89 篇
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Crane Wife</span>
C.J. Hauser · The Paris Review · 官方页
I don't know even know where to begin with this essay. It was only published five months ago and I bring it up every chance I get when talking about how to craft a personal narrative in a structurally unique way. Who would've thought that the end of an engagement combined with the discovery of cranes and their behavior would have that much in common? Hauser beautifully blends this moment of coming into her own as a newly single woman who's studying cranes as she reflects on all the times in her previous relationship where she had red flags to leave. Emotionally resonant, vulnerable, and smart, I hope Hauser continues to publish as much as she wants.
Food Writing
Toward a Theory of American Festival Cusine是时候认真对待美国公平食品了
The amazing team of writer Meghan McCarron and photographer Gary He have been killing the Presidential Candidate Foodstuff beat this year. Despite the differences in their respective mediums, they share a distinct and tremendously exciting style: sharp-edged, slightly removed, warmly analytical, with an almost formalist sense of romance. Of the many pieces that came out of their time together at the Iowa State Fair (including the riotous “Why We Never Tire of Politicians Stuffing Their Faces”), my favorite was McCarron’s clever assessment of the mobile fried food economy, and the slippery notion of “real America,” deepened and made more golden with He’s almost surreal photos of funnel cake and turkey legs.
Arts and Culture
<i>Psycho</i>
Within the world of writing, criticism gets short shrift. Sure, maybe I’m just saying that because I’m a critic, but I do believe it’s true, both financially and in terms of how our society assigns value. Despite the ongoing journalism layoffs and consolidation bloodbath, a lot of great arts and culture writing was published this year. I don’t know if these two pieces were the best — I find myself utterly unable to make such judgments — but both are excellent examples of criticism at its best. And both have stuck with me.
Sports Writing
The Unbreakable Bond
A beautifully written, wrenching story from one of the best feature writers in America. It’s about football, sure, but it’s actually about a son and the mother who raised him — a mother who was blinded in her late 20s by a bucket of bleach mixed with lye. DeAndre Hopkins was 10 years old at the time. Mina Kimes’ brilliant prose tells an incredible story of resilience and love. It’ll stick with you for quite some time after: If her son scores, she explains, her daughter will help her stand up and lean over the barrier so she can accept the football from Hopkins. This ritual serves as a reminder that, while she can't see her son, he still sees her - and he wants the world to see her too.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Can a $1,300 baby bed make me a better mom?</span>
Alissa Walker · Curbed · 官方页
If you become a new parent, you will very soon hear people talk about the Snoo, the celebrity-backed, venture capital-funded $1,300 smart bassinette that supposedly cracks the biggest of all parenting codes: getting infants to sleep. But in what purports to be a look at this particular consumer product ends up being a thoughtful examination of how the structures we exist within, particularly in the United States, make sleeping, working, and keeping a baby healthy and alive all incompatible with each other. While this dilemma creates a consumer market of desperate parents, there is no product that alone can fix it.
Best of 2019
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Lesson Plan: This Is Not a Drill</span>
Jasminne Mendez · Queen Mob's Tea House · 官方页
On Facebook author Jasminne Mendez said “Lesson Plan” came out of “an attempt at capturing what I've felt and what I can only imagine feeling.” Art at its best, at its height, at its most vivid brings us into an experience so deeply one cannot help but feel the effects of the work in our marrow. “Lesson Plan” captures something unique and raw through structure, precision, poetics, and accuracy of what an initially conventional turned unconventional school day looks like when it comes to a new “normal”: active shooters/drills. How can we keep kids safe? Is that even possible anymore? What pressures are educators under? What and who gets lost when these events occur? When will this kind of terror end? The refrain of “this is not a drill” pulsates throughout. Remember… remember… remember. The bare honesty of “Lesson Plan” exemplifies the kind of writing that inspires you to experiment with how to encapsulate and explore our reality, as distressing as it may be.
Investigative Reporting
Stories About My Brother关于我兄弟的故事
Gupta investigates her brother’s death with tenderness and intimacy, providing us with a rare glimpse into the way toxic masculinity affects men. She recounts childhood memories of her brother Yush and his evolving views on power and masculinity, which have been shaped by his family and his mostly white classmates and peers. As Gupta grows up, she embraces feminism, which her brother defines as a “female supremacy movement,” and from that point on, their relationship deteriorates. Gupta, haunted by her brother’s death, digs deep to push through the pain of mourning and discover the cause. When she interviews Yush’s friends, they reveal that he had deep-seated insecurities about his height which led him to seek out limb-lengthening surgery. Yush believed that being taller would make him richer and more successful. Instead, he died of a pulmonary embolism, one of the side risks of the limb-lengthening surgery. Gupta’s work is personal, revelatory, shocking and provides insight into an area where we need more work: the ways in which conventional ideas of masculinity and power harm men.
Sports Writing
Climate Change is Sabotaging the World’s Most Dangerous Canoe Race
Since 1952, the Molokaʻi Hoe — otherwise known as the world's most challenging canoe race — has annually enthralled 40,000 competitors off the coast of Oahu, but as Stinton explains in this deep-dive, the Molokaʻi Hoe is threatened not by modernity, analytics, and improved training but by climate change. It's an angle I have long thought about, specifically how the planet's warming will affect the Bonneville salt flats, and this piece succinctly explains how the overall warming of the waters through which the course flows could cause this race to forever be delayed — and with that, the impact on the culture and heritage of its competitors.
