90 篇
Food Writing
A Cajun Seasoned Boil for a Big Party
I love Samin Nosrat's approach to writing, cooking, and life. Nosrat knows a lot —she is, after all, a bestselling cookbook author and a Netflix personality. But in her column for the Times, she approaches her subjects with great openness and genuine curiosity; you can tell she's still hungry to learn. In an industry whose celebrities often distinguish themselves by asserting their status with obnoxious, meaningless language like “toothsome,” “mouthfeel,” and “unctuous,” Nosrat aims for approachability and humility. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in her column about Mississippi River boat pilot-cum-home cook extraordinaire, Jared Austin. In just 1,000 short words, she captures Austin in his full humanity — as idiosyncratic, unique, and hospitable as his hometown of New Orleans. (I mean, “And yes, ‘bead' is a verb.” Come on!) In this moment when we're questioning all the characteristics traditionally associated with power and authority, Nosrat reminds us that humility is an asset, and for that, I'm thankful.
Crime Reporting
A Preacher, a Scam, and a Massacre in Brooklyn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
Fans of vintage New York crime stories will love Sarah Weinman’s brilliant Brooklyn-based tale, a sordid story that only gets worse the more you read. Weinman takes the reader into the mind and home of a con man named DeVernon LeGrand, a pretend preacher who kept a stable of women who dressed as nuns and begged on the streets. Of course, in true pimp fashion, LeGrand took most of their money. After moving his flock to 222 Brooklyn Avenue in 1966, things get worse for the crooked organization as it eventually becomes involved in kidnapping and murder. Although in the early 2000s I lived four blocks away from the scene of LeGrand’s various crimes for thirteen years, I had never heard of him or his house of pain and death until reading Weinman’s wonderfully written piece.
Omnipresence无所不在 |在线VQR
This multimedia criminal justice story is about how too-bright, all-night lighting in housing projects, and faulty design overall, contributes to a troubling level of surveillance in poorer communities under the guise of fighting crime. It makes something as basic as sleeping uncomfortable for thousands upon thousands of law-abiding citizens. I really like this story's taxonomic, poetic style, as well as how architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella gives the story a more formalist visual valence than your typical housing piece.
Food Writing
There Is No Dalit Cuisine没有达利特美食
Sharanya Deepak is one of the most promising, and inspiring food writers, to emerge from India in as long as I can remember. So often, food and travel reporting, both from India and from outside of India, evades questions of caste, gender, and state violence. But Deepak dives right into these topics. In 100 Cups of Tea, for Taste Cooking, she talks about how food traditions are fighting on, even thriving in the midst of India’s brutal violence in the disputed area of Kashmir. In a lesser writer, this type of story might come off as hokey, but Deepak complicates the narrative, both for Indian and non-Indian readers. My favorite piece of hers, though, is on Dalit cuisine in India for Popula. The word Dalit means “broken” and refers to about 16 percent of the Indian population who are excluded from the Hindu caste system and are often relegated to the most menial jobs in India, such as trash collection. Deepak shows us how food politics—such as the banning of cow slaughter—has been used by upper-caste Brahmins to preserve their hegemony and to deny Dalits agency. She even calls out one of India’s most celebrated food journalists, Vir Sanghvi, who she says, “reveres the upper-class and colonial vision of Indian cuisine.” This piece, and all of her pieces, is journalism at its best: uncomfortable, layered, and fearless
Investigative Reporting
The ISIS Files伊斯兰国档案
Callimachi is a reporter's reporter; she's all about the documents. During five trips to Mosul spanning more than a year, she scoured abandoned buildings that had recently housed the workspaces, training grounds, courts, and living quarters of ISIS militants, stuffing tattered papers and folders the group had left behind into trash bags. Callimachi and her team ultimately carted off more than 15,000 pages of documents. Through the lens of these records, Callimachi describes a regimented governing body focused on collecting taxes, issuing birth and marriage certificates, and meting out punishments. ISIS, she writes, “even ran its own D.M.V.” There are practical applications for such insights, the piece suggests. Our prior misconceptions about extremist groups like ISIS, Callimachi writes, have led to tactical failures in U.S.-led efforts to defeat them, such as a focus on destroying petroleum reserves when the group relied more heavily on agriculture for revenue. All this from a haul of jettisoned papers.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">A Business With No End</span>
My favorite story on commerce of the year has more in common with the dreaminess of the nuclear sequences from Twin Peaks: The Return than the everyday stock charts on CNBC. In one sense it's a story about absolutely nothing, if you consider that the news peg is basically some packages that started arriving at someone's house one day. But it's also a story about everything — Christianity, con artists, bookstores, the Internet, real estate, obsession, startups, copyrights, maps, and moisturizer. I was very sorry when it was over.
Best of 2018
Food Writing
Hazardous Cravings
In a genre that includes celebrity chef profiles, best of lists, and Yelp reviews, personal essays like Alex McElroy's prove how deep food stories can go. Growing up overweight, McElroy had a very American predicament: surrounded by food, he ate too much, and people made fun of him for it, and yet, as his weight made him a target of ridicule, his eventual dieting threatened them, and people both encouraged him to lose weight and pressured him to share in their gluttony. While working at a Dairy Queen, he became eating disordered and bulimic. In this powerful, intelligent, devilishly funny essay, McElroy calls dieting “a paradox of masculinity and emasculation.” By exploring his relationship with food and his own flesh, he shows how people mistake his large personal space for public space, and how he struggled to value what others, including himself, had mistreated for so long. It's an incredible, memorable portrait of a journey in the land of too much food, constrictive gender norms, and body shaming, and it's unusual to hear it told by a man. It's also about identity: how our past selves cast an inescapable shadow over our future selves, despite who we become.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">As Goes the South, So Goes the Nation</span>
In an election year when all eyes were on the South, when many sought to convince themselves — with quick, easy stories — that things are better (or worse) than we thought, Imani Perry’s letter from Alabama takes the reader on a different kind of journey through the South. Full of love for Alabama’s Black people — ancestors, artists, musicians, and thinkers — Perry maps the Alabama of past and present that she sees in her mind’s eye, in the outlines of her family history. But the essay is never simply a celebration of a South in which we want to believe. She follows every seductive image with another, more painful, and raw reality. “There are legions of cypress, oak, and loblolly trees, purple blazing star flowers, and all sorts of animals, especially the massive bucks that hunters pridefully kill.” She lulls us into a southern landscape before reminding us: “The Black towns in the Black Belt are now dumping grounds — of fantasies and waste.” It is a powerfully disorienting essay.
