131 篇
Investigative Reporting
Ghost Boat (Eric Reidy, Medium)
· 官方页
In the Spotlight-ish movie adaptation of “Ghost Boat,” I’m played by the John Slattery figure, the well-meaning editor who doesn’t quite see what we had at first and is half-annoyed to keep hearing the pitch. The mysterious disappearance of 243 refugees in the Mediterranean? How do you even tell a story without an ending? I didn’t have any clue, which is why I feel comfortable recommending the story here. But Medium editor and Matter co-founder Bobbie Johnson and Tunisia-based reporter Eric Reidy did: Make it as honest, open, and alive as possible.
Cosby: The Women (Noreen Malone, Photos: Amanda Demme, New York Magazine)
It’s been described as a feat of Mossian magazine-making, an innovative multimedia, multi-platform package, a site-crashing cover story—and it’s all those things, it is. But those monumental compliments also obscure the truly impressive thing about “Cosby: The Women”: Noreen Malone’s reporting—her painstaking, sensitive, rigorous, expansive, mind-blowing reporting. It must have taken months and untold reserves of will for her to find and interview these women, to gather their stories, shape them, bear witness to their pain. In her own words, from her intro: “The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study—both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period.” There it is: Not a cleverly packaged cover story about a dark-side celebrity, but a longitudinal study conducted over decades, reported over months, about trauma and silence and the culture that allowed it.
Whatsoever Things Are True (Matthew Shaer, Atavist)
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Matthew Shaer spent several months speaking to dozens of people while looking into a story of how two men were separately convicted and exonerated, years apart, for a double murder in 1982. The story takes you to unexpected places with its string of reversals, investigation into the investigators, and exposure of a limited criminal-justice system. Shaer found himself unraveling details until the minute he filed his story. “When I started the reporting process, 11 months ago,” he writes in his intro, “I assumed that every new interview would bring me, in a straight line, one step closer to solving the case. But more often than not, as the red light on my recorder went dim, I encountered new alleys, new questions, new ways of interpreting the available evidence.” In the end, a very convoluted story is masterfully pieced together.
Revenge Killing (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker)
Wow. This New Yorker piece by Rachel Aviv made me text my Louisianian African-American husband a thank you for not allowing me to try to move us back to Louisiana to raise our family. It made me cry. It made me send a small donation to the Innocence Project.
Best of 2015
Under-Recognized Stories
The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic)
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Adrienne LaFrance’s recent feature in The Atlantic tells the story of a pivotal moment in technological history — where enigmatic “titans of Silicon Valley” are investing billions of dollars in a race to build something unprecedented that could (truly!) change the way we live. While engineers on the “frontier of knowledge” experiment in secret, the corporate struggle to dominate this nascent market is already playing out in public. LaFrance was writing about the race between Google, Tesla, Apple, and Uber to build the best driverless car, but she could just as easily have been writing about Elon Musk competing for data and talent in artificial intelligence or billionaires (hello again, Elon!) squabbling over sending unmanned rockets into space.
Sports Writing
Chip Kelly, Football’s Most Intriguing Figure, Is Also Its Most Unknown (Kent Babb, The Washington Post)
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Many a profile has been written about Chip Kelly, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, and each has an anecdote of how the sui generis coach goes to great lengths to maintain his privacy off the field. Yet Babb, one of the best profile writers working at the moment, manages to not only track down and interview Kelly's ex-wife (a first, since those same profiles all reported he was a lifelong bachelor), he fleshes out in great detail a portrait of an individual who had a life before becoming Kelly of daily urine tests and heart rate monitors. In Babb's telling, Kelly's idiosyncrasies don't define him.
Investigative Reporting
Tenants Take the Hit as New York Fails to Police Huge Housing Tax Break (Marcelo Rochabrun and Cezary Podkul, ProPublica)
My inner watchdog has a huge crush on this story. I measure the value of investigative pieces in their power for public impact and with this piece, Pro Publica served the city of New York a political hand grenade that can't be ignored.
Under-Recognized Stories
Have You Ever Thought About Killing Someone? (Rachel Monroe, Matter<em>)</em>
I love this chilling, deeply insightful piece of longform journalism by Rachel Monroe. In its substance, it’s an examination of a killing in Big Bend National Park in West Texas, but in its mode of inquiry—in its devotion to doubt and complexity and wondering—it has so much to say about violence, about youth and vulnerability, about the complicated relationship that forms between journalist and subject. Monroe looks at the stories her subject, a self-confessed killer, wants to tell about himself, the stories she wants to tell about him (the divide isn’t what you might imagine), and the distance that remains between her and the tragedy she documents. She writes the horrible in a way that finds something human in its bleak contours. The piece is gripping. It won’t let you go. Or at least it didn’t let me go anywhere; I read it straight through without pausing—and it’s still with me, in many odd moments of haunting and recollection. It’s sharp, vivid, beautifully intelligent writing—intelligence directed towards a powerful openness of spirit, a commitment to nuance and insoluble mystery.
Sports Writing
The King Of Tides (Kim Cross, Southwest: The Magazine)
One of my favorite sports stories this year was really hard to find—it’s from an airline magazine, and although it is available online, it is so in sort of a PDF format, which isn’t much in vogue. So unless you flew Southwest, you might have missed this.
Essays & Criticism
“How Not to Be Elizabeth Gilbert” (Jessa Crispin, Boston Review)
“How Not to Be Elizabeth Gilbert by Jessa Crispin” was one of the best pieces of criticism I read this year. I love Eat, Pray, Love and have since I first read it. That said, I've always recognized that the book is the kind of travel narrative expected from women and wealthy, generally white women at that. In her essay, Crispin is incisive and provocative, particularly in examining the notion that women can only be experts on themselves. This essay, frankly, made me uncomfortable, but I appreciated that discomfort and expanding my thinking. I didn't agree with all of Crispin's points but damn, she made me think about writing as a woman, the expectations we face and the challenges of overcoming those expectations.
Business & Tech
First, Let’s Get Rid of All the Bosses (Roger D. Hodge, The New Republic)
Vance's book on the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is not just compelling for its deep reporting on one of the most interesting people in technology today; it's also an excellent lesson in how a journalist navigates the challenges of getting ever more access without handing over independence or control of a project. Vance talked with everyone—family members, employees, and Musk himself—without giving his subject final signoff.
Under-Recognized Stories
Reckoning (Lisa Mecham, Midnight Breakfast)丽莎·梅查姆的《清算》
I admire the structure, the elegance of the prose, and the unexpected way in which Mecham writes about trauma and growing into womanhood.
Under-Recognized Books
<em>Rare Books Uncovered</em> (Rebecca Rego Barry, Voyageur Press)
In Rare Books Uncovered, Fine Books magazine editor Rebecca Rego Barry deftly tells the stories of 50 bibliophiles who made discoveries of great, rare, or unusual works of literature. Although each story is brief, Barry manages to weave the history and terminology of book collecting into the background while offering an enlivening and adventurous look at the curious lives of book hunters and the dusty tomes they treasure.
Essays & Criticism
Sports Writing
The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived On (Wright Thompson, ESPN)
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The life of Ted Williams has long been a reliable source for some of the most lyrical and beloved sports writing ever put to paper. But in this narrative—which took years to coalesce—Thompson’s focus is not trained on the Splendid Splinter but rather Claudia Williams, Ted’s last surviving child and the one burdened with protecting his legacy. The result is a heart-breaking examination of family, of remembrance, of death and the kind of deep love that binds us together, especially in the most turbulent of times. Thompson’s 2015 was, for him, a typically superb year that resulted in some of the most ambitious sports writing anyone dared attempt. I’d argue this was his most relatable and affecting piece.
Science
What to Do With Dead Bodies in Space (Daniel Oberhaus, Slate)肇事逃逸后
This piece is totally weird and wonderful. As humans start planning longer space missions, we are faced with a thorny dilemma: what should be done with an astronaut's body if he or she dies in space? Oberhaus tackles the unique methodological and ethical questions with gusto, weaving together history, scientific hypotheticals, expert opinions, and a cornucopia of extremely excellent details. I only wish it were longer.
Business & Tech
The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide (Karen Weise, Bloomberg Businessweek)
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Karen Weise investigates the real reason that Gravity CEO Dan Price decided to pay all his employees a $70,000 salary. I slept on this story initially because Price’s spiel always struck me as a ploy to go viral, but the mystery builds slowly towards unexpected ends. Weise highlights the strangeness one can unearth by diligently fact-checking a company’s claims. Price’s saga may not have widespread implications, but Wall Street Journal’s expose on Theranos raised the bar on tech reporting and Weise makes you wonder what else startup CEOs are hiding.
Crime Reporting
Where the Bodies Are Buried (Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker)尸体埋葬的地方
Historically-minded visitors to Belfast might feel inclined to partake in the Troubles Tour, in which cabdrivers and other longtime, knowledgeable residents who may or may not have participated in one way or another in the violence of yesteryear guide outsiders through the northern Irish city. Enormous murals proclaiming allegiances and denouncing enemies, commemorating victories and defeats, are painted on across the sides of people's homes. Long walls topped with razor wire divide neighborhoods throughout the city—Catholic on one side, Protestant on the other. Tourists consume these places as artifacts, signifiers of a conflict that has come to rest, if not entirely resolved. Patrick Radden Keefe's “Letter from Belfast” tells another story, one of a generational trauma with which the city's denizens are still living.
