190 篇
Under-Recognized Stories
Canvassing (Nikil Saval, n+1)
This may be, as they say in my part of the internet, overdetermined, but I think the most overlooked story of 2016 was the fact that millions of people came out to vote in the Democratic primaries for a 74-year-old socialist from Vermont. In my lifetime I have never seen a political candidate on the national stage say such simple and true things as what Bernie said (that everyone is entitled to medical care; that everyone is entitled to an education; that the United States is not simply a blameless actor on the bloody stage of geopolitics), and what's more I have never seen these ideas receive such a passionate response. Nikil Saval's description of canvassing for Bernie in Philadelphia for several weeks in April, and then experiencing his defeat at a bar called The Gaslight, combines a tender reflection on the difficulty of being both a person in the world and a political actor, with a foreshadowing of the raw shock all of us would experience, with much more justified horror, seven months later. “Everyone meets at a bar called The Gaslight. As soon as I enter, someone asks, ‘Did you see?' When I look at the screen, I see the result. Hillary Clinton is standing at a podium next to a giant version of her stolid blue-and-red icon, the H-arrow, somewhere in the Philadelphia Convention Center. It looks like something out of Citizen Kane.”
Food Writing
In Sickness, in Health, in White Castle (Allison Robicelli, Food52)
Honestly, the world needs more pieces like this one. “You drive into the darkness underneath the D tracks, searching for moments from your South Brooklyn childhood, when things like cancer and terrorism weren’t part of reality.” What do you drive for? Sliders, of course.
Arts & Culture Writing
The Fight of Your Life (Lyra McKee, Mosaic Science)
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This may on its surface appear to be a sports story, and it is, but it’s also about culture–the culture of boxing, and the culture of idealized masculinity–those men who never speak up about what hurts. It’s a sad story, and an important one. It also helped me understand chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) a bit more, particularly as it occurs among boxers. McKee goes to Belfast, Boston, Chicago and a small town in western Canada to talk to the people who study CTE and those who’ve experienced its horrific effects among deceased loved ones who were boxers. You don’t need to know that McKee is a Northern Irish girl or the history of Irish boxing as a whole to understand the compassion she brings to the piece along with her reportorial eye.
Best of 2016
Under-Recognized Books
The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir Of Place, Solitude, and Friendship (Katherine Towler, Counterpoint)朴茨茅斯的便士诗人：地方、孤独和友谊的回忆录：凯瑟琳·托勒：9781619027121：Amazon.com：图书
Yes, I’m friends with the author. But I would choose this book even if I didn’t know Katherine. I’m a sucker for memoirs about writers and the writing life—and this is one of the best books I’ve ever read in that category. Years ago, Katherine Towler moved to Portsmouth, NH and met Robert Dunn—a fiercely stubborn, eccentric poet who was beloved in the literary community, but content with being a “minor poet.” She became a caretaker for him in the final years of his life, and recounts what she learned from her friendship with Robert. It’s easy to focus on validation when you’re a writer, but this beautifully written book is a reminder that none of that really matters in the end. What counts in being an artist is the work itself, and the solitude and friendships we count on to fuel our creativity.
Science Writing
Katharine Hayhoe, a Climate Explainer Who Stays Above the Storm (John Schwartz, The New York Times)
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Too often scientists find themselves lecturing. Most people do not want to be lectured. In some cases, this can lead to a standoff. This profile of Hayhoe not only explains how scientists can speak to ordinary, it provides an example of how scientists can learn to listen. Often, it seems scientists live in their own parallel world; this Hayhoe is firmly of this one.
Intersex: Seeking the Beauty in Difference (Martha Henriques, Mosaic)
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I remember reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ expansive 2002 novel, “Middlesex,” with fascination and admiration. It tells the story of Callie, the daughter of an entrepreneurial Greek-American family who discovers at age 14 that she is a hermaphrodite, and decides to identify as a man after she learns the truth about her condition. More than a decade after “Middlesex,” we can watch “Transparent,” hear North Carolinians debate unisex bathrooms and follow Bruce Jenner’s transformation into Caitlyn, but the spectrum of intersex and transgender individuals still struggle with pervasive misinformation and misunderstanding. In Mosaic, Martha Henriques finds out what it’s like growing up intersex and meets those fighting to improve intersex rights.
Food Writing
Pete Wells Has His Knives Out (Ian Parker, The New Yorker)
A ranging profile of New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells. It offers insight into how he formulates the reviews that can make or break restaurants, and how restaurateurs like Momofuku’s David Chang and Per Se’s Thomas Keller are affected by those sometimes scathing reviews.
Investigative Reporting
Healing Hasidic Masturbators and Adulterers — With Psychiatric Drugs (Batya Ungar-Sargon, Narratively)
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Batya Ungar-Sargon investigates the phenomenon of Hasidic Jews being treated with heavy psych meds to steer them away from sexual behavior considered by the religion to be taboo. Men called askanim, refer members of their community who engage in anything considered sexually deviant to a handful of specialized psychiatrists, who treat their subjects’ theological transgressions as mental illness. Transgressions include but are not limited to: masturbation, same-sex attraction, and responding to the kind of sexual ennui that might result from marrying at 20 by engaging in affairs. Ungar-Sargon interviews a number of men and women in the community to find many of them have had similar experiences.
Food Writing
Escaping the Restaurant Industry’s Motherhood Trap (Amanda Kludt, Eater)
I’ve always loved the flexibility of food writing. Travel, culture, policy, environment, crime, and just about everything else can fall under its umbrella. It does, however, make it difficult to narrow down my favorite essays. Though there was plenty of excellent food writing in 2016, few pieces touched a nerve like Amanda Kludt’s article on the lack of options for mothers who work in the restaurant industry.
Under-Recognized Stories
Fair Dancin’ Mad: A Scottish Town Fights Trump (Rebecca Donner, The Rumpus)
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Donner’s tale begins with Mickey Foote, ex-manager of The Clash, explaining “how Trump hoodwinked his country.” Join the club, buddy. However, this energetically reported piece surfaced before election day, when it was lost in the flood of outraged hot mic op-eds and other controversies. In retrospect, it reads like a far more salient indictment of Trump’s character, and the dangers it presents, with respect to his wielding of political power.
Business & Tech Reporting
Venezuela, A Failing State (William Finnegan, The New Yorker)
Can a functional society commit suicide? We all know the answer is yes. But experiencing it through the eyes of Finnegan brings it home in a horrifying way. His incredible reporting—peppered with quotes from people who are happy to be quoted by name, since they no longer have anything left to lose—shows the destruction of a society. Once prosperous, if corrupt, Venezuela, in the aftermath of Chavez and Maduro, is a place where people wait in line all day for food and still go home hungry; a place in which the only people who can earn money are security guards and police, though that’s not guaranteed, either. As we flirt with our own dystopia, it’s a cautionary tale indeed.
Investigative Reporting
Unearthing The Secrets Of New York’s Mass Graves (Nina Bernstein, The New York Times)
If Nina Bernstein had not investigated, this story—of how some of New York’s most vulnerable wound up in this mass “graveyard of last resort” and the systems that failed them—would likely never be told. Bernstein’s unearthing of hundreds of those buried at Hart Island for The New York Times is a haunting, systematic indictment of some of the ugliest chapters of America’s past and present, from the Southern slave owners who “donated” or sold the bodies of dead slaves to medical schools, and the 16 people with AIDS who were buried on the Island “under 14 feet of soil instead of the usual three” during the height of ignorance and fear surrounding the epidemic, to the inmates who are today paid 50 cents an hour to act as pallbearers there. Through rigorous data collection and analysis, extensive interviews, and rich historical context, this piece manifests many of the best practices of investigative journalism, but it also showcases the kind of beautifully crafted storytelling that is too often lacking from this hard-hitting genre, making Bernstein’s opus a triumph.
Arts & Culture Writing
Ripping the Veil (Britt Bennett, The New Republic)
“What does it mean when white audiences are suddenly so eager to consume narratives of black suffering?” Bennett asks, offering vital context to the ever-growing body of art focusing on the history and legacy of slavery.
Sports Writing
After The Process: Meet Sam Hinkie 2.0 (Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated)“自由之路”：自由大学如何阻止和驳回学生的性侵犯报告 — ProPublica
I love the insight, and ideas, in this catch-up with former Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie. It’s really not a sports story at all, but a story about a guy in between, trying to figure out what’s next.
Essays & Criticism
Southern Fried Pride: What Hattiesburg’s First Pride Means in the Deep South (Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Medium)
The Reverend Jasmine Beach-Ferrara of the United Church of Christ is a wife, a mother, a lesbian, a former college professor (I took her class at Warren Wilson College), and the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality. In this piece, Jasmine takes a road trip across the Deep South to visit Hattiesburg, Mississippi on the occasion of its very first Pride parade. People like Jasmine do the work that all Americans need, whether they accept it or not. In her peaceful, dignified but impassioned manner, she fights for equality for all Americans. That she happens to be a damn fine storyteller is just icing on the deep-fried cake.
Under-Recognized Books
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (Sarah Hepola, Grand Central Publishing)
This is the story of a seemingly normal woman, until she picks up a drink. Hepola’s blackouts lead her to some very dark places, but with such humor and bravery that you’re too busy cheering to be embarrassed.
Best of 2016
Crime Reporting
The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff, The Atavist)
It’s not a surprise to readers that Evan Ratliff’s incredible Mastermind series on a kingpin-turned-snitch is being adapted into some kind of filmed entertainment. It was sprawling and weird and well worth binging on after a huge holiday meal.
Under-Recognized Books
Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Ocean Vuong, Copper Canyon Press)
Poetry is often under-recognized—and while Ocean Vuong’s has been recognized by Whiting, poetry needs every opportunity to be read. So I’m laying it down here. This is the one to read. Every poem beats with exigency and passion, and his work is complicated—spanning history and time and blood and heartbreak and hope. And yet there is meaningful silence in the words, too—gaps and pauses in the line breaks and spaces filled with guesses and anticipation and questioning. Vuong is a fan of Li-Young Lee and like Lee, Vuong investigates fathers, mothers, country, and historical pain. But it very well could be that he will make a mark bigger than Lee’s.
Political Analysis
Autocracy: Rules for Survival (Masha Gessen, The New York Review of Books)
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It almost seems like this year’s political analysis needed to be broken into two phases: the period of incredulous disbelief before November 8 that Trump was a real candidate at all (versus a businessman cannily exploiting the worst attributes of the Republican party to boost his Twitter following), and the shock of this past month, where we start to realize what happened.
Sports Writing
Mamba Out (Ramona Shelburne, ESPN The Magazine)肇事逃逸后
Ramona Shelburne had the best year of any sportswriter. I’m just going to pick one of her pieces from this year, but I could easily have picked half a dozen. In April, Shelburne someone managed to put out the definitive piece on an athlete, Kobe Bryant, who has been under the microscope for two decades.
Investigative Reporting
The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife (Ariel Sabar, The Atlantic)
My favorite investigations often are ones where you the reader gets a glimpse of the obsessions of the reporter, much like what Anderson did in the David story. The Atlantic ran this amazing piece last summer about an obsession over a small scrap of papyrus that suggests that Jesus was married — and the around-the-globe hunt filled with crazy real-life characters that it took Ariel Sabar on.
Welcome to America — Now Spy on Your Friends (Talal Ansari and Siraj Datoo, BuzzFeed News)
Donald Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric may have cast a worthy spotlight on Islamophobia and Muslim registration programs, but this fresh attention masks a grim fact: similar programs have already been in existence for years. In this BuzzFeed News investigation, Talal Ansari and Siraj Datoo shed light on one of the least known among them, the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program, or CARRP. Formerly secret, this federal program delays or denies citizenship and immigration benefits based on what rights groups have only been able to identify as religion, national origin, or similar factors. The overwhelming majority of those affected by CARRP are Muslim. Their investigation, “based on government and court documents, official complaints, and interviews with immigrants, immigration and civil rights lawyers, and former special agents,” exposes how many Muslims caught in CARRP’s crosshairs have reported being pressured by the FBI to become informants in exchange for immigration help — a violation of the FBI’s own rules. It’s remarkable, not just for its depth and unprecedented findings, but because it offers a blueprint for other investigative reporters as they venture into the burgeoning Islamophobia beat in the Trump era.
Sports Writing
Money in the Bank: The Story of Pro Wrestling in the Twentieth Century is the story of American Capitalism. (Dan O’Sullivan, Jacobin Magazine)
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This one came out two years ago. The thing is that I couldn’t stop thinking about politics in 2016 and how much it resembled professional wrestling. So when Trump won, then a few weeks later said he was going to appoint Linda McMahon to a position in his administration, I had to read this again.