Food Writing
Le Colonial Is an Orientalist Specter
Soleil Ho · San Francisco Chronicle · 官方页
The image of the food critic as a stodgy white man or woman with resting jerk face here to maintain the Eurocentric status quo came to a stunning halt with Soleil Ho's review of the Vietnamese restaurant, Le Colonial. Soleil, an accomplished and controversial, smart-dressing intellectual whose interests extend into food, visual art, writing, and cultural critique, challenged the restaurant's proprietors beyond food. As a Vietnamese American and self-described queer woman, she challenged the French colonial decor, the yearning for colonial-era nostalgia in light of what those signifiers mean to a descendant of the colonized, as well as to those uninitiated in the socio-political world of Southeast Asia. Without losing the disciplined gaze of a food critic, this review put face forward to the reader ideas about culinary justice equal to questions about plating, taste, and concept. Would you want to eat in a space that reflected and honored the path to an unshakable trauma in the history of your family or peoplehood? In a time when diners are thinking about the “position” and packaging of their food, Ho modeled, in the hottest days of the culture wars, the fine line between concept and convenient stereotypes that unwittingly create a divide even before we dine.
Investigative Reporting
Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before It Happens?
Andrea Stanley · Cosmopolitan · 官方页
Who profiles the profilers? Cosmo’s Andrea Stanley, apparently. The FBI has long used profilers to identify serial killers and the like. But the subject of Stanley’s profile, who goes by K, specializes in the violent men spawned from online hate groups.
Music Writing
I Believe I Can Lie
Kimberlé Crenshaw · The Baffler · 官方页
In the wake of the edifice-toppling documentary Surviving R. Kelly, law professor and intersectional theorist Crenshaw analyzes the lyrics to Kelly’s answer song, “I Admit,” as an example of the “SOB (Save Our Brotha”) rhetorical strategy also employed by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when faced with accusations of sexual harassment.
Profiles
At 82, Glenda Jackson Commands the Most Powerful Role in Theater82 岁高龄的格伦达·杰克逊 (Glenda Jackson) 在戏剧界扮演最重要的角色
I enjoy Parul Sehgal’s criticism, so much so that it would be more accurate to say I’m a student of it. The work of my favorite writers and critics has a generous, teaching spirit. Beyond offering context, it allows the reader to participate, to bring her own experiences to bear, to look on a subject anew. It teaches her how to look. Sehgal's profile of actress Glenda Jackson on the occasion of a Broadway revival of King Lear appealed to me for its layers upon layers of study — on, among many things, aging, Shakespeare, Brexit, Britain's intra-War years. Of course, it also works beautifully as character study, illuminating the subject with intricate details of her physicality as a performer, (“You could make a study of the movement of Jackson’s right hand alone,” Sehgal writes), and on the mood and tenor of the subject-reporter relationship. I was taken with the spaces of refusal, where Jackson draws borders around herself. Sehgal's deft rendering of the words unsaid between the two reminded me how negative space is as essential to a portrait as its main image.
Crime Reporting
Bound by Statute
Ko Bragg and Melissa Lewis · Reveal · 官方页
When reporter Ko Bragg spotted a story about a 13-year-old who was being tried as an adult in Mississippi, she wondered if there were others like him. Her investigation, meticulously examined with data reporter Melissa Lewis, uncovered that nearly 5,000 children were charged as adults in the state in the last 25 years. They found that racial discrepancies abound: three in every four of the children are black; sentences for black minors tried as adults average twice as long as sentences for white minors charged as adults; and even when white kids are handed longer sentences, they're released much sooner than black kids.
Sports Writing
2019 Sportsperson of the Year: Megan Rapinoe
One of the best stories I read this year came in just under the wire, in SI’s Sportsperson of the Year issue in mid-December. Jenny Vrentas wrote a masterful piece on an athlete I thought I knew quite a bit about. But it became clear as I began reading this that there were layers to Megan Rapinoe I was totally unaware of, layers that made her even more intriguing both as an athlete and person. There’s a care and precision to the reporting and writing of this piece that comes through in each and every word. You can tell it’s important to Jenny that just the fourth unaccompanied woman to be named Sportsperson of the Year have her story told honestly and fairly. And she does just that.
Music Writing
The Poetic Consequences of K-Pop
Emily Yungmin Yoon · The Paris Review · 官方页
This deceptively modest memoir of being seen within the crowd of BTS fans speaks volumes about how pop can literally speak for its audience.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The State With the Highest Suicide Rate Desperately Needs Shrinks</span>
Monte Reel · Bloomberg Businessweek · 官方页
This isn’t a traditional business piece — in the sense that it’s not a profile of a kooky founder or a growing industry, or an investigation into corporate wrongdoing, or a capitalist reckoning. It’s a wrenching read about what happens when a job market/industry (in this case, mental health) slowly folds in on itself while demand for that industry’s services and providers grows dramatically. Monte Reel’s profile of the one psychiatrist in eastern Montana (Joan “Mutt” Dickson, whose grit will stick with you) covers so many other pressing American problems: addiction, guns, depression, anxiety, burnout. Reel’s portrait of Dickson’s work — and his mastery of the background forces at play — is a grim-but-captivating look at what the dearth of mental health resources in the rural and mountain West means.
Sports Writing
How the Harlem Globetrotters Integrated the NBA哈林篮球队如何融入 NBA
Earlier this year, Nusbaum debuted Sport Stories, a subscription-based newsletter which highlights oft-forgotten characters and incidents in sports history. This installment, from early November, is one of my favorites, in that it involves Goose Tatum, George Mikan, and Ermer Robinson, a World War II vet whose specialty was lofting one-handed shots thirty feet away from the basket (truly, THE OG Steph Curry). But what makes this Sports Stories' articlr so interesting is how it goes beyond the game, and gives credit to the Harlem Globetrotters for irrevocably altering the NBA: following this 1948 contest, in which the Harlem Globetrotters defeated the dynastic Minneapolis Lakers, the National Basketball League merged with the American Association of Basketball, and by 1953, three black players would make their professional NBA debut, a first for the league.