The Untold Story of the Silk Road (Joshuah Bearman, Wired)
When it comes to nonfiction narrative technique and style, this story has it all—multidimensional characters, intimate reporting, twists and turns. That’s why I assigned it to my UC Irvine students for our class, “Narratives in the Digital Age.” Many said it was their favorite story on the syllabus. Here are some of their responses explaining why:
Under-Recognized Stories
The Hidden Story of Harley Quinn and How She Became the Superhero World’s Most Successful Woman (Abraham Riesman, Vulture)
I'm not much of a comic book person, but I found myself engrossed in Abraham Riesman's look at the history of the DC Entertainment character Harley Quinn, whose origins stem from a daytime soap actress and evolved to be one of the most fascinating female characters in comics. As one writer put it, “Wonder Woman sort of represents perfection, whereas Harley represents everybody else.” I'm not sure if this story was read much aside from those already interested in the superhero genre, so I've selected it here.
Arts & Culture
The Late, Great Stephen Colbert (Joel Lovell, GQ)
Stephen Colbert has pulled off the rare feat of being a public figure for the better part of a decade while keeping his true self almost entirely obscured behind a braying façade. Here, with such uncommon intelligence, sensitivity and nuance, Joel Lovell shows us who’s been under there the whole time. The writer is very present in the story, sifting through the meaning of what he finds and tugging us along behind him through reporting and writing that starts out rollicking and then turns surprisingly raw and emotional. But Lovell never gets in his own way or turns self-indulgent; that’s a tough thing to pull off. The word I kept coming back to in thinking about this story was “humane”—it just feels so complex and wise, and unexpectedly aching, buoyed with perfect, telling details and effortlessly excellent writing.
Science
Famous Berkeley Astronomer Violated Sexual Harassment Policies Over Many Years<br>(Azeen Ghorayshi, BuzzFeed)
This story exposed a long-running scandal in science, and it even brought about important changes. The subject of the story, a prominent astronomer at Berkeley, left the university, and astronomers in general began to look seriously at sexual harrassment’s toxic and chronic effect on their community.
Investigative Reporting
Shaken Science (Debbie Cenziper and many others, The Washington Post)
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The Post had to have a lot of guts to take on a topic as fraught as Shaken Baby Syndrome, the (now) controversial diagnosis that has landed countless innocent parents and caretakers in jail over the past four decades. “The diagnosis gave a generation of doctors a way to account for unexplained head injuries in babies and prosecutors a stronger case for criminal intent when police had no witnesses, no confessions and only circumstantial evidence.” Working with Northwestern University's Medill Justice Project, the Post team examined 1,800 SBS cases since 2001, to show how many questions have been raised after the fact, and how little consensus there now is for the science SBS was supposedly based on. The series includes heartbreaking interviews from both sides of the debate, and graphics that inform and explain in a non-overwhelming way. It's incredibly thorough, totally readable, and devastating.
Essays & Criticism
“Selfie: The Revolutionary Potential of Your Own Face, In Seven Chapters” (Rachel Syme, Matter)
Syme's meditation on the selfie as a vital, valid contemporary means of self-expression is as smart as it is fun. In making her argument that taking self-portraits and posting them on social media can be empowering for women, she presents a well-researched history of women photographing themselves spanning more than a century, from Virginia Woolf's great aunt in 1883 to Kim Kardashian today. In another section, she includes the selfies and stories of others, which she solicited on social media as she was working on the piece. Throughout, Syme takes to task those who would dismiss the practice of taking and posting selfies as shallow and vain, defending it as a way of allowing women to boldly be seen—something misogynist culture discourages—and to project self-images of their own making. She writes, “We are writing the story of how we want to be seen.”
Business & Tech
The Couture Club (Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker)
On its surface this is a piece about fashion—a couture runway show staged by Italian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana like nothing I’ve ever experienced. But it’s also a fascinating window into the world economy. While Greece was negotiating a restructuring of its debt, the wealthiest (like, the 0.001%) people in the world assembled for a four-day orgy of parties and conspicuous consumption (the gowns start at $40,000). The descriptions of the clothes and the jewelry were amazing— “A stunning necklace, wrought with jewelled and enamelled flowers, fruits, and butterflies, weighed heavily on its display stand”; “One model showed off a patchwork fur jacket in which the pelts of various animals had been dyed vivid colors to make a fantastical new creature.” Overall, it was delicious and disturbing escapism.
Essays & Criticism
“On Pandering” (Claire Vaye Watkins, Tin House)
No “Best Of 2015” would be complete without the transcript of Claire Vaye Watkins' lecture from the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop. “On Pandering” inspired discussion about the differences in privilege among white men, white women and people of color, as well as the patriarchal structure of academia and the literary canon. I yelled in recognition as I read lines like “Nearly all of my life has been arranged around this activity. I’ve filled my days doing this, spent all my free time and a great amount of time that was not free doing it. That hobby, that interest, that passion was this: watching boys do stuff.” And: “She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write.” Watkins' words inspire me to interrogate my motivations, my chosen mentors and where I find inspiration.
Under-Recognized Stories
A Father’s Initiative (Eli Saslow, The Washington Post)
Saslow takes a classic reporting assignment—personalize an obscure policy initiative by following a person who's navigating it—and he does it just about perfectly. This piece tells the story of Paul Gayle, a 19-year-old single father in Milwaukee who is enrolled in one of the “fatherhood classes” that are so heavily favored and funded by the Obama administration. He's broke, but he's trying; he's looking for a job he can get to without a car and selling his PlayStation for baby food.
Shrimp Boy’s Day in Court (Elizabeth Weil, The New York Times)法庭上的虾男孩节
Elizabeth Weil and I are close and typically read each other's first drafts, and this was just great from the beginning: “Shrimp Boy's Day in Court” is the very colorful life story of a gangster facing the legal system that Liz captures with a pitch-perfect tone—spare, certainly not too heavy—that allows his story to come through and stay with you long after you're done reading it.
Best of 2015
Crime Reporting
A Manhattan Fortuneteller Cost Him Fortune After Fortune (Michael Wilson, New York Times)曼哈顿的算命师让他一次又一次地失去财富（迈克尔·威尔逊，《纽约时报》）
This year, beginning in June, the New York Times' Michael Wilson wrote a series of stories in his “Crime Scene” column on New York City's storefront psychic industry. It began when one 32-year-old British consultant living in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Niall Rice, went to the police after giving 26-year-old Priscilla Kelly Delmaro and another psychic some $700,000 over just under two years. Delmaro had promised him she could reunite him with the woman he loved. In the midst of her psychic efforts, the woman died; more was required of Rice. (At one point, Rice and Delmaro slept together.) In November, Delmaro took a plea deal. “She somehow said all the right things,” Rice said. “It sounds mad now that I’m saying it.” In a tangential story, Wilson reported on convicted psychics who have gone before parole boards and disavowed their earlier practices.
Business & Tech
The Rating Game (Josh Dzieza, The Verge)
It's eerie how quickly consumer behavior has adjusted to the luxuries of on-demand apps. We feel guilty for hailing an Uber, but we can't help ourselves. Josh Dzieza’s piece zooms on the effect on just one feature—instant rating systems. Tech companies claim that rating your Uber driver or a Handy housecleaner with a tap of your smartphone is “two-way” street that offers “mutual accountability.” But only one side can lose a job over it.
Sports Writing
Broke (Spencer Hall, EDSBS)
A common criticism of longform writing, especially on the internet, is that it’s too self-centered; too many features rely on the first person, and too many writers insert themselves into their pieces. This is often true. But sometimes, as with the case of this stunning Spencer Hall essay, it’s an incredibly effective technique.
Essays & Criticism
“In the New Whitney” (Ingrid Rowland, New York Review of Books)
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**Two bonus picks from my own publication: Country Notes by Sterry Butcher (“Butcher is like the modern E.B. White or Marilynne Robinson when Robinson writes from the perspective of Father Ames in ‘Gilead'”) and “The Will of God” by John Spong (“moved me to laugh and cry”).
Science
Erasing Mossville: How Pollution Killed a Louisiana Town (Heather Rogers, The Intercept)
This story is a rusty knife to the jugular. Heather Rogers spotlights a Louisiana community made sick by the petrochemical industry. Unfortunately that’s a common tale, but this story digs deeper than other pollution stories. In the end, Rogers conveys in stunning detail how an overlooked branch of our own government has misused science to promote a dangerous agenda. The story stood out for me because it carefully illustrates how science can be hijacked by powerful agencies and corporations, a trend that is poisoning our nation and desperately needs exposure.
Under-Recognized Stories
An American Void (Stephanie McCrummen, The Washington Post)这些是迪伦·鲁夫在查尔斯顿教堂枪击事件发生前住过的人
“Where do you live now?” Wendy Darling asked Peter Pan, who was floating mid-air in her nursery and covered all in autumn leaves and cobwebs,. “With the lost boys,” Peter answered, “They are the children who fall out of their prams when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Never-Land. I’m captain.” Those lines kept getting all mixed-up in my head when I re-read for maybe the fifth time “An American Void,” probably because I knew I couldn’t think of the right words to describe “An American Void.”
Under-Recognized Books
<em>Genoa</em> (Paul Metcalf, Coffee House Press)
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Here's another deeply American book, reprinted this year on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Indeed, it may be the most American book I've seen in a long time, not counting that children's series Rush Limbaugh writes where he travels through time to stabs redcoats. Genoa deals in seafaring, in ghosts, in mythmaking and violence. As with the Wieners collection, this was my introduction to the author, and I was glad for it. Metcalf writes through his corpse, so to speak, in the same style used and advocated by Davenport, Delany and Gass. In this novel that deep attention to the narrator's body runs in a feedback loop with excerpts and discursions about and by Herman Melville and Christopher Columbus. The result feels shockingly au courant, as if Maggie Nelson, Eliot Weinberger or Valeria Luiselli had taken it upon themselves to gloss an Updike story.