Under-Recognized Stories
Chop Suey Nation (Anna Hui, The Globe and Mail)
This two-part feature from the Toronto Globe and Mail is built around one of those genius, why-didn't-I-think-of-that concepts: Ann Hui gets in a car in British Columbia, and drives all the way across Canada to remotest Newfoundland, following the path of eastern railroad expansion and so, confluently, the path of Chinese-Canadian settlement. The anchors for her journey are the Chinese restaurants that thrive, often in relative cultural isolation, in this line of towns and cities that belt the nation. It's a deceptively ambitious feat of stunt journalism: Hui's prose is newspaper-clear, her narrative is mostly linear, her threads are neatly defined. But she expertly avoids the often saccharine pitfalls of this kind of storytelling, balancing the human-scale narratives of the men and women of these restaurants with a broader, razor-sharp dissection of the ways Canada does and doesn't make room for its nonwhite citizens. And the closing scene, what Hui finds when she reaches a Chinese restaurant on windswept, isolated Fogo Island — god, it's a knife to the heart.
Best of 2016
Essays & Criticism
The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Buzzfeed)
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Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has become my favorite writer of my generation since I first read her writing about Dave Chappelle in The Believer several years ago (it was a National Magazine Award finalist, collected in The Best American Nonrequired Reading as well as The Believer's anthology Read Harder). Since then I've been a fan of every piece of hers and this chronicle of traveling to the home of James Baldwin in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France is no exception. (It's a highlight of what I consider one of the best books of the year, the Jesmyn Ward-edited The First This Time). Ghansah writes about Baldwin from all different angles and with every emotion, braided with her own issues of identity. The result is a hard, rough, beautiful diamond of piece, pushed to brilliance from considerable pressure. Ghansah is perhaps one of the only writers we have today who can live up to Baldwin in so many shades of style and substance.
Science Writing
Seeding Doubt: How Self-Appointed Guardians of ‘Sound Science’ Tip the Scales Toward Industry (Liza Gross, The Intercept)
In this investigation, funded by the Food and Environment Reporting Network, Liza Gross digs into the history of Sense About Science, a London-based charity that presents itself as a neutral arbiter in public policy debates involving science. Gross found that Sense About Science and its US affiliate, Sense About Science USA, undertake some initiatives that serve the public’s interest. But the groups are far from neutral: the founder of the British organization worked with some of the architects of the tobacco industry’s disinformation campaign, and both groups have promoted results that favor industry interests over public health. At a time when even the concept of truth is debatable, and no fact can be taken for granted, such deep dives into the reliability of our public messengers are more essential than ever. Gross, like Wapner, is a freelance journalist; that they were able to report and execute these challenging stories without long-term institutional support is heartening, and raises the bar for the rest of us.
Sports Writing
What the World got Wrong About Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Jay Caspian Kang, The New York Times Magazine)世界对卡里姆·阿卜杜勒·贾巴尔的误解是什么（杰伊·凯斯皮安·康，《纽约时报》杂志）
I’ve always been obsessed with Kareem, so when I saw that NYT Mag had a piece on him I expected some deep profile with him saying a bunch of things, sharing secrets learned over his life and career, and stuff of nature. What Jay Caspian Kang gave us was sort of the “Frank Sinatra has a Cold” of 21st century sports reporting. Abdul-Jabbar didn’t really say much, but the piece was really deep and profound. I get students asking me from time to time about pieces that I really like or think that they should study and I’ve been pointing them to this one for the last year now.
Under-Recognized Stories
Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.(Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica)
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ProPublica had one of the best stories of the year with its investigation into machine bias and how it can impact minorities. Brilliantly reported and eye-opening, this piece shows how important it is to have experienced data journalists on staff doing investigative, longform reporting and writing. ProPublica’s reporting exposed how algorithms work behind the scenes of our lives, with most of us not understanding the intricate programming or methodology that goes into it. In our blindness, these algorithms make decisions for us—and these decisions can have serious consequences. Biases and prejudices are built into machines and if more attention is not paid to this future, we will find ourselves in a scarier and perhaps more prejudiced and unequal society than ever before. ProPublica’s ongoing reporting on this topic exposes this reality, warning us of what may happen if we don’t pay attention and keep the pressure on designers and creators of this technology to remain aware.
Crime Reporting
Body on the Moor (Jon Manel, BBC News)
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I’m not naturally drawn to crime or detective stories, but this immersive BBC News story unfolded on my laptop screen like a suspenseful, well-paced movie. Manel’s “Body on the Moor” tells the tale of a man found dead last year in Saddleworth Moor, in Peak District National Park in Northern England — a cyclist found him in a peculiar position, in clothing inappropriate for a walk, and with no belongings or forms of identification. Six months later, detectives across England still were unable to identify him — or figure out why he traveled 200 miles to die on the moor. Studying the maps, CCTV footage, photos, videos, and timelines while reading the story feels like you’re examining evidence alongside investigators. It’s a curious case and an engrossing read.
Essays & Criticism
427: Ten Years Without Jen, Twenty-Six With (Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com)
Matt Zoller Seitz's wife, Jennifer, died of a heart attack on April 27, 2006, and this essay, published on the 10th anniversary of her death, is not a typical story about grief. He tells the reader that up front: “This is not another love letter to Jen…Nor is this a meditation on Jen and the experience of losing Jen by way of criticizing somebody else’s art…It is not an advice piece.” What follows is a piece about Seitz's “experience of being without Jen,” about not dwelling on bad moments, about giving “yourself permission to just live,” about trying to not force meaning into a date, about how it's OK to be OK 10 years later. Though Seitz insists he's not offering any advice, there are plenty of lessons to take away from this piece.
Arts & Culture Writing
The Secret Life of Tumblr Teens (Elspeth Reeve, New Republic)
Who doesn’t want to know more about the generation that will eventually be in charge? Reeve’s piece illuminates Tumblr, a sphere where anonymity gives teens immediate social acceptability. It’s a place to share bizarre yet benign fetishes and absurd jokes alongside your deepest anxieties and social insecurities. What I loved most about this piece is how emotionally intelligent teens have proven how just being yourself is enough; you can find success in creating, sharing, and curating the “relatable,” those awkward moments of human existence we all share.
Political Analysis
My President Was Black (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic)
An in-depth profile of Barack Obama and a look at his eight years not just as president, but as America’s first black president. Ta Nehisi-Coates looks at the factors behind the Obama’s unique brand of optimism, which helped propel him as a politician—and also helped him to grossly miscalculate the results of the 2016 presidential election.
Under-Recognized Stories
Riding the Rails of the Underground Abortion Railroad from Texas to New Mexico (Taylor Prewitt, Broadly)
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I wish this story didn't have to exist but I'm glad I read it. In Texas, where Medicaid insurance cannot be used to cover abortions, and where HB2 (the subject of Wendy Davis's 2013 filibuster) left only 18 clinics (mostly concentrated in urban areas) serving the entirety of a massive state, it is exceedingly difficult for low-income women to get abortions. Sample sentence: “The necessity to secure both travel funds and procedure funds makes access an elusive, moving puzzle made up of ever changing pieces for women who are often piece-mealing funding from two or more providers on the side of coordinating travel plans. Flights can be missed, appointment can be cancelled or rescheduled, funding can fall through forcing appointments to be cancelled or rescheduled, and so on.” This piece reports on the network of small organizations that help women put together the money (often in increments of $50 or $100 at a time) for both the procedure and coordinate the necessary travel arrangements.
Arts & Culture Writing
Why the Literati Love Muhammad Ali (Janan Ganesh, Financial Times)文人为何喜爱穆罕默德·阿里
Written less than four months before Ali’s passing in June–on the occasion of the release of Davis Miller’s second book about the icon–Ganesh’s piece explores his popularity as a literary subject. He decides that the heroic sports figure and activist appeals most to writers not just because of his heroism, because of his demons as well. That he could be mean-spirited, and was a womanizer and negligent father, added to his complexity as a character.
Under-Recognized Books
Nine Island (Jane Alison, Catapult)
I never expected an experimental novel that makes extensive allusions to classical Roman poetry to feel so vital and immediate, but Nine Island proved me wrong again and again. It's the story of J, a translator of Ovid, who lives in relative solitude in one of those big, sprawling condos on an island in Miami. She's not young, but she's not yet old enough to retire in “paradise”, as so many of her neighbors have. The best comedy and poetry in Nine Island is in J's depiction of her life in the present-the trips to Publix and the sunbathing and the existential angst-as well as her remembrances of the past.
Under-Recognized Stories
How Simple is That? At Home With Ina Garten (Sandra Allen, BuzzFeed)
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Sandra Allen wrote a profile about Ina that is also about socioeconomic access. Her description of Ina Garten’s familiar, curated image is engaging and also edged, because Allen does not fail to note that Garten is someone people clamor to imitate, but cannot inhabit. How Ina Garten’s recipes are simple, and yet also privileged in their ingredients and yield. She asks who Garten’s cooking is for, and for whom it is not. Garten is in so many ways Martha Stewart’s successor, but one happily married to “Jeffrey,” that differentiator becoming a core part of her public face. I myself have never understood Ina Garten’s popularity—once, she made a face of disgust upon smelling kimchi, and that ended any respect I had for her. But this—this helped me understand the phenomenon of Garten and her admiring fanbase. The best part of this profile is when Allen herself tries to bridge the gap between the observer and Garten’s life. She shares the following:
Best of 2016
Sports Writing
The Official Coming-Out Party (Kevin Arnovitz, ESPN The Magazine)
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Bill Kennedy was living his childhood dream of being an NBA referee when his world was upended last December: A star player yelled two anti-gay slurs at him during a televised game. Kennedy’s open secret—that he was, in fact, gay—was now quite public and on its way to becoming a national story. With empathy and a deft touch, Arnovitz details what happened that night, what preceded it, and (perhaps most importantly) what followed in the months ahead, as Kennedy’s coming out became a national story and sent the veteran referee on a personal journey that was decades in the making. (The kicker, which takes place at New York’s LGBT Pride March, is stirring and sensational.) When this new season tipped off, Kennedy became the first openly gay player or referee to appear in an NBA game. What Arnovitz so brilliantly conveys is the scope of all that had to happen for that moment to finally become real.
Essays & Criticism
Reefer Momness: I Got High With My Mom at Hempcon (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ)
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This is another of the essays that has stuck with me all year. And Taffy Brodesser-Akner is another of my favorite writers. Dragging her insomniac, anxiety-ridden Hassidic mother to a weed convention in California turns what might otherwise be a humorous but hollow piece of reporting into a humorous reported essay with heart.
More Than Coffee: New York’s Vanishing Diner Culture (George Blecher, The New York Times)
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George Blecher paints a wonderful portrait of the diner he loves the most. He also gives a great bit of history about the rise of the diner in New York City. I grew up in New Jersey, which has its own brilliant and thriving diner culture but I lived in New York for many years. The old diner joints there are just as important as George says. Here in my newer home in Los Angeles, a city I love, I've got a few diners I can depend on: in Silverlake, Sunset Junction Coffee Shop; in Los Feliz, House of Pies; and more scattered around town. And in Manhattan, at 100th and Broadway, George has the Metro - for now.
The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale: How Ayahuasca, an Ancient Amazonian Hallucinogenic Brew, Became the Latest Trend in Brooklyn and Silicon Valley. (Ariel Levy, The New Yorker)
Ariel Levy is one of my favorite writers. As someone who's fascinated with, but also terrified of, psychedelic drugs, I very much appreciated getting to have a sort of vicarious experience of an Ayahuasca journey via Levy's essay about hers. Like much of her writing, the piece is smart, funny and viscerally alive.
Under-Recognized Stories
Nameplate Necklaces: This Shit Is For Us (Collier Meyerson, Fusion)
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At first, it may seem like a simple essay about cultural appropriation, but this opus on the nameplate necklace is so much more than that. It is a beautiful ode to black and brown fashion. It is a moving history of how unique names became a form of political resistance to white supremacy. And it is the biting reality check Carrie Bradshaw so desperately needed.
Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine在隔离城市为我的女儿选择一所学校（妮可·汉娜·琼斯，纽约时报杂志
Sometimes an investigation that begins within your own life can lead to illuminating reporting about the world beyond. This is what Nikole Hannah-Jones’ reporting on choosing a school for her own daughter in a segregated city does so poignantly. It begins with a choice that many parents must face. When you are a parent of color, the idea of diversity in education is not as simple as “a boutique offering for the children of the privileged,” as Jones writes, one that “does little to ensure quality education for poor black and Latino children.” Intentional school integration, as she points out “almost never occurs unless it’s in the interests of white students.” Through her expert storytelling, she is able to weave the personal narrative choice with the historical and social backstory of segregation in American schools, making for a thoroughly researched and captivating read.
All the Petty Horse Shit (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ)
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This isn’t the low-access celebrity profile we’ve all grown to collectively roll our eyes at—the cover story about the overly PR-managed star who grants a 60-minute interview that the writer must then, rather painfully, spin into a fleshed-out sketch. No, here we find Billy Bob Thornton tired and vulnerable and rolling along on a tour bus with his band the Boxmasters. We see the actor angry. We see him in good spirits. We see, thanks to a profile full of voice and verve—and a lot of access—an uncommon look at a man famous for his privacy.
Science Writing
Breast-Feeding the Microbiome (Ed Yong, The New Yorker)
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This excerpt of London-based science writer Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life is fascinating–perhaps particularly to a person with a crummy immune system, who wasn’t breastfed. It points to many of breast milk’s nutritional superior qualities, most importantly its apparent ability to fortify the body’s microbiome by feeding it with a variety of protective human milk oligosaccharides, or H.M.O.s, thus strengthening the immune system.
