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A glimpse into what it’s like to have aphantasia. An account of escaping wildfire in Yellowknife. A profile of an NBA-reporting phenomenon. An essay about taking control of one’s own story. And a read on meat and the English language.

1. My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

Marco Giancotti | Nautilus | October 4, 2023 | 3,644 words

Marco Giancotti has aphantasia, which means “the absence of images” in Greek. Ask him to picture a top hat or recall a sound or a smell and he can’t imagine it. He has trouble remembering events unless he can deduce their timing by assembling facts such as where he was living and the people in his circle at the time. For Nautilus, Giancotti does a terrific job breaking down his lived experiences and the studies he’s participating in so that science, society, and the lay reader can begin to understand more about this fascinating condition. “As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind,” he writes. “I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head.” What’s most beautiful and poignant about this piece is how, by learning more about aphantasia and contributing to its study, Giancotti comes to appreciate his condition as an example of what makes humanity so beautifully diverse. “The question I started with—what’s wrong with me?—was both rhetorical and itself wrong. The better question is one we all ask ourselves at some point: ‘What makes me who I am?’” Can you imagine how much better our world would be, if we all dared to do so? —KS

2. I Evacuated From Yellowknife This Summer. Coming Home Was The Hardest Part.

Jessica Davey-Quantick | Maclean’s | October 5, 2023 | 3,842 words

This September, I saw flames licking up the side of a hill near my house. The smoke spiraled above in thick, sinister plumes while the taste of bonfire invaded the once-crisp air. I was lucky: my local wildfire was controlled before evacuation was necessary. Many in Canada were not so fortunate. Nearly 200,000 Canadians were under evacuation orders this summer, Canada’s worst wildfire season since records began. Jessica Davey-Quantick was one of them, fleeing her home in Yellowknife as the area burning across the Northwest Territories reached roughly the size of Denmark. She left reluctantly, boarding one of the last evacuation flights with her cats—Allen and Bruce—squeezed in beside her. Her account is one of both fear and the mundane logistics of evacuation travel, a mixture that makes this piece incredibly relatable. When she finally reaches her destination, the wait begins. She waits to see how long before she can go home. She waits to see if she has a home. When she finally does return, the sky is still smoke-filled. I know how that feels—days on end of murky light, filtered through a hazy lens, air that clings hot and heavy as claustrophobia creeps up to envelop you. This apocalyptic atmosphere brings reality home, as it does for Davey-Quantick, who ends her piece with a desperate plea: Climate change is screaming at us. We have to listen. —CW

3. Shams Charania’s Scoop Dreams

Reeves Wiedeman | Intelligencer | October 11, 2023 | 6,695 words

In The New Yorker this week, Choire Sicha tells Kyle Chayka that he pegs 2014 as the beginning of the end of social media. Coincidentally, that’s the same year that a young sports journalist named Shams Charania landed his first big NBA scoop. As it turns out, tweeting first about an impending trade wouldn’t just turn him into a first-name-only phenomenon among basketball fans; it would eventually place him at the dead center of sportswriting’s current existential crisis. Reeves Wiedeman isn’t the first to profile Charania, as he did this week for New York’s Intelligencer vertical. He is, however, the first to do so in a way that lays bare the larger forces set in motion by Charania’s ascendancy: chiefly, The New York Times’ decision to disband its sports department in favor of The Athletic, its $550 million acquisition that just happens to be Charania’s current home. Wiedeman has written stories far more cinematic—2021’s “The Spine Collector” and 2018’s “The Watcher” come to mind—but there’s something undeniably pleasing about how this acts as both unflinching profile and business story. As much as Charania’s indefatigable M.O. is the stuff of legend (and no shortage of resentment from his competitors), it happens to be a prime example of how journalism has been subsumed by that formless extrusion known as “content.” Yes, during the offseason a good #ShamsBomb delivers a frisson. But as a representation of how we consume and share information, it might also be laying waste to its surroundings. —PR

4. The Protagonist Is Never in Control

Emily Fox Kaplan | Guernica | October 2, 2023 | 6,552 words

Spellbound. This isn’t a word I use often. But rarely does a piece mesmerize me like this one. Emily Fox Kaplan recounts growing up with an emotionally abusive and manipulative stepfather (who is also a prestigious surgeon). Smartly written in second person, Kaplan uses the power of voice and narration to take back control of her story, shifting effortlessly between her perspective as a child to self-assured present-day narrator. “And you’ll realize, too, that a person can tell a story any way she likes; that the same story — a little girl who loves to read — can be told as a horror story or a fairy tale, depending on the choices of the author.” It’s a tense read, likely triggering for some people, about the power of “bad men” and the effects of toxic family dynamics. But it’s also a brave piece, and I’m glad Kaplan could tell it. —CLR

