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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:

When it was time to go home, after 35 days on shift, that gut-twisting fear came back. I knew too much and too little: I knew enough to be terrified that this was too early, that the highway through the South Slave up to Yellowknife was still unsafe and threatened by winds like the ones that had sent us all out of the territory in the first place. But I didn’t know what I’d be coming home to. 

Across the region, roads buckled, car windows cracked and power cables melted. The emerald fringes of conifers browned overnight, as if singed by flame. Entire cherry orchards were destroyed, the fruit stewed on the trees. More than 650,000 farm animals died of heat stress. Hundreds of thousands of honeybees perished, their organs exploding outside their bodies. Billions of shoreline creatures, especially shellfish, simply baked to death, strewing beaches with empty shells and a fetid stench that lingered for weeks. Birds and insects went unnervingly silent. All the while the skies were hazy but clear, the air preternaturally still, not a cloud in sight. The air pressure was so high they’d all dissipated.

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A former plantation turned into a source of pride. The freedom of a street dog. The heavy toll of a gambling addiction. The strained lives of South African copper thieves. And an uplifting profile of a rock icon. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.

1. Reclaiming a North Carolina Plantation

Cynthia R. Greenlee | Garden & Gun | April 24, 2023 | 3,050 words

I went to college in North Carolina, where I took a history-meets-writing seminar about Stagville, a former slave plantation near campus. By trawling through historical documents and walking the site, I learned how a 30,000-acre operation was made possible (and profitable) by the labor of roughly 900 Black people held in bondage. Stagville is now maintained by the state; it never occurred to me as a student that the land might be used for anything other than studying and honoring the past. As this story in Garden & Gun shows, there is another way to approach land once tended by slaves, one that can provide for local communities, now and in the future. Two remarkable sisters have been transforming Snow Hill, a former plantation not far from Stagville, into an incubator for gardeners and small farmers. They are promoting sustainability and battling food insecurity while at the same time promoting land access to populations long denied it. The sisters currently lease the land, but as Cynthia R. Greenlee explains, “using a conservation easement, which restricts development rights and lowers property values,” they plan to buy the acreage, likely worth millions, for just $37,000. “Land isn’t just a source of the compounded traumas of slavery, sharecropping, migration, and food insecurity for Black Americans,” Greenlee writes. “It’s also a wellspring of pride, knowledge, economic power, and spiritual connection.” —SD

2. The Free Dogs of India

Krithika Srinivasan | Aeon Magazine | May 4, 2023 | 2,800 words

India has the world’s largest population of street dogs, historically labeled as “pariahs” and “strays” by the British and viewed as a symbol of the decline of India. British colonialism spread the idea that dogs are only legitimate if they belong to a breed; any others are dirty, inferior creatures meant to be culled. As Krithika Srinivasan argues in this insightful piece, dogs existed before breeds, before fancy dog shows, before the upper class groomed them. Shouldn’t the country’s street dogs be free to live in public places? Despite the need to find their own food, water, and shelter — and their exposure to mostly human-made harms like traffic and cruelty — these free-living dogs live mostly autonomous and peaceful lives. Srinivasan challenges us to reconsider the long-held idea that dogs are meant to be human companions, and to rethink how humans can coexist with other beings on the planet. —CLR

3. I Placed my First Wager When I was 10. I’ve Gambled More than $1 Million Since.

Noah Vineberg | Maclean’s | May 10, 2023 | 5,098 words

In my city, the climate wreaks havoc on infrastructure. Potholes abound. Curbs crumble to dust after a single brutal winter. But guess what has a shiny sparkle? The newly renovated and expanded casino, located within walking distance from some of the most impoverished postal codes in town. The government insists gambling proceeds help fund “healthcare, education, social services, housing and infrastructure.” I’m not against gambling, but for some, it extracts a much greater cost than it could ever repay in helping fund community and social services. At Maclean’s, recovering gambling addict Noah Vineberg recounts how he spiraled into gambling addiction from sports betting as a teen and the steep non-monetary price he’s paid ever since. —KS