<em>Rules for Werewolves</em> (Kirk Lynn, Melville House)
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I read this book in one fast gulp, anxious fingers poised to flip the page. In Kirk Lynn’s debut novel, a band of young runaways moves swiftly through the suburbs, squatting in foreclosed houses and in the homes of unwitting vacationers, wild eyes trained on the promise of a self-made utopia. The thrills and pleasures of this new society are the benign trappings of suburbia (well-stocked refrigerators, lavender soap, the privacy of closed doors) coupled with the first bright licks of freedom. As the pack grows tighter, defining the boundaries of its own morals and ideology, it also grows more feral. Unbridled idealism and independence begin to unravel into violent and irreparable ends.
Under-Recognized Stories
Searching for Eve (Meredith Talusan, Matter)寻找伊芙（梅雷迪思·塔卢桑，Matter）
Our social media streams show how happy we are, how deeply we read, how thoughtful we are on the issues of the day. These idealized online selves, we all know, filter out our bad days, and all that we may not want the world to know. But this story by Meredith Talusan turns that idea of the real vs. ideal virtual self on its head, presenting a transgender woman who lives her truth on the Web, but not at home. It is a fascinating deep dive into her life. The writer handles the main character's privacy carefully and respectfully, capturing Eve's journey as she moves closer to coming out offline.
Arts & Culture
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Lili Loofbourow, Post 45)
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Last summer Lili Loofbourow read Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series while grappling with her sister's suicide. In the way novels have of seeming to mirror one's present experience, the story's “intrusive literary excavation” cast light on the one Loofbourow herself was conflictedly but doggedly conducting. Like Lenu, one of Ferrante's characters, Loofbourow was struggling to reconstruct a woman who'd erased herself. She went through her sister's house, photographed her phone bills and bank statements, contemplated a glass brick of a tablet hidden beneath the sink, covered with fingerprints but wiped clean of all the data it once held. And then she found a sheaf of her sister's writings: “Her poetry, her life story, and pages and pages on her fear, above all, of having her privacy compromised, of being hacked.” Loofbourow is one of my favorite essayists, and this piece, written as part of a group discussion of Ferrante's novels, blends criticism and autobiography into the best kind of reading journal.
Essays & Criticism
“On Spinsters” (Briallen Hopper, Los Angeles Review of Books)“体制有病”：足球如何忽视黑人教练
I love this piece because it offers an instance and vision of criticism as an inspired art, not simply an appraisal or a value judgment. It takes a book as its occasion, but its discussion of what that book does (or doesn’t do) ventures into such exquisitely soulful territory—thinking about identity, intimacy, and marginalized voices—that I couldn’t possibly do it justice here. By its close, it has swelled into a beautiful ode to surprising and enduring forms of spinster community: full of black-eyed peas and repaid student loans (also a one-eyed Chihuahua!). In its reach and its heart, this piece not only illuminates criticism as passionate conversation—the creative act as utterance, the critical act as response—it also explodes any limited notion of “negative” criticism as a destructive act. Its critique sings with the possibility of what can be.
Science
The Forgotten Students, and Eroding School Districts, of California’s Drought (Mareesa Nicosia, The Seventy Four)
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Mareesa Nicosia takes three of the country’s most burning issues—agriculture, immigration, and education—and shows how they are all perilously linked to the California drought. The drought was surely one of the most significant environmental stories of the year, and no long-form story I saw contained such a novel hook. The storytelling style is arresting and relentless, it leaves the reader desiccated. You are there with these students, the children of immigrant farm workers, on their parched vacant playgrounds.
Best of 2015
Business & Tech
What Happens Next Will Amaze You (Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words)接下来发生的事情会让你大吃一惊
This is an essay adapted from a talk that feels like it was adapted from some imaginary greater text. It's sprawling and surprising and less careful than confident. It is excellent. In this one presentation, Maciej talks about regulation in the way I expect the rest of us will in two years; he talks about privacy in ways that make other critics sound feeble and captured; he argues comfortably from perspectives mainstream tech writers would strain to even reach. All that said, my most honest endorsement is a petty one: he's infuriating to some of the people who infuriate me most. What more could I ask for?
Best of 2015
Under-Recognized Stories
The Frenchman Who Followed Chris McCandless Into Alaska (Brendan Borrell, Outside)
I'm a sucker for pieces on people—like François Guenot—who choose to live unconventional lives. This story captures the journey Guenot, a free-spirited Frenchman, took into the Alaskan wilderness. It's full of melancholy and joy and plenty of surprising twists. The author Brendan Borrell has a gift for vivid descriptions and pacing. Well worth your time.
No, Native Americans Aren’t Genetically More Susceptible to Alcoholism (Maia Szalavitz, The Verge)
I’m abashed that as a science journalist and former genetics teacher, I’ve never, never, never known that American Indians aren’t genetically more vulnerable to alcoholism. As Maia Szalavitz reports for the Verge, however, “there’s no evidence that Native Americans are more biologically susceptible to substance use disorders than any other group.” Instead, aboriginal people’s higher rates of addiction all around the world are better explained by early-life poverty and trauma. Luckily, there are ways societies can fix those risk factors—unlike people’s genes.
Sports Writing
This is Why NFL Star Greg Hardy was Arrested for Assaulting his Girlfriend (Diana Moskovitz, Deadspin)
Last year, the NFL was rocked by several incidents of domestic violence, starting in September with the release of a video of Ray Rice's assault of his then-fiancee and peaking in February, when charges against star defensive end Greg Hardy were dismissed after his accuser disappeared. By November, most football fans had moved on. Diana Moskovitz did not. She continued to tirelessly report on the issue, and in November, Deadspin published a devastating scoop: pictures that showed exactly what happened between Hardy and his ex-girlfriend, Nicole Holder, that night in Charlotte. Moskovitz's piece, which laid out the facts of the case in meticulous detail, forced many to confront what had happened. It also pushed readers to ask why it took photographic evidence to make the world care.
Investigative Reporting
The Price of Nice Nails (Sarah Maslin Nir, The New York Times)
I can't remember another investigation that had as much widespread and immediate impact as this one. Through a year of persistent and patient reporting, Nir uncovered the ugly truth of New York's nail salon industry: the labor exploitation, institutionalized racism, and dire health risks faced by its manicurists. It was an explosive story, but Nir told it with restraint. When this came out, everyone I knew was talking about it. Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio both pretty much immediately launched emergency task forces and investigations to address the problems Nir described. Reforms continue to roll out for salon owners who put their workers at risk.
Essays & Criticism
“‘Where’s My Cut?’ On Unpaid Emotional Labor” (Jess Zimmerman, The Toast)
As a woman-type person and a good listener, I connected immediately to Jess Zimmerman's essay. It's about all the big and small ways women provide emotional support to their male friends without hope of reciprocation. Zimmerman puts into words what so many people feel but can't explain: Why is emotional labor-pseudo-therapy sessions with lovelorn dude friends, for instance-seen as effortless when it is, in fact, extremely draining and utterly taken for granted? Zimmerman discusses #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, housework, and capitalism with eloquence and sharpness. Required reading for anyone who has had a friend, like I did in college, who wanted to be a Navy SEAL after graduation, ate lunch with me every day and updated me on the minutiae of his sunrise workouts without letting me get a word in for an entire semester. He hasn't spoken to me in three years, because (I assume) he can no longer hold me captive over food. Zimmerman's essay captures the nuances of relationships like ours.
Under-Recognized Stories
What Happened When I Confronted My Cruellest Troll (Lindy West, The Guardian)
@AaronGilbreath · 官方页
It is one thing for a man to confront his trolls. For instance: comedian Chris Gethard invited his teenage Twitter antagonist to appear on The Chris Gethard Show on Fusion. It was charming and hilarious. Soon after, Gethard recounted the experience for NPR, saying “This kid's bored, but he's actually pretty funny.”
Teachings (Win Bassett, Poetry magazine)
For several years I've known Win Bassett mostly as an avatar on Twitter, a distant connection that exists mainly because he occasionally tweets #longreads. What I've since discovered is that he is a former criminal prosecutor who discovered poetry and went to divinity school. Through his remarkable essay in Poetry magazine about working as a hospital chaplain, he takes us far away from Twitter—to the hospital beds of those who are dying. Some have hope, many have lost it. Some have no one to pray for them except those, like Bassett, whose job it is to make sure that never happens.
Crime Reporting
Blood Ties (Nathan Heller, New Yorker)
In “Blood Ties,” which ran in the New Yorker, Nathan Heller wrote a piece that starts out with the spareness of a pot-boiler, and ends up reading like a literary essay on the unreliable nature of storytelling. Heller’s subjects are Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering, students who fell in love at the University of Virginia, and were both convicted (Haysom as an accessory) in the brutal murder of Haysom’s parents. There is a touch of Edward Albee in the dark, witty letters Haysom wrote describing her desire to do in her alcoholic parents; Soering, who went on to write several books in prison, presents himself as a romantic and tragic hero, who falsely confessed to murder to save the life of the woman he loved. In the end, Heller is dissatisfied by all of the stories he hears from the convicted in their own defense. “We cherish characters in books and shows for seeming like real people, though our sense of what is genuine is shaped largely by what we watch and read,” he writes. “At least one of the people implicated has been hiding the truth with a writer’s mind.”
Best of 2015
Sports Writing
The Unhappy King of Snooker (Sam Knight, The New Yorker)
At 39, Ronnie “The Rocket” O’Sullivan is the world’s best snooker player. Just don’t ask him how or why he got to the top. He’s as mystified as anyone as to why he can make the white ball dance and why, for three long years, he could not. Mastery of anything is often hard to decipher and harder to explain. The Rocket is also baffled by what the game has done for him—and to him. He seems happier when he’s not playing but can’t enjoy it because then he starts worrying he’s not playing enough.