5. Who’s Afraid of Spatchcocked Chicken?

C Pam Zhang | Eater | October 3, 2023 | 1,300 words

I love words. (I know, shocking.) I am also a vegetarian. So it was with delight and horror that I read C Pam Zhang’s piece all about the English language—and meat. Have you ever considered why most animals are shielded by a fancy term once they hit a plate? Why is it a beef bourguignon, not a cow casserole? Zhang muses extensively on this prissiness—while spatchcocking a chicken, as a student at Cambridge, no less. It turns out (like many things in England) it has to do with the French. And class. Zhang explains: “The names of the living animals have Anglo roots, whereas the names of the ingredients came from the French—a trademark of Norman conquerors who, in the 11th century, hoped to subjugate the ‘savage’ Natives of the British Isles.” (The humble chicken managed to keep its name by being considered peasant food, not worthy of a new anointment.) Zhang compares this coyness with words in Mandarin, where pork can literally be labeled “pig flesh.” It’s a fascinating and fun essay, with the added pleasure of imagining the smell of baked chicken guts wafting down the hallowed halls of Cambridge and into the nostrils of disgruntled young lords who like their veal marinated. (Helped by the marvelous illustration of a chicken running down said halls.) While a little shorter than our usual Longreads offerings, you can’t say “spatchcocked” without encountering some joy, so I hope you will forgive me. —CW

Audience Award

Our most-read editor’s pick this week:

During the tumultuous months of the Trump presidency, during the Covid-19 pandemic and the George Floyd uprising, the feeling that our fictional sense of evil was not sufficient to match the evil in our world repeated as I watched some of the popular entertainments meant to help me stay inside my home, safe from the virus and out of the overburdened hospitals. As Covid reshaped the world’s economies and democracies, and the spectacle of, first, the Trump administration having competence forced upon it and, second, the playing out of the Biden administration, I kept thinking, “The scale of this evil is set too low.”

Pop culture has tried to improve upon the monster of Dracula, with not entirely satisfying results. Thanos, the popular Marvel villain, for example, while technically more powerful than Dracula, is boring in his omnipotence. How am I supposed to fear an ecoterrorist — a popular villain in movies, but never seen otherwise — when Trump undid air safety regulations around particulates that now kill 10,000 people a year — likely more now, with Covid — and it doesn’t even rank among the things for which we might prosecute him? How do I get myself worked up over a single murderer, of any kind, as thousands die every night due to governmental terror or neglect in countries all over the world? Trump and Bolsonaro’s destruction of Latin America’s healthcare system, done in the name of fighting Cuban Communism, while Covid spread — while they themselves had Covid — is closer to the scale of the horror I speak of, the horror we must write about.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Nathan Thrall, H. Claire Brown, Alexander Chee, Jean Garnett, and Erica Lenti.

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1. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Nathan Thrall | New York Review of Books | March 19, 2021 | 20,500 words

“One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.”

2. How Corporations Buy—and Sell—Food Made with Prison Labor

H. Claire Brown | The Counter | May 18, 2021 | 3,810

“The notion of work as punishment has enabled prison administrators to compel incarcerated people to work on farms and in dairies for low or no pay and without basic labor protections, sometimes in service of secretive billionaires they’ll never meet.”

3. What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America

Alexander Chee | GQ | May 14, 2021 | 3,680 words

“And he said something I would never forget. ‘The best fighter in tae kwon do never fights,’ he said. ‘He always finds another way.”

4. There I Almost Am

Jean Garnett | The Yale Review | May 19, 2021 | 4,933 words

“I can be a very generous sister—maternal, even—as long as I am winning.” Jean Garnett writes about envy and being a twin.

5. My Quest to Make My Dog Internet Famous

Erica Lenti | The Walrus | May 17, 2021 | 2,138 words

“When I spoke with several people behind some of Canada’s most influential dogs, agents and managers for pet influencers, and even researchers on canine-influencer culture, I began to understand. Whether they’re couch potatoes partnering with your favourite snack-food company or high-falutin divas posing beside expensive cars and decked out in the latest couture, pet celebrities have one thing in common: they are symbols of inspiration. Even if Belle was a dog, she needed to portray a life that could be. To be famous, she’d have to convince others she was already living the carefree millennial dream.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alexander Chee, Matt Gallagher, Delphine Minoui, Lauren Markham, and Jamie Figueroa.