Crime Reporting
Checkpoint Nation
When Americans think of “the border” as a narrow and specific line, we neglect the legal reality that the term actually applies to a border zone, a much larger halo covering up to 100 air miles from any U.S. land or coastal boundary. The zone touches parts of 38 states, covering 10 in their entirety — and within that wide rim, anyone can be subjected to a warrantless search at any time. In this signature longform reality check, Melissa del Bosque digs into the history of how Congress vested U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with alarming, far-reaching powers to search and detain even long-term residents who've never committed a crime at surprise, “suspicionless” checkpoints.
The Trauma of Everyday Gun Violence in New Orleans
Jimmie Briggs and Andre Lambertson · VICE · 官方页
This photojournalistic investigation into how gun violence affects black communities explores how living with that violence can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) just like experience with war can. But unlike with returning veterans, gun violence-plagued communities don’t get the funding or mental health resources to help them cope.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Scandals Catch Up to Private Chinese Hospitals, After Fortunes Are Made</span>
When we think of China, I suspect many people see a behemoth, ruled by a party that is able to do largely what it wants domestically. But as with all things (and perhaps more so in the case of China), the reality is far more complex, and Sui-Lee Wee's stories on the disorder and problems with China's healthcare system — from the inaccessibility of prescription drugs, to the crushing financial distress caused by health scares — offer evidence of that. It has been first-class journalism, illuminating a complex subject with nuance and care.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Hamzah AD 2018</span>
Kima Jones · Unruly Bodies/Medium · 官方页
This year, I read several different essay collections, and dozens of essays online, but this is the piece I keep returning to, the one I’ve thought about most. It is joy and pain, an elegy, a celebration. Every sentence vibrates with poetry. The image of a young daughter on a bicycle, a father’s favorite memory, a family that’s been separated by incarceration. The intimate details of the rituals of faith and grief, an inventory of the things a family sends for sustenance, when clearly it is love that sustains them. Listen: “Hamzah AD 2018” is a gift.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sign Here to Lose Everything</span>
Good investigative journalism can leave you with that curdled taste of outrage in your mouth, but only great journalism can introduce the world to a whole new kind of loan sharking. And it takes something really splendid to jump from a millionaire city marshal to a gangster named Jimmy Dimps, a Maltese Shih Tzu named Coco, a town called Canandaigua, a drug smuggler named Braun, actual piles of cash, bloody vomit, and 30,000 court cases. Faux and Mider's work is the best I've ever read on predatory lending.
Investigative Reporting
How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People
I will always associate 2018 as the year of the scammer. There’s been several great pieces of journalism published this year chronicling the exploits of the grifter. My favorite was Jessica Pressler’s exposé on The Cut that detailed the life of Anna Delvey, a woman who manages to furrow her way into New York’s elite social scene and then scam them into thinking she is a rich heirress. It can’t be easy diving into the background of a chronic liar but Jessica Pressler gets receipts from everyone from Anna’s father to Martin Shkreli, and weaves a fantastic story about what you can get away with if you can act rich enough.
Science and Technology
<span style="font-weight: 400;">They Know Seas Are Rising, but They’re Not Abandoning Their Beloved Cape Cod</span>尸体埋葬的地方
For more than a year, Meera Subramanian has been traversing the country for InsideClimate News, creating a series of vivid and wonderfully balanced portraits of small communities wrestling with the havoc of climate change (whether they admit it or not). This one from October, focused on an increasingly flood-washed area called Blish Point, stands out for me. It's a tapestry-like picture woven of relentlessly rising seas, threatened homes and businesses, the politics of climate change science, and pure, stubborn human reluctance to give up on a beloved way of coastal living.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Puerto (Very) Rico: The Newest Haven for the Super Rich</span>
Sometimes you just have to read a thing that makes you furious — not at the writer or the reporting (both of which, in this case, are fantastic), but at all the rich asshole subjects that inhabit it. And Jesse Barron’s dispatch from the nouveau riche tax haven has rich assholes in spades, and they are a bizarre bunch.
Best of 2018
Investigative Reporting
Lost in the Storm
I am going to use this opportunity, which Longreads has graciously (and somewhat surprisingly) granted me, to share another gut-punching narrative investigation. Sheri Fink’s “Lost in the Storm” — also set in Texas, also involving a husband and his deceased wife — showcases not only the highest level of reporting acuity, but an inherent understanding that investigative reporting doesn’t have to be dry and clinical; it can read like a thriller, stab your heart like a love story, and twist the knife like a tragedy. And with Fink’s riveting multimedia account of Hurricane Harvey, that’s exactly what we get. But it’s not really about the storm at all; rather, it’s about how the institutions tasked with protecting residents during a natural disaster failed at the highest level. For a story, on its face, about how calling 911 during a hurricane can be unreliable, I sure came away feeling that I had, instead, read a tale about love and loss, desperation and determination — about how one man’s adoration for his wife wasn’t enough to save her life during Houston’s historic flood. (A side note: The Daily podcast did a tremendous job translating Fink’s story into a nail-biting audio experience; I highly recommend reading the story and then listening to the episode.)
