating. The parasite in question is reminiscent of Alien, invading ghost moth caterpillars and taking over their brains until stroma blasts out of their heads and sticks up from the soil. (Wang describes this much more eerily and beautifully.) In China, this stroma is celebrated for helping with a different kind of protrusion and is known as “Himalayan Viagra.” The attributed medical and aphrodisiacal powers (by no means proven) mean the sale of this fungus equates to a massive tenth of Tibet’s gross domestic product. Inevitably, people are attempting industrial farming, and mountain vistas are being devastated as caterpillars are collected to sell to fungus breeders. But it isn’t working. Spraying caterpillars with spores of the parasite O. sinensis does not infect them. Wang’s PhD explains why these centers are failing: The complicated, intricate ecosystems where these hosts and parasites evolve together are impossible to replicate. His research proves the decimation of delicate montane habitats is pointless, but not enough people are reading it. You can. —CW

3. Orange Is the New Yolk

Marian Bull | Eater | August 17, 2023 | 5,025 words

Free-range! Cage-free! Pasture-raised! Certified humane! I’ve felt a slight sense of relief in buying eggs with any of these promises stamped on the carton. But what do these terms really mean when it comes to living conditions for laying hens? For Eater, Marian Bull examines our current food fetish, an ongoing quest for “shockingly orange yolks” that denote hen health and somehow help us to feel better about the food we’re eating. Bull isn’t chicken about pecking into the truth, scratching well beyond the surface to help us lay readers understand what these terms mean and how our love-and-sometimes-hate relationship with egg yolks has brought us to this quest for the perfect egg, both in color and cooked consistency. What’s more, Bull does it with style and a sharp wit. “We want it over easy, its yolk sploojing across the plate,” she writes. “And we want its color to convince us that it was not hatched in some animal welfare hellscape.” You didn’t know you needed 5,000-plus words on the state of egg farming in America, but with Bull, you get a much-needed education, and that’s no yolk. —KS

4. Seeking To Solve The Arctic’s Biggest Mystery, They Ended Up Trapped In Ice At The Top Of The World

Mark Synnott | National Geographic | July 25, 2023 | 5,835 words

Do you love stories about historical mysteries, extreme adventures, or scientific expeditions? Or do you, like me, love all those things as well as season one of the AMC show The Terror? If you answered yes—and honestly, even if you didn’t—this feature is for you. In 1847, Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men disappeared while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. In the decades since, there have been rumors and ghost stories but no conclusive evidence about their fate. Recently, a National Geographic team sought to find that evidence, namely Franklin’s tomb. But as the headline of this story states, “the Arctic doesn’t give up its secrets easily.” That isn’t merely a reference to the terrain, which at one point threatens to lock the team’s sailboat in winter ice—which, as it happens, is the last thing that we know for sure happened to Franklin’s ships. Superstition also hangs heavy in this compelling narrative. “I’m convinced that the Inuit may have once known where Franklin’s tomb is located,” one of the story’s main subjects says, “but they didn’t want it to be found because it was cursed.” —SD

5. The Evolution of the Hip-Hop Hunk

Clover Hope | Pitchfork | September 6, 2023 | 2,781 words

My wife’s in love with Method Man. Why shouldn’t she be? Dude is … very attractive. I mean, that’s just science. Besides, we’re all afforded celebrity crushes, especially those that took root in our younger years. Clover Hope was in love with Method Man too, but she was also in love with LL Cool J, DMX, Ja Rule, and Nelly, just to name a few—and in plotting her own life of crushes against the arc of hip-hop’s evolution, she elucidates how sexuality became an indispensable marketing ploy for male artists. Sometimes that entered problematic waters, as when Tupac grew into sex symbol. But times change, and when Hope surveys the present landscape, she sees little that gets her heart racing. Some of that is age, maybe, but much of it is archetype: When you’re the dominant cultural aesthetic on Planet Earth, the commercial behemoths need to flatten and trope-ify you any way possible. So we don’t have Andre 3000s anymore; instead, we have Drakes and Jack Harlows. Besides, female artists have come along and cornered the market on sexual fantasy, and queer artists have spun and subverted the the gaze as well. (“A single second of a Megan Thee Stallion Instagram workout video is worth a million and one Drake gym mirror selfies,” she writes.) This piece trades on looking backward, but Hope’s genius is in nudging our expectations—and our appetites—forward. —PR