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1. Anti-Asian Violence Must Be a Bigger Part of America’s Racial Discourse

Alexander Chee | GEN Magazine | March 15, 2021 | 12 minutes (3,194 words)

“White people still drive the narrative about Asian Americans. We have yet to have control over our own stories.”

2. In ‘Cherry,’ the Bank Robber Is the Victim. What About the Teller He Held Up?

Matt Gallagher | The Intercept | March 13, 2021 | 26 minutes (6,700 words)

“Erasure doesn’t have to be an act. It can be a process too.”

3. Hunting For Books in the Ruins: How Syria’s Rebel Librarians Found Hope

Delphine Minoui | The Guardian | March 16, 2021 | 17 minutes (4,310 words)

“Most of them had already lost everything – their homes, their friends, their parents. Amid the chaos, they clung to books as if to life, hoping for a better tomorrow, for a better political system.”

4. The Crow Whisperer

Lauren Markham | Harper’s Magazine | March 15, 2021 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)

“What happens when we talk to animals?”

5. The Stories I Haven’t Been Told

Jamie Figueroa | Emergence Magazine| March 11, 2021 | 22 minutes (5,690 words)

“Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the blank pages of her family’s history, navigating generational trauma and lost ancestral stories in order to reveal and reclaim her cultural and familial inheritance.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Allie Conti, Joe Sexton and Nate Schweber, Alexander Chee, Nell Scovell, and Bee Wilson.

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* * *

1. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb

Allie Conti | Vice Magazine | October 31, 2019 | 23 minutes (5,753 words)

When reporter Allie Conti got a call from her Airbnb host 10 minutes before she was supposed to check in to her rental in Chicago, “Andrew” claimed the toilet had backed up, making the unit unavailable. The good news, he said was that he had a larger place he managed nearby. Little did Allie know that she stumbled on an Airbnb scam involving nearly 100 property listings in eight cities.

2. The Wrong Goodbye

Joe Sexton, Nate Schweber | ProPublica | October 31, 2019 | 30 minutes (7,659 words)

On July 29th, 2018, the family of Frederick Williams said a tearful goodbye as a man was taken off life support following a suspected drug overdose at St. Barnabas, a facility run by Hospice of New York. It wasn’t until the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, as part of routine procedures, ran fingerprint tests and discovered a grave error.

3. How to Unlearn Everything

Alexander Chee | Vulture | October 30, 2019 | 9 minutes (2,461 words)

“When it comes to writing the ‘other,’ what questions are we not asking?”

4. Ten Years Ago, I Called Out David Letterman. This Month, We Sat Down to Talk.

Nell Scovell | Vanity Fair | October 30, 2019 | 14 minutes (3,510 words)

Comedy writer Nell Scovell — who quit her job on Late Night with David Letterman in 1990 after just five months because of sexism and “sexual favoritism,” and who called out Letterman in another Vanity Fair piece 10 years ago, following the revelation that he was cheating on his wife with various women who worked for him — sits down with a newly chastened Letterman, and receives a genuine apology from him.

5. The Instant Pot Understands the History of Women’s Labor in the Kitchen

Bee Wilson | Bustle | October 29, 2019 | 19 minutes (4,794 words)

The history of domestic cooking is littered with useless gadgets that were supposed to make home cooks’ lives easier, and failed. The Instant Pot is a rare exception.

Alexander Chee | Longreads | October 2018 | 10 minutes (2,448 words)

My first move to New York begins at the back of a Queer Nation meeting in San Francisco in 1991, with a man visiting from New York with his boyfriend who tried to pick me up. I turned him down as a way of flirting only with him. He seemed at a loss as to what to say next, and so I said, When can I get you alone?

We stood at the back of that meeting for some time, not quite willing to walk away. We hadn’t known each other long but the attraction we felt that would end up tearing up our lives and remaking them was already in charge. We exchanged addresses, deciding to be pen pals, then wrote each other letters for months. We met up again at a writers conference, then wrote more letters. He broke up with his boyfriend and got an apartment by himself. The answer to my original question then seemed to be, Seven months from now, in New York. And so I put my things in San Francisco up for sale and boarded a bus for New York that summer, with a copy of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess as reading material, and my best friend, who we’ll call S.