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Code Red</span>
Over the past couple years questions of if, when, and how workers at technology companies might unionize have loomed large. The nature of these companies (how many people they employ, the wide variety of work those people do, the tech sector’s traditionally anti-union stance) has made those questions complex, to put it lightly. Alex Press’s reporting on organizing efforts among tech workers did a wonderful job of explaining that complexity, looking at the history of organizing at tech companies, and laying out some of what might be next.
The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail
This is my hands-down favorite business story of the year. It is at once a murder mystery, a thickly naturalistic portrait of an immigrant population, and the story of a neighborhood and its underground subculture. It makes excellent use of multimedia and found imagery. It is a devastating profile of one woman’s life, and, finally, an argument for the decriminalization of prostitution. This piece was original, well-reported, visual, well-told, and remarkable for its implicit political conclusions.
Best of 2018
Sports Writing
Everyone Believed Larry Nassar
A thoroughly reported, devastating reconstruction of what might be the most important sports story in recent history: how Larry Nassar sexually abused hundreds of young women and not only got away with it, but thrived in the gymnastics community.
Investigative Reporting
The Delay
Rachel Monroe · Esquire · 官方页
The investigative pieces that stuck with me this year had a theme: people whose lives were caught up in systems meant to prevent harm, but that ended up causing harm. The first of those was written by one of my favorite long-form journalists, Rachel Monroe, about the disappearance of 12-year-old Ashlynn Mike on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. It's a complex story that shows how well-intentioned systems meant to help children aren't applied equally to Native communities. In this case, the incident of one child going missing led to a bureaucratic game of telephone between the Navajo Nation Police, the FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the New Mexico State Police. This isn't only a story about a girl who fell through the cracks, it's a story that waves a flag, warning that it will happen again if something doesn't change.
Best of 2018
Sports Writing
The Search for Jackie Wallace
On the Friday before the Super Bowl, The Times-Picayune dropped this tremendous profile of former NFL player and New Orleans native Jackie Wallace and his heartrending — and apparently ongoing — struggle with homelessness and drug abuse. The story got its start in 1990, when photographer Ted Jackson came across Wallace living in a camp underneath Interstate 10. Jackson photographed him for a story that ran that year, which seemed to lead to Wallace being rescued from the streets and addiction. But this is where the story begins, as Jackson loses touch with Wallace over the years and details his search for him over the next couple of decades. There's so much to love here, starting with the care Jackson and the Times-Picayune put into showing how drugs can unravel a life and into asserting the fundamental humanity of Wallace. Jackson also subtly shows there's more to his relationship with Wallace — a reminder that reporting doesn't have to be merely transactional — and much more to Wallace than his troubles. It's surprising in all sorts of ways, but especially in how humanizing it is of Wallace.
Best of 2018
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans</span>
Peter Whoriskey · The Washington Post · 官方页
Parables of economic class in the financial system don’t get much clearer than this. Whoriskey found that a company owned by private equity firm Warburg Pincus occupies a “fertile niche” in the U.S. economy, mass-mailing checks to strangers with the understanding that some are desperate enough to cash them. The story highlights interest rates as high as 36 percent and fine print that forces the borrowers to pay the companies’ legal costs if they go to court for nonpayment. The punchline, though, is the identity of Warburg Pincus’s president: Timothy Geithner, who had condemned predatory lenders during his stint as Obama’s treasury secretary.
Profiles
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Jerry and Marge Go Large</span>
Jason Fagone · Huffington Post Highline · 官方页
To Gerald “Jerry” Selbee, an “intellectually restless” dyslexic cereal box designer from Battle Creek Michigan, everything in the world was a puzzle to be solved. At age 64, Selbee's mathematical mind discovered a loophole in the Michigan Lottery's “Winfall” game. He figured he'd test his lottery strategy as something fun to do to in retirement. Jason Fagone wrote 11,000 words about how Jerry and Marge Selbee won $27 million gaming the Michigan Lottery over nine years and this piece has it all in a winning combination. As you root for the working man who finds a way to win against a big government entity, you too savor the thrill of solving a tough puzzle to make your lottery dream come true. This is longform at its finest.
Food Writing
Crying in H MartH Mart 里哭了
Those of us who like to read food writing are probably all tired of the Great Cliché: misty memories of grandma in the kitchen, stirring a pot of fragrant, utterly authentic stew from the Old Country. At the same time, food remains such a useful symbol of our entangled connections to the families and cultures that made us. The reminiscence of a meal includes barely recoverable flavors and scents, ephemeral gestures of care, and, occasionally, flashes of perfect belonging.
Science and Technology
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How Forlini’s Survives the Instagram Horde</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Forlini 如何在 Instagram 部落中生存</span>
Instagram has fundamentally changed where and why we visit the places we do. Alex Vadukul's piece on New York Italian restaurant Forlini's taps into this idea. He perfectly captures how one establishment's demographics can change over time. One group of patrons goes for the food and convenience — Forlini's is next to the courthouse — while another prefers it as a backdrop for Instagram photos. Vadukul includes incredible quotes, too, especially the one in which a Forlini's owner marvels at how influencers manage to drink alcohol and stay thin. I wonder that, too.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">God Is in the Machine</span>
Carl Miller · The Times Literary Supplement · 官方页
Whether it’s your social media feed, prison sentence, or driverless car, our world is increasingly governed by algorithms. The terrifying thing is that we’re quickly approaching a horizon after which no one will be able to explain the code used or decisions made to build these things. This sobering excerpt from Carl Miller’s book, The Death of the Gods: The new global power grab, makes startlingly clear our ignorance of the machines we’ve hacked together. “Truth is dead,” as one programmer tells him. “There is only output.”