Audience Award

And with no further ado, here’s the story our audience loved this week:

Death row didn’t offer any of the educational or mental-health programs available in regular prisons; rehabilitation isn’t the goal for those on death row, and special programming is not always logistically feasible for people held in solitary confinement. For these players, the games served as their life-skills course, anger-management class and drug counseling, too. Like Ford and Wardlow, a lot of the men on the row came to prison at a young age and never had a chance to be adults in the free world.

In 2013, Ford’s mother died, and he quit the game. But Wardlow kept talking to him, even when it was just a one-way conversation through the rec-cage fence. At first, Wardlow just mused aloud about whatever was on his mind, his voice calming and hypnotic. As he kept talking, Ford started to open up, too, crying as he recounted memories of his mother. He remembered the pride she took in her work as a police officer, and how much she taught him about computers when she worked in an Atari warehouse years later. He remembered how she showed him the basics of chess. At one point, Wardlow sent over some jelly beans — he knew Ford loved them, especially the black ones.

“Next thing you know, I’m not crying when I’m talking about my mother,” Ford told me two years ago during one of our first in-person interviews. “I’m just talking about her.” A few weeks later, he jumped back in the game.

Looking deeper into the catalysts for violent crime. How an Iraqi U.S. Army interpreter became an underground drug kingpin. What plants have to teach us about life, both real and artificial. Aging, but with vitality and grace. How one Iceland town comes together to help baby puffins take their first flight, and our first-ever audience award. Here are five + one stories to kickstart your weekend reading.

1. The Mercy Workers

Maurice Chammah | The Marshall Project | March 2, 2023 | 7,750 words

When we look at the face of a criminal in a mug shot or in a courtroom, what do we see? Many adults facing the death penalty have been shaped by childhood trauma or violence they experienced or witnessed in prison as juveniles. Mitigation specialists work to uncover traumas and dig into the personal and family histories of people on death row — not with the aim to excuse or justify their crimes, but to help paint more complete portraits of them as human beings. Maurice Chammah spends time with mitigation specialist Sara Baldwin as she works on the case of James Bernard Belcher, a man on death row for the 1996 murder of Jennifer Embry. It’s a complex story that Chammah reports and tells with great care and empathy, and highlights a little-known profession that helps to illuminate why people hurt one another and are led to violence. —CLR

2. On the Trail of the Fentanyl King

Benoît Morenne | Wired | March 9, 2023 | 5,403 words

There’s an old episode of Portlandia in which the city’s mayor goes on the dark web to buy fireworks, and of course winds up buying rocket launchers instead. Buffoonery and prosthetic noses aside, that was the impression most people have always had of the dark web: a place where you could buy absolutely anything with total anonymity. Alaa Allawi was one of the people making the first part of that impression come true. After becoming a U.S. Army interpreter at age 18, Allawi developed an impressive proficiency for low-level cybershenanigans — and when he ultimately left his native Iraq for the U.S., those cybershenanigans became his way out of poverty, courtesy of selling counterfeit Xanax online. But it turned out that “total anonymity” wasn’t quite right, and after the real fentanyl in his fake pills led to overdoses and a campus cop took notice, there wasn’t a prosthetic nose big enough to save him. With precision and a relentless chronological tick-tock, Benoît Morenne details Allawi’s rise and fall, as well as the federal investigation that slowly tightened around him. Sure, you’ll find bitcoin and giant champagne bottles and Lil Wayne cameos, but the kingpin stereotypes are few and far between. This story has no heroes, anti- or otherwise. That’s the point. —PR