Business & Tech
Depressiongrams (Jamie Lauren Keiles, The Message)
One of the best things I read about depression all year; one of the best things I read about writing and art all year; one of the best things I read about Instagram this year. It's a tidy essay about a short time and a small place that is rigged with a shattering aside in nearly every paragraph. Lesser writers would have ruined this essay with a big muscular ending (or an extra few thousand words. Is this even a #longread??? MODS???). But Jamie doesn't.
Essays & Criticism
“The Mother of All Questions” (Rebecca Solnit, Harper’s)
· 官方页
“There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question,” writes Rebecca Solnit, neatly packaging a manifesto’s worth of logic into 20 words. She’s talking about the persistent idea that a woman’s life can be morally dictated, and I’ve never been one for slogans, but I would readily get that sentence tattooed.
Under-Recognized Stories
Going It Alone (Fenton Johnson, Harper’s)独自行动（芬顿·约翰逊，哈珀出版社）
I read this piece, or part of it, late on a Sunday night in Kennedy Airport. I was standing in line for a taxi to go home, a line that seemed almost humorously long, agitated-human noises blaring into the harsh flourescence. An unpleasant situation. Yet as I stood reading this remarkable piece, surrounded by bags, all of that disappeared. Life was a pinpoint: this essay. Johnson’s meditation on solitude is lyrical and precise, a slow and thoughtful accretion. Johnson had lived alone for more than two decades by the time of writing, but his focus is not singles or hermits but “solitaries.” “The call to solitude is universal. It requires no cloister walls and no administrative bureaucracy, only the commitment to sit down and still ourselves to our particular aloneness,” he writes.
Toile Chic (Colette Shade, The Awl)
It's surprising how you can groan about ugly decor your whole life, yet never ask any questions about its origins. Fortunately, in The Awl, writer Colette Shade asked questions about that ugly 18th century European textile pattern called toile. Depicting, in Shade's words, “images of happy poor people,” as well as French colonialism and exoticism, toile shows peasants farming, peasants lunching, peasants feeding ducks and doing other rural labor that, removed from the actual poverty and labor, look quaintly pastoral inside a wealthy person's home. The French bourgeoisie decorated with toile wallpaper, curtains and upholstery, just as a certain breed of affluent American decorates with it now. Shade tells where the patterns came from and how they functioned “as a reminder that everything is okay, showing wealthy people how idyllic poor people’s lives can be,” during a time when the French were largely subsistence farmers suffering bad harvests and over-taxation, and preparing to revolt. Toile's is a story of social and economic inequality, of how the privileged use interior design to warp reality and assuage any bad feelings about the status quo. Read in our era of increasing class divisions and political divisiveness, it's the story of how, in many ways, little has changed.
Arts & Culture
Unfollow (Adrian Chen, New Yorker)
It would have been easy—maybe even justified—to slip into a sneer when writing a profile of Megan Phelps-Roper, one of the most prominent young faces of the Westboro Baptist Church, which traffics in an almost cartoonish sort of hatred. It also would have made for a boring and cheap story. Instead, Adrian Chen begins with Phelps-Roper tweeting “Thank God for AIDS!” on World AIDS Day, and then lays out how she and the rest of her congregation arrived at their beliefs, and how it was that Phelps-Roper ultimately came to turn her back on almost every other thing she’d known. In Chen’s telling, Westboro’s tenets and practices become comprehensible, if still repellent, and a central character who could easily have been a two-dimensional villain instead reveals herself to be intelligent, engaging and reflective—someone you root for. This is a redemption tale for the social media age, without an ounce of the saccharine.
Business & Tech
Towers of Secrecy: Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows Into Elite New York Real Estate (Louise Story and Stephanie Saul, The New York Times)
This was a fascinating, important story, the first in a multipart series. It’s the result of many months of intensive reporting, the kind that we could use a lot more of. It explains a phenomenon that many people living in major cities around the world may have noticed, the emergence of new mega-towers and mansions where single units sell for $100 million or more. They are largely, this piece reveals, places for the foreign superrich to park their money, which is often done anonymously through the use of LLCs. My friend Andrew Rice took a bite out of this subject too, with an earlier cover story for New York Magazine, “New York Real Estate is the New Swiss Bank Account,” that was also great.
Best of 2015
Essays & Criticism
“My Writing Education: A Time Line” (George Saunders, The New Yorker)
So many people read and loved this beautiful piece by Saunders but I’m going to talk about it here because (dammit!) I loved it too. It made my pulse race with the sheer fervor and eloquence and non-photoshopped specificity of its appreciation—its appreciation for teachers, for literature, for teaching. It offers an account of how writing happens across the course of a lifetime—in between the daily realities of kids and jobs (even pharmaceutical company jobs)—and how teachers inspire us to inhabit our best selves, or at least catch sight of what those selves might look like. There are lines in here that are some of the best descriptions I’ve ever read, casually uttered, as if Saunders could just toss them off before breakfast, which he probably could, and probably does. (But of course part of his gift to us, in this piece, is showing us that nothing was easy and everything comes along the course of a long, winding road.) Of his teacher Tobias Wolff, he writes: “Toby is a powerful man: in his physicality, in his experiences, in his charisma. But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness.” WTF?? What a magnificent thing to say about another human being. I will never think about power or gentleness in the same way again.
Best of 2015
Under-Recognized Stories
What Happened After My Kidnapping (Bradford Pearson, Philadelphia Magazine)
During his senior year at Saint Joseph's University in Phialdelphia, Pearson was robbed at gunpoint and then kidnapped for hours. Now, a decade after his assailants were convicted, Pearson revisits the crime, recounting what happened that night, how he dealt with the lingering trauma and stress in the ensuing years, and how, this past spring, he visited two of the three men who assaulted him. It's a gripping first-person feature, and Pearson does a good job straddling the line between emotion and objectivity.
Business & Tech
<em>Elon Musk: <span id="productTitle" class="a-size-extra-large">Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future </span></em><span id="productTitle" class="a-size-extra-large">(Ashlee Vance)</span>
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Arts & Culture
Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up (Susan Burton, New York Times Magazine)
This is the Terry Gross profile I have long awaited. YES! A big, emphatic yes. As with the “Broad City” piece, I was pretty much the target audience here, and pounced on this piece like a starving armadillo on a pile of grubs. And oh, did it deliver. (Note: despite our identical last names, Terry Gross and I tragically are not related.) The piece is about Gross and about the art of the interview more broadly, and Susan Burton is sensitive and insightful on both counts. The bits I loved and longed to frame for my walls are too numerous to list, but here’s a sampling: “Gross is an interviewer defined by a longing for intimacy. In a culture in which we are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening intently; she’s asking just the right questions.” And: “She is acutely attuned to the twin pulls of disclosure and privacy.” And: “In her, a fragility—fair skin, narrow bones—is fused with a powerful sense of self-containment.” Also: “She uses the very public space of the interview to access tenderly personal places.” Finally, some excellent numbers: Terry Gross is 4 feet 11 inches tall and has done around 13,000 interviews. Can you believe that?
A Very Revealing Conversation With Rihanna (Miranda July, T Magazine)
This is ostensibly a profile of Rihanna, but it reveals just as much about Miranda July and the strangeness of meeting a superstar to write an article about her. A substantial portion of the piece describes July’s trips to and from the interview, including long conversations with her Uber driver, and internal monologue. I can be overly bound by category and precedent, so I’m particularly drawn to writers and artists who eschew genre conventions. (Oh, right, you can do that! You can do whatever you want!) This piece is full of gems that made me laugh, that offered a sense of shared humanity:
The Late, Great Stephen Colbert (Joel Lovell, GQ)斯蒂芬·科尔伯特谈打造自己的深夜秀
The best profile of the year, in my opinion, was Joel Lovell's Stephen Colbert profile. Lovell's work has always been a big influence on me—my first-ever profile was published in the same issue of the New York Times Mag that had his excellent George Saunders cover story—but this one was especially devastating. Lovell comes in sad, but we're not quite sure why. And that's the thing to me that is best about this story, that we don't need to know, and to explain it would be to divert from the subject. Lovell's sadness is our sadness, whatever that sadness is on the day we read it.
Under-Recognized Stories
Prison Born (Sarah Yager, The Atlantic)
· 官方页
Some stories you feel on a visceral level, even though it’s rooted in a specific scenario or environment that may be completely foreign. Such is the effect of Yager’s compelling exploration of women who give birth while incarcerated and the rationale for creating more on-site nurseries so that being in prison doesn’t preclude being a mother. Yager neatly sums up the inherent tension (“Should institutions that limit so many basic rights allow inmates to be active parents?”) and then shows readers the real-life ramifications contingent on that question’s answer, in addition to providing a remarkable and eye-opening history of women in American jails. With a deft narrative touch and more than a little empathy, Yager illuminates a very real, national problem that often goes unseen.
Under-Recognized Books
<em>Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners</em> (Edited by Joshua Beckman, CAConrad and Robert Dewhurst, Wave Books)
· 官方页
I'm embarrassed to say that this was my introduction to the work of Wieners. I don't know that the book was ignored this year—certainly not among poetry readers—but he deserves to be a household name. As this collection spanning his career makes plain, he was not only a throbbing heart of postwar American poetry, he was a clear and lasting influence on more recent generations of poets. Wieners was a member of the last class of Black Mountain College—his early work toys with Creeley—but consensus seems to be that it was his 1958 The Hotel Wentley Poems that made him famous. They are masterful, twisting up Whitman and Williams and Crane and Llorca to stitch out his own confession in the tight queer seams of the American language.
