110 篇
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The Betrayal
When the United States prepared to withdraw from Afghanistan last August — 20 years into its failed war — they fully expected Kabul to fall to the Taliban; they just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. At The Atlantic, George Packer reports on the hopelessly bureaucratic Special Immigrant Visa program and the Afghan allies that attempted to use it to flee their country, crushed in a sea of chaos and abject human suffering amid crowds desperate to flee Kabul at Hamid Karzai International Airport. This is a harrowing read; much is told through the eyes of those who fled and readers should be warned that some scenes will not be forgotten. The greatest tragedy, in addition to the many lives lost unnecessarily, is that it didn’t have to be this way: “No law required the U.S. government to save a single one—only a moral debt did,” writes Packer. Had the U.S. acted earlier and with much greater will and focus, they could have saved far far more than the 124 thousand they estimate to have evacuated: “Administration officials told me that no one could have anticipated how quickly Kabul would fall. This is true, and it goes for both Afghans and Americans. But the failure to plan for a worst-case scenario while there was time, during the spring and early summer, as Afghanistan began to collapse, led directly to the fatal chaos in August.” —KS
The Art of Bidding, or How I Survived Federal Prison
When Eric Borsuk was incarcerated in federal prison with two accomplices, the three friends used self-education to pass the time. They studied on a demanding schedule and evaluated assignments for one another. When an injustice within the so-called justice system separated them, Eric lost not only their companionship but his primary coping mechanism, forcing him to find a new way to protect his mental and physical health during the final five years of his sentence. In this incisive piece at The Marshall Project (published in partnership with VQR), Borsuk recounts how the justice system’s willful blindness and casual cruelty helped inspire him to write. American Animals, the memoir Borsuk wrote from his cell, became a major motion picture in 2018. —KS
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I Loved Bike Touring—Until I Got Paid to Do It
Full disclosure, this is an older story, from the age before COVID, no less — that distant year of 2019. I came across it this month when Outside made it into a podcast, a wise decision: It’s a fun, witty tale that bounces along at pace. Grabbing you from the start, it places you in the middle of a bike chase with “a middle-aged psychopath in high-vis spandex.” The psychopath in question is a disgruntled client kicked off one of the bike tours led by the writer, Caitlin Giddings. Giddings relays her time as a tour guide with candor, and with just a few words manages to paint a visceral picture of dirty, sweaty trail life, and leave you giggling at the characters sharing it. It’s a snapshot of the broad spectrum of humanity, from how we deal with tragedy to how we allocate who washes the group spatula. Luckily Giddings stuck out this grueling profession long enough to gather these stories, although sadly left before discovering the identity of the mysterious tent urinator. —CW
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What Bullets Do to Bodies
I’m breaking from tradition here and highlighting a story that’s already been in one of these newsletters, and as a top pick no less. The circumstances demand it. On Tuesday, a gunman armed with two legally purchased AR-style assault rifles slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in a single classroom at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. As authorities worked to identify the victims, they asked parents to provide DNA samples. What’s unspoken in this detail is that the dead children were unrecognizable, or so mangled that it would have been an unimaginable cruelty to ask their parents to look at them. I can’t get this fact out of my mind, and it prompted me to re-read one of the best pieces of explanatory journalism in recent memory. Almost exactly five years ago, Jason Fagone spent time with the head of trauma surgery at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia to understand the damage that bullets do to bodies. What Dr. Amy Goldberg had to say about the Sandy Hook massacre could be said today about the shooting in Uvalde: “As a country, we lost our teachable moment…. The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” America is a country where the mass murder of children is followed by mourning and forgetting, but never action: Congress hasn’t passed a single piece of gun control legislation since Sandy Hook. Until that changes, Goldberg’s comment will be relevant again in another community, at another school. It’s only a matter of time. —SD
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Sam Taggart’s Hard Sell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
Where do I even begin to endorse Tad Friend’s safari into the world of modern-day door-to-door salespeople? First, I guess, would be the disclaimer that this sort of subculture piece is catnip for me. I’m a sucker for industry argot, from “bageling” to “tie-downs” to the BOLT system. I’m a sucker for play-by-play annotations, as when Friend details the conversations that Taggart — would-be king of the “knockers” — has with the folks unlucky enough to answer the door and expose themselves to his white-toothed psychological siege. I’m a sucker for anything that plumbs the depths of alpha-bro “performance” thinking, foreign as it is to my character. But that’s only the starting point. What Friend delivers here is a portrait of the want that plagues so many of us, a want for success that’s really a want for redemption. It fuels the cold calls, the seminars, the mind games. “Failure is abhorrent because it can induce a contagious loss of faith in the whole enterprise,” he writes. That was likely the case in the days of Fuller brushes and vacuum cleaners, and it’s certainly the case today, with the knockers peddling home-security systems and high-commission solar panels. Somehow as devastating as it is entertaining. —PR