4. Life Inside the South African Gangs Risking Everything for Copper

Monica Mark | Financial Times | May 10, 2023 | 4,823 Words

Sausages, Mafia, and TwoSix: Three men at the bottom of a supply chain sourcing stolen copper for international syndicates. Monica Mark uses their story to explain how the South African gangs stealing copper have reached an industrial scale — causing outages in water, sanitation, and hospitals, and even train crashes. She sets the personal tale of these men against the larger backdrop with intricate skill: Copper thieves are widely despised (vigilantes even beat a suspected thief to death), but Mark’s account evokes empathy for those driven by poverty to this crime. Yes, they often use the money to buy drugs, but Mark explains how “Heroin helped numb everything: the chill seeping through the thin walls, the stomach cramps from hunger.” It is skinny, softly spoken TwoSix who — after weeks of negotiation — Mark manages to spend time with. TwoSix will wrench your heart. This essay does not shy away from the devastating effects of these thefts, but it also shines a fierce, unflinching light on the plight of the people committing them. As ever, it’s complicated. —CW

5. The Dave Matthews Guide to Living and Dying

Alex Pappademas | GQ | May 18, 2023 | 5,777 words

I’m not sure I ever had an opinion about Dave Matthews. I knew how I felt about his music — which is probably best left for another time, though “no thanks” pretty much sums it up — but I also think I thought he was Jack Johnson. (White guys with guitars, man; I don’t know what to tell you.) After reading Alex Pappademas’ stellar profile, though, I finally do have an opinion, and that opinion is that the world needs a few more people like Dave Matthews. Pappademas has always been able to walk the razor-wire tightrope of inserting just enough of himself to leaven a story without pushing it into This Famous Person Is Just an Excuse For My Thoughts territory, and that talent is on full display here. Even beyond the effortlessly entertaining writing, it’s a profile of the type we don’t see enough of these days: a multi-day/location/activity hang in which a rapport grows and a subject’s personality emerges. There’s lots here about Matthews’ understanding of who he is and how the world sees him, of course, but just as much about the way he moves through the world and the joy with which he approaches life and its inevitable end. Regardless of how you ever felt about DMB, you’ll leave this one feeling a little bit changed for the better. Which is probably exactly how Matthews would want it. —PR

Audience Award

And now for the big one — the piece our readers loved the most this week.

I spent anywhere from $50 to $150 a day on Pro-Line tickets, using my daily allowance or money I made running the salad bar at the Keg, which paid $13 an hour and up to $300 in tips on a good night. It left me with more than enough cash to support my burgeoning habit. I don’t think my mom ever suspected anything—at least not until later in life. There wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t place at least one bet. The legal gambling age was 18, but back then, the tellers never asked for ID. If I was lucky, I won once every few weeks. One time, I put down $100 and accurately picked the outcome of all 10 games, which resulted in an $11,000 payout. I was never smart enough to save the money from my wins, though. I usually dumped it right back into more bets.

I loved the waiting that came with gambling: those final, dramatic moments of uncertainty, when a last-minute field goal or three-point shot could alter the result of the game. The feeling of anticipation— that’s where I got the high. And when I had several bets going on at once, it felt like my brain was on fire, the ultimate stimulation. Nothing else mattered in those moments. Even if I lost, I never let on that I cared. That was part of the appeal, too. People never knew if I had $100 or $10,000 in the bank. I felt like I was bulletproof, like no matter how it turned out, everything would be all right.

By Alison Fishburn

At the center of the photo book my sister made of our 2014 trip to London is a collage of partial views. One photo features a glimpse of the side of Queen Elizabeth’s face while she rides in the backseat of a car; another, her back.

My sister, mom, and I — classic American tourists that we were — had arrived at the Tower of London first thing in the morning to begin another day of sightseeing. We came to an area of the complex where the tower’s famed Beefeater guards were setting up a series of metal barricades. When asked, they told us a “very special visitor” would be arriving. We interpreted the clue to mean the Queen, so we waited. Over the next hour or so, a crowd, mostly tourists like us, filled in on every side.

And then it happened.

Shouting. Clapping. Frantic waving. A procession of cars driving into the complex. A sea of arms holding cell phones in the air to capture whatever images they could of Queen Elizabeth on her way to attend a service in the Tower’s chapel.

Those few moments became the defining event of our entire trip, of our photobook, of the way we choose to remember.  