Essays & Criticism
“How They Do in Oxford” (Kiese Laymon, ESPN the Magazine)来自《杂志》：Ole Miss 足球的魅力
Can't believe I'm choosing a sports feature! But Kiese Laymon's essay helped me better understand a few things I'm pretty ignorant about—the appeal of football and the lived experience of racism in the south—in expansive detail. It's highly personal but also universal and relevant to contentious issues of the moment, which means it's hitting on all levels that a great essay should.
Under-Recognized Stories
The Final Rhapsody of Charles Bowden (Scott Carrier, High Country News/Mother Jones)
Charles Bowden wrote an army of innovative and fiery longform stories. Last year he died, but shortly before his death Scott Carrier visited him. Another titan of the literary frontier. This short sweet essay shows the two firebrands meeting around the hearth. It is about the death of a master, and it is about what writing is all about. It is beautiful. You can see Carrier struggling with the form, the message he needs to convey is too powerful for words alone, which is why I suggest anyone interested in long-form writing also watch the 8 minute video clip of Scott Carrier interviewing Bowden.
Sports Writing
The Education of Alex Rodriguez (J.R. Moehringer, ESPN Magazine)
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What I find most impressive about J.R. Moehringer’s profile about Alex Rodriguez is that despite the tremendous advantage he had having access to his subject over a period of months and the luxury to spend so much time with him (more than 100 hours), he still bothered to write this story in an innovative way. Rodriguez is not quoted in the story at all, an approach that both reveals a deep understanding of Rodriguez as a character—no matter what he has ever said about himself, it never seems to come out as intended or remotely spontaneous—but it also shows that Moehringer, as a writer, is still willing to experiment and take risks. We’re all familiar with the write-around, where a writer doesn’t have access and is forced to present a silent character. In this story, Moehringer turns that device on its head, and the result, A-Rod without A-Rod’s constant commentary on all things A-Rod, makes Rodriguez somehow even more accessible, and, shockingly, even sympathetic.
Crime Reporting
Online Dating Made This Woman A Pawn In A Global Crime Plot (Brendan I. Koerner, Wired)
One of my favorite nonfiction books of the past few years was Brendan's The Skies Belong To Us, about the rash of hijacking in the U.S. in the late '60s and early '70s—not just because it brilliantly placed these dramatic crimes into cultural context, but because it treated the people involved with them as fully realized humans with complex motivations. And he does all of that here. Catfishing lonely, vulnerable women for profit is about as mundane a con as the internet has to offer, but by focusing closely on the case of Audrey Elrod, a West Virginia divorcee charmed and strung along by, ostensibly, a charming Scottish widower working on an oil rig named Duke (but, in actuality, scammers called “Yahoo Boys” likely based in Nigeria), the story is painful and heartwrenching to read. Driven hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, and eventually to jail, Elrod is fully and vividly rendered as the answer to the question, “Who would fall for something like this?” The perfect crime is not one that relies on common sense but, simply, the desire for something unbelievable to be true.
Best of 2015
Crime Reporting
Troll Detective (Katie J.M. Baker, BuzzFeed)
“Troll Detective,” which Katie J.M. Baker wrote for Buzzfeed, is about the mysterious murder of Jessica Chambers, a young woman living in a small Mississippi town; but it is also about the way that the Internet allowed the outside world to make that particular tragedy its own. Once those outsiders claim a tragedy as its own, Baker shows in vivid detail, they have the right to demand answers, even if it means tormenting the people closest the case, or distorting the facts for the even bigger world watching from a slight remove. Chambers’ story is a troubling and fascinating one in its own right, but Baker brings an anthropologist's expertise to her examination of how a modern murder plays out online.
Science
The Really Big One (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker)
Kathryn Schulz introduced the world to a huge natural disaster that will arrive sooner or later—a massive earthquake in the northwestern United States. She turned her impeccable reporting into a relentlessly readable thriller.
The Internet’s Hidden Science Factory (Jenny Marder and Mike Fritz, PBS)互联网隐藏的科学工厂
I love how this story takes a notion that’s pretty technical—does a common behavioral science study volunteer recruitment method render the studies moot?—and makes it real. And it’s so real: The types of studies this story talks about are often the ones that journalists say can apply to people’s personal lives, and to policy. (I’m guilty, too!) Anyone who ever reads anything about the social sciences should know how their sausage is made, and “The Internet’s Hidden Science Factory” tells you just that.
Crime Reporting
This Is What They Did for Fun (Albert Samaha, Buzzfeed)“这就是他们为了好玩而做的事”：现代私刑的故事
It was modern-day lynching that made new headlines, but Buzzfeed crime writer Albert Samaha recognized a deeper story had yet to be told. He focused his reporting on the partner of the victim, and the aftermath of the horrific murder. This approach elevated the piece from tragic crime story to emotionally resonant character-driven narrative. It is an important and compelling read about one couple and the events that ripped them apart. It is also an important history lesson on racism in today’s America.
Under-Recognized Books
<em>The Door</em> (Magda Szabo, NYRB Classics)
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Called a masterpiece by Claire Messud in the New York Times Book Review, Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo's award-winning 1987 novel, The Door, untangles the tangles of female friendship with intensity and insight. Only now released in America, The Door should signal an alarm that we are overlooking a substantial writer.
Essays & Criticism
“The Meme-ification of Misandry” (Charlotte Shane, Matter)
2015 was the year I discovered the work of Charlotte Shane (which makes me already late to the game, her amazing TinyLetter, Prostitute Laundry, began in early 2014 and is now being collected into a book). I am so glad I did. Shane writes about all kinds of things—sex work, bodies, feminism, identity politics, emotional labor—but one of my favorite essays she wrote this year was this one, both a look back at the growing “misandry meme” that has been bubbling up throughout the Internet (2015 was also the year it became en vogue to talk publicly online about not liking males) and a passionate argument about why lazy misandry is just as bad for women as lazy misogyny. She writes about how most popular misandrist language comes from a place of privilege (she argues that it is only possible to mock men without the fear of violent retribution) and also says that many anti-men jokes are obscuring the larger systemic issues underneath: “But sometimes, misandrist jokes create a cycle of sisterly confirmation in which discussions about women’s rights begin and end with how we’re wronged by individual men — which may never turn into an analysis of the larger power structures supporting sexism.” I always appreciate Shane's writing for how clear it is, but also how full of fire it is. It is very rare to find a writer who can fully support an argument while consistently dropping in surprising provocations that make you think in an entirely new way, but that is just what Shane does.
Arts & Culture
Taylor Swift Is Definitely In Her Zone (Jia Tolentino, Jezebel)
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I could read Jia Tolentino dissecting pop stars — or actually, pretty much anything — all day. Here, she uses the occasion of a Swift concert in Washington, D.C. (and, nominally, the format of a concert review) to deliver a brilliant, hilarious, complicated consideration of what makes Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift. Tolentino is ruthless in her dissection of Swift's outfits (“on Swift, lingerie is almost businesslike”), her dancing (“she’s phenomenal at posing and can’t move her hips”), her fans (their screams are aching with “ambient desperation”), and yet, she can't help but admit that she had the time of her life at the show, “a 12-year-old having the best night of her life.”
Under-Recognized Stories
Believe in Featherbowling (Chris Koentges, ESPN Magazine)
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A lot of people missed this story, and it's easy to see why. It's about a quirky sport that no one's ever heard of, centered around a protagonist with an unfamiliar name. To be honest, I wasn't interested in reading this story until I started reading it. Then I couldn't stop. Chris Koentges pulled off a series of difficult feats here: He tells the story of the game, explains how it works, imbues it with a sense of wonder, and then uses that mythology to build a compelling, heartbreaking narrative around a singular character—Steve Gosskie, the son of Detroit who became its featherbowling champion. Koentges created a small, specific, beautifully rendered world, and when I finished the story, I didn't want to leave it behind.
Slipping Away (Shannon Proudfoot, Maclean’s)溜走
It’s a fallacy to think that because of the Internet we all have access to every story ever written and every story worth reading gets passed around like the flu until we’re all coughing in unison. It doesn’t always happen that way, particularly in the United States for stories from Canada, my other country (at least my other country when, as a dual citizen, I’m down here in my other country, the U.S.)
Investigative Reporting
How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes (Justin Elliott and Laura Sullivan, ProPublica & NPR)
Whether it's a business, government or charity, following the money almost inevitably leads to indications of waste. But Justin Elliott and Laura Sullivan's account of mismanagement with the Red Cross's efforts in Haiti is still shocking in how millions of dollars and seemingly good intentions can lead to corruption and “a cycle of overhead” where no one in need actually benefits.
Best of 2015
Under-Recognized Stories
American Deserter (Wil S. Hylton, New York magazine)
Like Dave Philipps’s New York Times story on the Marine unit that’s been battling suicide as if it were a virus, Wil S. Hylton’s NYMag story on American deserters brought the particulars of military service in the post-9/11 era to chilling, immediate and surreal life. A paragraph in this story mentions a man named Rodney Watson who watched American soldiers assault Iraqi civilians in Mosul, then afterwards deserted; he claimed sanctuary in a church that he has been unable to leave, even for a moment, for five years. More than 20,000 American soldiers deserted from 2003 to 2006 alone, Hylton writes, and the act still carries a possible death penalty. In patient and compelling detail, “American Deserter” follows soldiers who fled to Canada, and now fight deportation and imprisonment for the crime of removing themselves from a war that a majority of the people they were ostensibly protecting now agree, from the comfort of our phone polls, was a mistake.