<span style="font-weight: 400;">See No Evil</span>
Miriam Posner · Logic · 官方页
Posner's piece on using software to make supply chains more transparent contains some powerful observations. It elegantly highlights how some characteristic features of modernity have harmed rather than helped this endeavor. Large scale, distributed networks like the internet and global supply chains might be more resilient and efficient than their predecessors, but they are almost impossible to regulate. Similarly, modular information design and the ‘black box architecture' of software helps scale businesses, but they can also obfuscate the decision making process of those in charge, leading to a lack of accountability.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War</span>“体制有病”：足球如何忽视黑人教练
Facebook had a bad year, culminating most damningly in a New York Times’ report in November that showed the company’s inability to safeguard the platform from nefarious parties trying to influence the 2016 election, as well as its unwillingness to take responsibility and make fixes. But the insidiousness of Facebook in the U.S. dwarfs what’s happening overseas. Davey Alba, writing for BuzzFeed News, illustrates how Rodrigo Duterte and his autocratic regime in the Philippines leveraged the platform to disseminate false news and propaganda, exacerbating the carnage inflicted by his war on drugs and dismantling many of the country’s democratic structures. It’s a terrifying example of what happens when our biggest fears of the unregulated sprawl of Facebook are realized.
Crime Reporting
The Man Who Captures Criminals for the DEA by Playing Them
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee · The New Yorker · 官方页
Why actor Spyros Enotiades told his story to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee I don’t know (there must surely be a bounty on his head), but the storytelling was extraordinary. Undercover capers don’t get better than this.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The B-Side of Blackness</span>
Zandria Felice Robinson · The Believer · 官方页
2018 was chaotic, mournful, elegiac, with a seemingly unending avalanche of losses and disorienting highs and lows. Much is unresolved. In America, our moral crisis may have been years in the making, but right now, it is all especially noisy, and pronounced, with no real end to the nastiness in sight. At the start of the year, Trump slurred Haitians while rescinding deportation protections put in place after the 2010 earthquake. Last month, Cindy Hyde Smith won an election in Mississippi, the state with the highest number of lynchings in history, despite, (mayb, because of), making public comments about a “public hanging” and laughing it off. The midterms' “blue wave” brought us Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tahlib, and Lauren Underwood as well as the defeat of Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke and a new awareness of voter suppression.
Best of 2018
Sports Writing
They Are the Champions塞斯·罗根现在是老板
Both of these stories are extraordinary examples of my favorite kind of sportswriting — the kind that uses sports' near-universal appeal and reach to illuminate social and political issues. “The Children of Central City” uses the lens of one youth football team in New Orleans to examine violence in one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods; as its former coach explains early in the multi-part series, he's had 28 former players be shot and killed over a 14 year span. The football team is a jumping off point through which the authors (and director — there's a corresponding documentary) can explore how the trauma that comes from growing up surrounded by violence impacts kids' lives, and how football is an escape, if an imperfect one. It's a thoughtful, empathetic take on a story that's too often left unexamined because it's wrongly perceived as inevitable.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye</span>
This fall, I taught my freshman composition classes through a pop culture lens. Many of my students had been indoctrinated with the false promises of the five-paragraph essay and began the year with the certainty first-person point of view had no place in professional or academic writing. After I assigned this personal essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates during week one, most, if not all, of them changed their minds. Coates dissects the celebrity of Kanye West by interweaving personal narrative, meticulous research, and deft cultural and political commentary. It’s a remarkable model for what the personal essay can accomplish. How Coates ties the personal to the societal to the universal is hard to match. Coates’s ease in presenting West’s cross-generational relevance also presented an important point of connection between my students and me. Regardless of the age gap, we had all grown up on Kanye’s music. Our mutual familiarity opened up an important conversation about the divide between art and the artist, as well as the sticky social, cultural, and political complexities of fame. Throughout the semester, I found my students returning to this piece. It became a common point of reference. Certainly this essay was a pleasure to teach, but it also had much to teach me, and for that I am grateful.
Arts and Culture
<span style="font-weight: 400;">‘That had to hurt.’ Lessons learned on the diving board in summer’s final days.</span>
Taylor Telford · The Washington Post · 官方页
The diving board in this story is ominous, a tongue. The swimming pool below it “a churning ecosystem of youth.” We are dropped into the summer glow, in with the sunbathers and the divers and the lifeguard, and get to spend a few unforgettable moments inside this day with them, as readers — a world rendered in the third dimension by the sights and sounds and in the movements captured by Taylor Telford. The water dripping off shiny skin, the concrete blazing, people hopping back and forth so their feet don't burn. This story is wonderful, from the lede to the end, and though it’s a short story that reads like a more ambitious one, it never commits the sin of boring writing: it’s always entertaining, and it demands to be read all the way through. I marvel at the little observations and how she uses them, at what it took to write this and how many people there she must've interviewed to make it feel like she didn't need to interview a soul. That she must've stared at people’s faces, toes, hands, the concrete of the pool itself, the counting of steps, the height of the board, the shadows and the sun, the way people were positioned and how they were talking to one another, a great reminder of the type of observation required for this kind of work, and how fun and vivid nonfiction can be.
Sports Writing
Drew Brees is Hiding in Plain Sight德鲁·布里斯 (Drew Brees) 隐藏在众目睽睽之下
Bishop tackles the age-old question of what makes greatness — or even the greatest — and why it can be so easy to overlook. Take Drew Brees, the subject of this piece. At the same time, without being didactic, Bishop reminds us of something else: as seriously as we take all the records, sports are fun. And so is this story.