3. What Plants are Saying About Us

Amanda Gefter | Nautilus | March 7, 2023 | 4,890 words

Professor Paco Calvo used to study artificial intelligence to try and understand cognition. However, he concluded that artificial neural networks were far removed from living intelligence, stating “what we can model with artificial systems is not genuine cognition. Biological systems are doing something entirely different.” The abilities of AI have been dominating many a headline of late, making Amanda Gefter’s essay on Calvo’s theories a refreshing read. Calvo claims we have much more to learn from plants than AI. Plants sense and experience their environment, learn from it, and actively engage with the world, which he sees as the key to consciousness. His theories may be a little out there (I am not convinced neurons are not necessary for thought), but this essay did make me consider the significance of our interactions with our external environment in the thinking process. Rather than leave you with these Big Thoughts, I will end with Calco’s joyful description of plants: “Upside-down, with their ‘heads’ plunged into the soil and their limbs and sex organs sticking up and flailing around.” You will never look at your roses in the same way. —CW

4. Desert Hours

Jane Miller | London Review of Books | March 16, 2023 | 1,999 words

What makes time meaningful? Is it time spent with a book? Learning something new? Maintaining your fitness routine? Doing things for others? What’s the relationship between meaningful time and being satisfied and happy? How does the definition of happiness and satisfaction change over your lifetime? If you’re anything like Jane Miller, age 90, you might ask yourself these and other questions, reflecting on the one resource we share on earth: time. At the London Review of Books, Miller ponders all this and more. “When I was​ 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool,” she writes. While I can’t relate to her need to swim a kilometer a day, I can empathize with owning a body much closer to its “best before” date than its birth and the constant need to evaluate how I spend my time. In sharing her boredom and anxieties, Miller’s given me much to think about. —KS

5. An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins

Cheryl Katz | Smithsonian | February 14, 2023 | 3,125 words

Every year Bloomberg Businessweek publishes what it calls the Jealousy List, featuring articles that authors wish they’d written or that editors wish they’d assigned. If I were to have my own jealousy list for 2023, this piece by Cheryl Katz would be on it. I love it so much. Seriously, drop what you’re doing and read it. Katz’s story is about a village in Iceland where, every year, residents young and old work together to save baby puffins, also known as “pufflings.” The wee birds that look like they’re wearing tuxedos often get lost leaving their burrows and struggle to fly out to sea as they’re supposed to. Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carries them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate.” Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carry them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate. As climate change does its worst to the earth, ushering pufflings into the sky has never been more important. I’m jealous I didn’t get to write this story. Or maybe I’m just mad I’m not in the Puffling Patrol. They get to do good for the world by communing with adorable baby birds. How often is something so essential also so joyful? BRB, Googling flights to Iceland. —SD

Audience Award

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In the midst of that impasse, I’ve come to see mitigation specialists like Baldwin as ambassadors from a future where we think more richly about violence. For the last few decades, they have documented the traumas, policy failures, family dynamics and individual choices that shape the lives of people who kill. Leaders in the field say it’s impossible to accurately count mitigation specialists — there is no formal license — but there may be fewer than 1,000. They’ve actively avoided media attention, and yet the stories they uncover occasionally emerge in Hollywood scripts and Supreme Court opinions. Over three decades, mitigation specialists have helped drive down death sentences from more than 300 annually in the mid-1990s to fewer than 30 in recent years.

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

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1. The Art of Bidding, or How I Survived Federal Prison

Eric Borsuk | The Marshall Project | September 22, 2022 | 8,775 words

When Eric Borsuk was incarcerated in federal prison with two accomplices, the three friends used self-education to pass the time. They studied on a demanding schedule and evaluated assignments for one another. When an injustice within the so-called justice system separated them, Eric lost not only their companionship but his primary coping mechanism, forcing him to find a new way to protect his mental and physical health during the final five years of his sentence. In this incisive piece at The Marshall Project (published in partnership with VQR), Borsuk recounts how the justice system’s willful blindness and casual cruelty helped inspire him to write. American Animals, the memoir Borsuk wrote from his cell, became a major motion picture in 2018. —KS