Best of 2015
Under-Recognized Stories
Spun (Steve Friedman, Bicycling)
This story is not in my beat, but it's written by one of my favorite writers, Steve Friedman, who (disclosure) has been my mentor and friend. He sent me an early draft of this, and it was great then, but it emerged as a heart-wrenching story of addiction and love and people who find each other and therefore themselves, written with sensitivity and a quiet respect, and I don't know why more people didn't find it. This is fully absorbing, the kind of story you come out of as if you just walked out of a dark movie theater into a bright light, and those are the stories that make it all worth it.
Essays & Criticism
“The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Magazine)
The way Claudia Rankine writes about race so plainly and with such profundity and grace overwhelms me. Her essay, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” was a painful but necessary read. Rankine was clear eyed and unwavering as she outlined the constancy of mourning in black life and reinforced the importance of Black Lives Matter. Each line is full of patient rage as Rankine outlines the reality of being black in America, and the losses we continue to sustain without respite. The word that keeps coming to mind each time I read this essay is, necessary. I remain haunted and moved by the last line. “Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the living.”
Arts & Culture
The Really Big One (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker)庞贝古城的废墟讲述了这里被奴役、卖淫的妇女的故事永旺随笔
Measured by conversation-starting power, few culture articles had as much charge as this one. An earthquake of enormous magnitude was going to strike the Pacific Northwest, Schulz said, and beloved Portland, Oregon was not prepared. I live in Portland. For months, everyone was talking about this article. Friends, coworkers, baristas, wait staff and my family back in Arizona, even people who don't subscribe to The New Yorker, all were asking: Aren't you scared? Have you stockpiled food? Do you have a generator? Are you going to secure your house to its foundation? Type “New Yorker” and the first word Google auto-fills is ‘earthquake.' This pending natural disaster revealed powerful fault lines and the power of storytelling. In a narrative sense, it had everything: danger, visions of apocalypse, a vulnerable populace, a popular city having a cultural moment, and the looming dramatic question of “when?”. The paradisiacal vision of Portlandia suddenly looked less appealing to many people planning to live here. Those of us who did fell into two camps: those who turned their terror into earthquake preparedness kits, and those who did not. The danger is real, but Portland's greatest danger might not be quakes but good food. There's so much of it. It isn't safe to live in a place known for fried artisan dough balls, sausages containing “hand-cut fat” and restaurants named Gravy. In these conditions, Portland's passionate eaters are likely to suffer cardiac arrest before civil unrest. For now, enough time has passed since The New Yorker story that locals have gone back to our unsafe lives. Our hospitals are still on hills. Our commutes take us over the river where some of us think, “What if this bridge fell?” Beyond that, people have stopped talking about the article and have gone back to talking about where we're eating, and our food allergies.
Essays & Criticism
“The Bully’s Pulpit: On the elementary structure of domination” (David Graeber, The Baffler)
What is the nature of bullying? “Bullying,” Graeber writes, “creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.” His essay mostly considers the relationship between the logic of the schoolyard and the logic of military conflict, but the clarity of that central concept—reaction as justification for the action that provoked it—read also as a precise accounting of the theatrics of brutality and backlash that would occur in Paris and beyond after the essay was published.
Under-Recognized Stories
They Did It All for the Nookie: The Rise and Fall of Nu-Metal (Shane Mehling<em>, </em>Decibel)
Because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it??? The best possible story about the worst possible thing.
Business & Tech
Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology (John Carreyrou, Wall Street Journal)
My second nomination is John Carreyrou's Wall Street Journal investigation of Theranos, which took a darling of recent Silicon Valley mythology out behind the shed and put a bullet in its skull. The original piece was, of course, devastatingly well-researched and thorough, but it's the fallout from the story—the regulatory mess around the biotech sector, the increasingly mystique-laden character of Elizabeth Holmes, the silly and unconvincing defenses attempted by tech tribalists (who are unaccustomed to scrutiny that leaves a mark), and the swirl of financial uncertainty that has come to surround other big venture-backed businesses since the piece was published (deservedly or not)—that make it obvious that Carreyrou's work will be fought over for years.
Arts & Culture
“THE STAGE WAS SET. AND WE TURNED UP. AND THE PEOPLE SAID, ‘YES.’ AND THEN IT JUST EXPLODED.” (Alex Bilmes, Esquire UK)
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I realize that technically a Q&A isn’t what we think of as a piece of longform, but this is certainly a long read, and it’s a tremendous one. I would read literally any interview with Noel Gallagher —the guy is so honest and refreshing and hilarious - and this is maybe his longest and most entertaining yet. Anyone who’s done celebrity stories, and I’ve done my share, understands that the biggest frustration and challenge is getting the famous person to say or do something, anything, interesting. That’s incredibly hard in most cases. So many of them aren’t that interesting, beyond their talent at acting/singing/painting/whatever, and those who are are trained to be boring – if you’re boring, you can’t create controversy. The mad science of celebrity PR is maximizing exposure of your client while not allowing said client to have a three-dimensional personality. That’s why so many of these stories are conversations about “the project” over lunch. But Noel – Noel doesn’t give a single fuck. He enjoys talking, and that’s evident from this interview’s opening moments, when Alex Bilmes asks him if he has a hobby. Noel answers: “This is my hobby!” Prompting Alex to ask, “You mean, music?” Noel: “No! This: doing interviews. I fucking love it. I could do this all day long. It’s sick.” Even if you don’t know Noel, or care about Oasis or Britpop or even rock, this is well worth your while. But you should also care about Oasis, because they were great. Thanks mostly to Noel.
Essays & Criticism
“Not Knowing” (Katherine Bernard, The Awl)
One of my favorite books of the year was Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and like any book that contains multitudes, it inspired some of the best writing of the year as people tried to grapple with its pages. One of my favorite essays to come out of wrestling with Nelson was Katherine Bernard's beautiful, meandering journey through her own queer identity in “Not Knowing”—Bernard wrote something that is part essay, part memoir, part longform poetry, part performance, and I found myself really hypnotized by her work. It never comes to any one conclusion—instead, it raises questions and makes you think about your own ways of defining yourself. Sometimes the most moving writing doesn't hit hard, instead it envelops you like a cloak and makes you feel warm and protected, in the hands of someone who, like everyone else, is just trying to figure it out.
Sports Writing
Life’s Rich Pageant: Meet a Florida Man (Holly Anderson, Grantland)
For me, the biggest (and saddest) story in sports media was the abrupt folding of Grantland, which was a near-daily source for some of the most tenaciously reported and elegantly written prose in sports writing. But Grantland was at its most captivating when it pushed its own fuzzy boundaries and made you wonder how exactly something got published (even as you were thankful that it was). Anderson’s harrowing and hilarious tale of a Florida man embarking on a bowfishing trip gone horribly, painfully awry encapsulates this ethos in every anecdote and cringe-worthy turn of events, even as it doubles as a riveting piece of culture writing that enlightens rather than patronizes. Would anyone else have published this piece? Maybe, but maybe not. Point is, Grantland did, and the site shall live on in our hearts, for this piece and so many of its daring brethren.
Essays & Criticism
“Ina Garten Does It Herself” (Choire Sicha, Eater)
This piece presents itself as a “profile” of Ina Garten, and was even received as such, with a flurry of OMG I love Ina tooooo tweets, but it is something else entirely: “while many might think of her career as being a person who appears on television, she is rather a cookbook writer,” Sicha writes, and what follows is a chatty-seeming but ruthless exercise in close reading of text and utterance that goes thousands of miles away from the kitchen and countless dark fathoms below the surface of aspirational prosperity and comfort, into the cold lightless gears of power.
Crime Reporting
The Great Cocaine Treasure Hunt (Daniel Riley, GQ)
· 官方页
This is easily one of my favorite stories of the year, regardless of genre. Sure it has buried treasure, 70 pounds of cocaine, and a questionable undercover sting in the Caribbean, but it’s also a tale about the power of story and good story telling. I’m pretty sure I emailed Riley’s opener to more people this year than any other, which starts like the seductive thrum of a GTO:
Business & Tech
Instagram’s TMZ (Jenna Wortham, New York Times Magazine)
My first nomination is Jenna Wortham's NYT Mag piece on the Shade Room, an Instagram-only publication that focuses on celebrity news. It's a piece that made me realize that, while much of the digital media was obsessing and handwringing about The Future Of Publishing, there was this entirely separate set of people who were just going out and *doing the work*, creating publications native to new media that had none of the legacy hangups or procedural ankleweights of the competition, needed no deep VC pockets to enact their visions, and that were often more capable when it came to finding and amplifying diverse voices. It's a too-short piece (I could have read 10,000 words on it) but Jenna's piece stuck in my head as an exemplar of technology journalism that focuses on what is *actually* new and innovative, and doesn't just rely on prognostication from the same old voices.
Under-Recognized Stories
How to Make Yogurt in Manila (Grace Talusan, The Butter/The Toast)如何在马尼拉制作酸奶 - The Toast
I was so moved by this essay by Grace Talusan, a writer on a Fulbright fellowship that has brought her back to her native Manila. It was originally posted on The Butter, The Toast’s sister site, which was discontinued shortly after this piece appeared. Talusan writes about sublimating her loneliness and frustrations—with the staggering poverty she encounters, with her powerlessness to help poor children living in horrendous conditions, with her infertility–in obsessively making yogurt, from scratch. It’s wrenching, reflective personal narrative with a thread of sensuous food writing artfully wound right through it.
The Ad-Rock Retirement Plan (Zach Baron, GQ.com)
It's a little weird to be casting a Zach Baron GQ profile of one of the most successful pop artists in recent decades as an underdog, but this one seems to have slipped under a lot of radars. (The story didn't run in the magazine, hence the movie still art and the relative lack of promotion.) But this is just a stunningly frank and melancholy snapshot of a guy who has been famous for more than half his life and just isn't really sure what to do with himself now that the one thing he's always done—make music with his best friend Adam Yauch, who died in 2012—isn't an option. He doesn't need to work, but he's not totally sure of what to do with himself every day. Stars, they're just like us, etc.