***

When a person dies, every memory of them becomes remarkable, every object becomes an artifact. The timeline of their life can be organized into a finite series of photos and stories. But for someone like Queen Elizabeth, birth alone delivers them into the annals of history. Her image and voice have been documented in all available mediums, her likeness replicated in film and television, and her visage still graces the currency of 33 different countries. Her lifetime, her legacy, is like the number of photos captured by pedestrians and professionals: endless. For many years, the Western world did not look much beyond these commemorations, but, over time, questions about the role of the monarchy did begin to emerge.

Gradually, too, media coverage has evolved, from the near-worshipful stance of early profiles to the increasingly incisive commentary that marked her final years. Here, then, is a reading list about the longest-serving British monarch in history: her life and reign as both an individual, and the guardian of an often problematic institutional monarchy.

 ***

The Education of a Queen (Wilson Harris, The Atlantic, December 1943)

Written the year before the then-Princess Elizabeth turned 18 (she became queen at 25), and about two years before the end of World War II, this 1943 article reads like the time capsule it is. From Harris’ first sentence, “The people of Britain are beginning to take a growing interest in the personality of their future Queen,” a global expectation comes into focus: The young princess was being groomed to become a symbol of constancy and tradition. While making direct comparisons between Princess Elizabeth and a young Princess Victoria, who became “the greatest Queen Britain has known, and one of its greatest sovereigns,” Harris distinguishes how Princess Elizabeth’s upbringing in London, her curricula of history, French, German, music, and English literature, as well as practical skills learned through the Girl Guides, are preparing her for the day she will occupy the throne. 

The Princess may have years of service as heir-presumptive before her. She may at any moment by the caprice of fate be summoned to the most exalted position in the greatest Commonwealth in the world. Enough is known of her upbringing to show how well the preparation for either lot has been achieved by a training that has never threatened to dim the freshness or mar the simplicity of her girlhood.

Queen Elizabeth II and the Shape of 20th Century Power Dressing (Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times, September 2022)

The cover of the April 29,1929 issue of TIME magazine has an illustration of a 3-year-old Princess Elizabeth with the caption, “She has set the babe fashion for yellow.” Citing iconic looks from the queen’s domestic and international engagements, Vanessa Friedman shows how dressing with “diplomatic symbolism” among politicians and figureheads began with Queen Elizabeth. In her true-to-form relatable style of fashion meets history meets intelligent journalism, she lays out how the queen, during her reign as the longest serving British monarch in history, “let her clothes do the talking for her.”

Her strategic wardrobing began in 1953 with her coronation gown, an ivory satin style embroidered with choice flora of the realm — including English roses, Scottish thistles, Welsh leeks, Irish shamrocks, Canadian maple leaves, New Zealand silver ferns, Pakistani wheat, Australian wattles and South African protea — kicking off what would be decades of considered diplomatic symbolism.

Elizabeth II’s Fine-Tuned Feelings (Martin Amis, The New Yorker, May 2002)

Martin Amis makes a case for why the queen’s character, more often associated with aloofness than congeniality, was actually a lifelong calculation based on her responsibility as sovereign. Citing moments in the queen’s history from two biographies, Robert Lacey’s Monarch: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II, and Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober’s The Monarchy: An Oral Biography of Elizabeth II, Amis presents the constancy in Queen Elizabeth’s character against “Dianamania,” and the events that unfolded around the Queen in the immediate aftermath of Princess Diana’s death in 1999. Amis, who has charted the intensity of familial reflection and personal grief in his books Experience and Inside Story: A Novel, writes with a keen sense of familiarity, drawing comparisons between the public and private lives of Queen Elizabeth and Diana, while detailing the pressure on the Queen to break with her adherence to tradition. 

Driven out of the Royal Mews in an open carriage for her regular airings, the diapered Elizabeth drew large crowds of cheering, waving admirers; one of her earliest skills was to wave back. She made the cover of Time at the age of three. The first biography, ‘The Story of Princess Elizabeth,’ appeared when she was four. ‘She has an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant,’ wrote Winston Churchill…

The Royal Family is just a family, writ inordinately large. They are the glory, not the power; and it would clearly be far more grownup to do without them. But riveted mankind is hopelessly addicted to the irrational, with reliably disastrous results, planetwide. The monarchy allows us to take a holiday from reason; and on that holiday we do no harm. 