2. Has The Zodiac Killer Mystery Been Solved (Again)?

Aaron Gell | Los Angeles Magazine | September 22, 2022 | 6,235 words

Bestselling novelist Jarett Kobek believes he’s uncovered the true identity of the Zodiac Killer. His research into the cultural references in the killer’s cryptic letters led him down a rabbit hole and, ultimately, to an eccentric man named Paul Doerr, who died in 2007. But Doerr’s daughter, Gloria, isn’t so sure — until Aaron Gell suggests that the two of them come together to meet. I’m in no way immersed in the subculture of cold-case websleuths, but Gell’s story hooked me from the start, and it was impossible not to picture the movie version of this piece in my head as I was reading. As Gell shows, the evidence against Doerr might be the strongest yet, especially after chilling conversations with Gloria about her father, her childhood, and their relationship. Even if Kobek is just another amateur detective making this claim, Gell’s piece demonstrates how easy it is to become obsessed with unsolved cases like these. —CLR

3. 14 Hours in The Queue To See Queen Elizabeth’s Coffin

Laurie Penny | British GQ | September 18, 2022 | 3,415 words

I was 13 when Princess Diana died. For weeks, her death was the dominant force in England — on every channel, every paper, every face. A soap opera stuck on a tragic loop. My mum took me to London to lay flowers at Buckingham Palace. I remember the plastic cellophane suffocating the dying blooms, glinting in the sun in an expanse that seemed to stretch forever. I remember it being silent. I had picked flowers from our garden, which were now a sad, wilted offering. I was embarrassed putting them down — partly by the flowers, partly by even being there. Looking back, I am still a little embarrassed; it was strange to be driven by this huge, incomprehensible, national grief. So I appreciated Laurie Penny’s awkwardness in joining “the Queue” to walk past Queen Elizabeth’s coffin, quick to explain she is “not here for the Queen; I’m here for the Queue” (and that she is being paid). People have quipped Brits have been practicing for this queue their whole lives, and Penny encounters great stoicism as people settle into “groups of around seven or 10, and we take turns keeping each other’s place.” Her group is the focus of this essay: An array of characters brought together simply by turning up at the same time, they bond over the 14-hour ordeal with true blitz spirit. I was particularly rooting for 84-year-old John and his wife, feeling horrified when, after 13 hours, an official tried to remove them for being too frail. Reading, I went from chuckling at Penny’s wit to feeling tearful. Not for the Queen — I would not have joined the queue without being paid either — but, as a British expat of 10 years, for missing being part of a nation of people who would willingly share such a bizarre experience. A beautiful essay that, for a brief moment, made me miserably, gut-wrenchingly homesick. —CW

4. The Magic of Summer Basketball

Hanif Abdurraqib | ESPN | September 28, 2022 | 8,314 words

If you’ve only read Hanif Abdurraqib’s peerless arts criticism and occasional profile work, you may not be aware how deeply he loves the game of basketball. (Or how stoically he shoulders his own pathos-filled Minnesota Timberwolves fandom.) But that love suffuses every word of his journey into the world of summer hoops leagues — those offseason battlegrounds where promising young draftees go up against hometown legends and NBA icons alike, in tiny jam-packed gyms that amplify the game’s visceral swells beyond imagination. This is more than a travelogue. It’s a paean to the forge of competitive pro-am basketball, a tradition that sharpens games and shapes folklore. “The court is home,” he writes of Columbus’ Kingdom Summer League. “It transcends the places you live, or have lived. If you were made in this city, you can come back and play in this city, and there will be people who remember you when you first made a name for yourself. In a city like Columbus, if you were great once on these courts, you can always exist in a space beyond fading memories.” —PR