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The Demon River
In recent years, we’ve witnessed the blossoming of a subgenre of longform writing that I’ll call the nature thriller. It’s born of necessity, by which I mean the collision of an ever-expanding human population — we hit 8 billion souls just this week — and a changing, temperamental climate. Natural disasters are on the rise, and with them come harrowing stories of jaw-dropping devastation and remarkable survival. In the right hands, these stories are propulsive without feeling glib, emotional but not exploitative. J.B. MacKinnon is a master of the nature thriller, deftly weaving plot with science. In this multi-chapter feature about the worst flood British Columbia has ever seen, MacKinnon had me on the edge of my seat reading about storm patterns, pressure systems, and infrastructure — yes, infrastructure. I learned from this story as much as I enjoyed it. (Sidenote: I had the pleasure of helping shepherd another MacKinnon feature, “True Grit,” to publication at The Atavist this month. It too qualifies as a nature thriller.) —SD
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The Legend of The Music Tree
I had never heard of “The Tree” until reading Ellen Ruppel Shell’s fascinating essay, but in certain circles, The Tree is not only famous, it is magical. A mahogany tree originating from the Chiquibul jungle in Belize, its beautiful wood is prized by carpenters and luthiers — with musicians claiming guitars made from The Tree produce an extraordinary sound. Shell wanted to discover more about this Tolkienesque-sounding entity and immerses herself in its story: from being cut down in 1965 to the hunt for any remaining stashes of the precious (and finite) material today. A cross between an adventure story and a collector’s tale, Shell throws in some psychology for good measure: Does this wood actually create a unique sound, or is its coveted nature influencing what people hear? This detailed exploration made me sit down and consider the use of rarity to define prestige. —CW
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Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
I've watched with growing horror how divided the U.S. has become, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. As someone who grew up in an age before the internet, it’s hard to understand how this happened. When I read this article, it seemed like everything fell into place. The Atlantic probably does the best job in all of the media in terms of covering the ramifications of social media on our society, and this was their best story of the year. —David Hirning
Profiles
Stone Skipping Is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It.
There is something primal about skipping stones. See some rocks near a body of water and I'll bet you chuck one across it, as millions have done before you, all the way back to competitions in Ancient Greece. The subject of this profile, Kurt Steiner, has tapped into this deeply embedded part of our psyche. Stone skipping, he says, has an “undeveloped natural purity, a refuge against the consumerist, plutocratic, kleptocratic, f*cking destroy-and-build-up-everything mentality.” In this beautiful piece, Sean Williams attempts to find out more about Steiner and this ancient sport. It was not an easy quest: Kurt lives in a cabin with no central heating or shower, craps in a bucket, and goes weeks without cell or internet coverage. It took Williams a year to reach Steiner via email, two years to set a time to meet him, and an intense few minutes to persuade U.S. border guards he was entering the country to interview a stone skipper. It was worth it. Williams immerses himself in Steiner’s world, spending days with him, skipping stones until his elbow throbs, talking for 12 hours at a time. He discovers a fascinating character for whom stone skipping is a respite from mental illnesses, love, and loss. The time invested in getting to know Steiner is apparent in every word. A respectful, thoughtful look at someone who has found a way to step out of society as we know it — and produced some record-breaking throws to boot. —Carolyn Wells
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Nicolas Cage and John Carpenter are Cinema’s Most Studious Eccentrics
In my house, we worship at several artistic altars, two of which are Nicolas Cage and horror movies. My husband is a devotee of the former, I of the latter. So I can’t help but feel that this conversation between Cage and horror auteur John Carpenter was made specially for us. Situated here as two of the weirdest, most talented figures in modern Hollywood — no arguments from me — the pair talk about James Dean’s “perfect” career, how to know if your child is an actor, some very discomfiting alpacas, and doing charades with Anthony Perkins. Their dialogue is a delight. Time to rewatch Halloween and Mandy. —SD
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I Smuggled My Laptop Past the Taliban So I Could Write This Story