Meghan and Harry’s Interview: A Royals Expert on What We Did and Didn’t Learn (Patricia Treble, Maclean’s, March 2021)

In this essay, independent royal expert Patricia Treble outlines key moments from Oprah Winfrey’s 2021 interview with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (formerly Meghan Markle) and Prince Harry. During the two-hour televised event — viewed by 17 million people, according to Nielsen — the royal couple dropped a litany of bombshells, from accusations of racism among the press and royal family to the revelation that Meghan had experienced suicidal ideation while pregnant with her first child. 

Treble asserts that the interview “was aimed squarely at the American market, where the couple is focusing their new ventures (including deals with Netflix and Spotify), and where the royal family is seen as entertainment,” and points out missed opportunities in Winfrey’s interviewing style that could have added helpful context and clarification along the way as “Harry and Meghan effectively lobbed grenade after grenade over the gilded fences of Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Kensington Palace.” Treble’s expertise and perspective on the inner workings of the royal family make this piece a solid rock in the sea of clickbait that followed the interview.

As I watched the Sussexes recount their experiences during the interview, one thought kept cycling through my mind: Why hadn’t Prince Harry clearly explained to Meghan what a life of royal duty involved when he proposed in 2017? Or gotten someone else to explain the strictures of royal life and its grinding protocol and hierarchy? They both seemed woefully unprepared for their new royal roles and the fairytale turned into a nightmare for both of them.

Prince William and Kate’s Tour Was Meant to Secure the Monarchy in the Caribbean. Instead, It’s Raising New Questions About Its Future (Eloise Barry, TIME, March 2022)

A year after Harry and Meghan’s televised interview (and just two months after Buckingham Palace formally stripped Prince Andrew, the queen’s second-born son, of his military titles and usage of “His Royal Highness” in the face of a sexual-abuse lawsuit), Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (formerly Kate Middleton) faced their own public scrutiny. A week-long tour of Belize, Jamaica, and the Bahamas was, according to Eloise Barry, officially “meant to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, celebrating 70 years on the throne,” but was really “to persuade the three countries to keep the Queen as head of state, and not to follow Barbados, which transitioned to a republic last November.” The couple was met with protests and renewed calls for the British government — and the royal family — to apologize and pay reparations for its colonial rule and slavery. Barry clearly walks readers through the controversies of the couple’s tour and contextualizes the queen’s role as head of state for the 14 countries known as Commonwealth Realms.

Calls for republicanism have been growing in Jamaica, which celebrates its 60-year anniversary of independence from Britain this year. According to leader of the Jamaican opposition, Mark Golding, the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests reignited conversations around national identity in Jamaica, whose population is over 90% Black.

Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire (Maya Jasanoff, The New York Times, September 2022)

The British Empire, the vernacular epitome of colonization and colonial rule, became known as the British Commonwealth in 1926. As part of that transition, the countries still ruled by the Crown, including Australia, Canada, India and South Africa, agreed to an allegiance to the British king or queen — without being ruled by the United Kingdom. 

In this opinion piece, published on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s death, historian Maya Jasanoff asserts that “The British Empire largely decolonized, but the monarchy did not,” and that “[d]uring the last decades of her reign, the queen watched Britain — and the royal family — struggle to come to terms with its postimperial position.”

In the wake of the queen’s passing, existing calls for the imperial monarchy to end have reverberated across news coverage and the transfer of power to King Charles III. Three days after her death, proclamations of “God save the King!” in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, were met with booing in the crowd. In New Zealand, at a proclamation-of-accession ceremony, it was reported that prime minister Jacinda Ardern expressed support for King Charles III while also reaffirming the country would one day leave the British Commonwealth. 

Jasanoff spends this must-read essay citing example after example of how the monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth as its face, has struggled to find a balance between its lasting imperial priorities and mounting pressure to make amends for those same historic priorities. “She has been a fixture of stability, and her death in already turbulent times will send ripples of sadness around the world,” she writes. “But we should not romanticize her era.”

The queen’s very longevity made it easier for outdated fantasies of a second Elizabethan age to persist. She represented a living link to World War II and a patriotic myth that Britain alone saved the world from fascism. She had a personal relationship with Winston Churchill, the first of her 15 prime ministers, whom Mr. Johnson pugnaciously defended against well-founded criticism of his retrograde imperialism. And she was, of course, a white face on all the coins, notes and stamps circulated in a rapidly diversifying nation: From perhaps one person of color in 200 Britons at her accession, the 2011 census counted one in seven.