5. I Do Not Keep a Diary

Will Rees | Astra Magazine | September 15, 2022 | 3,051 words

Will Rees doesn’t yet keep a diary, but he aspires to. Maybe. He carries a notebook and pen, ready for the precise set of planting conditions that would allow him to sow his thoughts and ideas. The notebook is well traveled. The cover is worn, yet the inside remains blank as he struggles with how to portray himself on the page, asking “How would I like to appear when it is only myself who is looking?” I loved this piece because I find it wholly relatable. Have you ever felt those sweet yet rare moments when you’re infused with possibility, that desire to make sense of your life and your experiences, to uncover meaning in how you spend your days? Have you ever aspired to get thoughts down before they evaporate, before that drop of inspiration or insight is gone forever? To take pride in yourself as a thinking person who makes reflection a habit? Don’t we all? —KS

By Maurice Chammah

I’ve been in a lot of conversations lately in which a two-word phrase is spoken — ”true crime” — and then, during the ensuing beat of silence, everyone reads the room and modulates their reactions based on the expressions of everyone else. Or maybe it’s just me. For some, the phrase simply sparks exclamations and recommendations, stories of late nights spent binging The Jinx or I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. But others wince, because no matter how sophisticated the storytelling or agreeable the politics, an icky aftertaste remains.

On the other hand, as lawyer and podcast host Rabia Chaudry recently pointed out to the New York Times, the genre can also invite more scrutiny of the justice system. Over the last five years, while writing a book about the death penalty, and a narrative story about a controversial murder investigation, I’ve noticed that our debates sometimes fail to articulate that when we say “true crime,” we’re really talking about a huge variety of story types, one of which is especially good at taking readers right to the heart of important policy questions. 

I’ll call it the “Wrongful Conviction Story,” a subgenre of true crime that examines the failures of police, courts, and other government actors, and questions whether they’ve caught and punished the correct person. I’m not calling it the “Innocence Story,” because “wrongful” is a subjective adjective, implying an argument is being made, while “innocence” implies the writer can fully prove the objective truth, which, usually, they can’t. These stories aren’t necessarily out to answer whether someone is guilty or innocent. They’re about the failures of a system that ensnares millions of Americans each year, innocent and guilty. 

A few years ago, I heard another writer say that magazine editors didn’t want these stories anymore, because they were no longer “surprising” to readers. That may be overstated, but it is true that journalists need to keep innovating in terms of how we build narratives if we’re going to get readers to follow us into a system full of misery, pain, and jargon like “voir dire” and “Brady violation,” showing them the real thing rather than the tidy heroes-and-villains worlds of Law & Order and NCIS.

I’ve collected a handful of my favorite examples of the Wrongful Conviction Story. Each represents a further slice of the subgenre, along with other stories I think are worth your attention if you want to go deeper, whether because you’re a fellow journalist, a lawyer (very much a profession in which one tells stories), or just a curious reader.

Bloodstain Analysis Convinced a Jury She Stabbed Her 10-Year-Old Son. Now, Even Freedom Can’t Give Her Back Her Life. (Pamela Colloff, ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, December 2018)

Pamela Colloff didn’t invent the wrongful conviction magazine story, but she did perfect it. While working for Texas Monthly, ProPublica, and The New York Times Magazine, she’s figured out how to foreground action and build characters efficiently, so that you can slip into the pool with her protagonists and feel their panic as they start to drown. One of her lesser-known tales concerns Julie Rea, a single mother convicted of killing her 10-year-old son Joel, based on faulty analysis of blood at the crime scene. We learn about “blood spatter” but spend most of our time on Rea’s four traumas: losing her son, being falsely convicted, going to prison, and trying to make her way again in the free world. 

In the wake of the murder, she could not bear to be alone. Terrified of the dark, she rarely slept. She stayed in an apartment an hour-and-a-half’s drive away, in Bloomington, Indiana, where she had been commuting to Indiana University’s Ph.D. program. There, a rotation of friends stayed with her around the clock. “To fall asleep, I had to have someone on either side of me and the lights on,” she said.

Reasonable Doubt (Maya Dukmasova, Chicago Reader, August 2021)

It’s pretty bold to make the second word of your article your own name, but anyone who has listened to Serial understands that it can be valuable for the journalist to present him or herself as a first-person narrator. I’d been struggling with whether this was worth doing in my own writing, and I was impressed with how Maya Dukmasova utilized her own ambivalence — and the more freewheeling prose style typical of alt-weeklies like the Chicago Reader — to propel the reader into her tale of a potentially innocent Illinois prisoner. She also goes meta, discussing  Janet Malcolm’s seminal book The Journalist and the Murderer and the sticky ethics of reporting on someone who tells you they’re innocent. You say you believe them, but both of you may be lying. 