Investigative Reporting
The Counted: People Killed By the Police in the US (The Guardian)
& Investigation: Police Shootings (The Washington Post · 官方页
The Guardian has done extraordinary, laudable work compiling its database of all police shootings in 2015; The Washington Post’s investigation was equally impressive, and they’ve generated a lot of great stories out of it and around it. These databases are necessary, but they can also run the risk of reducing a lot of human beings to digestible stats and scrollable infographics. So I’m mostly putting them down because I can’t say “Twitter and Facebook, and millions of people on them.” On these social platforms, activists and bystanders with their cell cameras and invested, inventive journalists and terrified young people are pulling together a devastating investigation into an institutional crime as big and old as the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals. On these social platforms, those databases are updated live, with another terrible video, another needless death, on those social platforms, victims are given back their humanity and voice. As Stacia L. Brown wrote in her heart-aching Buzzfeed piece, “Why I Facebook Stalk Black Teenagers.”: “It’s a powerful and chilling development: young people of color sharing what could become their last will and testament. They’re shooting cell phone footage that could be admissible in the trials that follow their deaths. They’re erecting memorials in their own honor, typing micro-obituaries.”
Under-Recognized Stories
From Doubles Tennis to Internet Porn: My Year as a Supreme Court Clerk (Ted Cruz, Politico)
· 官方页
Listen, I'm a twenty-something yellow dog Democrat—about as un-pro Ted Cruz as they come—but I honestly can't comprehend why more people weren't obsessed with this story. The piece, which recounts Cruz's year as a clerk for then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, opens with Cruz standing behind Sandra Day O'Connor while they look at hard-core porn on a giant computer screen. It's fun. It's funny. It's full of great details (Rehnquist wore “big wide ties with floral patterns and Hush Puppies,” Souter had an ascetic yogurt lunch routine, Breyer had a habit of talking loudly about pending cases in crowded restaurants, et al). Was this ghostwritten or is Ted Cruz secretly kind of cool?
Arts & Culture
Invisible and Insidious (William Vollmann, Harper’s)《看不见的和阴险的》，作者：威廉·T·沃尔曼
For the second time, author William Vollmann traveled to Japan to investigate the Fukushima nuclear disaster's effects on the Japanese people, landscape and psyche. Weeks after the 2011 meltdown, Vollmann entered the sinister-sounding forbidden zone to interview locals and explore the dangers of the unknown; he wrote about it in an Amazon single. In his 2015 Harper's piece, he returned to see what had happened during the last four years, and to measure not just isotopes, but the effects of corporate cover ups and government subterfuge on the Japanese public's health and trust. In towns near the power plant, he asked if people were afraid of eating the fish, breathing the air, or living there. With so much conflicting information, what did they believe? Besides the compelling sense of danger and the thrill of peering inside a shadowy area, part of the story's appeal is its tenor. Vollmann writes about official statistics and decontamination efforts with biting meta-commentary, crafting dry acerbic phrases to reveal the ridiculousness of certain claims. When the U.S. media moved on from Fukushima to other stories, most Americans did too, but Vollmann is here to tell us that Fukushima isn't just a Japanese disaster. Nuclear energy is a global danger. Look at Japan, he's saying. This could be you.
Sports Writing
A Force Unleashed (Tim Layden, Sports Illustrated, Appearing online in 2015)
· 官方页
Thirty years ago, Mike Tyson launched his boxing career in Catskill, NY. Tim Layden, then a young, hungry reporter for The Schnectady Gazette and The Albany Times Union, was by Tyson’s side, carefully chronicling Iron Mike’s first professional bouts. Without acknowledging it, Tyson and Layden shared a hunger to get out of upstate New York. Tyson goes “from Knockout Curiosity to heavyweight champion to the precipice of Full-Blown Freak Show,: while Layden reaches his profession’s pinnacle at Sports Illustrated, where he’s worked with distinction for 21 years.
Essays & Criticism
“Against Chill” (Alana Massey, Matter)
Full disclosure: Alana and I are now pals IRL, but I had only encountered her via the Twitterverse before I read “Against Chill” in April. We actually met as a result of this essay (which contains so many #firethoughts that it is hard to pick out a favorite line)—after I read it three times through and got my bearings back, I thought to myself, “ok, wherever this woman is in the world, I have to find her, sit down with her, and let her brilliance wash over me in waves.” Massey's essay was a part of Matter's “Getting It” series, about relationships, but it stands on its own as a powerful argument about why affecting “chill” is a pose that is working for no one, not just in terms of love but as an entire flawed worldview. As Massey wrote: “Chill takes and never gives. Chill is pathologically unfeeling but not even interesting enough to kill anyone. Chill is a garbage virtue that will destroy the species. Fuck Chill.” She dismantles, with a withering but measured tone, the act of putting distance between yourself and the world as not just an insipid social trend but as a veneer that is holding us all back —from feeling how we really feel, from getting what we really want. I have zero chill about how good this piece is. And so I'll urge you all to read it, waving my hands around and making a bit too much noise to ever look cool. Because why would you want to be chill when you can be enthusiastic, warm, and bursting at the seams? Life is too short to pretend not to care about it.
Arts & Culture
Searching for Sugar Daddy (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ)
I’m not sure if this falls under the category of arts but it’s certainly culture of some kind — a culture of terrible humans occupying a realm that few of us will ever stumble into. I like pretty much everything Taffy writes, because she is so incredibly entertaining in the way she types words into sentences that assemble to form stories, but I’m sure I’ve never had more fun reading her work than I had reading this one. I’m aware that it created a bit of a kerfluffle with certain women who felt it was demeaning to sex workers, but I’m not sure I buy that or care because no one in here is doing anything he or she doesn’t want to be doing, everyone is rewarded in his or her own way, and I have to imagine all parties herein know how gross and terrible these transactions are and probably don’t care at all what we think of them because they are being paid well in money or, um, company. Or at least that’s how I rationalized it over the past 60 seconds while forming that thought. It’s a fun story. I liked reading it. You will too.
Under-Recognized Books
<em>Tender Points</em> (Amy Berkowitz, Timeless, Infinite Light)
I found this book on the Staff Picks shelf at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and, like all of the worst bookstore customers, read most of it right on the spot. Tender Points is short and tough, a personal but unsentimental chronicle of trauma and chronic pain, delivered in a series of blunt, intimate fragments. Berkowitz has fibromyalgia, the primary symptom of which is easy articulated: sweeping, persistent, full-body pain. But pain is of course internal, and this particular illness lacks any attendant external indicators, making it subject to skepticism and dismissal in the medical community. It’s also crucial to mention that fibromyalgia disproportionately affects women, many of whom have a history of sexual abuse; it quickly becomes clear that this is a nightmare illness to explain to colleagues and acquaintances, let alone a male doctor.
Sports Writing
Crunching the Numbers: College Basketball Players Can’t Wear 6, 7, 8, or 9 (Zach Schonbrun, The New York Times)计算数字：大学篮球运动员不能穿 6、7、8 或 9 号球衣
College basketball is one of my many passions, but I never for a moment considered the origins of uniform numbers in the college game. Schonbrun's takes a great question—”Why do college uniforms only include the numbers 0 through 5?”—and goes beyond the answer (referees can signal a player for a foul just once), reporting when the practice started and whether it needs to be changed as more and more universities are added to the Division I ranks.
Under-Recognized Stories
How An American Tourist Lost His Passport In Istanbul And Was Sucked Into Syria’s War (Mike Giglio, Buzzfeed)我的儿子，时尚王子
Here’s a look at the Syrian refugee crisis that sheds light on the current dilemmas and was under-recognized when it came out in May.
Under-Recognized Books
<em>Katherine Carlyle</em> (Rupert Thomson, Other Press)
· 官方页
This is a brilliant book, strangely overlooked. It's UK author Rupert Thomson's 10th novel, and in it he achieves a sublime nonchalance. He's not striving. He's just an ice floe, pulling incrementally ahead. His language works double-time, both dripping with metaphor and brutally direct. There are some masterful one-liners to be found in these pages—lines like “He... blows out a thin blade of smoke that blunts itself against the night.”
Essays & Criticism
“The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison” (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, New York Times Magazine)
· 官方页
I will read every last word that Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah writes, which is why I am so glad that at the tail end of 2015 she announced that she will be publishing a book (though now we have to wait years for it!). It is always wonderful to read a profile that reads like a true meeting of of minds, a kind of osmosis between writer and subject (so many of them can feel at best staid, and at worst predatory). This piece where RKG writes about the long career of Toni Morrison felt like a dance, and it flows back and forth between being a reported profile, a lyrical essay, a deep work of historical research, and a polemic about the states of both black and women's literature—I appreciate that this piece is so unclassifiable but comes together in the end like a long prose poem, which is what I think the best profiles do; they break down genre boundaries and you start to wonder where the subject ends and the writer begins and you keep learning new things along the way. Even Kaadzi Ghansah's in-between paragraphs are gorgeous, those quiet moments when she is setting the scene between interviews or quotes from Morrison. She writes, “It was still winter, but the day had spring undertones, a good deal of sun and now a pink evening sky that I could see through the slots of the skyscrapers. Across the way, I could see a dance class that was in session, a row of arms in flight. Yellow taxis scuttled down below like beetles. The building directly adjacent to his office seemed to be a hotel, and someone was turning down the sheets. It was one of those moments in which New York feels timeless.” I don't think I have read a better throwaway paragraph in a long reported piece this year.