Those who heralded a second Elizabethan age hoped Elizabeth II would sustain British greatness; instead, it was the era of the empire’s implosion. She will be remembered for her tireless dedication to her job, whose future she attempted to secure by stripping the disgraced Prince Andrew of his roles and resolving the question of Queen Camilla’s title. Yet it was a position so closely linked to the British Empire that even as the world transformed around her, myths of imperial benevolence persisted.

***

Alison Fishburn is an American writer living in Paris, Ontario. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy Editors: Peter Rubin, Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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

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1. Coming Into Focus

Carla Ciccone | Harper’s Bazaar | September 5th, 2022 | 3,231 words

“Getting diagnosed with ADHD on the cusp of 40 brought my personal history into sharp focus,” writes Carla Ciccone in this personal piece for Harper’s Bazaar. There’s been a spike in the number of ADHD diagnoses among adult women, especially in the last several years, and Ciccone was one of them. “But women aren’t suddenly waking up with a neurological disorder,” she writes. “It’s likely been there all along, masquerading as low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, ‘she’s difficult,’ ‘she’s an airhead,’ ‘she’s unlucky,’ ‘she’s lazy,’ and other labels that tend to mark a girl as she moves through her life.” Ciccone describes her own struggles growing up — in school, in relationships, in processing traumatic events — and how her diagnosis at 39 has helped her reframe the way she sees herself, her family, and her past. It’s an honest and illuminating read, especially for those who may see their own experiences reflected in hers. —CLR

2. Serena Williams Refused to Bend. She Bent Tennis Instead.

Lex Pryor | The Ringer | September 8th, 2022 | 2,554 words

There’s been no shortage of encomia written since Serena Williams exited the U.S. Open a week ago, but none of them have felt quite so lived-in as Lex Pryor’s remarkable paean. It details her many distinctions, obviously, but more importantly it properly situates her as the watershed player she is — a subverter of the head-down gentility that Black tennis pioneers like Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe embodied, and the mother of an entirely new lineage of champions. “Is there anything more alpha,” Pryor asks, “more Tiger, more Michael, more wonderfully and ridiculously competitive, than Williams, in the midst of yet another Grand Slam victory, reacting to a bad shot by throwing her arms back, arching her spine, and screaming ‘Fuck are you doing’ into the sky?” If you’ve been lucky enough to watch Serena over the years, you already know that she’s a one of one. This piece not only articulates that with insight and brio, but it drives home the miracle of what she accomplished: remaking American tennis like few have done before, and fewer still might do after. —PR

3. The Match

Bhavya Dore | Fifty Two | September 2nd, 2022 | 5,241 words

“Wouter Dijkstra always knew he had two mothers: his Dutch adoptive mother and his Sri Lankan birth mother. In September 2020, he found out he had three.” With a lede like that, you know a story is going to be excellent. Bhavya Dore’s reporting on the long-term consequences of a fraught adoption pipeline between Sri Lanka and Western Europe is tender, eloquent, and nuanced. There are surprises and disappointments, bright glimpses of beauty and quiet moments of profound grief. The subjects of Dore’s story leap off the page, and I found myself wishing for happy endings I knew could never be. Of all the pieces I’ve read recently, this one felt the most alive — it crackles with humanity. —SD

4. The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” Investigation

Michelle Cyca | Maclean’s | September 6th, 2022 | 7,624 words

How far would you go to secure a job? In the case of Gina Adams, the answer seems too far. Far too far. In this riveting piece, Michelle Cyca explores Adams’ claims of Midewiwin descent from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. She used this claim to further her university career — but has not been able to prove her heritage in the face of allegations these ties are false. Cyca’s narrative races along, exploring other people’s doubts about Adams until, with Adams remaining in her position, Cyca feels compelled to investigate herself. As a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, and having worked at Emily Carr University at the same time as Adams, Cyca has a unique perspective to give to this story, and she tells it exceptionally well. While delving into Adams’ case, Cyca opens the Pandora’s box of university hiring practice: In the rush to add First Nations to faculties, no one was checking backstories, and now, invented Indigenous heritage is emerging at several universities. This story will grip you — and frustrate you — to the last word. —CW