Publishing a story someone doesn’t want out there is an act of betrayal even if you have no relationship to them. As a journalist, especially a white one, the way you justify it to yourself is by saying that the story is bigger than its central character, that his life experiences aren’t really just his to publicize or keep private, that they belong to everyone. This line of thinking is particularly potent when you’ve already invested significant time and energy into a story—as though with that expenditure you’ve purchased a person’s right to refuse or consent to be written about. I’d done a lot of digging by then. I decided to keep going, partially because it felt too late to turn back, and also because I believed what happened to Allen was wrong, even if I didn’t fully believe him.

The Sniff Test (Peter Andrey Smith, Science, October 2021)

Stories about the court system’s failures are generally best when they focus on people, but this story artfully foregrounds a canine character, exploring the dubious science of “cadaver dogs” as the latest of the forensic disciplines that judges, lawyers, and researchers are finding lack any real scientific backing. Many such stories look at trials from the distant past, but Peter Andrey Smith manages to capture multiple timelines while also centering a tragic Colorado case that is very much happening now and features a duel between a star expert witness and the Innocence Project lawyers questioning her claims. 

Behind a dog’s leathery, wet nose lies a cavernous labyrinth of scroll-shaped chambers called ethmoturbinates lined with some 200 million olfactory receptors, encoded by an estimated 2.5 times as many genes as in humans. In recent years, researchers studying canine cognition have shown pet dogs can sniff out minute quantities of odorants, such as the odor of their owner’s T-shirt after it has been worn.

How the Unchecked Power of Judges Is Hurting Poor Texans (Neena Satija, Texas Monthly, September 2019)

On the other hand: If a writer is too focused on the people (or the dogs), they may miss the big picture dynamics. When an innocent person goes to prison, it’s a failure of multiple people and institutions. I love how Neena Satija uses a single assault charge — a more common crime than murder, the typical focus of wrongful conviction stories — to help us understand the problems of money, favoritism, and red tape that surround how people who can’t afford to pay for lawyers get represented, or not represented. 

A 58-year-old with strawberry-blond hair and thin glasses, [Ray] Espersen was one of Austin’s most prolific lawyers: the previous year he’d been paid for work on 331 felonies and 275 misdemeanors in Travis County, as well as 46 felonies in neighboring Williamson County—more cases than nearly any other Austin-area attorney. … [Marvin] Wilford did not know this. What he did know was that … Espersen didn’t seem to be listening. The visitation room was tiny, and the two sat practically knee to knee, but “he was looking at the floor, scratching his head, looking everywhere but at me,” Wilford recalled.

Drawings from Prison (Valentino Dixon, Golf Digest, May 2012)

Did you hear the one about the golf magazine that helped free a man from prison? While serving a long sentence for murder, Valentino Dixon grew obsessed with drawing golf courses, which caught the attention of Golf Digest. But the editors there also found his conviction suspicious, and they dug in. Dixon is now free, and the original article about his case involves a fascinating juxtaposition of hard-nosed criminal justice reporting and Dixon’s honest, intimate account of finding mental solace through his ordeal by drawing greens, holes, and trees. 

I’ve never hit a golf ball. I’ve never set foot on a golf course. Everything I draw is from inside a 6-by-10 prison cell. The first course I ever drew was for warden James Conway. He would often stop by my cell to ask how my appeal was going and to see my drawings. Before he retired, the warden brought me a photograph of the 12th hole at Augusta National and asked if I could draw it for him. … The look of a golf hole spoke to me. It seemed peaceful. I imagine playing it would be a lot like fishing.