Investigative Reporting
Do Men Enter Bathtubs on Hands and Knees? An Investigation
I want to completely change course for a moment and highlight a very different kind of investigative story: It's a piece of humor writing based on a very real message board post left on BabyCenter, a resource site for parents. I don't want to give too much away by explaining how this message board post is investigated, but I do want to say that the writer, Kelly Conaboy, consistently writes pieces full of heart and humor that are a welcome escape from a crushing news cycle that usually involves our president and his tweets. I thank her for that, and for writing this hilarious story.
Blood Will Tell
Pamela Colloff · ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine · 官方页
The best investigative reporting doesn’t feel like reporting — it feels like storytelling. When we meet Joe Bryan and his murdered wife Mickey in Pamela Colloff’s “Blood Will Tell” (Joe — ding ding ding! — is charged with the killing), they don’t feel like examples of an injustice, but rather the injustice itself, a living and breathing thing, with all the sordid facts woven into a captivating narrative. Colloff is best known not only for her reporting grit, but also her ability to craft a compelling tale out of dry police reports, crime scene photographs, newspaper clippings, and the like. It takes a truly gifted writer to transform thousands of pages of paper into a real story. And that’s what she has done here with “Blood Will Tell.” But you’ll never get lost in the lyrical prose, of which the piece abounds, because Colloff, who spent over a year reporting the story, doesn’t let the bigger picture escape her: That bloodstain pattern analysis, a forensic “science” which has lent itself much use to prosecutors not only in this Texas-based case but also in dozens of other cases around the country, is unreliable at best and egregiously incompetent at worse. I left this story convinced that the prosecutors had committed a grave injustice — that it wasn’t Joe Bryan who had blood on his hands, but them.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bad Romance</span>新共和
Jeong’s story is about a lot of things: group chats, scams, friends who are no longer friends, trademark law, jpegs of sexy firefighters. All of these elements are the sum parts of a bit of high drama within the self-published romance author community called Cockygate. Few people can boil down the nitty gritty of tech as well as Jeong, and even the byzantine systems of Amazon come through clear.
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations of Sexual Misconduct</span>
It's hard not to think about impactful journalism without coming up with Ronan Farrow's name. We're still seeing the reverberations of his August piece on CBS's Les Moonves and his pattern of sexual misconduct. The piece, and a follow-up story in September, was well-reported, and the stories from the women were compelling. More importantly, Mr. Farrow showed how having a sexual harasser at the top of a company cascaded down into the lower ranks, enabling the behavior of other executives. Mr. Farrow has been relentless in speaking truth to power, and all of his stories have been must-reads.
Crime Reporting
Jerry and Marge Go Large
I write about unusual heists from middle-America, so I was game for this Michigan lotto scam story from FOIA-bandit Jason Fagone. In crime writing it’s the characters who make for a good yarn, and I was all-in on this Mom and Pop who used brain-power to beat the system, and the odds.
Investigative Reporting
Dirty Gold, Clean Cash迈阿密的黄金贸易如何助长拉丁美洲的帮派、枪支和利润
This Miami Herald investigation looking at how billions of dollars worth of gold from Latin American narco-traffickers illegally made it into South Florida was an impressive feat of storytelling that required a large team of reporters, editors, and visual journalists collaborating together. Very few news organizations are able to dedicate significant amounts of resources to these kinds of projects anymore, and this one was well worth it, incorporating animation, interactive graphics, and video into a compelling narrative explaining how drug money was laundered into clean cash using circuitous routes. The ill-gotten gold is used to make our jewelry, coins, and smartphones while on another continent, workers burn toxic chemicals to mine the gold, poisoning themselves and a rainforest locals use to farm fish.
Arts and Culture
Drawing a Line in the Sand Over River Rights莎拉·芬纳蒂的《亲爱的小女巫》| Rkvry文学季刊
Maybe it’s because I was born with an innate sense of communitarian justice. Maybe it’s because, at the age of 9, I was traumatized for several months after a cranky neighbor screamed me out of her yard when I attempted to sate my (natural, innocent, child’s) curiosity by opening her much-larger-than-usual mailbox. Maybe it’s because, as an adult, I now know that the Venn diagram of people who are really into their private property and people who really suck is basically a circle.
Sports Writing
Juan Martín del Potro Strikes Back
Juan Martín del Potro is one of tennis's most popular — and inspiring and tragic — figures. Del Potro won the U.S. Open in 2009, beating Roger Federer, and then his wrists began to fray. Cooper Jones tells the story of his long journey back. This is a beautifully written profile, an insightful portrait of the player on the court and the person off it — but it is also, most movingly, a meditation on pain.
Best of 2018
Crime Reporting
The End of Evil
I published a book and wrote a lot of my own pieces in 2018 — including one for this site — so, oddly, I didn't keep as good track of longform reporting produced by others (podcasts, however, that's a different story, but this is Longreads, not Longlistens). But I keep returning to Sarah Marshall's “The End of Evil” because it makes fresh a story long consigned to easy tropes. Marshall, who also co-hosts the stellar podcast You're Wrong About... and is one of my favorite true crime writers, gives voice to the myriad of women and girls Bundy murdered, shows him as something far less than an evil mastermind, and demonstrates why, with particular clarity, “the longer you spend inside this story, the less sense you can find.”