5. The Mushrooms That Ate Luke Perry

Casey Lyons | Orion Magazine | Sep 6th, 2022 | 2,869 words

I confess, it was the headline that drew me in. I wasn’t a Beverly Hills, 90210 fan, never got suckered by Luke Perry’s squint-smirk combo. But I couldn’t resist that monster-movie construction, so I read it — and I’d urge the same of you, regardless of your feelings about Aaron Spelling primetime soaps. This piece starts with Perry’s death, but Casey Lyons uses the actor’s green burial as a springboard to trace the remarkable arc of his life as well, and in doing so to explore what we seek from our corporeal end. “Luke Perry knew about desire, having been buried in a laundry hamper to escape it,” Lyons writes. “He also knew it as the holder of a notion about physical erasure from the planet, that our bodies don’t have to harm the earth when we die. We all know desire. Death is a muse, but desire is a blunter sort of thing.” Regardless of whether the mushrooms feasted the way they were supposed to (spoiler: they didn’t!), you’ll walk away with a fuller sense of the man inside the suit, and maybe even of your own plans for that inescapable day. —PR

The message was clear: being Indigenous was tragic or shameful. Or it was mystical and noble, a warrior on a horse, somehow untouched by colonization. Middle-class and easily sunburned, I didn’t fit with any of the stereotypes I saw or heard.

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

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1. A Texas Teen Wanted an Abortion. Now She Has Twins.

Caroline Kitchener | The Washington Post | June 20th, 2022 | 4,100 words

If I were a journalism teacher, I would assign this story to my class immediately. Not only because it is wrenching — and my god, it is — but also because it demonstrates the value of beat reporting, editorial foresight, and covering the ripple effects of major news stories. Caroline Kitchener writes about abortion for one of the biggest newspapers in the country. The so-called “heartbeat bill” in Texas went into effect nine months ago, which means the first women in the state who couldn’t get abortions because of the law are now having babies. Therein lies the seed of a story idea, in the form of a question: What happened to those women? Kitchener found one of them, a teenager who gave birth to twins several weeks ago, and crafted an intimate narrative that simmers with pathos yet lets the facts speak for themselves. I won’t soon forget the scene in which antiabortion activists hold up the subject of Kitchener’s piece as a political victory — even lighting a candle in her honor — without any knowledge of what their shameful advocacy has meant for her well-being, her sense of self, or her future. This is complex, award-worthy storytelling. —SD

2. How Three Sisters (and their Mom) Tried to Swindle the CRA out of Millions

Sarah Treleaven | Maclean’s | June 21st, 2022 | 4,359 words

Who doesn’t love a Canadian grift story? When Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) employee Carol Power was asked to audit the Saker sisters from Nova Scotia — deemed to “be the model of rural ingenuity” for their diverse portfolio of interests — she had no idea that she had stumbled on to a complicated web of serious tax fraud going back years. When the CRA prodded, the sisters doubled down on the fraud, inventing false paperwork to cover their crimes. When taken to court, they proclaimed themselves victims of a vast CRA conspiracy against them. “The CRA investigators were looking for books, records, documentation, and electronic hardware and storage devices. They subsequently spent nearly three years combing through the Saker family bank records, sales receipts and invoices and searching for T4 slips, trying to track the Sakers’ behaviour and establish their patterns. Boudreau learned that many of the businesses had been operating largely without bank accounts, and most appeared to have no employees, supplier contracts or even production expenses. When CRA investigators asked the Sakers to provide supporting documentation to prove they were entitled to the refund amounts they claimed, the Sakers produced a huge volume of vendor invoices and sales receipts…One of the many vendors listed by the Sakers was Vandalee Industries, a name nearly identical to that of George Costanza’s fake employer on Seinfeld. It was almost like the Sakers were having a good time.” —KS

