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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

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Wojnarowski and Charania have become so dominant in the race for scoops that most other reporters who cover the league told me they have stopped trying. “I talk to the same agents, the same GMs, but I never even try to break news,” another ESPN reporter told me. “I know it’s already promised to one of them — like they’re a wire service.” In an attempt to keep up, Ken Berger, who was a national NBA reporter at CBS Sports, started using Google Voice to send texts because it allowed him to send separate identical messages to five people at once. “I could text three agents and two front-office people in five seconds, and I’m still getting beat,” Berger said. He eventually left NBA media for good to run a fitness studio in Queens. To help his old colleagues, he started a personal-training program tailored to helping NBA journalists survive the unhealthy lifestyle the job entailed.

On Memorial Day, Broccoli drove to his property in Fishkill, where a crowd was gathering to protest his planned development. These were the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the town’s Revolutionary War history and, in Broccoli’s view, to making his life hell. For more than a decade, the Friends have argued—based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like—that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States. Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes—with some evidence, but not as much as he would like—of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is.

“Is Domenic Broccoli here?” Keith Reilly, a co-president of the Friends, asked the protesters through a microphone. “Mr. Broccoli, we dare you to be a profile in courage.” The crowd included a half-dozen Revolutionary War reenactors with muskets and several people Broccoli has sued, including Bill Sandy, the archaeologist who found the first dead body. The protesters marched up and down the edge of the property—careful not to trespass lest Broccoli call the police—while honks came in from passing cars.

Broccoli had told me that he had planned to crash the protest with “guns a-blazing” but ultimately thought better of it. “If I go there and then my Bronx comes out, it’s not gonna go well,” he said. His Bronx had come out plenty in his campaign to build the IHOP as part of a Colonial-themed strip mall he was calling Continental Commons. The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot are a group of history buffs and retiree volunteers, and yet Broccoli claimed he had found it necessary to spend more than a million dollars battling them with archaeologists, lawyers, and the private investigators he hired as “spies” to infiltrate the Friends. As it happened, one of his spies was at the Memorial Day protest holding up a STOP CONTINENTAL COMMONS sign while surreptitiously recording the group in case anything might help the RICO case Broccoli was building.

Broccoli insists that he’s not anti-history. He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance; his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried.

One award-winning investigative filmmaker told me she gets regular notes from her agent — documentary directors didn’t used to have agents — about what streamers are looking for, and they weren’t the kinds of films she was used to making. “I’m getting, ‘Did anybody murder your sister, and do you want to make a film about that?’” she said.

It was after 10 p.m., and Derek Broaddus was alone. He raced around the house, turning off lights so no one could see inside, then called the Westfield Police Department. An officer came to the house, read the letter, and said, “What the fuck is this?” He asked Derek if he had enemies and recommended moving a piece of construction equipment from the back porch in case The Watcher tried to toss it through a window.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jody Rosen, Reeves Wiedeman, Rebecca Liu, Sara Rimer, and Will Hodge.

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1. The Day the Music Burned

Jody Rosen | The New York Times Magazine | June 11, 2019 | 51 minutes (12,752 words)

“It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew.”

2. The I in We

Reeves Wiedeman | New York Magazine | June 10, 2019 | 28 minutes (7,040 words)

How WeWork — a company based on founder Adam Neumann’s vision of a “capitalist kibbutz” — became a sleek, dystopian, mammoth-sized tech unicorn.

3. The Making of a Millennial Woman

Rebecca Liu | Another Gaze | June 12, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,960 words)

“To demand someone enter into and entertain your anxious mind-palace and reckon with your complicated and endlessly fascinating individuality can be an act of power. But who gets to be an individual to the Western public? Who gets to be complex?”

4. A Dead Humpback, a Team of Scientists, a Race for Answers

Sara Rimer | Boston University Research | June 10, 2019 | 21 minutes (5,333 words)

Sound is a whale’s main navigational tool. So does ocean noise pollution impair their ability to communicate, to migrate, to mate? “Answers to these questions, among others, have eluded scientists, simply because 40-ton, seemingly healthy humpback whale carcasses with very little decomposition don’t wash up on our shores very often. So when Vector did, every second counted.”

5. Inside the black (cherry) market of vintage Kool-Aid packet collectors

Will Hodge | The Takeout | June 6, 2019 | 8 minutes (2,141 words)

“When you’re in the mood for Kool-Aid, you can walk into a grocery store and chose from about 20 different flavor packets all priced at about a quarter a piece. However, if you’re in the market for some quintessentially classic, high-grade, ‘Oh Yeah!’-era Kool-Aid, you’ll have to enter the fruit-flavored underbelly of one the most intriguing subsets in the world of pop culture food enthusiasts: the black market of vintage Kool-Aid packet collectors.”

Unceasing development. The constant hum of diesel generators on the beach. Out-of-control EDM festivals. Contaminated cenotes. The problems continue to pile up in Tulum, a five-mile strip of white-sand beach on Mexico’s Riviera Maya. At The Cut, Reeves Wiedeman takes a look at how a mix of poor infrastructure, unsustainable hotel practices, drugs, too many DJs, and tourists of all flavors over the years — backpackers, hippies, wealthy hippies, pseudo-spiritual partiers, influencers, celebrities — has ruined a once-chill getaway destination.