Investigative Reporting
What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane?
William Langewiesche · The Atlantic · 官方页
Best of 2019
Music Writing
How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music
Emily Lordi · The New Yorker · 官方页
In Emily Lordi’s insightful New Yorker feature, she illustrates how Hayes’s 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul was an exercise in Hayes commanding his own space — musically, sartorially, and physically. The album was both an act of resistance and healing during a time when Hayes was distraught over the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His insistence on being himself remade the record industry, with songs like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which ran for 18 minutes, and “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” which Lordi refers to as an “exercise in the refusal of fear and containment.”
Investigative Reporting
A sick baby. A worried mom. Diagnosis: Abuse?
Have you heard of Keri Blakinger yet? The formerly incarcerated journalist has been reporting for the Houston Chronicle for several years, and her stories have done everything from expose the identity of an execution-drug-producing pharmacy to help Texas prisoners get dentures. She's also written insightful columns about her own time in prison. But the story I keep thinking about from this year was part of a series she published this year along with NBC News reporter Mike Hixenbaugh. It's about doctors who are trained to uncover child abuse, but sometimes make decisions that turn out to be wrong — with devastating consequences, including children removed from their parents and even parents wrongly put in prison.
Best of 2019
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">WeFail: How the doomed Masa Son-Adam Neumann relationship set WeWork on the road to disaster</span>WeFail：孙正义与亚当·诺伊曼的注定失败关系如何让 WeWork 走上灾难之路
The debacle of WeWork, a company that rents out office space but portrays itself as a new breed of technology company, is one of the business stories of the year, possessing many dramatic elements of the quintessential Silicon Valley drama: a tech bro CEO (Adam Neumann) with a grandiose sense of self-entitlement, outlandish corporate shenanigans, and an IPO fiasco. And yet, WeWork is but a mere chapter in the bigger narrative of Softbank, the Japanese conglomerate led by Masayoshi Son, a charismatic leader with a grand 300-year vision of the future and a $100 billion fund to realise it. This compelling feature story recounts the relationship between Son and Neumann, whose character arc from prodigal son to pariah is propelled by his flawed instinct that he was born for this.
Crime Reporting
False Witness
Pam Colloff's story on jailhouse informants is one of the best stories I've read this year. It's a topic that sounds like it could get technical — Pam's reporting drew on thousands of pages of public records, covering half a century of criminal cases in Texas and Florida — but in true Pam fashion, this piece is completely and totally fascinating. It's also enraging. The main character is a real piece of work, manipulative and charming and unrepentant. The ways in which he's charmed women, cops, and juries, destroying peoples lives in the process, must be read to be believed. Incredible reporting, remarkable storytelling. I remain in awe.
Investigative Reporting
Sports Writing
Robyn Hightman Found a Life on Bikes. In an Instant It was Gone
Peter Flax · Bicycling · 官方页
“What’s up with that bike?” a friend visiting Toronto asked me on a recent walk. He was motioning to a bicycle across the street that was painted white and chained to a hydro pole, with bright plastic flowers curling out from the spokes.
“You’re Going to Have to Run Faster”: How Football Neglects Black Coaches“体制有病”：足球如何忽视黑人教练
Over the years, there have been many conversations surrounding the NFL and race/social justice. Tyler Tynes tackles one of those issues, the underrepresentation of Black head coaches, by speaking with Black coaches and introducing us to the NFL's annual occupational mobility data. Racial disparities in hiring practices are not exclusive to the NFL and are deserving of further study and conversation. Tynes' story is a reminder that not only is the Rooney Rule ineffective at preventing bias in hiring, but that more can be done. Tynes' reporting is methodical, and it imparts care and insight that the topic deserves. It is a reminder that sports are political, no matter how hard people try to tell us otherwise.
Muffet McGraw is Done Hiring Men
Lindsay Gibbs · Think Progress · 官方页
This is the story heard 'round the Twittersphere and the entire NCAA Women's March Madness tournament. Gibbs went to South Bend, Indiana to spend time with Notre Dame WBB coach Muffet McGraw and came away with the sound bite that would make waves when the story was finally published: Muffet McGraw had an all-women coaching staff, and that was intentional. But rather than rest on just the juicy quote, Gibbs uses McGraw and the Notre Dame WBB program to examine why the gender disparity in women's basketball still exists, why there aren't more women coaching this women's sport, and what needs to happen for that to change. It's not often that women's March Madness gets the headlines; Gibbs and McGraw made sure they would.
Food Writing
The Great Regression
Jon Bonné · Taste · 官方页
I love it - I LOVE IT - when great writers apply their critical lens to restaurants as cultural phenomena, rather than just talking about them as places where the food is good or bad and the prices are low or high. In this scathing, beautifully written piece, Bonné dissects the mini-trend, at the high end, of restaurants that more or less cosplay a mid-century notion of masculinity. He makes the case that the mahogany prime rib carts and sleek martini services and all that jazz are just dazzle camouflage for a truly distasteful core of retrograde and exclusionary values — white male fragility, restaurant edition: “Keep your Noma sensibilities and edible flowers,” he writes, explaining these restaurants’ sales pitch. “Stick them into the part of a cow not served on a silver trolley, and let us dine in a time before tofu and Title IX.”
Music Writing
For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway
Tari Ngangura · Catapult · 官方页
One of the coolest things about original essay sites like Catapult and Longreads are the abundance of music related pieces that double as personal essays. In August, writer Tari Ngangura, published her piece For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway, that began as a coming of age in 1999, the same year she bought and embraced Meshell Ndegeocello’s brilliant Bitter album. In the two decades since its release, the disc has served as a soundtrack and solace through various of Ngangura’s relationships. Her writing is poetic, probing and precise, and made this Bitter aficionado quite blissful.