3. Safety Town

Ilana Bean | Guernica | June 20th, 2022 | 3,839 words

My most vivid childhood memories are the ones where I’m on my bike, at 4 years old, just after I learned how to ride. Our family’s home has an unusually long driveway: We can fit over a dozen parked cars during parties. There was so much space: to play, to ride, to create my own little whimsical world. I thought of this formative time as I read Ilana Bean’s piece on traffic gardens, those small-scale street systems through which kids can learn about road safety. In the imaginary world I built in front of our house, cracks in the concrete became turns. Carefully laid sticks became dividers. Rocks I collected from the neighborhood became coins for the toll bridge. But this curiosity in the built physical space I moved in quickly faded, and cars — driven by adults — would take me wherever I needed to go. Bean’s mother, Fionnuala Quinn, is a traffic safety expert, focused on building more intuitive relationships between children and our streets; car culture in the U.S. means that many of us “don’t actively interact with transportation until we reach the magic age of sixteen,” and at that point, we’re then expected to master the art of driving after a minimal amount of training. This is a thoughtful read on road safety and design — which I admit I’ve spent very little time thinking about in my life, despite the amount of power and responsibility I have each time I get behind the wheel. Even more, it’s a lovely, unexpected essay on the dedication of a mother, and the potential for a world in which children are raised with the skills to navigate their environments independently and safely and people are empowered to ask for and help build better streets. —CLR

4. How OXO Conquered the American Kitchen

Dan Kois | Slate | June 20th, 2022 | 3,066 words

When the second season of the brilliant sketch series I Think You Should Leave dropped last year, one of its oddest moments was the trailer for Detective Crashmore, a hardboiled action movie starring Santa Claus as the titular cop. There’s much more I’d like to say about it, but for our purposes today the thing that matters is a single line Crashmore utters: “Everything has sucked lately.” You know why? Because he’s right! We’re all mad and sad and worried. And when we’re all mad and sad and worried, that’s exactly when you need to read something like Dan Kois’ cheerful dive into the inner workings of OXO. You probably have a salad spinner or garlic press or measuring cup from the obsessively utilitarian housewares company; maybe you’ve marveled at it, maybe you haven’t. But in a time when the clearest articulation of our global mood comes from an irascible Santa-Claus-portrayed maniac, it’s worth taking a few minutes to concentrate on something small and good. Even when that something small and good is a vegetable peeler. —PR

5. A Marriage Story

Alan Siegel | The Ringer | June 14th, 2022 | 2,330 words

“It is, without a doubt, one of the most moving film sequences of the past 20 years.” I saw Up a long time ago, in a part of my life I’d like to forget. I don’t remember much about that time in my life (thankfully!) or much about the movie itself, other than what it reduced me to: a sobbing heap on the couch. I don’t think the term “ugly cry” had been invented yet, but that’s an accurate description of my response. How could two animated film characters conjure such a powerful emotional response in a hapless viewer in a mere 10 minutes? At The Ringer, Up director Pete Docter and codirector Bob Peterson reflect on the care and craft that went into making Carl and Ellie, as well as the specifics of imprinting them and their shared history on the hearts of an unsuspecting audience in that seminal first part of the film. —KS

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

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1. Untold

Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod | ESPN | April 11th, 2022 | 31,519 words

Even those detached from the world of college sports remember how Penn State’s legendary football program crumbled (at least reputationally) under the weight of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky’s horrific sexual abuse of young boys. However, as Lavigne and Junod chronicle in this sprawling, compulsively readable investigation, it wasn’t the first time a monster found some measure of protection in the organization. After a young linebacker named Todd Hodne was arrested for rape in 1978, head coach Joe Paterno kicked him off the team; yet, Hodne would go on to strike again and again, enabled in part by the culture of deification that surrounded the Nittany Lions. The story of Hodne — indeed, the story of the women whose lives he disrupted and destroyed over multiple years in multiple states, some of whom broke decades-long silence — spills over the lines of “magazine story” into something altogether different. It’s a testament to survival. To living through atrocity and coming out the other side. And through its expert storytelling, it delivers something that the recent glut of true-crime documentaries and podcasts never could. You won’t forget this one anytime soon. —PR

2. The Hidden and Eternal Spirit of the Great Dismal Swamp

Lex Pryor | The Ringer | March 30th, 2022 | 8,700 words

I grew up two hours south of the Great Dismal Swamp, and I know virtually nothing about it except its name. There’s a reason for that: The Dismal, as it’s known, has long been dismissed by the gatekeepers of American history as a place where history simply doesn’t happen. As Lex Pryor reveals in this elegant, haunting essay, people with ancestral ties to the Dismal are working to change that — to memorialize the slaves who once toiled in the swamp, and the runaways who found refuge in it. “In a nation whose every territory is drenched in overlapping legacies of violence and erasure, the Dismal stands as a most American tangle,” Pryor writes. “It is scarred. And yet it is anointed.” Next time I drive home to see family, I’ll be stopping at the Dismal to pay my respects. —SD