S and I dressed more or less alike for the trip, as we had for much of our friendship. If memory serves, we were both reading the same book. We made White Goddess jokes the whole way. We wore jean cutoffs, combat boots, and sleeveless hoodies, and sat in seats next to each other, emerging from the bus for smoke breaks. Our aesthetic then was modeled mostly on the comic Tank Girl and what we could remember of issues of The Face, and I had recently shaved my own head after a long night in Oakland that served as something of a private goodbye to San Francisco. S was coming with me a little in the way of a best man or a bridesmaid, as if I were getting married. I wasn’t used to getting what I wanted from love, and survived through intense friendships instead. We had been inseparable best friends since meeting, writing in coffee shops and stalking used bookstores for books by Joy Williams, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn Hacker, and, yes, Joan Didion, and so while he joked he wanted to make sure of me, and I wanted him to — I didn’t trust myself — we were also, I think, preparing for being without each other on a daily basis.

The Graves book interested me because he is the author of the original Goodbye to All That, a memoir of his experiences during the First World War, a book perhaps as famous now for being the source for the title of the essay Joan Didion wrote about leaving New York. I had read the Didion essay, had imagined being her there, or being the friend the people owed at a party, or having been so impractical as to have my sheets blowing in the wind outside my window, and it was easy to imagine her past as my future, the essay a guide to being not just a writer but a doomed writer in New York, because I couldn’t imagine what it could be like on my own. The essay may have been her way of saying goodbye to the city, but I used it almost like a map, and in any case, she had since moved back to New York.

I put my things in San Francisco up for sale and boarded a bus for New York that summer, with a copy of Robert Graves’s ‘The White Goddess’ as reading material, and my best friend, who we’ll call S.

It didn’t make sense to me that Graves could be the author of that book and also be the author of this one, but I was young and had a narrower idea of intellectual production then. I was still in the process of meeting Graves, in any case. I was also something of a lapsed witch, trying to feel my way into the future and writing. New York to me was a place I remembered mostly from college, when I had gone there on weekends to test my looks on the men of the city. This book was my talisman for the ride, and as I passed through the country in the belly of the bus on my way to my love, I read about how all literature is only great if it focuses on stories of the Goddess — and the thoughts this provoked were good company for a cross-country trip.

As I’d made my way across the country, I felt like the last letter in the correspondence I’d had with my boyfriend, sending myself in person at last.

***

As I write this, I can see that most if not all of my closest friendships have at least a single book at their root. I don’t know how much I understood of The White Goddess after I arrived, but perhaps my first apartment was a blessing from her, delivered through my friend Eliza, who found it for us in Williamsburg. We had met over our shared love for The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson, and would quote a line from it to each other at times — What you risk is what you value — to dare each other to do things, like this cross-country move. I’d written letters with her also — I was a big correspondent then — and she’d read them to a friend of hers, who in turn had even used the discussion of the novel as information for a seduction. He’d come into the bookstore where I worked and asked me to help him find it. I’d even written the same line to my boyfriend. And so for a few months of my life, Eliza, and to some extent Jeanette through her, felt like like my lucky charm, with life and with men.

Our two-bedroom on Berry between South Fourth and South Fifth was almost under the Williamsburg Bridge, and we paid $400 a month — which we split. I don’t remember it much, as I lived there for maybe five months. It quickly became the place I got my mail, which the postal carrier delivered in a pile on the floor, as there were no mailboxes for anyone in the building. I had a futon mattress on the floor, and my clothes stacked in the closet, if a pile is also a stack. Throughout my 20s, I would stick postcards I liked to the wall, something I now think of as being like a premonition of the internet. The first thing I did upon arrival was clean off a layer of soot on the windowsill, but the next morning I discovered the layer of soot renewed, if lightly, and cleaned it again. It fell constantly, coming off the cars on the bridge like a soft black rain.

When I explored the neighborhood, I found the blocks almost like little countries all their own, a patchwork of tiny states with residents who’d been there for a long time, and the markets often told you where they came from: Italy, Poland, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. I remember buying a container of prune juice, and, not knowing what it was for, drinking the whole bottle, talking about how delicious it was, then spending the afternoon on the toilet. I got a coffee at a Dominican deli that felt stronger than cocaine.

My boyfriend was in the East Village, in an apartment he shared with a friend off of Tompkins Square Park. Taxis wouldn’t go there, driving off as soon as they heard the address, and so I learned the state of surrender to the regular neglect that was the L train then, in some ways another premonition of the future.

On my first night, I lay awake fearing the cracking sounds I heard intermittently were gunshots, but at some point my boyfriend told me they were only the metal sheets on the bridge, laid over the holes in the roadway, snapping each time they were hit. Looking back, it seems to me that learning this was when I felt at last like I might learn how to be in this city.

