The dark side of the seafood industry. The morality of mortality. Memory versus belief. The flying cowboys lighting up the skies of the West. The food-service secrets of a tableside firestarter. All that (and more!) in this week’s edition.

1. The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words

Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and handled it? The more I read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and horrific work conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fleet. These ships roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas; analysts believe the country disguises some of them as fishing vessels when they’re in fact part of a “maritime militia” surveilling the sea, looking to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will. Ian Urbina, who runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, spent four years visiting the fleet’s ships and investigating their conditions. (To communicate with fishermen on ships that prohibited him on board, he tossed up plastic bottles, “weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions.”) He also tracked where squid caught irresponsibly would end up: first to plants in China, some employing Xinjiang labor, and then continuing on to the very places we buy our seafood, like Costco and Safeway. This is a massive report on how China has become a fishing superpower, but Urbina also weaves within it an emotional, devastating story of an Indonesian worker who joined one of these ships in order to give his family a better life. Extraordinary reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari. —CLR

2. We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Looking back at the last few months of my selections for this newsletter, I realize that I prize writing that escapes the presuppositions of its genre—or, rather, writing that escapes your presuppositions of its genre. Take this essay from the great Hanif Abdurraqib. When you first find your way to it in The Paris Review, you might notice the rubric “On Games” and see a screenshot from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, and decide then and there to keep browsing. Would I begrudge you that decision? Probably not. But I’d also know that you were unwittingly denying yourself something marvelous. From the very first sentence—”I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven”—the piece thrums with a keen melancholy that never tips into sorrow or indulgence. When Abdurraqib writes about the futility and powerlessness of playing to save the doomed, he’s of course writing about something larger, and he has no hesitation in drawing the line for you: this is about real redemption. About the sins of youth and the circumstances that absolve them, or don’t. About the love we extend to others but not ourselves. About how we face our own ever-shortening lives. The word “spiritual” is a slippery one, used as it is to mediate our own discomfort with the unknowable, but there’s no better word to apply to this essay. Abdurraqib’s spirit shimmers here, its full spectrum diffracted through his 19th-century avatar; that it does so in the service of what some might flatten to “game writing” only proves my point. This is something special. —PR

3. Mere Belief

Sallie Tisdale | Harper’s Magazine | October 16, 2023 | 6,222 words

In my earliest memory, I’m peering under my uncle Raymond’s bedroom door. He lives with me and my parents in the second bedroom of the duplex we all share. My mom’s given me his mail and I’m flicking the envelopes under the door, watching them spin over the parquet floor and disappear from view after crossing a patch of bright sunlight. I am not yet 5 years old. This is an autobiographical memory, according to Sallie Tisdale and her fascinating piece on memoir and memory for Harper’s Magazine. As a memoirist, Tisdale trades in remembering, but this is no romanticized account of an unlimited well of perfect recall that fuels her writing. She looks at the science behind what we remember and how memories morph, shifting in shape and color in the liminal spaces of our brain, while she wrestles with the conundrum of her own evolving identity, and how what seems like fact can become blurred. “It is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. Memory is wet sand,” she writes. “This is what I want to interrogate: the slipperiness, the uncertainty.” Is there nothing more beautiful—and more human—than searching for truth in the blurry spaces of our memory? —KS

4. Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers

Brad Rassler | Outside | October 18, 2023 | 10,300 words

Off-airport pilots. Strip baggers. Flyboys. The recreational bush pilots in this piece sport many names. But are these social media-savvy flyers bringing new people into an exciting sport or just “boys with pricey toys” who clog up the skies and take reckless risks? Brad Rassler is dedicated to his discovery mission—even braving some terrifying maneuvers while in the passenger seat of planes that weigh no more than a golf cart. I love meeting big characters, and this piece is jam-packed with them, all sporting varying amounts of facial hair, from “a thick soul patch ornamenting [a] chin” to “a ginger-brown beard that doesn’t quite attach to the mustache part.” (One lucky exception has a “handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw.”) You cannot fail to be impressed by such a range of beard-related eloquence. Culminating in a chaotic rally in the evocatively named Dead Cow Lakebed, Nevada, this feature is quite the ride. —CW

5. Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

Adam Reiner | Eater | October 11, 2023 | 1,553 words

Adam Reiner’s short but sweet Eater piece on food as entertainment is perfectly satisfying. For three years Reiner worked as a captain at a Manhattan chophouse called The Grill, where he prepared food tableside, including Dover sole and Bananas Foster, the flaming pièce de résistance. Reiner serves more than stories of boorish patrons as seen from behind the gueridon. (The fancy trolley containing cooking ingredients and utensils.) He gives us a taste of food-as-performance at his restaurant and others, such as Papi Steak, where the $1,000 wagyu ribeye’s reveal is meat theater—complete with special effects that could rival Taylor Swift in concert. “The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival,” he writes. Reiner also reveals the perils of performance, and the very real anxieties that go along with it. For every Bananas Foster or cherries jubilee, there’s always the potential that the flambé is a flop, “like striking a book of matches in the rain.” Steak entrances and fancy flaming bananas aside, it’s Reiner’s writing that will keep you coming back for more in a story that’s less about the food and more about his uneasy relationship with the distastefulness of restaurant showmanship. —KS

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

Like with any exclusive club, the general rule is that the crowd worsens as the years tick by, and it’s no surprise that René is shutting down next year; I’d pull the rip cord too, mate.

I imagine the edimental salad days, back when gourmand freaks with open minds and food writers craving the next big thing lined the reservation book. I got a feel for the evening’s clientele with a welcoming cider: crypto bros, ponytailed tech virgins with bottles of añejo for the chef, and their TikToking wives along for the clout-chasing ride. I’m sure these folks like eating food, but do they really deserve to eat here, the Vatican for the global food bro?

Exclusivity isn’t always bad, so long as you can exclude the right people.

I think about the toll of that kind of performance and the burden of framing your culture primarily as “fun.” The menu that has barely strayed from steak and shrimp and fried rice. Spending all night slicing and dicing and flipping to applause, then reemerging into a world that values you only for your ability to conform to its preconceptions. Perhaps you think of yourself mainly in terms of how well you live up to others’ expectations, even if you never agreed to them, and fret about performing that role. Perhaps there’s barely room to think of what else you could — or want to — offer. Anyway, there is no show good enough to earn you acceptance. But still, you hope.

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A kindergarten class dispersed by war. A taut investigation into two men’s disappearance. A portrait of the legendary Harry Belafonte. Memories of a traditional cooking lesson. And everything that goes into the restaurant of the moment. These are our favorite reads of the week, chosen from all of our editors’ picks.

1. How the War in Ukraine Has Forever Changed the Children in One Kindergarten Class

Elissa Nadworny, Claire Harbage | NPR | April 12, 2023 | 4,700 words

This piece takes war down to the micro level, the story of a conflict told not through politics or death tolls but through the fate of one class of kindergarten children. It makes for a blisteringly relatable read. Elissa Nadworny and Claire Harbage have carried out meticulous reporting, meeting several children and their families from a classroom in Kharkiv with “bright yellow and green walls and long, gauzy curtains.” (Such attentive details are sprinkled throughout.) Some children remain in Ukraine, but more than half have fled around the world, separated by thousands of miles. Some are struggling with new languages. Some can’t sleep. Some are still scared. They all miss each other. Beautiful photographs and snippets from their group chats help to bring their new realities to life. A small war story but a powerful one: These few children represent so many. —CW

2. The Deputy and the Disappeared

Thomas Lake | CNN | April 21, 2023 | 9,276 words

What happened to Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams, two men who went missing three months apart in Immokalee, an agricultural town near Naples, Florida? As you discover in this gripping, well-researched investigation by Thomas Lake, the evidence points to Steven Calkins, the Collier County deputy suspected to be the last person to see both men. Lake and the CNN reporting team bring inconsistencies and telling details to light, and build minute-to-minute timelines of the days these men disappeared, using interview transcripts, dispatch logs, phone records, and other documents. Calkins declined interview requests, but comments from people around him, including former colleagues, reveal suspicion and a loss of trust in the former officer. Still, the cases remain unsolved, and you wonder: Where is the justice for these men, for their families, for this small town? —CLR

3. Voice and Hammer

Jeff Sharlet | VQR | October 2013 | 8,251 words

Like Harry Belafonte himself, there is much to love about Jeff Sharlet’s profile of the legendary singer, actor, and activist who died this week at the age of 96. The writing is vivid, the quotes astonishing, every anecdote riveting. Like the one where Belafonte recruits Sidney Poitier to go with him to hand-deliver $50,000 to civil rights organizers in Mississippi, amid a storm of violence and threats of it. (“They might think twice about killing two big n****rs,” Belafonte tells Poitier.) A truck presumably driven by Klansmen meets them at the Greenwood airstrip and follows them into town, ramming the back of the car that’s carrying them. When Belafonte arrives at a dance hall where supporters are waiting, he sings a version of his most famous tune, “Banana Boat (Day-o),” and defiantly dumps a bag full of dollars onto a table. What a story — to put it lightly, holy crap. But the moment that got me most in this gorgeous piece is when Sharlet sits in an archive, headphones on his ears, watching a tape of “Tonight with Belafonte,” an iconic 1959 TV revue. “I felt like I was watching a different past, one in which the revolution had been televised,” Sharlet writes. “Goddamn. As if that was what TV was for. A signal. This, I thought, this.” I have the same feeling about Belafonte’s existence. It showed what living could be for. This, I’m still thinking. This. —SD