Crime Reporting
Inside Italy’s ultras: the Dangerous Fans Who Control the Game (Tobias Jones, The Guardian)
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Any story that includes the line “who died when a nautical rocket fired by an ultra flew the length of the pitch and hit him in the head,” automatically becomes a Best of Whatever Year contender for me. (Admittedly, it’s a small detail about a well-beyond-tertiary character, but what a way to go: beer in hand, watching your favorite team, rocket searing toward your head.) Through the lens of one particularly ill-fated fan’s life, Tobias Jones details organized crime’s infiltration of Italian soccer, and the impossible task of then trying to extract them. It’s a look into a world—sports, in the broader sense—that many of us look at as a release. For many of the characters in this story, though, it’s all they have. And they’ll fight to the death for it.
Under-Recognized Books
Vow of Celibacy (Erin Judge, Rare Bird Books)
In addition to her budding career as a novelist, Erin Judge is an incredibly talented comedian, and her debut novel manages to be very funny without ever devolving into simply a string of humorous bits. That's partly because her heroine, Natalie-an aspiring fashion designer who takes a vow of celibacy after a string of toxic relationships starting way back in adolescence-has so much heart. That Natalie is plus-sized and bisexual is an important part of the narrative, but it isn't the whole story. Natalie is sex positive and body positive and she happens to be the star of a fun, smart, sexy romp of a novel in which she errs and learns and grows just like traditional protagonists do. I hate the idea that in this day and age Vow of Celibacy can still feel revolutionary in its treatment of both sexuality and size, but it's true.
Business & Tech Reporting
My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family (Jessi Hempel, Time)
This story, by my former colleague Jessi Hempel, is one of the most moving, unusual and politically relevant stories I read all year. It chronicles the journey of Hempel’s trans brother as he gives birth to a child. The photographs are intimate, even shocking to some—as is the story, which upends the traditional notion of a family in every way except for one—love. I wept while reading this. Then, while reading it again post-the 2016 election, I wept for different reasons altogether.
Under-Recognized Stories
Officer Steven Blakeney Terrorized the St. Louis Area. Why Did No One Stop This Very Bad Cop? (Doyle Murphy, Riverfront Times)
· 官方页
Nearly every sentence in this deeply reported story about a rogue cop made me outraged. Murphy puzzles out the political antics and bureaucratic breakdowns that provided cover for an officer of the law to victimize scores of people around St. Louis.
Essays & Criticism
Advanced Search (Franceska Rouzard, Real Life Magazine)
The right essay can turn an object or memory that I'd previously found mundane into the stuff of gripping narrative. Such is the case here, as Rouzard's essay opens with descriptions of AOL dial-up in the mid-1990s before segueing into a capsule history of social media, and then extending into broader questions of identity and the sacred. It neatly parallels its author's life with broader societal questions, keeping the two in perfect balance, and leaving me with a greater sense of both–I can't ask a great essay to do more than that.
Science Writing
If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots? (Nathan Heller, The New Yorker)
This is Nathan Heller, in The New Yorker, taking a fascinating look at how we tend up overplay the human characteristics in some entities (such as the hitchhiking robot hitchBOT, which made its way around a few cities before it was vandalized) and downplay them in others, such as animals, where a growing body of research seems to point to a wider range of experience than once thought possible. Can we give up the notion that we humans have cornered the market on a “magical” existence? Can we get our heads around what it’s actually like to be a gorilla, or a fish, or a mosquito? And how about robots? Our self-driving car is likely programmed to drive us into walls rather than mow down a row of pedestrians. If that happens, will we forgive it?
Best of 2016
Food Writing
Dinner at Tao with the “FoodGod” Jonathan Cheban (Joshua David Stein, G.Q.)
Joshua David Stein is an emperor of extravagantly florid prose. For most writers, high diction is suicide; for Stein — especially in this hilarious, joyous, absurd, deeply loving profile of Jonathan Cheban, Kim Kardashian’s best friend and the self-proclaimed “Food God” — it’s a precision instrument. Stein doesn’t play it straight, but he also doesn’t give in to easy targets; he relates his evening with Cheban at a Manhattan clubstaurant with brilliant sincerity, titrating his snark to the microliter and shining the spotlight on a particular sort of mainstream celebrity and consumer culture that, in the world of food media, is usually sniffed at, if it’s acknowledged at all. But really, honestly, it’s just a flat-out privilege as a reader to read words and sentences this exuberantly deployed.
Sports Writing
Gridiron Gangster: How a Vigilante Gambler Took Down an Alleged Crime Boss (David Amsden, Rolling Stone)
· 官方页
I love any sports story that somehow dovetails with mystery. And Rolling Stone lived at that intersection with this piece by David Amsden.
Under-Recognized Books
The Telling (Zoe Zolbrod, Curbside Splendor Publishing)
· 官方页
Zoe Zolbrod courageously, artfully, and compassionately examines herself-as a woman, mother, and sexual being-through the lens of her experience being molested as a child. The book is as intelligent and enlightening as it is beautifully written. I particularly admire how remarkably generous Zolbrod is toward the cousin who violated her.
Sports Writing
After the Process: Meet Sam Hinkie 2.0 (Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated)
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“This story is about what happens after,” writes Chris Ballard of Sports Illustrated. “What happens when you’re 38 years old and have already blown up a franchise and become both cult hero and cautionary tale. What do you do next?”
Under-Recognized Stories
Digital Pimps or Fearless Publishers? (Kate Knibbs, The Ringer)
Kate Knibbs digs deep into the murky world of Backpage.com-a site “not stringently moderated for explicit content beckoning an exchange of goods for sex,” as Knibbs writes. Arrests of the site’s creators have been made, with felony charges of pimping a minor and more. But part of this disturbing story is how the ads were envisioned as a last-ditch effort to keep gutsy alternative journalism afloat.
Arts & Culture Writing
What Is The Best Night Any Celebrity Has Ever Had At Madison Square Garden? (Sam Donsky, The Ringer)
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This piece is incredibly long, detailed, and hilarious. Sam Donsky published it on The Ringer on October 14th, at which point I was already sorely in need of sheer laughter. This piece delivered. I grew up in Jersey and have been to dozens of events at Madison Square Garden over the years. This is a goofy pop culture hallucinogenic mushroom trip that should be savored.
Winona, Forever (Soraya Roberts, Hazlitt)永远的薇诺娜 |黑兹利特
Back in February, months before Stranger Things reminded me how much I’d missed Winona Ryder on screen, Soraya Roberts’ Hazlitt piece — a mammoth, almost-9000-word, all-in affair — reminded me how much I missed her as a cultural presence, as someone who matters. The story untangled multiple threads that made up Winona’s ’90s persona, from her signature brand of quirkiness to all the inane gossip stuff, yet you still left the piece with a coherent idea of who Winona was and what made her a pre-Millennial icon. (It also fills me with joy that the only person who might think, “Wow, 2016 was an amazing year!” is Winona Ryder.)
Best of 2016
Essays & Criticism
On Domestic Disobedience (A.N. Devers, The New Republic)
I nominate this sharp-eyed and insightful piece not only because it brilliantly gave us a taste of Claire-Louise Bennett's collection, but it gives it its proper place in the family tree of nature-writers by blowing “nature-dude” writing out of the water. Devers shows readers how important and triumphantly Bennett's penmanship is, even in its simplicity: how even writing about the goings-on in the microcosm of a kitchen can dip into great depths to the mind and soul.
Under-Recognized Books
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Randa Jarrar, Sarabande Books)
These are stories that don’t compromise—that stand their ground and say come here, because I won’t come to you. And that’s the most valuable thing to read—to go somewhere other than where you are. The characters are dark and twisty; she’s an Arab American Roald Dahl—the world they inhabit likewise whimsical yet treacherous. Her lively staccato use of language is the perfect foil to this darkness, keeping the reader suspended and engaged throughout. It never plods. Never holds your hand to the fire for longer than a few seconds at a time. The title story, “Him, Me, Muhammad Ali,” is one of the strongest in the collection, interweaving ancestry and tradition with contemporary conflict. There’s not a minaret in sight. Not even on the cover.
Best of 2016
Sports Writing
Why Are So Many BASE Jumpers Dying? (Andrew Bisharat, National Geographic)
· 官方页
Despite an unfortunate headline, Andrew Bisharat’s story doesn’t pretend to offer a concrete answer to a question with so many variables. Instead, by coming it at from every conceivable angle, he provides readers a double service: He gives a thorough overview of the world of the increasingly less obscure sport of wingsuiting, and he sheds light on the internal and external pressures that are pushing jumpers further than many of them are prepared to go. Explanatory enough for an uninitated reader yet wonky enough for an enthusiast, this is less an investigation into a recent spike in deaths than it is a comprehensive portrait of a niche sport trying to figure out where it’s going next.
Under-Recognized Stories
The darkness at the heart of Malheur: A Westerner traces the roots – and meaning – of the Oregon occupation. (Hal Herring, High Country News)
· 官方页
The best of the many stories that chronicled the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in early 2016. Herring, who describes himself as a “gun-soaked, nature-obsessed malcontent,” hangs in, listens hard, and emerges with a humane but unsparing portrait of the occupiers. “The nature of evil is to take a truth and twist it,” he concludes, “sometimes as much as 180 degrees.”
Essays & Criticism
Who are All the Trump Supporters? (George Saunders, The New Yorker)
Saunders has always been one of my favorite writers-it's physically impossible for me to not read a piece by him-but this classic from last summer will be surely studied for decades if not centuries in the future. Trump and his supporters are a perfect match for Saunders, who although a liberal, often sketches the America Trump supporters know well in his fiction. The trademark Saundersian dark absurdism is a perfect fit for taking to the campaign trail and interviewing Trump supporters at rallies in Arizona, Wisconsin and California. The result is as funny as it frightening. It's doubly a punch in the gut to read it now that Trump is, somehow, our president-elect.”Although, to me, Trump seems the very opposite of a guardian angel, I thank him for this: I’ve never before imagined America as fragile, as an experiment that could, within my very lifetime, fail,” Saunders writes, and ends almost prophetically: “But I imagine it that way now.”
Under-Recognized Books
The Ghosts of Birds (Eliot Weinberg, New Directions)
· 官方页
The closest thing to a major review Eliot Weinberger has received for his latest collection of essays, published in October by New Directions, came in an episode of the “Inside the NY Times Book Review” podcast, where the book was mentioned in passing. I don’t understand the critical silence surrounding his work, which ranges in The Ghosts of Birds from ancient China through medieval Ireland onto George W. Bush. Perhaps he is too much a modernist for our post-modern tastes, though one would think that his keen sense of irony, deadly effective use of pastiche, unrepentant liberalism, and broad sense of humanity would appeal to readers-especially in 2016-looking for an antidote to what is starting to feel like the closing act of an abbreviated global era.
Essays & Criticism
H.: On Heroin and Harm Reduction (Sarah Resnick, n+1)
This year I started teaching writing workshop classes for the first time, and a lot of students want to learn how to do exactly what Sarah Resnick does here-and so do I! Addressed to a relative with a longstanding heroin habit, as well as a host of other problems, Resnick's essay goes down several different paths, ultimately illuminating a lot of what's circuitous and maddening about addiction and recovery as they're currently understood in America, and how harm reduction programs work. The essay's idiosyncratic, personal approach makes it more convincing than a straightforward argument for a new understanding of addiction could be. Reading it is memorable the way an experience is.
Food Writing
The State of the Domestic Goddess (Emily Gould, Eater)
This piece delivers in more ways than one. Written by an essayist and novelist whose work I’ve long admired, is equal parts cook book review, personal essay and humorous social commentary. Now that she’s married with a kid, Emily Gould’s passion for cooking has been curbed. In her quest to revive the domestic fantasy she entertained pre-motherhood of effortlessly making and serving deicious meals to her family, she road-tests cook books by two very different American “domestic goddesses”: Gwyneth Paltrow’s It’s All Easy, and Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings.
Science Writing
The Billion Dollar Ultimatum (Chris Hamby, BuzzFeed)
· 官方页
I was blown away by this investigation into a global super court that allows businesses to strip countries of their ability to enforce environmental regulations. “Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, this legal system is written into a vast network of treaties that set the rules for international trade and investment,” Hamby writes. “Of all the ways in which ISDS is used, the most deeply hidden are the threats, uttered in private meetings or ominous letters, that invoke those courts.” This is the second part of Hamby’s series on the ISDS, and it focuses on an Australian company that was able to strip-mine inside a protected forest in Indonesia. Even though the company was complicit in the beating and, in one case, killing of protestors, the government was too cowed by the court to revoke the company’s permit.
Crime Reporting
In Death, an Artist and a Young Woman Meet (Sarah Weinman, The Guardian)
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Another friend to crime readers everywhere, Sarah Weinman, published a fascinating story on how the murder of a young woman influenced artist Ana Mendieta, who suffered a tragic fate herself.