The activists have been most successful in decreasing the use of plastic — many restaurants now serve agave straws and cutlery made from avocado seed — but the more serious ecological problems don’t have agave solutions. Tulum is built on highly permeable limestone, the geologic equivalent of Swiss cheese, below which flows one of the world’s largest underground river systems. Some of Tulum’s biggest non-beach attractions are its cenotes, where the ground has collapsed to reveal open-air pools with highly Instagrammable turquoise water. The trouble is that less than 10 percent of the town is connected to the municipal sewer system. The beach, and many of the newer developments, aren’t connected at all. Most businesses depend, instead, on septic tanks, but, whether by accident, neglect, or ignorance — willful or otherwise — a significant amount of Tulum’s waste ends up in the ground, where it eventually leaches through the limestone into the water. In January, a documentary called The Dark Side of Tulum was released with footage shot by cave divers of feces floating in the rivers. According to Mexico’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, 80 percent of the cenotes in the Yucatán Peninsula have some level of contamination, and researchers have found traces of the entire Tulum consumption cycle: skin-care products, cocaine, Viagra, and ibuprofen.

Hotels in Tulum like to describe themselves as “eco-chic,” a term Melissa Perlman claims to have coined — she had recently considered sending cease-and-desist orders for its unauthorized use — but Olmo Torres-Talamante, a local biologist who runs an environmental NGO, said that, while a few places are trying harder than others, none of the hotels in Tulum operates sustainably. The do-what-you-want ethos of Tulum’s early days has produced fresh consequences now that people show up to party as much as they do to commune with nature, and the sacrifices being asked of tourists are comically small. (The first rule posted on a government sign instructing visitors on how to interact with sea turtles is a request not to sit on them.) One of the new EDM festivals encouraged attendees to use “biodegradable glitter,” but no one seemed eager to grapple with the inherent unsustainability of clearing a spot in the jungle to put in a giant speaker system.

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Ben Blum, Reeves Wiedeman, Mizuho Aoki, Amy Wright, and Sarah Scoles.

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1. The Lifespan of a Lie

Ben Blum | Medium | June 7, 2018 | 30 minutes (7,628 words)

Dramatizations, manipulations, lies ─ the famous Stanford Prison Experiment proved to be a highly influential psychological study, even though it was hardly scientific.

2. A Company Built on a Bluff

Reeves Wiedeman | New York Magazine | June 10, 2018 | 32 minutes (8,000 words)

Vice Media grew from a free alternative magazine into a company with 3,000 employees and a multi-billion-dollar valuation. It’s also been investigated for sexual misconduct and has struggled to deliver on its promise of bringing millennials back to television, raising questions about its future.

3. Lost: Struggling to Cope with Millions of Unclaimed Items in Tokyo

Mizuho Aoki | The Japan Times | May 27, 2017 | 7 minutes (1,837 words)

When things get lost in the world’s largest city, they often end up at the Metropolitan Police Department’s lost and found center. So which one of these 3,000 umbrellas is yours?

4. Dorothy Allison: Tender to the Bone

Amy Wright | Guernica Magazine | May 18, 2018 | 21 minutes (5,311 words)

Amy Wright interviews novelist, activist, and feminist Dorothy Allison on class, how poverty can influence a life’s path, the definition of a working-class heroine, and the role of women writers in literature.

5. NASA is Learning the Best Way to Grow Food in Space

Sarah Scoles | Popular Science | June 6, 2018 | 11 minutes (2,951 words)

Sarah Scoles on how growing food in space is a critical milestone to furthering space exploration, because astronauts simply can’t haul all the fresh fruit and vegetables they’ll need to thrive during long absences from Earth.

This week, we’re sharing stories by Reeves Wiedeman, Monica Mark, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Daniel Duane, and Danny Chau.

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1. The Dirtbag Left’s Man in Syria

Reeves Wiedeman | New York Magazine | April 3, 2017 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

A profile of Brace Belden, a Jewish 27-year-old anarchist and former punk musician from San Francisco who spent six months in Syria fighting against ISIS with Kurdish rebels.

2. Poor, Gifted, and Black

Monica Mark | BuzzFeed | March 30, 2017 | 23 minutes (5,909 words)

In South Africa, students of color still struggle with the long-lasting effects of apartheid, because education, like society, is still run by and for the white minority.

3. The High Price of Leaving the Ultra-Orthodox Life

Taffy Brodesser-Akner | New York Times Magazine | March 30, 2017 | 20 minutes (5,000 words)

Footsteps is an organization for formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews, or those thinking about leaving their strict religious communities. Each week the members struggle with issues of sex, modesty, whether they should stay with their religious spouses, kiss on a first date, or even eat the non-kosher pizza provided at meetings.

4. Cooking Lessons

Daniel Duane | The California Sunday Magazine | March 30, 2017 | 27 minutes (6,952 words)

Two successful chefs decided to open a chain of healthy fast food restaurants in lower income neighborhoods where fresh, nutritious food is scarce. They started in Watts and hired in Watts. They kept prices low, wages fair, and quality high. They were disrupting conventional fast food. Their model had a mandate. Making it work has been difficult.

5. The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken

Danny Chau | The Ringer | August 31, 2016 | 20 minutes (5,244 words)

How a decades-old standby dish in Nashville found its way into stardom.