I’m Sorry (Kyle Zirpolo as told to Debbie Nathan, Los Angeles Times, October 2005)

It’s sad to say, but many readers now shrug when they see a headline like “Innocent Person Freed” because the phenomenon feels so common. The stories told about these cases can fall into patterns and cliches that lose readers. One solution is to focus not on the story of the wrongfully accused, but on someone else involved in the case. Reporter Debbie Nathan was even more creative, ceding the voice of her story almost entirely over to Kyle Zirpolo: a young man who, as a child, had accused adults of sexual crimes, but later realized he’d been pressured by the authorities to invent the stories. Nathan follows up his account with the backstory of why he came forward.

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted. I know the types of language they used on me: things like I was smart, or I could help the other kids who were scared.

The Murders at the Lake (Mike Hall, Texas Monthly, April 2014)

I remember vividly sitting in a coffee shop in Austin as the sun set, squinting and ignoring my stomach growls while I inhaled each twist in Mike Hall’s story about a murder mystery and the many lives consumed in its wake. There are questions around forensic science and the behavior of prosecutors, but Hall keeps casting his camera in new directions, novelistically accreting details and tapping true-crime conventions to lead us towards ineffable questions of time, tragedy, and justice. 

[David] Spence insisted he couldn’t remember murdering anyone, but he began to wonder if it was possible that he had really done it. 

“Did I kill them kids?” 

“I think you did,” said the deputy.

“Why don’t I know?”

Dead Certainty (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, January 2016)

Let’s end this on a note of caution. For every somber reporting project, there’s some juicy content that uses the tools and stylistic modes of journalism, but lets either entertainment or advocacy take precedence. I’ve returned maybe a dozen times to Kathryn Schulz’s essay on Making a Murderer, which explores why journalists, filmmakers, and others have grown comfortable questioning the verdicts of the courts, and what the costs of this can be, especially for the grieving families at the center of these cases. 

Yet the most obvious thing to say about true-crime documentaries is something that, surprisingly often, goes unsaid: They turn people’s private tragedies into public entertainment. If you have lost someone to violent crime, you know that, other than the loss itself, few things are as painful and galling as the daily media coverage, and the license it gives to strangers to weigh in on what happened. That experience is difficult enough when the coverage is local, and unimaginable when a major media production turns your story into a national pastime.

***

Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. He was on a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. His first book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, was published by Crown in 2021 and won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Book Award. A former Fulbright fellow in Cairo, he also plays the violin and is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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

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1. Anatomy of a Murder Confession

Maurice Chammah | The Marshall Project and Dallas Morning News | January 18th, 2022 | 6,600 Words

“They put us together…and tell us that we can do whatever we want, as long as we solve cases.” That’s what James Holland, a Texas Ranger and media-dubbed “serial killer whisperer,” once said about the Rangers’ work on unsolved murders. The person he said it to was James Driskill, a suspect in a cold case, and Holland wasn’t kidding: To pin the murder on Driskill, the Rangers used hypnosis, deception, a “hypothetical” confession, and other investigative methods criticized by criminal justice experts and advocates as dramatically increasing the risk of convicting an innocent person. Which is exactly what Driskill, now serving a prison sentence, and his legal team say happened to him. Maurice Chammah’s story about Holland’s questionable techniques, which aren’t isolated to Driskill’s case, is as jaw-dropping as it is expertly crafted. —SD

2. The Assassination of Drakeo the Ruler

Jeff Weiss | Los Angeles Magazine | January 13th, 2022 | 6,842 words

The heyday of hip-hop magazines like XXL and Rap Pages might be behind us, but there’s still a cadre of thoughtful, incisive journalists chronicling the culture in a way that transcends the usual artist profiles and album reviews. One of my favorites of the past few years has been Weiss, who has become an ardent keeper of the L.A. flame, creating compelling portraits of hometown heroes like 03 Greedo — and here his gifts are on full display, though they’re the sour fruit of a tragedy. In December, when Los Angeles rapper Drakeo the Ruler was ambushed backstage at a music festival and fatally stabbed, Weiss was feet away. The two had kindled a relationship over the years, one that had begun under the auspices of journalism but evolved into friendship; now, over the course of nearly 7,000 words, Weiss braids together Drakeo’s all-too-short life with his own journey of grief. Proximal but never predatory, it peels back the myth to reveal a young man who sought to put his sprawling city on his back, even though it meant a collision course with a grisly fate. This isn’t music journalism; it’s human journalism. —PR