Arts and Culture
Sports Writing
Lesbians Won the Women’s World Cup
This is my favorite take on my favorite sports story of the year, because in this article, Shannon Keating is all of my queer women friends who told me, “I’m not a sports fan, but I am a fan of these hot girls” as the USWNT spent the summer pummeling all competition en route to another World Cup win. In my experience, sports and the gay community don’t mix as often as they ought to—when I tell someone in a queer space that I’m a sportswriter, a longer explanation is almost always necessary. But in just a handful of games over a few weeks, players like Megan Rapinoe, Kelley O’Hara, and Ashlyn Harris helped invite countless outsiders (like Keating) to bask in the joy of their victories.
Best of 2019
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Hideous Men</span>
In this stunning excerpt from her memoir, What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, E. Jean Carroll recalls being sexually assaulted by numerous men throughout her life, and outright raped in the mid-'90s in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room by none other than Donald Trump.
Crime Reporting
How judicial conflicts of interest are denying poor Texans their right to an effective lawyer
/ How the Unchecked Power of Judges Is Hurting Poor Texans (Neena Satija · Texas Tribune and Texas Monthly · 存稿官方页存档
In 1963, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states are required, under the Sixth Amendment, to provide an attorney to defendants in criminal cases who are unable to afford their own counsel. How states should pay for this defense, crucially, is left up to the states. For Texas Monthly and the Texas Tribune, Neena Satija exposes the undeniable structural flaws that prohibit funding indigent defense properly in Texas. Satija has done readers an incredible service by recreating the bewilderment of encountering these judicial paywalls from both sides of the bench, bringing much needed humanity to straightening out so many convoluted conflicts of interest.
Science and Nature
Our Secret Delta
One of the most interesting trends in climate change reporting is the way writers now quietly and deftly weave its effects into the background of natural disaster stories, from the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic to the increasingly explosive wildfires in the west. I’d like to pay tribute to two outstanding examples of this in the past year.
Crime Reporting
Show of Force
Every Rachel Aviv story is a marvel, and “Show of Force” — which looks at the intersection of domestic violence and law enforcement — is no exception. In language that is both spare and foreboding, Aviv builds detail upon detail as she sketches the contours of a troubled new marriage in Spalding County, Georgia. She notes that Jessica and Matthew Boynton, the protagonists of her story, left their wedding reception “after less than an hour” and that “Matthew wore a titanium wedding ring with a blue stripe, to signify that he was in law enforcement.” As these small but revelatory details accumulate, so, too, does a growing sense of dread. Aviv illuminates the real human cost behind the chilling statistics that suggest law enforcement officers are more likely to abuse their spouses, making it clear that Jessica, despite being in grave harm, has nowhere to turn. By the time I reached the story’s denouement, my heart was in my throat.
Sports Writing
They Want Her to Be the Next Yao Ming. But What Does She Want?
Through just one conversation with the 19-year-old New York Liberty rookie (via a translator), Everett Cook dives far beneath the simple quirk of Han Xu’s existence as both the tallest active player in the WNBA and its first Chinese draft pick since 1997. Instead of wondering what everyone else wonders when they first see Han — when will she fulfill her destiny as the female Yao? — readers will finish the piece simply hoping that she’ll soon feel less alone. As captured in the profile, Han ducks to avoid ceiling fans, scrapes pickled chiles off her pizza after ordering from a menu she can’t read, and struggles to both pass the time and develop as a player in a place where everyone’s a stranger and few speak her language. Though nobody will ever experience the kind of year that Han Xu had, it’s impossible not to feel a deep empathy for this lonely, gifted, and unique basketball player after reading this profile.
Investigative Reporting
How This Con Man’s Wild Testimony Sent Dozens to Jail, and 4 to Death Row
Pamela Colloff · The New York Times Magazine & ProPublica · 官方页
There may be some recency bias at play here (Pam Colloff’s latest year-in-the-works investigation in her dual role for the Times Magazine and ProPublica was published earlier this month) or even some favoritism (when I was first asked to contribute to Longreads’ year-end list, way back in 2012, I included Pam’s two-part series for Texas Monthly, “The Innocent Man”), but regardless of byline or timestamp, this piece is one of the best of the year—in any category. It’s an investigation that required combing through thousands of pages of court documents, a compelling feature story that spans several decades and states, and a profile of Paul Skalnik, a one-time police officer turned jailhouse informant.
Best of 2019
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adults in the Room</span>
Megan Greenwell · Deadspin · 官方页
Before dozens of staffers walked out right behind her, Deadspin's former Editor in Chief Megan Greenwell conducted her own exit interview after resigning from her position in August 2019. In this courageous farewell column, she diagnoses why so many media owners are unfit to be in the business of journalism, despite the woefully misguided trend of private equity firms purchasing “cheap” media companies as just another asset to flip in an investment portfolio. In the eyes of the already-wealthy, turning a profit — practicing the quaint art of adequately resourcing, supporting, and otherwise getting out of the way of a thriving business run by trustworthy professionals — pales in comparison to the bottomless project of turning wealth into more wealth.
Food Writing
The Chef Who Can Teach Us a Thing or Two About Grit可以教我们一两件事关于毅力的厨师
I tend to agree with most criticisms of using the first-person in profiles: Who cares about the writer? Why the throat-clearing about yourself? Who asked about you when I’m just trying to read about Rihanna? It takes a writer of real skill, and very little vanity, to pull off this first-person trick. I marvel at the way Julia Bainbridge gently, unobtrusively inserts herself into this Heated profile of chef Iliana Regan. In doing so, Bainbridge allows the reader to understand the subject in fuller, more generous terms.