4. Remembering the Egyptian Childhood I Never Had Through Its Culinary Traditions

Jasmin Attia | Literary Hub | March 27, 2023 | 2,014 words

Jasmin Attia’s beautiful Lit Hub essay puts you, the reader, in the kitchen as she and her mother make waraa eynab (stuffed grape leaves). This is a story that captures all your senses: You can smell the sumac, feel the smooth grape leaves, and hear the perfect traditional soup bubbling gently on the stove, a meal that binds her Egyptian heritage with her birth in America. One of the most difficult jobs a writer must do is convey lived experience so that those who lack it can begin to understand. “But my hands must still learn what the right amount of meat feels like between my fingers. There is no recipe in my family, nothing written down, no measurements. Measurements are for the inept. This is my mother’s mantra. We, the proud women of the family, we feel and smell and taste and touch and create. We know when it is good because we know when it is good,” she writes. This small but wonderful taste of Attia’s writing left me hungry for a second helping. —KS

5. Inside Superiority Burger: The Buzziest Restaurant in America

Brett Martin | GQ | April 26, 2023 | 3,834 words

Most writing about food focuses on the output. Some of it focuses on the people. A bit of it focuses on technique. But not enough of it teases out the synesthesia of a night in a restaurant: the adrenaline, the prep, the community, the taste. The vibe of eating, as much as I hate to use that word. Brett Martin’s piece shrugs off those limitations on its way to being the most visceral look inside a restaurant since The Bear. Nominally a profile of punk-drummer-turned-chef Brooks Headley and his vegetarian burger joint, it manages to capture the twin high-wire acts of executing and eating inside New York City’s restaurant of the moment. Martin veers from evocative tasting notes (“[s]omething about the feathery sheets of tofu skin, layered on a squishy hero roll with broccoli rabe and a spiced chickpea paste that evokes Vietnamese pate, flips the same feral switch in my chest as does eating, say, andouillette, the most offaly of French sausages”) to capturing Headley at full speed on a packed Thursday night (“[o]ften, he’ll bustle in one direction, only to pull up short as though he’s forgotten what he was doing, and then run off in another”) to some shrewd commentary on the punk ethos and food gentrification. It feels, in the very best way, like you’re a drone being piloted through Superiority Burger during a dinner rush. Whether it makes you hungry is beside the point; it’s a feast of its own. —PR

Audience Award

It’s time for the piece our readers loved most this week — and the oversized trophy goes to:

Though Headley arrives early in the morning to do prep work and develop new dishes, and has lately been in charge of cooking the daily family meal for staff, he spends little time in the kitchen during service. Instead, he’s in constant motion on the floor, wearing his paper hat, black hoodie, dark green pants, and clogs. He checks in on tables, runs out burgers, and rushes to clear plates as quickly as they are done, a touch he says is borrowed from Roll-N-Roaster, the venerable Sheepshead Bay roast-beef restaurant. If there’s been one complaint these first weeks, he says, it’s that service is too fast. Often, he’ll bustle in one direction, only to pull up short as though he’s forgotten what he was doing, and then run off in another. In fact, he’s monitoring music volumes, which vary wildly from song to song and spot to spot, in part because he insisted on replicating Odessa’s vintage ceiling speakers instead of installing a modern sound system. For each dinner service, he creates a fourteen-hour playlist, which he then DJs in real time from his phone, adjusting to the shifting energy of the room. (If the mark of a truly great restaurant soundtrack is regularly defeating Shazam, Headley’s playlist achieves it tonight, by my count, in five songs.) On most nights he clocks over 35,000 steps according to the device on his wrist, without venturing beyond the short walk to his apartment and the restaurant floor.

Even as QR code technology threatens to render printed menus obsolete, it occurred to me that nothing can replace the texture and poetry of a physical menu. No matter how much restaurants have changed in the century since Miss Buttolph lived, the humble menu has endured—as the diner’s first impression, a statement of the chef’s intentions, and a love letter to the appetite.

Taro and Mishi were tuckered out by the end of the day. “I was doing work while they were going through photos,” said Perez, “and I had both of them on my belly a little bit, just chilling out. I think they were really, really tired. They passed out in my little sweater and just stayed with me while I was doing work.” They headed home in an Uber around six, asleep most of the way. At the apartment, Perez streamed behind-the-scenes footage and pictures from the day for her roommates on their TV, but the rats were ready to return to their cage. “They just all went into a little cuddle pile and fell asleep again,” she said.

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