3. The Nurse Imposter

Sarah Treleaven | Maclean’s | April 11th, 2022 | 4,344 words

Nurse, teacher, and hair stylist: At one time, Brigitte Cleroux earned a living at each of these professions without a single qualification to her name. Was it delusion, pure hubris, or something else entirely that forced Cleroux to become a remorseless fraud artist and serial imposter? How is it possible that no one was seriously injured or killed given that Cleroux posed as a nurse for 30 years without proper qualifications or a nursing license? At Maclean’s, Sarah Treleaven attempts to unravel the truth. “Somehow, Cleroux was able to slip past not one, not two, but at least three provincial nursing regulatory systems—and not just once but multiple times. In the aftermath of her arrests, Cleroux’s employers have remained largely silent.” —KS

4. Notes From the Underground

Zack Graham | Astra Magazine | April 6th, 2022 | 2,740 words

A door to a graffiti-covered warehouse in Queens. The relentless thump of techno, sounding like metal parts clanging inside an auto shop, pounding against your chest. Dancers in an indiscriminating darkness, moving their sweaty bodies in ways you never thought possible. These are a few of the sights, sounds, and sensations that Zack Graham recounts from his first descent into the rave underground: a “parallel reality” where people can be themselves, a world that’s subversive and inclusive, a scene that looks nothing like today’s massive, commercialized EDM festivals. I’ve read many versions of this journey — and have written my own — but I never tire of reading them. Those first moments of discovery, of wonder that at times borders on fear, of ecstasy in the wee hours, and then, after you’ve crawled out into the bright daylight, a transformative aftermath that, for some, doesn’t really end. I love writing that explores the mental-physical awareness that creeps up on people as they discover the power and swiftness of their own bodies when dancing, and how Graham describes how he eventually harnesses the otherworldly sounds at a party — “the track unleashed a creature inside me and time disappeared” — and becomes less afraid of this darkness over time. He later encounters the underground rave scene abroad, notably the Freetekno movement in Vienna, and meets partiers who’ve taken “the origins of raving to an extreme.” For these people, there is no underground from which to resurface, no normal world to rejoin after a long night. “This was another level. This was something entirely new,” he writes. For me, it’ll be 25 years this May since my first rave in one of Oakland’s infamous warehouses from the ’90s; though there are of course differences between this scene and the ones that Graham describes, the warm core of the experience is the same. His essay brings back that night for me so clearly, fuzzy edges and all, and those subsequent years of going to parties, finding myself, and being part of a freeing community that operated on a different plane. “Never in my life had I felt that powerful,” Graham writes, “and I haven’t felt that powerful since.” —CLR

5. Too Much Vino and Project Veritas: My Extremely Weird Evening with James O’Keefe

Laura Jedeed | Rolling Stone | February 1st, 2022 | 3,768 words

This story recounts one event — but what an event it was. Laura Jedeed details the launch of James O’Keefe’s latest book, American Muckraker, and her incredulity at what takes place oozes from her words. She describes “a 50-minute musical-theater production dedicated to telling O’Keefe’s story in song, dance, and strobe light.” Jedeed uses the visual prompts on stage (“A telephone repairman. Osama Bin Laden. A suit-and-tie journalist who interviews whistleblowers on YouTube”) to explain in detail the story they refer to, minus the reverence afforded the stage version. Jedeed admits to not thinking much of James O’Keefe’s work — his alt-right group, Project Veritas, attempts to discredit mainstream media and progressive groups — and, while still recognizing the problems with objective journalism, declares this “self-styled anti-elite crusader a lot like his musical theater: flashy, sometimes entertaining, and entirely pretend.” This essay aims to uncover O’Keefe’s end game — something I doubted would be revealed through a book launch — but in fact, the bizarre show O’Keefe dedicates to himself (and stars in) demonstrates a lot: “It isn’t about journalism. It isn’t even about fame. It’s about a boy who loves to dance and wanted to be part of a club that would not have him even as he railed against it.” —CW