Business & Tech Reporting
The Clean (Lizzie Feidelson, n+1)一名未来的轰炸机如何重建他的生活海象
As someone who is forever trying to strike a balance between work-writing that keeps me afloat, and my writing-writing, I loved this nuanced essay from n+1’s Dirty Work issue. It’s by an artist–a dancer, specifically–who finds a day job cleaning people’s houses. She’s working for another artist–a painter–who started the business as a way to leave her Wall Street job, so she could have more time to paint. But that doesn’t seem to be working out, and the painter/owner seems to resent the dancer/worker when the dancer/worker wants to take one week to attend a workshop.
Under-Recognized Stories
Few Women Fight Wildfires. That’s Not Because They’re Afraid of Flames. (Darryl Fears, The Washington Post)
· 官方页
Female firefighters are routinely harassed on the job; routinely propositioned for sex, inappropriately touched, stalked, spied on while bathing — all horrifying. This story was a remarkable piece of reporting that showed how a pervasively sexist environment makes us all less safe, by discouraging firefighters who could, in other circumstances, save our lives. This detailed, focused report will, I hope, lead to better job conditions for female firefighters. Another strong piece of science reporting that should be read widely.
Investigative Reporting
Ghost Stories (Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker)
Many Germans see ghosts and have premonitions. “It’s an old German habit of mind,” writes Burkhard Bilger, “this mixing of the mystical and the scientific.” Over half a century after WWII, guilt and spirits still haunt a generation of Germans, and many struggle to come to terms with their ancestors’ atrocities. They are called kriegskinder, the children of war. When Bilger goes to Germany to research his elusive grandfather’s Nazi involvement, he sees others like him, searching historical archives to piece together their family story. To cleanse their conscious, some attend a type of group counseling that mixes science and séance. Considering the Fascist parallels between Nazi Germany and President Trump’s current administration, Burkhard’s story seems particularly prescient. The Third Reich and the Holocaust indelibly shaped the psyche of German citizens. Wrestling with these issues, Bilger asks: what does inter-generational trauma look like? How do the offspring of the SS and WWII refugees deal with silence and guilt? One day, we Americans might be asking ourselves these same questions post-Trump. As people say about the Holocaust, never forget; it could happen again.
‘You Want A Description Of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem (Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion, Scott Glover, Los Angeles Times)
My father spent more than half his life working at an all-American car company until a workplace accident put him into early retirement. Multiple doctor visits and surgeries later, my father still refuses to take the pain medication prescribed to him because he’s seen what it’s done to other people in his position. Here’s a report published just this last week: “One-third of Americans who have taken prescription opioids for at least two months say they became addicted to, or physically dependent on, the powerful painkillers, according to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey.”
Under-Recognized Stories
The Audition (Sydney Brownstone, The Stranger)
· 官方页
I can’t recall an investigative story like “The Audition,” one that I couldn’t stop talking about, thinking about, revisiting, re-reading and discussing after I read it — even months later. In this piece, Seattle reporter Sydney Brownstone discovers that a tip about a woman raped during a porn audition is not an isolated incident, but an elaborate rape scam by a local man posing as an adult filmmaker. It’s a complicated story about consent, assault, deception and the complexities of rape. When Brownstone tugged on a string, she unraveled a nightmare. It’s one of my favorites from this year, too, because it made me think hard about what a sexual assault is. This story also aims to speak up for a group who might have been ignored by any other reporter.
Science Writing
My Sister Made Her End-of-Life Wishes Clear. Then Dementia Took Hold. (Judith Graham, Stat News)
A powerful first-person essay on what it’s like to watch a loved one slowly disappear in front of you. The crux of the essay lies in deciding when to remove Deborah’s feeding tube, and how to honor who Deborah was before dementia as well as who she had become. Too often, writing about dementia is impersonal — it’s rare to see how it affects families, and the unique difficulties that come with this particular kind of illness.
Crime Reporting
The Crotchgrabber (Mary Karr, The New Yorker)
After she’s casually groped on the street in Manhattan, memoirist Mary Karr takes action. She follows the guy and calls 911, and it results in him being arrested and spending a night at Riker’s Island. It also leads her to learn, and report on, how common this sort of sexual assault is–a kind our president-elect bragged to Howard Stern about engaging in–and to try and understand the motivations and satisfactions of its perpegrators.
Political Analysis
Revenge of the Forgotten Class (Alec MacGillis, ProPublica)
In the days following the presidential election, as people began to make sense of the results, I focused my attention on a specific group of voters: those who had voted for Obama in the previous two elections but switched their vote to Trump in 2016. What was behind their reasoning? Reporters set out to find out. This American Life’s Miki Meek spoke to two Latino police officers who said they didn’t like “how policing issues had been handled over the past few years” and Hillary Clinton’s support of Black Lives Matter, which they felt were anti-police.
Crime Reporting
The First Time Texas Killed One of My Clients (Burke M. Butler, Texas Observer)
· 官方页
Attorney Burke Butler meets the family of death-row murderer “Marvin,” to reconcile the boy who made peanut butter pancakes with the person who committed a multiple homicide before he was old enough to buy beer. Marvin’s upbringing was troubled and Butler’s observations offer insight into Marvin’s path and untimely death. His stepfather was violent, his mother was unstable. Marvin’s uncle Frank, on seeing a dead baby bird on the pavement outside the prison on execution day, said, “Sometimes they die young, and the others push them from the nest.” In Marvin’s case, it was both.
Under-Recognized Stories
Dear Trump Supporter, Who Says They Love Me (Amanda Deibert, Medium)
It is a sad, angry, compassionate, deeply horrified piece of writing that invites the reader to look into the mind and the family life of a married lesbian mother whose family is truly threatened by the policies represented by Mike Pence and Donald Trump. For many readers, her story presented something real they could offer to their own families, a set of cohesive and coherent talking points sorely needed in communication moving forward. Amanda is an actress and a writer of comics (Wonder Woman '77, John Carpenter's Tales of a Halloween Night Vol. 2 and more). She's presently at work on a 24-hour climate change live webcast script for a production group headed by former VP Al Gore. She worked on the first edition of that project along with a crew beside the Eiffel Tower the night of the Paris attacks on November 13, 2015. She is on Twitter at @AmandaDeibert.
Best of 2016
Food Writing
At Tampa Bay Farm-to-Table Restaurants, You’re Being Fed Fiction (Laura Reiley, Tampa Bay Times)
I read this story about food fraud slack-jawed. Laura Reiley’s basic premise is this: when you go to a restaurant advertising “local” or “farm to table,” it’s not only possible but highly likely(!) you’re being lied to. Years of working in restaurant criticism made Reiley rightly skeptical of menu claims, and suspicious that more was afoot than frozen cakes passed off as homemade. For her story she systematically investigates restaurants in the Tampa area that make declarations about their ingredients—sometimes embarrassingly high-mindedly—that they don’t exactly see through. A lot impresses me here, like Reiley’s persistence, guts, attentiveness, commitment, and spy moves (she kept ziptop baggies her purse to secrete away fish to lab-test later). The piece’s focus is on restaurants in Tampa, but it makes a broader statement about our convoluted food supply chains, and what it means to be an eater and consumer living in our increasingly weird world.
Best of 2016
Food Writing
California Dreaming (Marian Bull, Eater)
I reread Marian Bull’s brilliant Eater feature on Sqirl, “the quirky, punky, small-but-scrappy indie star of LA’s restaurant scene,” while sitting at Sqirl. I ordered too much: the crispy rice bowl and the famous ricotta toast with jam smeared atop. There I was, a New Yorker sitting there pondering my own “undying, sun-soaked fantasy of Los Angeles” as the subhead puts it, thinking about how rare it is that a long piece that ponders our current, almost cultish obsession with specific restaurants and the people that run them would actively make me want to try the food. It wasn’t a review or some short piece on one specific dish. No, Bull made me feel like I needed to be part of the story. And yes, I’m happy I went.
Investigative Reporting
Why Did It Take 9 Hours and 3 Emergency Rooms For This Woman to Get a Rape Kit? (Jillian Keenan, Cosmopolitan)
A harrowing look into one woman’s experience being denied rape kits in more than one ER in Texas after being sexually assaulted. The piece also sheds infuriating light on the difficulty many other women have getting tested and treated properly, and also on the hundreds of thousands of untested kits sitting in police departments nation-wide.
Food Writing
At Thomas Keller’s Per Se, Slips and Stumbles (Pete Wells, The New York Times)
· 官方页
Length-wise, this may not technically qualify as a longread, but it was one of the great events of 2016. Pete Wells walked into the Per Se kitchen, left nobody alive, and dear god it was beautiful.
Crime Reporting
A Positive Life: How a Son Survived Being Injected with HIV by His Father (Justin Heckert, GQ)
In 1998, a phlebotomist named Brian Stewart was sentenced to life in prison for injecting his own 10-month-old son with HIV-infected blood. By age seven, few gave the boy any chance to live. He had fevers, a swollen liver, chronic ear infections, no immune system. He had flat-lined twice. His mother even picked out a suit for the boy’s funeral. Against the odds, the boy they called Badger survived and has led a remarkable life. With elegance and empathy, Heckert tells the story of the inconceivable crime and explores who Badger has become in the years since.
Science Writing
Addicts For Sale (Cat Ferguson, BuzzFeed News)
· 官方页
Again, astonishing investigative reporting that shows how predatory rehab clinics are able to take advantage of addicts. Defending the vulnerable is an important function of journalism, and this Buzzfeed report is an excellent example of how to do this and why it matters. The “junkie hunters” who profiteer from addicts and their health insurance suggest that if we wish to take addiction seriously in this society, we must rethink how we are handling rehabilitation.
Business & Tech Reporting
The Failure of Welfare Reform (Jordan Weissmann, Slate)
· 官方页
I’d love to recommend this essay on the history of, and failure of, welfare reform by Jordan Weissmann at Slate. How Welfare Reform Failed takes one of the most undercovered issues of 2016–the plight of extreme poverty in America–and gives it the historical, statistical, and moral treatment it deserves.
Food Writing
Citizen Khan (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker)
I would read anything by Kathryn Schulz, and this story makes a perfect case why. Ostensibly it’s the story of a man named Zarif Khan, who in 1909 found his way to Wyoming from the Khyber Pass, and made a name for himself selling tamales (the name: “Hot Tamale Louie”). Khan was a recognizably curmudgeonly chef (God forbid you put ketchup on his burgers!) of the sort writers reliably profile today. But “profile” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what this goosebump-inducing story is. Woven into this tale are captivating tangents—about Wyoming’s inclusive beginnings, the various histories of naturalization (and denaturalization), tamales, and Muslims in this country (a history that goes back so much further than Trump would have you believe)—that turn out not to be tangents at all: the heart of this story about tamales and burgers is a story about America, and the immigrants that make it. In Schulz’s hands it’s skilled and quietly hilarious. The story felt fitting when it was published in June; it feels even more essential now.
Arts & Culture Writing
Prince’s Women and Me: The Collaborators Who Inspired a Generation (Porochista Khakpour, The Village Voice)
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Since Prince’s sudden passing in April, there’s been no shortage of articles and essays about him as an artist, icon, and human being, and rightfully so. But here novelist and essayist Porochista Khakpour pays homage instead to the women who surrounded him–the musical collaborators, the wives, the lovers. Khakpour says that those women–many of them women of color–and Prince’s shows of respect for them, helped her to define and understand herself as a woman.
Under-Recognized Stories
Seeing Stars (Alex Ronan, Real Life Magazine)
Alex Ronan’s beautiful exploration of grief for her brother, where her phone becomes a conduit of energy, memory, and light; where tweets have the potential to take us to another place, where the souls we knew are there, somewhere. She hops between astronomy, our relationship with our phones, and the nature of light ably, all in prose that beams an unearthly light.
Best of 2016
Food Writing
Changing of the Tide: The Galician Sisters Chipping Away at the Patriarchy, One Barnacle at a Time. (Matt Goulding, Slate)
Longreads Senior Editor and Editor at WordPress.com / Automattic. · 官方页
It’s too easy to dismiss food as a simple, surface-level topic. I live in a food-obsessed city where the topic of conversation is often whether you’ve tried the new Korean street-style sandwich cart or tasted the clam butter cocktail at Bar So-and-So. It grates on me. Can we talk about politics or books, please? Enough with the fancy sandwich. But food can function as a gateway to deeper understanding. As one of the first expressions of a culture that we encounter, food frequently peaks our interest enough to learn more about the ways other people live, and can provide a window into deep, serious topics.
Best of 2016
Under-Recognized Stories
The Reckoning: The Story of Claire Wilson (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly)
There was no shortage of praise for this story when it came out, but even then, it seemed a bit muted; I wondered what would've happened had it appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. I love Texas Monthly. Colloff is a writer I've long admired, and I have an embarrassingly biblical knowledge of some of her writing. I'd say this is her strongest work. She has an enviously tight grip over her prose, and genuine reserves of empathy for her subjects. I fear this piece will be left off some year-end lists, so, let me just say: If this isn't on your list, I think you're bad. Thanks. Bye.