***

New York City to me then was a paradise. From the queer punk loft squat in Williamsburg down the street from us, to the nightclubs open past dawn, to the drag queens dancing on bars in wigs lit by Christmas lights, to the Greek diners open 24 hours, to drinking the bodega coffee so sweet it made your teeth hurt. Most important to me were the old bookstores and magazine shops where I could linger for hours, read something I had never seen before and might never see again, and it would change me, and I was glad.

New York had felt like a misplaced destiny to me for years. A place I should be in but wasn’t. In college friends would ask me, “Did you go to Bronx Science or Stuyvesant?” and would then be surprised I was from Maine. At the time, this was yet another misidentification of me amid so many, and as such, easy to write off. One of my best friends then, who loved the way I danced, often said, “People don’t dance like that in Maine.” And she would laugh, arguing that this was proof I wasn’t really from there.

But I was from there. I even felt a bit of pride saying so, even as I knew I had always prepared to be from somewhere else, and had even at times allowed people to think I was. From the first days I watched Solid Gold as a child and practiced the dance moves I saw there like it was a language to learn before traveling to Planet Disco, which of course meant New York, I had dreamed of being there. On the nights I spent at the club in Portland, Maine, where my house music DJ boyfriend would play for me while I danced on the speaker by the booth, it was all a rehearsal for the nights I went to the Palladium, or Area, or Danceteria, or Save the Robots. For reasons I no longer question, I didn’t want to look like a hick on the dance floor.

In New York, the world felt more like what I thought it should be. I met the mix of people from all over the world that made sense to me. San Francisco had been something like a queer finishing school and a war, and I’m still friends with the friends I made there. But I’ll never forget the way I felt on the night when a beautiful bald Black queen came into the East Village gay bar where I was working and introduced himself: “I’m Kevin Aviance, House of Aviance, and I’ve come to New York City to take over.” I was just a barback, but I accepted the greeting as it was intended: the announcement of the most beautiful invasion.

And take over was exactly what Kevin Aviance did.

This is why you came to live in New York, I told myself. To see legends. And it was mostly true. After a year, to my surprise, I moved away.

***

As I packed, I knew a lot had happened, and it felt like too much and not enough. One of the most consequential things that happened to me that year was that I had caught a case of Hepatitis A that was going around the city, as the expression went. I had not been feeling well, but when it felt as if my liver was going to come out through my rib cage and I turned yellow, I took myself to Woodhull Hospital, where the nurse checking me in said, “You’re a junkie,” without examining me, and I waited for hours for a bed and a doctor. I spent the weekend in a room with a smear of blood on the wall from some previous patient, never cleaned up and never explained. Afterward I first went back to the apartment, where I was unable to take care of myself, then back to my mother’s home in Maine for three weeks to recover. I had never had a health crisis like this, and it shook me to be so weak. I took beach walks with my mother, who had to hold my arm to steady me, and felt in each one of them a preview of old age and death, unwelcome and terrifying. I was haunted also by something my brother had said to me in the hospital. He was the first one there, coming up from his school in Philly, and was shocked to get there before my boyfriend. “He’s afraid of hospitals,” I said.

When I was strong enough to get in a car and drive back to New York, I had the feeling of returning to the scene of a mistake.

“He’s not strong enough for you,” he said.

It was a blunt judgement, delivered without really having met him.The kind perhaps only family can deliver. But it was what I feared was true, and time would prove him right. When I was strong enough to get in a car and drive back to New York, I had the feeling of returning to the scene of a mistake.

I set two goals for myself: to get a magazine job and to get into graduate school on a fellowship. I moved out of Williamsburg, away from the soot, and into a friend’s spare bedroom in an apartment in Fort Greene. He was a painter who at the time was making work with his own blood and sperm. He’d pick men up in the park and bring them by the kitchen, where I’d be writing on my typewriter, introducing them each time by name as if I would ever see them again, and each time I would nod and act as if I would see them again also, like in a Noh play about cruising for sex.

I was shocked when I accomplished my two goals: After two months, I was hired at Out magazine as an assistant editor. Three months after that, having used the stories I’d typed up in that kitchen to apply to MFA programs, I got in to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, with a fellowship. I was so ready to fail, it was almost a crisis to get what I wanted and then choose.

The feeling of a mistake receded and instead it felt as if somehow New York had made it all possible. As I drove away to Iowa, I knew I’d be back. This was just me stepping away to do something that had begun here. A feeling I would have for the rest of my life.

* * *

Alexander Chee is most recently the author of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

Editor: Sari Botton

Excerpted and adapted from “New York Three Times,” by Alexander Chee, originally published in Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on their Unshakable Love for New York, edited by Sari Botton.