Competitive Oyster Shucking Is Real, Decadent, And China’s Best Party
I fell in love with food writing when I learned that to write about food is to write about anything. Food is wrapped up in personal memory and heritage, politics and history. Noelle Mateer’s piece for Deadspin proves why readers would be bereft if food writing were restricted to recipes and graded restaurant reviews. (It would be as sad as if sports writing decided it was better off “sticking to sports.”) This story reeled me in right away with an image of 60 people shucking oysters on the Great Wall of China. How oysters, which filter impurities from the water, came to be served raw in China, and who can afford to eat them, are a few of the pearls of this story.
Best of 2019
Music Writing
Arizona
Trying to find the linguistic key to a 1980s quiet storm classic by R&B lifer Freddie Jackson — “How do you offer a space with your voice that feels real enough for a listener to enter” — the 78-year-old novelist goes to a remarkably raw and poetic place in this piece of short fiction, as he contemplates pleasure, mortality, morality, and the imprisonment of his teenage son for murder the year after the song was released.
Investigative Reporting
The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder
Brendan I. Koerner · Wired · 官方页
Erika HayasakiReporter and associate professor of literary journalism at the University of California, Irvine.
Best of 2019
Crime Reporting
Taken: How police departments make millions by seizing property
Anna Lee · Nathaniel Cary, and Mike Ellis, The Greenville News · 官方页
One of the great truisms about criminal justice is that it's local. At a time when local journalism is increasingly endangered — along with the prospect of accountability for local wrongs — here's an example of a compellingly reported and written investigation by the intrepid staff of this Greenville, S.C., newspaper. They examined statewide civil asset forfeitures over three years and found that not only did the state seize more than $17 million in property, but also that black men were disproportionately the targets.
Food Writing
The Paleta War
Over the past 15 years, Mexicans across the United States have looked on in quizzical pride as ice cream shops under the name “La Michoacana” (“The Woman from Michoacán”) or variants sprung up wherever Mexicans were - the Southwest and big cities, yes, but also Omaha, Des Moines, and even Bethlehem (okay, Belen, New Mexico). The La Michoacana brand is the Baskin-Robbins of Mexico - but almost all of the American stores that use the name are independently run shops that have nothing to do with the decades-old Mexican company. So how did La Michoacanas become so ubiquitous in el Norte, and so quickly? Tostada Magazine editor Serena Maria Daniels tells a fabulous story that involves lawsuits, immigration, and history, and that will make you want to spread chile-mango ice cream across your keyboard afterward.
Best of 2019
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Optics of Opportunity</span>
I will confess that when Hafizah Geter tweeted about her experience with Barnes & Nobel's failed, deeply problematic Springing Center Fellowship for emerging writers, I reached out to invite her to write an essay about it for Longreads. I knew I wouldn't be the only editor pursuing this important piece, and I was happy to see it land at Gay Magazine.
Food Writing
Who’s Considered Thin Enough for Eating Disorder Treatment?
When I talked about this story with a friend, his first question threw me off: “What is an eating disorder exactly?” But the question of what an eating disorder is - and not what someone with an eating disorder looks like - is the heart of this overdue story by Virginia Sole-Smith. Insurance companies and doctors often use low weight as a benchmark for diagnosing and treating eating disorders, even when anyone who dangerously restricts food intake is at risk of physiological complications. This article shows a particularly harmful example of how diet culture has made it seem acceptable to starve yourself—as long as you’re big. Sole-Smith’s deftly handled reporting and writing on this immensely complicated subject makes for one of the most memorable pieces I’ve read this year.
Investigative Reporting
The Quiet Rooms: Children Locked Away in Illinois Schools
Jennifer Smith Richards · Jodi S. Cohen and Lakeidra Chavis, The Boston Globe & ProPublica · 存稿官方页存档
“The spaces have gentle names: The reflection room. The cool-down room. The calming room. The quiet room,” the story begins. But this tale takes a dark turn as the reporters lay out the findings of their investigation into child punishment practices in Illinois schools: children screaming to be let out, banging their heads, scratching at walls. The reporters analyzed more than 20,000 incidents during a year-long period, and the observations recorded by school staff provided chilling accounts of what it was like for children to be secluded in a kind of campus solitary confinement. “Dancing in feces. Doing the twist,” according to one note from a staff member. In another note, a student begged: “Please, please, please open the door. Please, I’ll be good. Open the door and I’ll be quiet.”
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Life, Death and Insulin</span>
The story behind the bloated price of insulin is one of economic concentration, government regulation, and corporate greed. But it’s also a human story with a body count. This article deftly weaves the history and data behind the soaring cost of insulin, an exemplar of rising prescription drug costs generally, with a moving story of one family devastated by these larger forces. And it makes the damning case that as pharmaceutical companies keep raising drug prices, people are dying and leaving ripples of grief in their wake.
Crime Reporting
The Minnesota Murderess明尼苏达女凶手 - 《返祖》杂志
Seifert's historical yarn starts out as a true crime tale but looks more broadly at the ways in which media has always incited panic about women exercising any form of independence in their lives.
Music Writing
The Ryan Adams Allegations Are the Tip of an Indie-Music Iceberg
Laura Snapes · The Guardian · 官方页
Two music stories from earlier this year are standouts to me. First is a piece by The Guardian’s deputy music editor Laura Snapes, published on Valentine’s Day. “The Ryan Adams Allegations Are The Tip Of An Indie-Music Iceberg” is not the most wieldy of titles, but the writing is crisp and incisive. Snapes speaks of a chronic indie rock condition, which reinforces and promotes misogyny even as it feigns enlightenment. “The industry has been slower to reckon with its abusers post-#MeToo than other art forms,” Snapes writes, “partly because it is built on a generally permissive culture of excess and blurred lines between work and leisure — but also because the myth of the unbridled male genius remains at its core.” Go read it. Practically every line is a pull quote.