Food Writing
Can We Honor Your Service with a Steak, Malibu Chicken, or the Jumpo Crispy Shrimp?退伍军人节，Sizzler 提供免费牛排以表彰服务
This piece encompasses so much that is lovely and so much that is brutal. On its surface Brown and her father go to Sizzler's on Veterans' Day for the free steak, a promotion to honor those who've served. In that, we are placed in midst of all that is heartbreaking about America, with its promise of opportunity juxtaposed against its exploitative reality. Brown and her father, in brief moments that punctuate long silences on the subject, discuss his service in the Vietnam War. In this essay, Brown explores her complicated feelings on the subject, her relationship with her father and, perhaps, the marketing machine he inadvertently fought for.
Crime Reporting
The Disappeared
When eleven high school students went missing in a single county on Long Island in just two years, law enforcement shrugged. Most of the teenagers who disappeared were recent transplants from Central America, and many of them were last seen heading into the woods, lured by the promise of weed. The Suffolk County police department responded with stomach-churning indifference, telling frantic parents that their children had simply run away.
Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women谁想射杀大象？
In a series of sweet, anonymous snapshots, Shiho Fukada talks to and photographs a growing cohort of Japanese seniors: “otherwise law-abiding elderly women” who have found a solution to the loneliness of aging in the reliable comforts of prison. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior, Fukada reports, and 90 percent of them are arrested for shoplifting. From the simple things they steal (rice, cold medicine, a frying pan) to the circumstances they're trying to escape (bedridden or violent spouses, invisibility, loss, and financial strain), the details of this story make structural inadequacies to meet the unmet social and healthcare needs of an aging population all too clear.
Profiles
<span style="font-weight: 400;">William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump</span>
Jelani Cobb · The New Yorker · 官方页
The intersection of class, race, and religion - what could be more fraught in these times? Cobb's rare combination of quiet wisdom and a steady journalistic hand is the perfect guide. He profiles Protestant minister William Barber, the progressive activist and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, with thorough reporting and sensitivity, letting facts speak for themselves but humanizing the subject as no fact alone can do. I've been part of the Poor People's Campaign at the ground level and was heartened to learn here that more than one respected source calls Barber “the real thing.” But, whether or not Barber is your political comrade, you will learn that he believes himself to be your spiritual brother - a refreshing fusion of political and moral force on the sometimes god-averse left.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">My Father’s Body, At Rest and in Motion</span>
I was already obsessed with death and dying when I read physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee's brilliant braided and reported essay in the January 8th issue of The New Yorker. I had no idea how much more relevant it would become for me in a few months' time, when suddenly my 89-year-old stepfather would fall ill and spend the last month of his life in a kind of medically-induced limbo. Balancing empathy with journalistic and scientific precision, Mukherjee artfully considers the body's proclivity for homeostasis, which kept his elderly father's failing body alive for longer than seemed to make sense, after he had begun failing, and falling.
Profiles
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s Battering Ram</span>新共和
I lost count of how many times Paige Williams was obliged to deploy terms like “inaccurately,” “falsely,” “erroneous,” and “lie” in this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What’s remarkable about Trump’s press secretary though is that, at least here, those words are rarely used to describe statements by Sanders herself — but rather of those whose lies she must justify. It’s also what makes Sanders a cipher of our time. How does someone who vehemently claims to possess high moral character rationalize defending the indefensible? Put another way: How does one become that person? Williams’s search for an answer takes her to her subject’s native Arkansas, where in the ’90s the daughter of then governor Mike Huckabee “was given Chelsea Clinton’s former bedroom” in the governor’s mansion, and Little Rock “residents and journalists mocked the Huckabees as rubes.” Later, during a visit with a lifelong friend, we catch a rare glimpse of the press secretary uncoiled and away from the podium, “wearing tropical-print shorts and flip-flops, with a blue blouse and her pearls.” Details like these are certainly humanizing. But Williams isn’t here to vindicate Sanders’s transgressions. In 9,293 words she deftly dismantles the notion that the president’s “battering ram” might walk away from any of this with clean hands. “A press secretary who had an abiding respect for First Amendment freedoms likely would have resigned once it became clear that Trump intended to steamroll his way through the Constitution,” Williams offers early in the piece. “But Sanders stayed.”
Food Writing
Dear Baby Witch莎拉·芬纳蒂的《亲爱的小女巫》| Rkvry文学季刊
I read this wrapped in grief. We’d just unexpectedly had to put a magical dog down. And I was going through a phase of hating myself taking diet pills and checking my weight frequently. The idea of eating seemed too close to letting love in, and letting love in seemed like it was reserved for someone who was not me, and Sara Finnerty wrote this beautiful essay and came to my door bearing a platter of homemade Chicken Parmesan and very specific heating instructions, and reading about a young girl kneading gnocchi in the basement with her grandmother was just the reminder I needed to continue to reach for whatever neat thing might be around the corner.
Arts and Culture
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Living With Slenderman</span>
I'm one of those cynical pedants who feels especially exasperated by click-baity social media posts that swear that whatever they're linking to is the best thing you'll read all year. More often than is probably (definitely) healthy for me, I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking, “it's April, my friend, and this year has eight whole months left in it!” So it's probably poetic justice that the piece that wound up being my favourite long-form essay of the year was published way back in January.
Investigative Reporting
Best of 2018
Arts and Culture
<span style="font-weight: 400;">I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life</span>
I have three pieces for you to read at this closing of the year. They all trade in perception and value.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">American Manufacturing Doesn’t Have to Die</span>为什么企业不采取更多措施来拯救美国制造业？
Haggerty turns what could have been yet another day in the life of the average American CEO into a counterintuitive meditation on what it means — what it costs, and what it takes — for a product to be Made in America. She starts with all the reasons why a story like this would be boring to read, then debunks each assumption to reveal meaningful questions about what exactly we want to make in this country, who we want doing the making, and what sort of job security we want coming back home. She pits the promises of benevolent billionaires, conscious capitalism, and ethical consumerism against the betrayals of automation, income inequality, and the legacies of slavery. It's a story, ultimately, “about doing something instead of doing nothing because doing nothing is easier.” Individual consumers' personal choices may not scale, but integrity and loyalty tend not to scale, either. And if the human beings behind business decisions have their flaws, the ideal of growth does, too.