Under-Recognized Stories
Inside Enya’s Castle (Anne Helen Petersen, BuzzFeed)恩雅爱尔兰王国内部
I don't know that this piece was overlooked, exactly. It's more like, I would have overlooked it, if not for its author. I love Anne Helen Petersen's sharp, funny, seriously penetrating and seriously unpretentious prose. Her profile of Enya is no exception. Petersen's portrait honors our international nostalgia for Enya.
Arts & Culture
How Much Damage Can It Do? On the Intellectual Element in Modern Fiction (Christopher Beha, Harper’s)
In the past few years I've become increasingly less interested in reading literary criticism, and in this excellent essay Christopher Beha encapsulates many of the reasons why. On the one hand, talented but narrow critics like the New Yorker's James Wood insist that literature is incompatible with “social comment,” or “preachy presentism.” An also-smart opposing camp rejects Wood's concern with “the Jamesian ‘palpable present-intimate” but, Beha argues, accepts “the binary Wood had established—you can have the novel or you can have social criticism— n+1 accepted the choice and opted for the latter.” Unconvinced that “the warmth of humanity” and “the social novel” are incompatible, Beha finds hope in the criticism of Adam Kirsch, a poet and poetry critic who “writes for a general audience, under the assumption that a general audience is capable of caring about poetry if a critic makes it sound like something worth caring about.” Kirsch doesn't write much about fiction, and I've never been drawn to his criticism, but Beha makes a strong case for it. “What the contemporary novel needs,” he contends, “is a critic who combines Wood’s belief in the novel as a form with Kirsch’s belief in what literature can do.”
Under-Recognized Stories
Anything to Make You Happy (Ottessa Moshfegh, Lucky Peach)特里斯坦·沃克：看得见的人
Ottessa Moshfegh's essay is about mayonnaise. But it's also about immigrant parents, and relationships, and how people can surprise us even when we've known them all our lives — and told in a tricky-to-pull-off tone that is at once poignant and sardonic, bordering on the absurd. In one scene, Moshfegh cuts her boyfriend's toenails, and draws blood. The symbolism is hard to miss, and yet, he's sitting there in a fluffy pink bathrobe from Victoria's Secret when her parents walk in, and I couldn't help but laugh.
Crime Reporting
The Strange Case Of Anna Stubblefield (Daniel Engber, New York Times Magazine)安娜·斯图布尔菲尔德奇案
Most anyone who works on stories like this for a living will attest that the true gauge of success is, traffic aside, the degree to which it seems like people are talking about them. And for a few days this fall, everyone I knew wanted to talk about this story and better, to argue about it: Could Anna, a married researcher truly have fallen in love with her subject, DJ, who has severe cerebral palsy and, according to the state, the mental capacity of a toddler? Or, as the story itself seeks to examine, could DJ really, as Anna insists, have fallen in love with her? Engber did not get to speak with Anna Stubblefield, who was convicted of first-degree sexual assault and could spend 40 years in prison for twice having sex with DJ, yet still masterfully recreates this impossibly complicated relationship as it unfolded during her trial. Central to it all is “facilitated communication,” a polarizing means of expression for the severely disabled that blurs the line between science and wishful thinking.
Essays & Criticism
“They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist” (Jenny Zhang, BuzzFeed)
Zhang fired off this incisive piece in response to poet Michael Derrick Hudson's admission that he'd appropriated a Chinese pseudonym–Yi–Fen Chou, the name of a woman with whom he'd gone to high school, without her knowledge or consent—to enhance his chances of having one of his poems published, first in Prairie Schooner, and then in Best American Poetry 2015. The essay ranges far beyond that one mortifying example of callous white male entitlement. It's a bruising, comprehensive catalogue of the many ways in which the white publishing establishment marginalizes and takes advantage or writers of color, making them suffer for their otherness with both discrimination and envy. As an acquiring editor myself, I have been unconsciously guilty of some of these, and I'm grateful for lesson. The piece is also a call to arms. “For those of us who didn’t grow up entitled, those of us who grew up underestimated, underinvited, undersolicited, underacknowledged, underloved, I say let’s expose each other’s excellence.”
“Free Joan Didion” (Haley Mlotek, The Awl)
I went all the way back to January to pick this essay by Haley Mlotek, which made me think about one of my favorite writers in a new way. That's sort of the point, actually: Joan Didion is one of everybody's favorite writers. Mlotek's essay explores how she has made a transition from merely a beloved writer to an easy shorthand for a certain type of literary importance.
Best of 2015
Under-Recognized Stories
The Genesis Engine (Amy Maxmen, Wired)
· 官方页
The one I felt was under-recognized was this Wired cover story on Crispr. I expected (and, to some extent, am still puzzled by the lack of) an extended national discussion about Crispr and gene-editing technology more generally, because it is the *craziest fucking thing*, and the work being done with it now will have implications bigger than 99% of technologies out there. Wired did a nice job of drawing the threads of the Crispr discussion together, and the only reason that I can think of that it hasn't blossomed into a huge national issue is that most people still mistakenly think gene editing is sci-fi? But it's not! It's happening now! It's going to happen a lot more! We should probably talk about it!
The Last Volunteer (Dan Kaufman, New York Times Magazine)
During the Spanish Civil War, a group of some three thousand Americans traveled to Spain to fight on the side of the democratically-elected government, against Franco. This is the story, in his own words, of 99-year-old Del Berg, the last-known surviving veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “It bothers me a little that at 99 you’re going to die any minute, because I have a lot of other things I want to do.”
Under-Recognized Books
<em>Galileo’s Middle Finger</em> (Alice Dreger, Penguin Press)
· 官方页
This overlooked piece of memoir-cum-true crime-cum science writing is wildly interesting, if a bit messily put together. And it's truly fearless, given the kind of public shaming (to reference Jon Ronson's topically related and more popularly received book also published this year) to which some of Dreger's antagonists have resorted.
Under-Recognized Stories
Playing God (Richard Kelly Kemick, The Walrus)
· 官方页
The first mention I saw of Richard Kelly Kemick’s story “Playing God” was a tweet along the lines of, “Give yourself a good 15 minutes after reading this to just sit and stare into space for a little while.” And, holy man, does it live up to that billing. This piece starts in one place—something like a grandmother’s charmingly navel-gazing column in a small-town weekly newspaper, maybe?—and then takes a hard left turn into David Sedaris-esque territory of weird, dark wonderfulness. It’s a testament to the crackling writing that even while one corner of my brain kept screaming, “You need to get a real job and apologize to your wife!” I was utterly transfixed by this. It’s a totally original and deliciously twisted meditation on obsession.
Business & Tech
Facebook AI Director Yann LeCun on His Quest to Unleash Deep Learning and Make Machines Smarter (Lee Gomes, IEEE Spectrum)Facebook 人工智能总监 Yann LeCun 探讨如何释放深度学习并使机器变得更智能（Lee Gomes，IEEE Spectrum）
This is not so much a story as an interview, but it's a damn important one. There's been so much written about Artificial Intelligence this year and much of it is thin and confusing. Here, Facebook's director of AI Yann LeCun offers up some of the clearest explanations you will find anywhere of the toughest concepts behind modern AI. LeCun is not a huckster or a hypester. He provides a clear-eyed look at just how far AI technology has come and how far is still has to go. It's a great read for anyone who wants to wrap their head around AI and feel conversant on the subject.
Essays & Criticism
“Addy Walker, American Girl” (Brit Bennett, Paris Review)
· 官方页
The American Girl phenomenon is often discussed as a universal part of any girl’s experience who was under 10 in the 1990s: conversations, essays and quizzes position the proto-Sex and the City choices between American Girl identities (were you a Molly? a Samantha?) as a catchall personality test for every girl. But the dolls were aimed at a specific market. They were deliberately expensive—drawing on a subconscious premium we place on the American lifestyle pre-Civil Rights—and of course, save Addy, all the American Girls were white.
Arts & Culture
The Broad Strokes (Rachel Syme, Grantland)
Oh, for the love of this profile! I read the piece, about “Broad City” stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, because I was already obsessed with the show: not a hard sell. And yet, incredibly, Rachel Syme exceeded my desires, not just giving the dirt on Jacobson and Glazer—what their friendship is like, how they work—but also explaining my obsession with the show to myself. Syme deconstructs its brilliance without ruining the humor at all: a real feat. “Their New York is the New York that can be experienced only as a duo: a kaleidoscopic playground made for two, the kind of cinematic, heightened fun-house version of the city that accompanies the most epic, swooning romances,” she writes. And, later:
Under-Recognized Stories
The Threat to Detroit’s Rebound Isn’t Crime or the Economy, It’s the Mortgage Industry (Anna Clark, Next City)
“One of the most sinister legacies of urban development—redlining—is making a de facto reappearance in Detroit,” writes Motor City journalist Anna Clark in this Next City feature. Clark details how mortgage industry practices are handicapping Detroiters' ability to buy homes in the city even as hundreds of thousands of structures sit vacant and in need of purchasers. This story had never been told before and in the way it week published, it was shared by thousands of Detroiters and covered by several local news outlets. Its impacts will surely be felt as mortgage lenders and local officials feel pressure to reform a system that has silently held back the city for too long.
Arts & Culture
The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, New York Times Magazine)
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's profile of Toni Morrison is both a stunning portrait of one of America's greatest authors and a keenly felt meditation on race, particularly in the publishing industry. The first person can often be trying in profiles, but here Kaadzi Ghansah wields her perspective skillfully and judiciously to show just how significant Morrison's contribution to the world has been — and why we have no right to expect anything more than what she's given.
Under-Recognized Stories
The Friend (Matthew Teague, Esquire)
“No one ever told me the truth about dying,” writes Matthew Teague. “Not once. When it happened to my beloved, I lost my footing in more than one way.”