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Manual for Mourning a Great Poet</span>
Caroline Stockford · Yrakha · 官方页
Many of the essays I read this year were written with outrage, a sentiment particularly well-suited to social media and the types of essays that get circulated within it. Outrage is easily spread; its sting is unambiguous and quickly felt. It has come to represent how much we care; it may seem the only way to write about the things that matter to us. In the language of outrage, the unremarkable aches of our lives can be cast aside, the small cares washed away.
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The 1619 Project</span>
By any measure, The 1619 Project, a visionary initiative that examines the legacy of slavery in America on the 400th anniversary of its brutal beginning, is one of the major accomplishments of the year. Three essays in particular offer essential histories that are key to understanding American capitalism today: Nikole Hannah-Jones‘ opening essay on the nation's founding, Matthew Desmond‘s essay on plantation economies, and Trymaine Lee‘s essay on the racial wealth gap. Heirs born into this wealth have maintained whitewashed delusions for centuries, refusing to acknowledge that economic prosperity in this country could never have existed without so much systemic, generational violence. Each of these essays haunts any based-on-an-untrue-story American business narrative that relies on sidestepping an honest accounting of overdue reparations. Together, all three serve as a blanket correction to business writing that omits slavery from the historical ledger.
Arts and Culture
Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World
Magdalena Edwards · Los Angeles Review of Books · 官方页
As 2019 comes to a close, I would like to offer up two essays, disparate in conceit, but both worth the return.
Science and Nature
Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries
This piece by Malcolm Harris has stuck with me for a few reasons. It came out in Pacific Standard, which was an important outlet for environmental writing before it was shut down this past August. (How the crisis in media has interacted with the climate crisis is a subject for another day.) The essay is an elegant synthesis of entomology, economics, and colonial history that places indigenous knowledge at the foundation of the climate conversation — not as ornament, but as central anti-capitalist critique, as timeless technology. Such a piece could inspire the allotment of more time and money — in academic, political, media, and cultural spaces — for deeper dives into indigenous environmentalism and systems of knowledge. It made me dream of a 1619 Project-style series devoted to un-suppressing those narratives, and made me think about Standing Rock and Mauna Kea and how the violent suppression of indigenous activism works hand-on-musket with the suppression of indigenous thought. Harris is a sharp and funny writer, which is why this story seemed something of a departure in approach and tone, and I appreciated it. I wasn’t familiar with the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who posits the crucial idea that what we call climate change is not a new challenge, but one as old as the New World, “part of a much longer series of ecological catastrophes caused by colonialism and accumulation-based society.” The piece resonated with my feeling that imagination is a function of collective human memory, or as Harris says, paraphrasing sociologist Nikitah Okembe-RA Imani, “[t]hose who study what has been suppressed can see the future.”
Music Writing
A Secret Ingredient in Songs of Summer
Over three years of listening, Ugwu identified a three-beat pattern (“boom-ch-boom-chk”) that always got him dancing: rhythm, the basic grammar of pop. This multimedia read follows it from Jamaica to Africa and the U.S., identifying an opportunistic cross-pollination, as he writes, that only benefits our playlists.
Investigative Reporting
Ponzi Schemes, Private Yachts, and a Missing $250 Million in Crypto: The Strange Tale of Quadriga
A great bitcoin story is never really about bitcoin itself, but all the things cryptocurrency tends to inadvertently be about: value, volatility, belief. It’s probably why everyone involved tends to be rich, emotional, paranoid.
Sports Writing
Don’t Forget Jordan McNair
With this story about the death of Jordan McNair, the Maryland football player who collapsed during a team practice, Tynes refuses to allow us to look away from a tragedy that should hold our attention but is too willingly forgotten. He uses McNair's death as a window into the exploitative world of college football, one that routinely and systematically harms young, Black men, and implores the reader to reckon with it. It is a great example of a human story that ripples far beyond a single person and challenges entire worlds and structures that many people hold dear.
Music Writing
Who’s Billie Eilish?
On the surface, this appears to be just another profile of an up-and-coming pop star, but this recounting of time spent at home with the teenage oracle of Gen Z goes deeper. Author Meaghan Garvey really listens to her Eilish and her family, and she does the work of letting the singer’s words — in conversation, but also in her journals, which Garvey reads — change her perspective on her art.
Sports Writing
The Line of Fire
Natalie Weiner · SB Nation · 官方页
We’ve all read stories about how sports – usually football or basketball – are a ticket out of poverty and violence. Usually for a black kid. Natalie Weiner’s treatise on the ways in which gun violence has affected football players takes that idea and turns it on its head. In a masterful piece of gritty reporting, Weiner takes readers through an emotional hellscape, imploring them to look closer at something they’d rather ignore. Even in the national discourse around gun violence, little attention is paid to its omnipresence in urban communities beyond the statistics. Weiner uses football as a way to explore the people and communities oft-ignored, deftly navigating the intersections of race and class therein. When a football player dies, Weiner notes that “football player” is often splayed across the headline, the subtext being “this is not just another kid, this is a football player. A kid who tried; a kid who worked; a kid who was doing all the Right Things...”
Crime Reporting
The King of Dreams
This grippingly-written and deeply-reported story exposed the scams of a Texas con artist who made millions promising prisoners' families their most cherished dream: bringing their children home. Thompson, a staff reporter for The Marshall Project, describes how this conman falsely promised them he could obtain reduced sentences and led them on to exhaust their life savings, in many cases. It's a window into the desperation and vulnerability of the millions of Americans who love someone who is incarcerated.