Science and Technology
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Can Dirt Save the Earth?</span>我客厅里的意外日托
Readers may be more familiar with Nathaniel Rich's historic New York Times Magazine story from this summer, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, than with this epic piece on dirt that came out back in April, but Moises Velasquez-Manoff literally redefined on-the-ground reporting — on soil itself. This story helped me dust off all of my murky grade school memories of nutrient cycles while teaching me anew why these basic, natural processes are so relevant to every sustainable challenge we face. Maybe I'm just a fan of solarpunk, but I love reading about known, practical mitigation methods that are worth doing anyway, even past all of our many missed opportunities and catastrophic points of no return. Carbon farming may not be enough, but what it can do might still be miraculous. Stories that neither sugarcoat real options nor deny that any exist at least give us some time back — if not enough for a full second chance, then enough to do something more meaningful, ultimately, than wait.
Sports Writing
The Children of Central City
Jonathan Bullington and Richard A. Webster · The Times-Picayune · 官方页
Best of 2018
Food Writing
Houston Is the New Capital of Southern Cool
This piece gave me new perspective on a city I dearly love, a place I wrote about for the Oxford American — early in this era of Houston-is-Cool revelations. I was proud of that piece and the insights I offered. But this essay is so dang much better. It’s smart and circuitous and searching, a string of observations that could be used to describe Houston itself.
Sports Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Alone at Sea</span>“这就像一个战区”：波特兰将芬太尼合法化后发生了什么
Aleksander Doba has kayaked the Atlantic Ocean three times, and each crossing has been more dangerous than the last. Weil's profile of the Polish native is an engrossing read of his trans-Atlantic trips, and why the 71 year old continues to push his body and psyche to such extreme limits. As he explains his reasoning to Weil, “I do not want to be a little gray man.”
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million</span>
All good business stories are about people, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner's piece on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop empire followed this maxim to a T. Many stories on Ms. Paltrow caricature her, but Ms. Brodesser-Akner's article gave me new insights into Ms. Paltrow and the challenges facing her business. Ms. Brodesser-Akner's eye for detail is amazing, and the piece was written with so much finesse. This line, in particular, is seared in my memory: “She wore a white shirred-neck dress by Tibi that would be advertised in the Goop newsletter the next week as she stood in front of her stove, steaming clams and grilling bread in her devastating kitchen. She wore no apron and cooked the meal herself right in front of me. She wore no apron and cooked it herself right in front of me and drank a whiskey on the rocks.” As with all great stories, the quotes just sang.
Crime Reporting
Blood Cries OutAI 能否完善 IPA？
In the book Popular Crime by Bill James, the author writes that the phrase “something terrible has happened” is “the best title ever for a crime book…those words turn the ‘crime story’ inside out by exposing the human beings standing on what otherwise appears to be a vast and grisly stage.”
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Intrusions</span>
One of my favorite essayists is Melissa Febos, whose symphonic writing is simultaneously intimate — grounded in memory, place, physicality — and grand, encompassing politics, theory, and history. She's in top form in “Intrusions,” from Tin House, Issue 77. After a tense scene in which she's propositioned by an unseen man outside her first-floor window, Febos unpacks the voyeuristic behavior of predatory men. She analyzes how cultural touchstones from Hitchcock to Stranger Things romanticize peeping Toms as lovesick loners with sweet intentions, then draws on first-hand accounts and statistics to reveal the terrifying and terrible truth that this behavior is often prelude to assault. As a straight white man, I grew up consuming the noxious culture she deconstructs, and with a father whose advice before a middle school dance consisted of “stare her down, then get in her space.” As Febos writes, patriarchy is “an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently inside our minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own jewelry.” Word by word her work calls it out, for which I'm grateful.
Investigative Reporting
The Peacock Patriarchy
David Usborne · Esquire · 官方页
Every single one of last year’s best-of lists — or every single one worth reading anyway — celebrated the feat of reporting that was Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s New York Times piece exposing Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator, and the extreme efforts he and the enablers around him took to silence those he harmed. It’s hard to believe that was only a year ago. With focused, relentless reporting efforts, Kantor and Twohey took down one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and, in the process, kick-started a movement that’s unlike anything previously seen. This year, more reporters have turned their attention to the #MeToo movement and I’d argue that some of the best investigative work being done now is still building on what Kantor and Twohey — and Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker — started.
Sports Writing
Most Dominating Athlete of 2018: Simone Biles
Danyel Smith · ESPN the Magazine · 官方页
Danyel Smith's ESPN the Magazine cover story of Simone Biles was one of the most impactful pieces of sports writing I read this year. After I finished it, I felt like I knew Biles. Smith got Biles to open up, to even admit the fear she feels while competing on bars (what Olympic gold-medal winning athlete readily admits fear?), which is a kudos to Smith's skills as a reporter. Although I don't know Smith personally, I felt like I could hear her voice throughout the piece. She seamlessly interwove history and culture and context and sport to put together one of the most versatile sports profiles I've ever read. My favorite paragraph really sums up Smith's brilliance as a journalist, and Biles' genius as a gymnast: “But no matter how sparkly her leotard, she's a killer as stone cold as David Ortiz or Robert Horry ever was. She creates each time she competes. Plus, Biles will run the score up on you with a red cheer bow on a ponytail pulled higher than J-Lo's.”