Crime Reporting
Trump Boasts About His Philanthropy. But His Giving Falls Short of His Words. (David Fahrenthold, The Washington Post)
One of my favorite ongoing crime series was David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post digging into Trump’s charity. It was a slow burn but by the time we got to the giant portraits bought with the non-profit’s money, I was all in.
Under-Recognized Books
Harmony (Carolyn Parkhurst, Pamela Dorman Books)
Carolyn Parkhurst’s novel about how far one family will go to help their autistic daughter, is that rare book that lets you feel you’re smarter than the narrator, until they do exactly what you would have.
Essays & Criticism
What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism (Nicole Chung, The Toast)
· 官方页
In this essay-sparked by a thoughtless comment by one of her in-laws' friends saying she looks like the entire cast of Fresh Off The Boat-Nicole Chung captures the insult added to injury when people of color find themselves weighing their responses so as not to hurt the feelings of well-meaning but clueless white people.
Science Writing
The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort of) Rattled the Scientific Community (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine)
Whenever one of Mooallem’s stories come out, I pretty much drop what I’m working on, kick back on my couch, and read it with a big, stupid grin. This delightful piece about a self-professed “idler” who discovers a new type of cloud is the perfect match between writer and subject matter. I guarantee that the moment you start reading, you, too, will float away from whatever it is you probably should be doing.
Under-Recognized Stories
History in Wax: How a museum in Baltimore shapes African American history—in wax. (Alison Kinney, Lapham’s Quarterly)
· 官方页
Until I read Alison Kinney's essay for Lapham's Quarterly, I would have never guessed a wax museum could be so moving or so political. Kinney visited the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore only two weeks after Freddie Gray's death and her account of watching a group of schoolchildren go through wax exhibits depicting lynchings, slavery, poverty, as well as Black role models is arresting. This essay ties my stomach in knots every time I read it. Kinney, whose book about the history and symbolism of hoods came out earlier this year, is a master at tackling difficult subjects without moralizing. First, she shows how important this museum is to its curators, then to its visitors, and the reader is left understanding why these exhibits should be required viewing for all Americans.
Arts & Culture Writing
“This Is Just What Success Looks Like”: The Illuminating Work of Saeed Jones (Molly McArdle, Brooklyn Magazine)
An inspiring profile of Saeed Jones–author of the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, and the forthcoming memoir, How Men Fight for Their Lives who’s also a BuzzFeed editor and champion of emerging writers, committed to promoting diversity in publishing.
Sports Writing
Too Fast to Be Female (Ruth Padawer, The New York Times Magazine)
· 官方页
Padawer’s piece, which was written during the lead-up to the Summer Olympics in Rio, lucidly recounts the ever-confusing and less-than-glorious history of sex testing in athletics. While I write about sports for a living, this was a subject that I knew little about. At the same time, it spoke to larger current issues surrpunding the complexity of gender differences, and our evolving attitudes toward them. What exactly divides men from women? What, if anything is essential, to either? Why is male excellence in athletics celebrated while female excellence is suspect? I came away from the article with a new perspective on all of these topics, and I’m guessing most readers would as well.
Political Analysis
Trump May Bring A Republican Recalibration, Not A Realignment (Julia Azari, Five Thirty Eight)寻找失去的时间，汤姆·范德比尔特
This may be a tad wonky. Azari discusses how Donald Trump’s candidacy may affect the Republican Party and where that would fit into the history of America’s political parties. She argues that, although Trump has run a very different sort of campaign than we’ve seen and incites emotions and fears that few other candidates do, there’s little evidence that his run will change the alignments of the parties. The parties seem to be fighting about the same basic issues that they were before his candidacy, and that system is proving remarkably endurable.
Crime Reporting
Death by Fentanyl (Darren Foster, Cristina Costantini, Fusion)寻找失去的时间，汤姆·范德比尔特
If you thought “Breaking Bad” was fiction, you’d be mistaken. At Fusion, Darren Foster and Cristina Costantini profile George Marquardt, a science prodigy and self-taught chemist. He cracked fentanyl’s chemical composition to make his own, with deadly consequences in the early ’90s. What I loved about this piece is the penchant for the telling detail. The authors paint a portrait of a mad genius drug manufacturer who is unrepentant and sanguine; Marquardt built his own spectrometer to test the purity of his lethal concoctions but did not know how to turn his phone off and on.
Food Writing
The Unrecognizable Genius of Guy Fieri (Jason Diamond, Esquire)
In Ian Parker’s New Yorker Profile of New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells (which I’ve cited just above this), he of course mentions Wells’s hilarious, scathing take-down of Food Network star Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar. In September, at Esquire, Jason Diamond came to Fieri’s defense with a smart and entertaining profile praising all things Fieri. http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a48351/the-genius-of-guy-fieri/
Essays & Criticism
Champagne in the Cellar (John Temple, The Atlantic)
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During the Second World War, John Temple’s parents hid in a basement in Budapest with a French doctor, underneath a home that German soldiers had made their headquarters. After they separated from the doctor, they never reconnected. For the next 70 years, they wondered what had happened to this man who saved their lives. After his parents’ death, Temple turns to the internet to search for this man, known to him only as Dr. Lanusse. This is a touching story about history, family, memory, and - ultimately - a lasting bond between two families, connected by extraordinary circumstances.
Under-Recognized Stories
The Long Rescue (Sonia Faleiro, Harper’s)
This story reads like a Grimm’s fairy tale. It’s about an Indian father’s quest to rescue his children from enslavement in a brick factory across the border in Nepal. The details are as cruel as you might imagine — the children were beaten with horsewhips — but the story has a timeless, placeless quality to it. The mother doesn’t tell the absent father about the disappearance of three of their five children until ten days after the fact. Once informed, he sets off on an incredible journey to save them, blocked at every front by corruption, incompetence, and heartlessness. It’s hard to believe this stuff is still happening. “Children . . . are the cheapest and most easily manipulated form of labor,” Faleiro writes, “Even the poorest adults are more likely to stand up to exploitation.”
Political Analysis
History classes are our best hope for teaching Americans to question fake news and Donald Trump (Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Quartz Magazine)
Novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee argues in favor of college history classes—which fewer students are enrolling in. She points out that studying history helps us to understand and apply critical thinking to current events, and also to detect fictions in news reporting. History classes maybe be more important than ever, she says, now that we have a president-elect who has little interest in history—or facts.
Under-Recognized Stories
Why Am I So Fat? (Sara Benincasa, Medium)
While it has been pointed out that this piece can be seen as problematic in ways, I loved Sara Benincasa's subversive response to the guy who wrote her asking, “Why did you gain so much weight?” It's brilliant, biting, and hilarious-and it includes links to much of the great work she's been doing “between when I started gaining weight (2011) and now (2016).”
Essays & Criticism
What I Pledge Allegiance To (Kiese Laymon, The Fader)
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Kiese Laymon is expert at conveying the dangers and complexities of being black in both White and Black America. He also lays devastatingly bare the minds of white folk, from patriotic bullies to the well-meaning liberals, many of them morally lacking and clueless as to “how to justly win or gently lose.” A new professorship brings Laymon back to Mississippi after twenty years away-to a much whiter university town than his native Jackson. On the porch of his university-owned house he finds a weather-worn American flag and a state magnolia flag. In considering whether it's safe to remove them, and whether he'd want to, he reflects on his experiences of identity in different places and different points in his life.
Sports Writing
The Secret Life of Tiger Woods (Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine)
Tiger Woods’ spectacular professional and personal crack-up remains one of American sports’ most confounding mysteries. In this ambitious investigation of its myriad causes, ESPN’s Wright Thompson begins with the May 3, 2006 death of Earl Woods, Tiger’s best friend, life coach, mentor and father. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that Tiger has carried his Dad’s death with him every day across a deeply disappointing decade.
The Best African American Figure Skater in History is Now Bankrupt and Living in a Trailer (Terrence McCoy, The Washington Post)
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A redemption story is difficult to write without slipping into cliché and trope, but a downfall story is an even greater challenge. This feature on Debi Thomas matter-of-factly handles her comedown from Olympic glory to poverty, professional failure, and mental illness without overplaying the pathos, because real life is dramatic enough, and without trying to crowbar in any greater meaning, because real life needs no narrative. Terrence McCoy lets Thomas tell her own story, supplemented and often contradicted by the factual record, and if there’s any hope to be found here, it’s that she’s allowed to appear happy. This story is never mocking, but never unquestioning either: McCoy remains at an arm’s reach that doesn’t insult his subject or his readers. Because this is not the second act of a play, and there is no reason to bet on a redemption.
Political Analysis
Hillary Clinton Didn’t Shatter the Glass Ceiling. This Is What Broke Instead.(Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine)
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This was a sobering piece to read in the days after the 2016 presidential election, and is no less so more than a month later. Rebecca Traister—whose first book, Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women—considered the implications of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary—tries to make sense of Clinton’s surprise loss to Donald Trump, and the potential threat to recent progress toward greater inclusion and representation for women and minorities.
Crime Reporting
Innocents (Rachel Nolan, Harper’s)
I immediately drop everything whenever Harper’s publishes a new story by Rachel Nolan. (Luckily this is pretty intermittent, as she’s working on her Ph.D. in addition to writing. Slacker.) Last year it was her report on the Dominican Republic’s plan to deport hundreds of thousands of Haitians. This year it’s a blood-roiling walk through El Salvador’s abortion laws, which bring together the medical and legal communities in an effort to not only prosecute women who’ve had abortions, but often prosecute women who’ve actually just had miscarriages. Nolan expertly weaves poverty, religion, geography, feminism, and gang culture into the story of Flor Arely Sánchez, who “left a trail of blood down the mountain.” No story made me angrier this year, which, considering what happened on November 8, is saying something.
Food Writing
Inside the Gentrification of Grand Central Market (Jesse Katz, L.A. Magazine)
It’s a tired old saw by now, the idea that the real trick with great food writing is that food isn’t food, it’s a lens — but that doesn’t make it any less utterly true. What made me fall into such electrifying, jealousy-inducing love with this L.A. Mag piece by Jesse Katz is that it takes so many non-food elements that, individually, could be engines for an incredible story — urban planning, real estate, gentrification and displacement, history and nostalgia, immigration and assimilation — and weaves them together into a piece that not only vividly sketches the ordered-chaos of Grand Central Market, but also meticulously and immersively establishes both the emotional and cultural stakes of the whole place. And god, what a sampler of technique: It’s beautifully reported, rigorously researched, and dips into first person at exactly the right times and in the right ways, all while juggling an expansive cast of characters and a half-dozen micronarratives, which orbit the particular story of one stall hawking nouveau bagels and lox. It’s one of the most perfect food stories I’ve ever read.
Under-Recognized Stories
The Snarling Girl (Elisa Albert, Hazlitt)
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This is the essay I didn’t know I was waiting for, but once I read it, I sent it to a bunch of ladies I know. (Thanks to my friend Elisabeth Donnelly for telling me about it!) Oh, how pleasurable it is to read another woman talking about the ridiculousness of the contemporary world we live in; how we all want something out of it but sometimes we just want the thing so much that the want gets in the way of the work. And is there any better description of the ridiculousness of social media than the following lines? “The work: this is what I would like to talk about. The work, not the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. And maybe I can float the possibility that the work is best when it’s done nowhere near the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. Maybe I can suggest that there is plenty of time for hearts and likes and dings and dongs once the work is done, and done well.” Amen to that. “The Snarling Girl” is a battle cry for ignoring other people’s “definition of success.”
Political Analysis
Hillary Clinton vs. Herself (Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine)
Hillary Clinton had serious, real flaws as a candidate, including her hawkish State Department record, but the misogyny she faced just by virtue of being a woman was real, too. In this piece, a classic of its form, Rebecca Traister limns the peaks and pitfalls of being the first female nominee of a major political party to run for president.
Under-Recognized Stories
Confessions of a Porn Addict (Benjamin Obler, The Times of London, Sunday Magazine)
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I choose this for the “under-recognized” category because it came out too late in the year-December 17th-for it to land on nominators' other best of lists for 2016. Novelist Ben Obler's first non-fiction piece about overcoming porn addiction-and more specifically unconsciously testing his “sobriety” by choosing a mate who triggered his addictive behaviors-was published here on Longreads in August. For the Times, he takes the story further, bravely delving into the difficult process of recovery.
Business & Tech Reporting
Everybody Goes Haywire (Anna Altman, n+1)
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Altman’s gorgeous essay about work, pain and disability was unlike anything I’ve read this year. So much of business reporting is about the money and power of the people at the top. To read about a worker’s physical agony — its history, its symptoms, its effects, and the attempts to ameliorate it — made me think about business writing in a new way. It’s a painful read, and a beautiful one.
Best of 2016
Crime Reporting
Framed (Christopher Goffard, LA Times)
This six-part serial narrative was the most compelling story I read this year. Packed with plot twists and glorious cliffhangers, Goffard tells the strange story of husband-and-wife lawyers who attempt to frame a PTA mom at their child’s school by planting illegal drugs in her car. Their “perfect crime” unravels slowly as detectives pull strings. As Goffard writes, it was “an inexplicable crime that seemed to throb weirdly at the nexus of suburban psychosis and class privilege.” Bonus points to the LA Times, which rolled out the series over the course of a few weeks rather than dumping it online all at once.