Science and Nature
The End Times Are Here, and I Am at Target末日已至，我在塔吉特
Perhaps the most perplexing paradox of climate change is its ability to be both overwhelmingly terrifying and mind-numbingly ordinary. Especially in the past few years, as denial has become less of a viable option and even delusion has slipped from our fingers, the climate crisis with its alarming headlines and horror stories has become... normal. The steady drumbeat to the banality of our lives. Hayes Brown manages to capture that drumbeat in this masterful essay, isolating its sound out of the symphony with surgical precision. As he runs regular errands in a regular Target on a regular, if unusually hot, summer day in Brooklyn, the climate crisis reverberates in the back of his mind, filtering into every choice of every item, if he allows himself to think of it. As someone who exists as a bonafide “climate person,” I love the fresh eye that Hayes brings to the subject. He gives voice to the haunting bewilderment, the guilt of surrender, and the uncertainty that lies within the cracks of the certainty. His essay reminds us of the dullness of our collective heartbreak as we stare into our manmade abyss.
Music Writing
Before & After ‘The B-52’s’“B-52”之前和之后
On July 15, Christopher Wiengarten gave us an entire weekend’s worth of reading and listening, thanks to “Before & After ‘The B-52s’.” The Times has done this type of thing before, like with 2014s dazzling, multi-media longread “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie.” But this new one is pure Technicolor. I freely admit my own biases here ― not just because I’m helping the Bs write their first official biography — but because I’m a sucker for context, precedent, and insight. Wiengarten shows us, not just what might have been the musical parents for any given B-52s song, but what those songs subsequently inspired. Great music often leads to great music, and these stepping stones always lead to a life better-lived.
Investigative Reporting
The Jungle Prince of Delhi
Ellen Barry's investigation about a family of ousted aristocrats living in wilderness in the middle of New Delhi is the result of a four-year-long obsession. It follows the life and death of Prince Cyrus, a man who claims to be heir apparent to the fallen house of Oudh, a Muslim kingdom annexed by British colonizers in the nineteenth century. Prince Cyrus, whose mother is said to have killed herself by swallowing crushed diamonds to protest their indignation, lives inside a hunting lodge granted as consolation by the Indian government. “This family, displaying its own ruin, was a physical representation of all that India had suffered,” Barry writes.
Sports Writing
The Maddening Promise of Diamond DeShields
Katie Barnes' writing is always a treat, and this story is a great example of why. With this profile, Barnes shines a light on Diamond DeShields, a player poised to break out in the WNBA, and elevates her apart from famous athlete father and famous athlete brother, allowing her to shine on her own terms.
The Olympics are Over, but Tessa Virtue is Just Getting Started
Genna Buck · The Walrus · 官方页
Very early into Genna Buck’s profile of Tessa Virtue, the Canadian three-time Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, the skater says, “Whatever I take on next, I’m never going to be the best in the world.” This is what I imagine every Olympic gold medalist at least thinks when they’re contemplating retirement or in the early stages of the transition — I’ll never be as good at anything else in my life as I am at [insert sport]. I, who have never been the best in the world at anything (though I am internationally ranked in kvetching), don’t know how you move on from that, and neither does Virtue, at least not yet. Buck’s profile of the skater, who is one half of one of the greatest figure skating teams in Olympic history, shows a talented, focused woman trying to figure out what to channel her relentless drive towards now that she’s done with her sport. The story keeps coming back to Virtue’s desire to the best at something and her paralyzing fear of putting a foot wrong, which is unsurprising given the nature of her perfection-oriented sport. Buck, in her prose, skates in circles, because Virtue, though she’s staying busy, really doesn’t know where she’s going yet. Virtue has climbed to the top of the mountain but she doesn’t know how to get down.
Best of 2019
Sports Writing
Jackie MacMullan is the Great Chronicler of Basketball’s Golden Age
This isn’t exactly a feature, but to label it simply a Q&A is to sell it short. It’s just a lovely, lovely interview with Jackie MacMullan, one of the all-time greats in sports journalism. Personally, I can’t imagine being a female sportswriter right now without someone like Jackie Mac to look up to, without someone like Jackie Mac paving the way. She opens up about her crazy career path and her issues with access journalism (preach!) in this day and age in the NBA. She also discussed the problems with writers being fans (again, preach!) openly. I loved all of it, and it’s worth sitting down to read. It’s not quite a feature, but you’ll feel you have a good read on the GOAT by the end. (Also, she references her relationship with Celtics great Red Auerbach ... who is the person I named my dog after! Bonus points for that.)
Business Writing
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Pimple patches are everywhere, but do they work?</span>
This story about pimple patches combines several of my personal obsessions and locates it within a larger market/consumer phenomenon so marvelously, I'm left grinning in awe (and a little healthy envy, let's be frank). At its core this is a story about why a simple war wound first-aid technology is all of a sudden being sold as a skincare treatment, but it also illustrates the darker tendencies of unchecked profiteering, and how corporations know exactly what hollow buzzwords to deploy (“skin positivity”) to convince frustrated shoppers into spending $30 for a sheet of novelty silicone stickers. All I ask for is that someone pierce the seething, bubbling mass of unscientific nonsense that is perpetrated in the free-for-all grift economy of the beauty market, and Cheryl regularly does it, while also managing to bring great humor and delight to it.