3. The Day My Wartime Cat Went Missing

Rasha Elass | New Lines | January 14, 2022 | 6,368 words

In this unexpected essay about living in wartime Syria, Rasha Elass writes about her adventures over the past decade with her two cats, Pumpkin and Gremlin, whom she adopted as kittens in Abu Dhabi. In 2010, before the Arab Spring, Elass goes to Damascus, where she was born, in the hope of connecting more deeply to the place of her birth. Conflict and civil war, however, make this impossible; Elass describes day-to-day life in the capital as both a resident and a journalist: the mortar attacks and the bombs, the hostile checkpoints and the dangers of reporting in rebel-controlled areas. But through it all, Pumpkin and Gremlin are there — watchful witnesses, beloved companions — as cats are. “When the war starts the cats will continue to soften the rough edges of the humans around them, even those who become agitated and brandish Kalashnikovs.” You don’t need to love cats to enjoy this essay, but if you do, you’ll certainly understand the bond Elass has with hers. —CLR

4. I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life.

Danielle Tcholakian | Jezebel | January 19th, 2022 | 2,371

Here at home, we would have a couple beers and probably a glass of wine every evening during that first year of the pandemic. We drank to have something to look forward to. (Well, at least there is a cold amber ale or two — or three — awaiting me at the end of yet another long day.) We drank to avoid the reality of the case and death counts here and elsewhere. We joked about it, a dark humor that helped justify and enable our choice of coping mechanism. But as Danielle Tcholakian recounts in her brave and poignant essay at Jezebel, alcohol became a weighted blanket that suppressed not fear, not self-loathing, nor the world at large, but a necessary perspective shift — one that life with less alcohol, or in Tcholakian’s case abstinence — could bring. Tcholakian’s piece recounts deep, dangerous depression. That’s where our experiences diverge, though the evolution in mindset she describes so well is something I recognize. “Maladaptive behaviors create what I imagine to be rutted little canals in our wiring, like scratched up dive bar tables…But over and over, pushing forward through these feelings that I previously would’ve poured alcohol over got me to a place I couldn’t have understood.” This piece is clear and deeply compelling: While we all experience and respond to the world and its stressors in different ways, we all feel scared and helpless at times. In being so vulnerable, Tcholakian reminds us of the most important thing, so often forgotten while we snuggle with the black dog: we are not alone. —KS

5. The Undoing of Joss Whedon

Lila Shapiro | Vulture | January 17th, 2022 | 8,989 words

The ’90s were a different era — a time before Netflix binging — when a whole agonizing week passed between each episode of your favorite show. Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on Fridays at 7 p.m., and I was either ready on the sofa or scrambling to record it on VHS tape. I loved it! To me, Buffy was a symbol of “girl power” (a beloved ’90s phrase), a young blonde woman finally playing the hero rather than the victim. Lila Shapiro, however, writes that the show can be interpreted differently: “the titillating tale of a woman in leather pants who is brutalized by monsters.” Disconcerting for me to consider, but in line with the recent revelations about Joss Whedon, Buffy‘s creator.

Shapiro has carried out extraordinary research for this article, interviewing Whedon’s former colleagues and lovers, as well as Whedon himself. Once a god to his fans, public revelations from his ex-wife and former cast detailing affairs with young actresses and casual cruelty have led to his fall. People are conflicted about whether he was merely difficult or crossed the line into abuse, and Shapiro finds no clear answers. Whedon is keen to deflect blame, claiming that, with regard to affairs with cast members, “He felt he ‘had’ to sleep with them, that he was ‘powerless’ to resist.” An uncomfortable and frustrating read — which may tarnish some childhood memories — but a brilliant exploration into the ruin of Whedon’s reputation. —CW