Science Writing
You Want a Description of Hell? Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem (Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion And Scott Glover, The Los Angeles Times)
This explosive series traces the origins of the opioid epidemic. I can’t think of a clearer explanation of how drug marketing matters to patients. It’s an astonishing feat of investigative reporting, which helps explain a current event — a great example for young journalists. Explaining how Oxycontin’s “higher highs and lower lows” made it possible for addiction to more easily take root in pain patients was vital; the story of how its dosing could accelerate addiction helps explain why the opioid epidemic happened.
Food Writing
Carl’s Jr., and the Thing That Happened There (Chris Onstad, Eater)
Why is Carl’s Jr. not a global fast-food juggernaut to rival McDonald’s? It might be Chris Onstad’s fault. I’ll read any essay Eater publishes in its excellent “Life in Chains” series exploring the role chain restaurants play in our lives and cities, but I’ll happily re-read (and re-re-read) Onstad’s chronicle of a fateful encounter with his younger brother in a Carl’s Jr. restroom in mid-1982.
Arts & Culture Writing
What Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’? (Alex Mar, Atlas Obscura)
I perk up when I see Alex Mar’s byline, as I know that what ensues will be both intelligent and searching, making me more curious about the subject. My favorite piece that she wrote this year was What Happened to the Most Liberated Woman in America, which ran on Atlas Obscura [full disclosure: co-funded by Longreads]. In it, she visits the septuagenarian Barbara Williamson, a co-founder of a 70s lifestyle experiment that played a leading role in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife, settling dimly in people’s memories as an artifact of the sexual revolution.
Science Writing
Learning to Let the Wild Be Wild in Yellowstone (David Quammen, National Geographic)
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This piece is a true longread. It spans an entire issue. (Check out the gorgeous cover.) Quammen has long been among the world’s finest science writers, and he’s at his highest and best here, weaving together a complex narrative about the century-long expansion of Yellowstone, and what it means for the surrounding towns and ranches, and the planet at large. National parks are often described as “America’s best idea,” but for many they are only a down payment on a more ambitious conservation agenda, a network of interconnected wilderness reserves that would cover half of Earth’s surface. Quammen’s piece is a good first look at the challenges those future conservationists might face. It may become one of their essential texts.
Under-Recognized Stories
How Blac Chyna Beat the Kardashians at Their Own Game (Sylvia Obell, BuzzFeed)
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This is perhaps the smartest piece of writing about the Kardasho-Jenner universe I have ever read, and certainly one of my favorite pieces of cultural criticism all year. Sylvia Obell masterfully charts Blac Chyna's rise from Miami's famed King of Diamonds strip club to the gated communities of Calabasas, detailing how “the Kardashians, a family often accused of stealing black men, black features, and black culture, got beat at their own game by a black woman.” It's a totally engrossing read made all the more relevant with each passing Kardashian “news” item that floods your feed.
Arts & Culture Writing
Michael Jackson: Dangerous (Jeff Weiss, Pitchfork)
Earlier this year, Pitchfork began publishing Sunday reviews that explore albums released in the time before said site debuted. This, in turn, has led to a whole lot of smart writers weighing in on the classics, the cult classics, the interesting failures, and the historically significant. Jeff Weiss’s epic take on “Jackson’s final classic album and the best full-length of the New Jack Swing era” is the sort of narrative music writing that’s catnip for me, the kind of work that sends me deeply into my own memories, and leaves me rethinking my own take on the album in question.
Business & Tech Reporting
Uncanny Valley (Anna Weiner, n+1)
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Take Anna Weiner’s hand and go beyond the world of Silicon Valley to see what the people at those standing desks near the ping-pong table in the middle of a tech start-up’s open-concept office are really talking about. “We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. ‘Our culture is dying,’ we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. ‘What should we do about the culture?'” This on-the nose piece about life, identity, and disillusionment in the Bay Area tech sector could only have been written by someone who (1) has been there and (2) is fearlessly honest.
Under-Recognized Books
Poor Your Soul (Mira Ptacin, Soho Books)
Balancing poignancy with subtle humor, Mira Ptacin weaves together the stories of her own tragic loss and her mother's. When an accidental pregnancy progresses into an unviable one, Ptacin and her husband must decide whether to terminate it, or wait for it to terminate itself. Their grief echoes that of Ptacin's immigrant mother's, after her only son was killed by a drunk driver.
Under-Recognized Stories
Confessions of a Killer Policeman (Raghu Karnad and Grace Jajo, The Guardian)
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I was pretty pissed that this Guardian story didn't get more attention. I have my suspicions as to why: there aren't a ton of readers in the West who might appreciate what this piece accomplishes so skillfully. I'm betting that most readers don't know about Manipur, a state in the region of Northeast India that's distant both geographically and politically from the rest of that enormous country. This true crime story functions as its own self-contained narrative, but it subtly manages to illuminate the political history of the region where it's set. It is an especially strong example of what the Guardian's Long Read section can do so well. It to my mind, one of the few Western publications to give nuanced, urgent reportage on India actual real estate. Maybe it's the only one.
13, Right Now, (Jessica Contrera, The Washington Post)
From the show-me, don’t-tell-me school of narrative nonfiction, Jessica Contrera’s feature for The Washington Post describes in lyrical detail what it’s like to be a 13-year-old girl, tethered 24/7 to social media’s fickle instant-notification culture of likes and emoticons. As the Dad of a pair of teenage daughters whose glowing multiple screens loom too large in their frenetic lives, I found the story of Katherine Pommerening’s online life achingly true and moving. In ways that are instructive and cautionary, Contrera dramatizes how we struggle to help our children navigate the ever-changing digital terrain, even as we struggle to master it ourselves.
Business & Tech Reporting
Theranos Whistleblower Shook the Company—And His Family (John Carreyrou, Wall Street Journal)
In 2014, Tyler Shultz anonymously emailed a complaint to New York officials who administered a proficiency-testing program in which Theranos, a once promising blood testing company, was enrolled. Shultz complained that Theranos doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks, and warned his grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was serving as a company director, about his misgivings. This is a terrific story about turmoil within a tech company and a prominent family, but I would like to acknowledge John Carreyrou’s consistently impressive reporting on Theranos; his investigative work should win plenty of awards in the coming year.
Political Analysis
Sweet ’16: Notes on the US Election (Benjamin Kunkel, Salvage)
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In the wake of the catastrophe of November 8, the media went into one of its favorite modes—self-flagellation—to suggest that, if only they had seen the Trump voters who kept thrusting themselves into their vision, they might have predicted the electoral outcome better. As a person who had just spent a year reading all the reports by these in fact pretty conscientious journalists about the strange and exotic Trump voter—many more than I had read about, for example, the Bernie Sanders voter—I found this pretty odd. Had they really not seen the Trump voters that they’d written so much about—or had they, instead, merely not understood what they were seeing? This essay by Benjamin Kunkel in the British leftist quarterly Salvage sets out the global context of economic crisis and stagnation against which the rise of Trump can actually be understood. In a year of darkness and confusion, it gives off actual light—though it, too, predicts a victory for Hillary.
Under-Recognized Stories
“I Can’t Make You Love Me”: A 25th Anniversary Oral History (Ryan Lease, Stereogum)
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I will look back and think of 2016 as the year I finally came around to oral histories. (Many others, especially my wife, will say I should probably remember it as the year I had my first child. I can remember both fondly, I’ll respond. I contain multitudes, I’ll say.) From Slate’s exhaustive, emotive look at Angels in America (by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois) to Complex’s examination of Drake’s airball at the University of Kentucky’s Big Blue Madness (by Eric Koreen), it was an A+ year for the form. Nowhere is that more evident than in Ryan Leas’ look at, as the subhead reads, “the backstory of a modern standard.” Leas took a song that we all know and dug into its genesis, development, and legacy, somehow managing to make even the most nuanced instrumental choices interesting. Would you judge me if I said I cried during an oral history about a Bonnie Raitt song? If so, judge away. Then listen to the gauzy, early-90’s-flecked demo of the song, embedded into the story, and try not to do the same.
Best of 2016
Under-Recognized Books
The Story of a Brief Marriage: A Novel (Anuk Arudpragasam , Flatiron Books)
I knew I had to read Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel when Garth Greenwell took time out from his own book party to introduce me to the author. Whenever someone I admire is that enthusiastic about something, I pay attention. And I’m glad I did. The Story of a Brief Marriage is set over a single day in a Sri Lankan refugee camp toward the end of a civil war that spans decades. The story centers around Dinesh, a young man who has lost everything and everyone he cares about. This haunting, devastating book is an intricate look at a man becoming reacquainted with his own body after living through some horrific experiences. He marries a woman he barely knows, and every moment is magnified by the dangerous situation they live in. The Story of a Brief Marriage is a story of grace and humanity despite catastrophic circumstances.
Arts & Culture Writing
Is Everything Wrestling? (Jeremy Gordon, The New York Times Magazine)
Donald Trump has been the media’s own chaos monkey, ably controlling the narrative with unstudied precision, due to all the cracks in the ice. He was a reliable source of hits when he was an outsider billionaire with a Twitter feed, his rallies were a place where a slew of writers could feed their ego nobly playing Cassandra, sneering at the Pandora’s Box of racism and fascism that he opened (an exception: Jeff Sharlet’s clear-eyed view of the religiosity of Trump’s appeal and its relation to the American tradition of self-help hucksters), and even when his campaign should have been over, he was still being talked about a billion times more than everybody else – and any terrifying high school queen bee could tell you that’s how you matter.
Investigative Reporting
My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard (Shane Bauer, Mother Jones)
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Hands down the best reporting I read all year is Shane Bauer’s “My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard.” Bauer applied for a job at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana; though, let’s be real, as you’ll learn from the piece, applications are hardly necessary. Winn, which is run by the Corrections Corporation of America, the company that basically invented private prisons in the eighties, pretty much begged him to come onboard. After all, the pay is $9 an hour, the shifts are twelve hours long, and only some one-third of hires stick around. Bauer’s piece gets readers up to speed on the history of private prisons and their ubiquity today and takes readers deep into the particulars of the understaffed hellhole that is Winn–a place in which the guards, having so little support, are left to negotiate their own rules with prisoners. Bauer’s portrait of the prison community–and it is a community–is rich, illuminating without being condescending, in part because Bauer is, to some extent, a participant. Here’s a taste of an exchange between Bauer’s 19-year-old coworker, a kid all too keen to demonstrate his power named Collinsworth, and a prisoner he won’t deign to talk to:
Under-Recognized Stories
Michelle’s Case (Annie Brown, California Sunday)米歇尔的案例
A clear-eyed, thought-provoking retelling of Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s long legal battle in hope of becoming the first American to receive sex-reassignment surgery while in prison. Her lawyers argued that the surgery was medically necessary and withholding it violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But, they argued, rather than grant the surgery and set a legal precedent, the Department of Corrections instead ordered her parole. The piece is a nuanced take on what it’s like to transition in prison—at least 400 California inmates were taking hormone replacement therapy when the article was published in May—where trans women are vulnerable to sexual assault and survivors are placed in a kind of solitary confinement, stuck in limbo in a prison system where it’s unsafe for them to live with men, but they are generally not allowed to live with women. And it asks a bigger question: What kind of medical care must the state cover?
Sports Writing
The Art of Letting Go (Mina Kimes, ESPN The Magazine)
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Whereas another writer might’ve taken this story’s central question—how (and why) Koreans have elevated bat flips in baseball to an art form that deserves celebration—and answered it with condescension or (at best) superficiality, Kimes goes above and beyond, taking readers on a swirling journey across South Korea, through stadium dugouts and Seoul’s inner-city neighborhoods, to produce a compelling narrative that is part sports, part travelogue, and as illuminating a culture piece as you’ve read all year. Between Kimes’ words (which are a masterclass in scene-setting) and the wondrous illustrations of Mickey Duzyj (who was along for the reporting), this was a story I kept seeing in my head all year long.
Under-Recognized Books
The Black Wave (Michelle Tea, Feminist Press)
The DMV is no longer issuing driver's licenses and the names of the fish that have gone extinct are crossed out on the walls of sushi restaurants: this is how we know the apocalypse is coming to San Francisco in 1999. There's the thick perma-smog and a vegetable shortage too, but it is the driver's license issue that grabs our narrator Michelle's attention in Black Wave, the latest book from Michelle Tea. She needs a driver's license to drive her getaway van to Los Angeles and escape the codependent relationships, drugs, and squalor (captured in all their pre-gentrified post-nostalgized charm) of the Mission in the late 90s. When Michelle gets to Los Angeles Black Wave bifurcates: LA Michelle, now sober, is attempting to adapt her unruly, unpublished 500-pg memoir called Black Wave into a screenplay. She is struggling, with sobriety, with the ethics of writing about her life and her loved ones, haunted by her past and by people she has yet to meet (in memoir-land, at the computer where she works every day - yes, there's an element of metafiction at work). But then the apocalypse comes to contemporary Los Angeles too, the actual irreversible accelerationist climate one we've all been in denial about since 1999, in a series of tsunamis that will take out the entire West Coast. The mass suicides begin in New York. Michelle's brother calls in a panic, begging an incredulous Michelle to turn on the TV and see for herself: “Michelle knew once she turned on her television it would remain on for a very long time.”
Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Frances Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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Before I read Frances Wilson’s extraordinary biography, I knew De Quincey only as the Opium Eater, a minor character skirting the fringes of the Romantic era. After finishing Guilty Thing, I have a newfound admiration for the man who essentially founded the true crime genre, the addiction memoir, pioneered literary autobiography, and influenced writers like Jorge Luis Borges.
Science Writing
The Empty Brain (Robert Epstein, Aeon)你的大脑不处理信息，它不是计算机 |永旺随笔
Who doesn’t like a juicy scientific polemic? Epstein’s piece attacks — with panache, one might add — a common rhetorical strategy to speak about the human brain as an information-processing machine: a computer. He patiently unpacks the problems with that metaphor, and its nefarious effects on brain research (and its funding). The article has been widely shared, and generated a lively discussion — including numerous thoughtful dissents. I’m happily under-qualified to say whether or not my brain is computer-like, but I learned a lot from this piece. And as a poetry lover, it’s heartening to see that metaphors — metaphors! — play such an important role in the way we arrange and construct scientific knowledge.
Business & Tech Reporting
How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley (Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker)
I don’t know a single person who has watched the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley” who hasn’t given it rave reviews or compared someone they know to one of the characters on the show. Marantz takes us behind-the-scenes, revealing a network of more than 200 consultants, which includes “academics, investors, entrepreneurs, and employees at Google, Amazon, Netflix, and several other tech firms,” who help make the show so good.
Under-Recognized Stories
Unfriendly Climate (Sonia Smith, Texas Monthly)气候不友好
Sonia Smith's seamless profile of the preeminent climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe wasn't overlooked by the rabid climate change denialists who went ballistic in the comments. But it was perhaps overlooked by many of us readers who take climate change for granted. We should all be looking now. In addition to co-authoring the last two National Climate Assessments and being a reviewer on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hayhoe is an evangelical Christian. She's even married to a minister, one who didn't initially believe in global warming. It took Hayhoe two years to convince him, but she did, and she's now quite skilled at persuading people of disparate beliefs and backgrounds of the need to come together to save our planet:
What Bill Cosby Taught Me About Sexual Violence and Flying (Kiese Laymon, Literary Hub)恩雅爱尔兰王国内部
This year, I think the storytelling we yearned for most was work that felt up to the task of capturing a state of reckoning. Kiese Laymon's piece on the Cosby assault allegations distills so many of the issues raised by that abuse.
Science Writing
NASA’s ‘Hidden Figures’ (Margot Shetterly, Al-Jazeera)
Writer Margot Shetterly’s bestselling first book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race uncovers the forgotten history and under-acknowledged contribution of Nasa’s black female scientists in launching America’s space program who worked in a blacks-only wing at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. In this excerpt from Al-Jeezera’s The Stream, Shetterley describes how as a daughter of an engineer she grew up surrounded by so many African-Americans with careers in science that she believed it was “just what black folks did,” to watching their contributions be lost, underplayed, and undervalued. Shetterley’s history of black women at NASA is an important work correcting the historical record. If the scientific community wants to attract people from all walks of life and gain trust in its findings, then they must start by demonstrating and applauding the value non-white, non-male contributors.
Sports Writing
I postponed open-heart surgery for the Cubs (Wayne Drehs, ESPN)
Personally, however, my whole year from spring training and onward was focused on the Chicago Cubs. This piece by Wayne Drehs on postponing a surgery that could ave his life so he could see the Cubs finally win a World Series really summed up everything about the team I love, but also sports obsession in general. So for my favorite one piece from 2016, I’m going with this.
Business & Tech Reporting
The Cost of Caring (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker)
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The pain in this story is deep and strong, not only for every mother but also for every child. Aviv takes us deep into the life of Emma, a Filipina nanny who leaves her nine children in order to send them to university. She succeeds in doing that by taking care of other people’s children—but the tradeoffs are so brutal that the piece is hard to get through. In Aviv’s voice, the story of Emma is the story of globalization—both how it provides incredibly opportunities and also takes them away.
Crime Reporting
Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered (Michelle Dean, BuzzFeed News)
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This heart-breaking case of one of—if not the—longest case of Munchausen by proxy is beautifully reported and written with precision by Michelle Dean. The death of Dee Dee Blancharde, as orchestrated by her adult daughter Gypsy, was horrifying and shocking, but Dean paints a detailed portrait that really allows the characters and their inner lives to emerge from the sheer horror of the crimes. Dean reveals that there was so much more to this story than what came out in breaking news reports—this piece was fascinating, troubling and at the end of the day, impossible to forget.
Political Analysis
The Obama Administration Just Granted Henry Kissinger a Distinguished Public Service Award (Greg Grandin, The Nation)
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Trump aside, the political year 2016 reached peak weirdness with the reappearance and lionizing of Henry Kissinger. As Greg Grandin wrote in this piece, the penultimate moment of a man “implicated in at least three genocides (Cambodia, Bangladesh, and East Timor)” being given Department of Defense’s highest award for a private citizen showed how the Democrats’ strategy of triangulation from the Clinton years has transmogrified into some kind of M.C. Escher five-dimensional trapezoid, and why cognitive dissonance, not, say, income inequality, became the leitmotif for Democrats this election. Consider how protesters who follow Kissinger around shouting “War criminal!” are portrayed as the loonies by the press, when they’re actually the ones who are right.
Under-Recognized Stories
The Earth Mover (Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker)
There should be a word (maybe there is one) for art crafted so well that your brain remembers it not as though you consumed it, but as though it happened to you. For me, this piece by Dana Goodyear about the work of Michael Heizer, evokes that sensation. A truly incredible work of profile writing.
Investigative Reporting
Pentagon: Special Ops Killing Of Pregnant Afghan Women Was “Appropriate” Use Of Force (Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept)
Since its inception, The Intercept has published a number of truly remarkable investigations that few other outlets would invest in. At first glance, it would be easy to overlook the years of reporting that went into this one. It began in February 2010, when the U.S. military announced a raid on a Taliban compound in Gardez, Afghanistan, where Special Forces discovered the bodies of three Afghan women. CNN described their apparent Taliban execution as possessing “the earmarks of a traditional honor killing.” But when British Sunday Times reporter Jerome Starkey journeyed to the site—the only reporter to do so—the official story quickly unraveled. The so-called Taliban militants were in fact government allies. One was even a police commander who had gone through dozens of U.S. police training programs— his walls lined with his portraits with American soldiers. Multiple witnesses and Afghan investigators told Starkey that American soldiers had dug bullets from the bodies of at least one of the dead pregnant women. All signs indicated that in one night 16 children lost their mothers because of a botched U.S. raid that was subsequently covered up. Starkey’s damning investigation forced the military to abandon its earlier claims and open a formal investigation. The story could have ended then, but more than six years later, The Intercept followed up with the long-awaited results of a Freedom of Information Act request for the military’s own inquiry. The answers Jeremy Scahill received — laid bare in this investigation — are devastating and important. They are also a testament to the dire need for investigative ground reporting from war zones, and the years of persistence required to hold the powerful to account.
Under-Recognized Stories
Mission: Burrito (John Birdsall, Bon Appétit)
In a story that’s as much about the vagaries of gentrification as it is about the cultural history (and complex present) of mission-style burritos, Birdsall packs a lot into 2,600 beautiful words. It’s about identity and the transformation of a neighborhood and how both inform a menu item worth arguing about. In other words, the best kind of food writing.
Sports Writing
Vertical Descent: Adventures in Synchronized Swimming (Elisabeth Donnelly, Virginia Quarterly Review)
Elisabeth Donnelly takes a look at the unique world of synchronized swimming. It’s an interesting time for the sport, as it’s just beginning to recognize men, like Bill May, one of the best in the world. Men aren’t allowed to compete in the sport at the Olympics–something many are hoping will change now that the Fédération Internationale de Natation, the official governing body for water sports throughout the world, has allowed for mixed duet competitions.
Essays & Criticism
My Son, the Prince of Fashion (Michael Chabon, GQ)我的儿子，时尚王子
Both of my “best of” personal essay nominations concern the reaches and limits of parenthood. At GQ, novelist Michael Chabon writes about his trip to Paris Men's Fashion Week, where his young son, 13-year-old Abe, catches a glimpse of his future and yearns after his tribe. I'd never presume to understand the intricacies of childrearing, but Chabon treats his son with a blend of kindness and respect we'd all do well to emulate with the young folks in our own lives-taking their desires, ideas and motivations seriously, and fostering their artistic instincts. And Chabon is simply an excellent writer, blending gentle self-deprecation with astute observation. He doesn't need paragraphs of adjectives to transport the reader to the studios and runways of Paris. You are there, sweating in the French summer. You are there, checking out the throngs of stylish young men loitering outside shows. And you there, beaming (Guardedly! Be cool!) at your son, when he recognizes and is recognized.
Investigative Reporting
The Architect Who Became a Diamond (Alice Gregory, The New Yorker)
First of all–mini spoiler alert–you can make a diamond out of someone’s ashes! That’s just one of the odd little twists in Alice Gregory’s nail-biter about the most unlikely of nail-biter subjects–an architect’s archive. The architect in question is the very on-trend (and truly talented) Luis Barragán, who designed geometric buildings with vivid colors throughout Mexico. And the problem is that a Swiss manufacturing family owns his archive. The woman in that family for whom the archive was bought is determined to carefully catalog his work herself and protect his legacy and so she has refused to grant anyone access to his archive for the last two decades. This story is about a contemporary artist’s clever plot to persuade her otherwise. Gregory’s excellent structuring lends suspense and urgency to questions about how to best maintain a virtuoso’s legacy. Who should be allowed access to his archives and who should determine who should be allowed access?
Sports Writing
Michael Jordan has not left the building (Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine)
· 官方页
As somebody who grew up in the Chicago burbs in the 1990s, I thought I’d read everything good about Michael Jordan until I read this piece. It really sums up Jordan the man, long past his playing days, still the insanely competitive prick he’s always been, but I’d describe this as a deep look at what god does after he’s retired. It’s great all the way through, but that last paragraph still gives me chills.
Essays & Criticism
Perhaps Having Kids Saves You From Mourning the Person you Might Have Been (Laura Hazard Owen, Medium and tinyletter)
Owen publishes her essays about parenthood via newsletter as well as on Medium. She's a journalist with expertise in publishing, tech and the business of journalism, and she brings the same kind of skepticism about received wisdom and eye for detail to her observations about children and parenting culture as she does to her other work. In this one, she takes on the hardest question of all - whether having children could be a mistake, whether parents can allow themselves to think it might have been. She writes about ambition so well. I will always remember the line here about lying on a couch reading in a beautiful house.
Under-Recognized Books
The Next: A Novel of Love, Revenge and a Ghost Who Can’t Let Go (Stephanie Gangi, St. Martin’s Press)
Ghost stories? Not a fan. Which is why I didn’t think I’d like Stephanie Gangi’s The Next: A Novel of Love, Revenge and a Ghost Who Can't Let Go. Revenge might be a dish best served cold, but Gangi makes us see how delicious it is served piping hot.
Political Analysis
Could Hillary Clinton Become the Champion of the 99%? (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New York Times Magazine)
· 官方页
This look at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, suggests that Americans of many political persuasions actually want a Great Society and Rooseveltian vision for America—but would Hillary Clinton be able to win the allegiance of the so-called 99%? One random comment on the piece dated July 25 was eerily prescient:
Arts & Culture Writing
By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead (John Hofsess, Toronto Life)
· 官方页
John Hofsess was part of a secret assisted suicide society. Before orchestrating his own death, he helped eight terminally ill people — including the poet Al Purdy — to die on their own terms. I’ve witnessed terminal cancer — the pain, suffering, and indignity of futile treatment. Hofsess’ strong case for returning control to the ill resonates with me. If we’re terminal, shouldn’t we have the right to sidestep death’s timetable and organize a gentle exit, with a favourite playlist and a glass of good wine?
Political Analysis
The Trouble With the Liberal Arguments Against Third-Party Voters—and What to Do About It (Josie Duffy Rice, The Daily Kos)
· 官方页
I got tired of reading about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016, especially when most pieces could be lumped in the For or Against piles. But Josie Duffy consistently managed to make me think and feel not just what I hadn’t thought or felt, but what I tried to avoid thinking and feeling. Her piece, “The Trouble With Liberal Argument Against 3rd Party Candidates …” is amazing in its scope. Josie is easily one of the most amazing young long-form essayists in the country. In between evocatively presenting autobiography and political analysis, she dropped three sentences that made music out of American Presidential noise. “Listen,” she wrote, “I am a firm believer that in a country like America you should vote for your opponent. Who do you want to fight against for the next eight years? Who do you want to push left?” The piece, like most of Josie’s writing, welcomes us in, cares for us and asks everything of us when we leave. I can’t share this piece enough.