Investigative Reporting
Dark Crystals: The Brutal Reality Behind a Booming Wellness Craze
Tess McClure · The Guardian · 官方页
Tess McClure’s investigation shows us the people and children who put their safety and lives on the line to mine the rose quartz, amethyst or tourmaline gem stones and crystals that have become popular among celebrities and people seeking alternative methods to heal themselves. McClure travels to Madagascar to reveal what happens before these shiny stones end up piled inside of glass bowl displays in a Sedona or Los Angeles crystal shop, marked by descriptors like “helps release insecurities,” or “heals trauma.” Her investigation is impressive, not only because of the vast reach of her solo reporting around the world, but also how she uses that ambitious journalism to bring the people she meets alive on the page for us. Her writing makes readers care about the individuals she interviews and the international human rights and environmental issues that she illuminates with her reporting. She does this by surprising us with vivid scenes, dialogue and quotes. Like this one from a family member of a worker who died:
Science and Nature
<span style="font-weight: 400;">After the Storm</span>特里斯坦·沃克：看得见的人
Mary Annaïse Heglar's “After the Storm” stood out to me as a knockout personal essay on climate this year. Heglar is building a body of important work marrying climate awareness with social, environmental, and racial justice. In this piece, which ran in Guernica in October, she frames her harrowing experience of Hurricane Katrina, along with her family in the Mississippi River region, as the lens through which she now sees the climate movement as an activist and director of publications at the National Resources Defense Council. She weaves together the overtly racist news coverage of that storm, the fact that it made landfall the day after the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till's murder, and the inequitable suffering of New Orleans' Black population to illuminate the layers of historical injustice magnified by the climate crisis, “covered in the fingerprints of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and genocide and patriarchy. It's what happens when large swaths of people are not only systematically ‘left out,’ but forced to be their own gravediggers and pallbearers.” This should be required reading for those interested in how equity and equality are pivotal to successful climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Food Writing
The Grill That Gave ‘90 Kids Their Kitchen Training Wheels
Aaron Goldfarb · Taste · 官方页
In the late ’90s and early aughts, my father broke out the George Foreman Grill every evening, placing several slices of fluffy, buttered (well, margarined) Publix bakery French bread on the grill, and held the lid down for a good minute. He loved to have these little flattened, greasy pieces of toast with dinner. That’s pretty much all he used his George Foreman for until the device faded into retirement in the garage, along with his kayak and 17 awful, outdated printers before it. Aaron Goldfarb’s ode to the George Foreman sent me back to the flattened-toast era and gave me a good chuckle, which is necessary in these trying times. Also, it’s wild to think that the contraption is the second-most purchased home appliance of all time. The George Foreman was advertised for its ability to drain fat from food; meat grease would slide off it into a little vat. But how many other garages are now burdened with these vessels?
Best of 2019
Science and Nature
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Climate Signs</span>
When Emily Raboteau's son becomes obsessed with extreme weather events after a family outing to the “Nature's Fury” exhibition at the natural history museum in New York, she wonders how much she should shield her five-year-old from conversations around climate change. It is a query she carries with her as she embarks on a city-wide pilgrimage to visit each installation of a public art project called “Climate Signals” wherein the artist hijacks highway traffic signs, rewriting their commonplace warnings with uncanny proclamations of new hazards ahead. In Saint Nicolas Park in Harlem, the sign reads: CLIMATE CHANGE AT WORK. At Hudson River Yards, the yellow lettering spells out an even more dire threat: CLIMATE DENIAL KILLS. In this expertly rendered essay –– gracefully weaving between the personal and critical, the scientific and political –– Raboteau attempts to make sense of what it means to raise a child in a world that is coming apart. It is a question many have but that is all too often addressed in reductive, late capitalist logic in which our human hearts are not taken into consideration.
Crime Reporting
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Greeter</span>
Matthew SalessesAuthor of the novels The Hundred-Year Flood and the forthcoming Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little A, August 2020).
Science and Nature
Music Writing
The Empire Strikes Back
Melissa A. Weber’s roller-coaster ride retrospective on George Clinton, P-Funk, Funkadelic, and various offshoots of everything funky is told with a musician’s attention to detail and a storyteller’s attention to drama. In the end, it’s Clinton’s otherworldly genius and cultural impact that can’t be denied.
Investigative Reporting
The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid弗兰基·马德里的生与死
I am drawn to investigations that harness the power of one story to illuminate the situation of a whole group — in this case, the lives of young, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Fernández writes poetically about the death and life of Frankie Madrid, an undocumented teen who arrived in the U.S. with his mom when he was either 4 or 6 months old. Fernandéz begins the story with Frankie’s death — he committed suicide after being deported to Mexico — and then works her way back in time, investigating the cause of his suicide, his relationship with his mother and the difficulties of daily life while being undocumented. Via Frankie’s story, we begin to understand the pressures that undocumented kids face and to question the increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies and practices that played a role in his suicide.
Everything You Think You Know About Toxic Shock Syndrome Is Probably Wrong
Nona Willis Aronowitz · Lifehacker · 官方页
Essays
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Breaking My Own Silence</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">打破我自己的沉默</span>
Every year, a slew of fantastic essays are published. 2019 felt even more exceptional in this regard. One particular essay resonated with me, both as a child of an immigrant mother who struggled with language, accent, and assimilation into American society, and as a scholar of Asian American literature. Novelist, Min Jin Lee’s, “Breaking My Own Silence,” beautifully chronicles her journey through life and education and the difficulty of speaking and speaking up. She moved from Seoul to Queens, NY when she was 7 years old and narrates her experience as a Korean immigrant to recount how the English language is one of the determining, often insidious, forces of assimilation. She also describes how she encountered notions of Asian women as silent, weak and submissive — the lotus blossom stereotype. Lee astutely and emotionally notes the differences between talking and writing. The links between the two and the power of both. The painful nature of each expressive gesture. Her experiences as a Korean immigrant, now having lived in the West for more than four decades, build to make sense of herself as a writer.