Food Writing
The Tyranny and the Comfort of Government Cheese
Bobbi Dempsey · TASTE · 官方页
I grew up in poverty. I grew up with my mother’s bounced check, a scarlet letter, taped to a wall behind the check-out at the Food King. I grew up washing out stains in the bathroom sink with hot water and a bar of soap, scrubbing until my knuckles bled, sharpening pencils with a steak knife, sucking on Kool-Aid and Country Time Lemonade off my licked wet fingers dipped into a sandwich bag. I want to tell these stories, these stories need to be told, these stories are my bones, and I’m so delighted that food outlets like TASTE are publishing them.
Best of 2018
Arts and Culture
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Tears ‘R’ Us: The World’s Biggest Toy Store Didn’t Have to Die</span>
Susan Berfield · Eliza Ronalds-Hannon, Matthew Townsend, and Lauren Coleman-Lochner, Bloomberg Businessweek · 存稿官方页存档
It’s easy to assume that the decline of Toys “R” Us, which closed all its stores in the US and UK earlier this year, was inevitable. Wasn’t it just the latest chain retailer to lose the price and convenience war with Amazon, Target, and Walmart? This Businessweek story delves deep into the company’s history and filings to determine that financial mismanagement was the actual culprit. The reporting is dense, but accessible, and explains exactly how debt — both the amount Toys “R” Us borrowed and the way it was structured – triggered the demise of this iconic company.
Best of 2018
Investigative Reporting
Targeted: A Family and the Quest to Stop the Next School Shooter目标：一个家庭和阻止下一个校园枪击案凶手的任务
In Bethany Barnes' brilliant investigation for The Oregonian, she speaks to fears of people across the country: with school shootings happening at a constant pace, how do you figure out which kid will be the next mass shooter? Barnes embeds with the family of “Sanders,” a Portland teenager who school officials have singled out, and watches as the boy and his parents unravel under more and more scrutiny. Any other reporter might not have been able to tackle the topic so deftly, but Barnes — as always — balances humanity with investigative detail.
Profiles
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The mystery of Tucker Carlson</span>塔克·卡尔森之谜
This was a really good year for profiles, despite their death (reported annually). So good that it was very hard to narrow it down, and so I was very grateful that I couldn't pick any from the New York Times, where I work, which really helped narrow it down. (Though you've just got to read this one.)
Crime Reporting
Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out
This is fantastic longform that embodies what I think social justice reportage should be today. It combines an under-heard, first-person voice with a gripping true story about one of the most crucial issues in America today, incarceration. Betts, who is a lawyer and a poet, also gives his tale an unexpected literary feel, with a comprehensive gloss on the sociology behind juvenile crime, prisons, jailhouse lawyers, and the limited social possibilities for ex-felons.
Arts and Culture
<span style="font-weight: 400;">For One Last Night, Make It a Blockbuster Night</span>
I didn’t know I needed a gorgeously written feature about Blockbuster nostalgia until this one popped up on my newsfeed. Turns out, I really needed it. All movie-lovers probably needed it. Certainly, all kids from small towns who once combed the store’s white shelves each weekend needed it. Justin Heckert’s superb story for The Ringer about one of the last Blockbusters in Alaska — where the once-hegemonic rental chain went to die — is an elegy for a distinctly 20th century way of consuming culture. Transactional, tactile, conversational, illuminating, and relatable. Rooted in real places, yet also in our imaginations. Situated at the intersection of the fantastic and the mundane. Like my favorite movies, I could rewind this story and read it again, and again, and again.
Business Writing
Evictionland
This autobiographical, EHRP-supported story is both a reported story of people being uprooted from their homes due to gentrification and the reporter Joe Williams' own eviction. The piece succeeds particularly, I think, because it's personal and thickly informational. Indeed, I think it augments Matthew Desmond’s outstanding work on this problem in the book, Evicted, adding a wrenching memoiristic element.
Investigative Reporting
Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis
Villarosa's unflinching examination of giving birth while black in America has stayed with me. We lose black newborns and black mothers at astonishing rates; in the U.S., black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants, Villarosa writes, and black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. Why? The piece lays out evidence for a theory that black women bear the trauma of systemic racism in their very physiology — that years of exposure to the stress of discrimination wreaks havoc on a body, and might contribute to pregnancy complications. Just as lethal, Villarosa's reporting demonstrates, is the frequency and callousness with which medical staff routinely — and disproportionately — dismiss the complaints of black pregnant women and ignore warning signs.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Denial by a Different Name</span>安娜·斯图布尔菲尔德奇案
If U.S. liberals are looking for someone to blame for inaction on climate change, we have an obvious, easy target: the science-deniers epitomized by our current president. Aronoff undercuts that simple answer by traveling to Germany, where climate change deniers are marginalized but proposals to confront the problem are still radically inadequate. While politicians remain mired in debates over whether to do anything, companies like ExxonMobil are two steps ahead, funding research on technocratic “solutions” that would mostly protect their bottom lines.
Arts and Culture
Science and Technology
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Survival of the Richest</span>
Douglas Rushcoff · Medium · 官方页
There's a lot of bad science writing about transhumanism − rich people wanting to live forever by uploading their minds to computers, etc. But Rushcoff explores the very human drive for a post-human future by elegantly tracing links between the failures of global capitalism, the growing divide between rich and poor, the ongoing climate catastrophe, and what transhumanism is really all about: escape. It's the best thinking I've read on the subject, and the piece stands out as a clear articulation of how some imagine − or fail to imagine − our digital future. I'm still haunted by the moment when a super-wealthy CEO who has paid to pick Rushcoff's brain about “the future of technology” asks, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
Arts and Culture