Under-Recognized Stories
You Are Not Going to Die Out Here: A Woman’s Terrifying Night in the Chesapeake (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)
· 官方页
I saw this story posted and shared a few times when it first ran, but in the middle of an insane election cycle, it didn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. This is the tale of Lauren Connor, a woman who fell off a boat and disappeared amid the crashing waves of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s about the search to find her, by both authorities and her boyfriend, and about a woman whose life had prepared her perfectly for the kinds of challenges that would overwhelm most of us. This is a deadline narrative, but it’s crafted so well—weaving in background and character development at just the right moments, giving readers so many reasons to care—that you couldn’t stop reading if you wanted to.
My Wife and I Are (Both) Pregnant (Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, The Cut)
· 官方页
Written as a conversation between Kate Elazegui and Emily Kehe — who are married and gave birth to baby boys four days apart — this is a fascinating look at pregnancy and motherhood. The women's experiences could not be more different, from the fertility process to nursing, and it's a piece about a relationship on top of all that. I love that this is an as-told-to; having them tell their story in their own words is incredibly powerful. Also, the photos are terrific.
Business & Tech Reporting
The Most Exclusive Restaurant in America (Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker)马克·沃伦：我父亲的遗言
I loved this piece so much, as much for how it was written as for what the story is about. Paumgarten takes the reader on a light-hearted journey inside the world of the most exclusive restaurant in the country, if not the world: Damon Baehrel. The place is booked, says the owner for so many years that he has stopped taking reservations. But all is not what it seems—and Paumgarten skillfully draws you in, confuses you, and leads you to a conclusion that you somehow feel is all your own, even though it isn’t. A refreshing interlude on food, facts and when the two don’t quite intersect.
Investigative Reporting
<br> The white flight of Derek Black (Eli Saslow, The Washington Post)
You may argue that this article doesn’t rightly belong in the investigative reporting category. Perhaps. But it was a difficult dig into one of the most important questions we currently face: How can the rising tide of hatred and xenophobia be combatted? Saslow’s story focuses on the extraordinary transformation of a single individual, Derek Black: a former prince of the white nationalist movement who, through the compassion and patience of the people he used to denigrate, changed his mind.
Science Writing
Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them (Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker)
· 官方页
It’s fitting that the year’s most impressive science longread would be about the year’s most impressive scientific discovery. This one would have topped my year-end list even if it ended after the lede, which features a long, lyrical description of a distant black hole collision, and the invisible gravity wave that rolled out of its center more than one billion years ago. Late last year, that wave finally reached Earth, where it was intercepted by a sensitive set of instruments built specially for the purpose, over the course of four decades. The scientists behind this epochal observation will almost certainly win a Nobel Prize for their efforts. Twilley tells their very human story beautifully.
Under-Recognized Stories
Why Men Fight (Thomas Page McBee, Quartz)我的儿子，时尚王子
I'm a sucker for boxing writing, and this story is an excellent example of the genre, first-person division. Page McBee's account of becoming the “first known transgender man to ever fight in Madison Square Garden” is also a meditation on what it means to be a man, on male friendships, and on higher-order locker-room talk. One particularly resonant line: “If every boxing story ever told could be neatly summarized it would be: I was afraid, and I did it anyway.
Science Writing
Digging for Glory (Paige Williams, The New Yorker)
An illuminating profile on a star paleoanthropologist Dr. Lee Berger, who has touted a remarkable number of major discoveries in his career including controversial and hotly debated announcements of new species that some paleoanthropologist’s argue are contributing to “species inflation” and an overly complicated evolutionary picture for homo sapiens. What emerges from Williams keen look at her subject, is that Berger is not just a scientist, but a master of the stage, a showman who announces his discoveries with the flourish and skill of a great magician’s slight of hand. Beneath Williams story are questions she doesn’t directly ask, but emerge from her work. What of Berger’s research is actually groundbreaking? What is overstatement? What is inaccurate? What role does narrative play in promoting science? After Nature has rejected twelve of his papers including those on a discovery of a species he named “Homo naledi, or Star Man” Berger is quoted at a talk openly embracing Facebook as a valid scientific platform: “A paragraph on Facebook may be as powerful as a paper in Nature,” he says. It may be more powerful, as we have recently watched fake news dominate and steer the 2016 presidential election, but what’s most worrisome about Williams statement, is that it demonstrates at least one expert scientist choosing the platform over a peer-reviewed path that is slow and meticulous in search of truth, and truth and power are two completely different things.
Under-Recognized Stories
Animals Strike Curious Poses: On Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon (Chris Randle, Hazlitt)
· 官方页
I'm always up for a well-written, thoughtful take on a creative work that may not have received its due when it was released. Chris Randle's in-depth analysis of Under the Cherry Moon is exactly that, and makes a solid case for this film's continuing relevance.
Investigative Reporting
David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue (Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine)大卫的脚踝：缺陷如何导致世界上最完美的雕像倒塌（山姆·安德森，纽约时报杂志）
Some of my favorite stories from this year involved deep, deep dives into history. Sam Anderson’s immaculate deconstruction of how Michelangelo created The David deftly covers 552 years of history, weaving together a tale I couldn’t put down. It’s about everything the sculpture represents and how a cultural icon that is so important to the world is literally teetering on the brink of destruction. This story pushed boundaries, too, because it seamlessly weaves together a brilliant investigation with personal essay, making it a fascinating, completely modern piece of journalism.
Under-Recognized Books
Surveys (Natasha Stagg, Semiotexte)
If Marshall McLuhan rewrote “Cinderella,” the result might come out looking something like this novel, Stagg's first. Colleen, an aimless 23 year old who works administering marketing surveys in an anodyne Arizona mall, lives a bleak and listless life, online when she's not drinking or avoiding the advances of the peeping Tom in her shabby apartment complex. Then she meets Jim, a minor celebrity, “online, it doesn't matter how...Describing it would be pointless and anyway, you can look it up.” Colleen and Jim fall in love and quickly, as a unit, become rich and very famous. The specifics aren't clear, and they never need to be: Stagg lays out the truths and the falsehoods of the attention economy brilliantly without them. At the height of her fame, Colleen becomes obsessed with Lucinda, Jim's ex, her obsession growing more desperate as Colleen's notoriety inevitably wanes. “I curled around my computer, searching for all the things I'd seen a million times. The views were not growing as steadily, but they were growing, and would always grow, never diminish... I grabbed my phone and muscle memory led me to look up Lucinda's Twitter. It looked as if all of it had been deleted. How stupid is she? I thought. You can't really delete any of it.” Stagg's dark wit, her accurate-to-the-millimeter rendering of the physical and psychological experience of consuming and being consumed by social media, and the emergence of Lucinda as someone whose power comes from her ability to be completely sustained by her own inner life - or at least, appear that way - makes Surveys really special.
Essays & Criticism
Chicago State of Mind (Derrick Harriell, LA Review of Books)
Derrick Harriell wrote a piece on Chicago State that challenged my understanding of what's possible with form and content in the long lyric essay. The piece narrativizes educational place and the journey of learning in a beautiful black place that's trying to survive.
Crime Reporting
Apocalypse Meow: How a Cult That Believes Cats Are Divine Beings Ended Up in Tennessee (Bob Smietana, Nashville Scene)
Finally, a cult cat story that pal Liz Lopatto brought to my attention. It’s wonderful and a great reminder that alt-weekly stories are often the best stories. (See Sydney Brownstone’s incredible Seattle Stranger reporting on a rapist posing as a porn recruiter, which led to his arrest.) Happy holidays, y’all.
Under-Recognized Stories
Sick Woman Theory (Johanna Hedva, Mask Magazine)
Last winter I was the sickest I'd been in a long time and many friends began sending me a piece that had appeared not long after the new year. I'd never heard of Hedva or Mask, but this wild winding essay that pierces the heart and soul of chronic illness was such a potent companion for me. At parts unapologetically academic-Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler are leaned on heavily-and at other parts heartbreakingly personal, this adaptation of a lecture reads both like a manifesto and a diary. “I thought of all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away and out of sight,” Hedva writes, always with boldness, clarity, and compassion. This piece was praised in many of my most cherished circles of social media-especially those realms of sick girls-but i hope it branches out much further.
Science Writing
Austin, Indiana: The HIV Capital of Small-Town America (Jessica Wapner, Mosaic)
· 官方页
In December 2014, the single largest HIV outbreak in U.S. history began in Austin, Indiana, a town of 4,100 people on the southern end of the state. Though Austin’s struggles with drug addiction and poverty were reported at the time of the outbreak, freelance journalist Jessica Wapner takes a much deeper and more detailed look at the town and the source of its problems in this feature for Mosaic. I appreciated both her old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting — she found many of her sources in Austin by simply knocking on doors and gaining the trust of residents — and her analysis of the outbreak as part of a “syndemic,” a cluster of health and other problems that public-health experts say must be treated as a whole, not as isolated parts. Empathetic, smart, and important.
Speak, Memory (Casey Newton, The Verge)
When her friend suddenly dies, Eugenia Kuyda builds a chat bot using thousands of his text messages, which allows his loved ones to ask “him” questions and get a remarkably apt response. The result is part digital memorial, part ethereal therapist, part Magic 8-Ball—and all bittersweet. (“How are you there?” one person asks the bot in the chat logs included with the story. “I’m OK. A little down. I hope you aren’t doing anything interesting without me?” the bot responds.) The article is alternately a reminder that we already live in the sci-fi future (remember the Finn from William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, who builds an artificial intelligence “construct” of himself that communicates from beyond the grave?), a meditation on the nature of what it means to grieve in the online age, and, ultimately, a think piece on how humans are creatures that make personalities out of words.
Arts & Culture Writing
Sex, Drugs, And Bestsellers: The Legend Of The Literary Brat Pack (Jason Diamond, Harper’s Bazaar)
Searching for John Hughes author Jason Diamond deconstructs the publishing industry’s mythologizing of the “literary brat pack”–Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Donna Tartt, Jill Eisenstadt and other writers in the 1980s as famous for their coke-fueled late nights at the Odeon as they were for publishing celebrated novels before the age of thirty.
Political Analysis
Donald Trump: He Was Made in America (Kirsten West Savali, The Root)
· 官方页
I don’t trust any journalist in the world more that Kirsten West Savali. Her work is consistently daring, loving of vulnerable folk, unafraid of calling out all kinds of abuse and deeply Mississippi through and through. Her piece, “Donald Trump: He Was Made in America” made clear to any one willing the listen what this nation was going to do on November 2. She uses repetition in this piece in a way that is both haunting and aptly comical. In a world where many writers work as extensions of the pop left and pop right, writing like this pushed and prodded many of us to reckon with what American complicity means and does in 2016.
Under-Recognized Stories
The Storytellers (Amanda Feinman, Entropy Magazine)
· 官方页
Amanda Feinman has a deceptively gentle voice, sprinkled with surprising zings, profound insight, and sharp feminism. I can't wait to watch her voice grow in the literary community.
Investigative Reporting
Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.(Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica)体育界的秘密MVP？便盆
Propublica had one of the best stories of the year with its investigation into machine bias and how it can impact minorities. Brilliantly reported and eye-opening, this piece shows how important it is to have experienced data journalists on staff doing investigative, longform reporting and writing. Propublica’s reporting exposed how algorithms work behind the scenes of our lives, with most of us not understanding the intricate programming or methodology that goes into it. In our blindness, these algorithms make decisions for us—and these decisions can have serious consequences. Biases and prejudices are built into machines and if more attention is not paid to this future, we will find ourselves in a scarier and perhaps more prejudiced and unequal society than ever before. Propublica’s ongoing reporting on this topic exposes this reality, warning us of what may happen if we don’t pay attention and keep the pressure on designers and creators of this technology to remain aware.
Essays & Criticism
My Last JDate (Esther Schor, Tablet Magazine)
Esther Schor leaves her husband after 30 years,“for no one at all!” Online dating after decades of marriage is fraught and Schor’s sometimes awkward wobble toward intimacy is at times charming and sweet, like a toddler learning to walk. What’s stuck with me about this piece is the realization that as we age and eventually fall ill - sometimes terminally - we just don’t have the luxury of time to allow intimate relationships to grow slowly and to naturally shed the pretenses that ignited attraction in the first place. What you lack together in time, you make up for in intensity.
Science Writing
The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (Becca Cudmore, Nautilus)
This story neatly does what the very best science writing should: It starts with a far-out proposition that makes you do a head snap, and then piles on surprising tidbit after tidbit until you arrive at a conclusion you never thought you’d hold. In this case, the author rides along with a veterinary pathology student who is part of a project tracking the rats of Vancouver, BC. She creates a portrait of rat society that is sophisticated and remarkably familiar (They live on the same block as their families! They have turf wars over immigration!) as well as of a rat digestive system that is freakishly good at hybridizing bacteria from different spaces and species to create superbugs. (“The rat gut acts as a mixing bowl,” says the scientist overseeing the project.) When you exterminate rats, you scatter their families, pushing them into new turf where they fight with the neighbors, swapping blood and bacteria that might combine to create something new. So maybe, the argument goes, it’s better to leave rats where they are, keeping local germs … well, local.