A year ago this week, Kabul fell to the Taliban. A year ago this week, Bushra Seddique tried to leave. At 20 years old, Seddique had never lived under a Taliban government, but as a journalist and a woman, she realized she could not stay. It was an agonizing decision; while a friend helped her and her youngest sister get a place on a flight, her mother and middle sister had to stay behind. This essay focuses on a seemingly small thing — the journey to the airport — but conveys so much. In an instant, Seddique’s prose pulls you closely into this tight-knit family, leaving you pulsating with the sisters’ turmoil as they reel between emotions. The joy: when after three days of waiting in fear near the airport, they are sent home and see their family. The grief: when the airport briefly opens again, forcing them to flee before saying goodbye. The excitement: when they are finally on a plane to a new country. The constant underneath it all is a deep sadness for a home that is disappearing, a place where just a few weeks ago “[p]eople were going out to sing and dance; music played in restaurants and taxis.” I vividly remember the scenes at Kabul airport playing out on the news last year, people clinging to planes, the bomb, the chaos, the filth. This essay takes you back — and removes any detachment you may have felt along the way. —CW
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Fall Risk
Madeleine Watts’ essay was published in March 2020, but the dis-ease she describes from unexplained fainting episodes is very relatable as the pandemic endures. As she examines her life and experiences leading up to and after being declared “weak with no known cause,” Watts suggests that “Our bodies are the containers for our thoughts…” It’s only by considering life stresses in hindsight (terminal family illnesses, immigration concerns, and fear for her own health) that it becomes easy to see why her body would suddenly shut down from sheer overload: “…the body sometimes articulates things that the mind cannot.” —KS
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The Radicalization of J.D. Vance
Five years ago, J.D. Vance was enjoying the success of his acclaimed 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Today, he’s running for Senate in his home state of Ohio, bankrolled by tech-con icon Peter Thiel, and competing with Ted Cruz to tweet the most abrasive MAGA platitudes. How we ended up here isn’t the primary goal of van Zuylen-Wood’s intellectually driven feature, though; instead, it’s an attempt to answer the question of where “here” actually is. Watching Vance preen for prospective voters and explain his equivocations is maddening, sure, but it allows van Zuylen-Wood to tease apart the philosophical paradox at the heart of Vance’s attempted makeover. “Vance’s media strategy seems to be that by playing Don Jr. on the Internet, he can push for more substantive populism in real life,” he writes. “The success of that tactic may depend on how far removed he truly seems from the Brookings Institution-to-Netflix pipeline he was riding until recently.” Inside (beltway) baseball? Perhaps. A crucial preview of the next few years of so-called culture wars? Definitely. Don’t say you weren’t warned. —PR
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Genuine Risk, Winning Colors, and Regret at the Kentucky Derby
Loftus' essay is ostensibly about a sporting event, but ultimately, it's a grotesque glimpse into the psyche of America at a particular point in time. Loftus' roots are in comedy, so it's also a darkly funny piece of writing, but it never loses its focus on the violence and excess of the event. When the essay came out, Loftus shared it on social media and joked, “please say no one has done this before,” obviously referencing Hunter S. Thompson's “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” This may draw the ire of MFA lit bros, but I'll just say it; I like her essay better than Thompson's. The description of the winning horse is chilling, beautiful, and unforgettable: “After he won, Rich Strike bit a pony over and over, taking what any underdog believes should be their reward, the flesh of their competitors and oppressors served raw. Instead, he got a slap to the face and a rumbling on Twitter, one almost immediately buried by Mother’s Day photos, which got buried by essays about How We Discuss Abuse, which got buried by news of three mass shootings.” —Krista Diamond
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The Price of Admission常春藤联盟学校如何反对学生
I’ve started writing this blurb, erased my attempt, and started again a few times now. The difficulty of summarizing Rachel Aviv’s latest feature is a testament to how good it is, and how complex. What starts as the story of a teenager escaping an abusive parent, navigating foster care, and making a life for herself in the form of a full ride to the University of Pennsylvania, a Rhodes scholarship, and even a new last name pivots at a certain point to something else entirely: an examination of the narrow frameworks that powerful institutions impose onto trauma and suffering, an indictment of the unforgiving expectations society has of abuse victims, and a study in human resilience. Just read it. Then talk about it. We need to talk about it. —SD
Inside Kyiv on the Night of Ukraine’s Stunning World Cup Qualifier Victory
“I came to Kyiv to watch a city watch a game,” writes Wright Thompson. And watch he does, while absorbing and documenting all he can as he wanders the capital and spends time with Ukrainians in this gem of a piece. Thompson captures the air in Kyiv on this first day of summer: the fear felt when air raid sirens go off, the tension that builds in the hour before the men’s national team plays Scotland in a must-win World Cup playoff semifinal, and the strangeness of life, of everything now. “But still there is an unspoken feeling hovering over everything, a mixture of worry that the success they’ve known so far could turn to defeat, that the destruction of war might return to Kyiv.” Everything in this piece feels raw and immediate: the scenes, the conversations, the moments. “History is being written in real time and nobody knows how things will end. These could be the last days of a regional war or the first days of a world war.” What a snapshot of this night, and a fleeting portrait of the city in a time of war. —CLR
Paper, Cut
Another day, another beloved print publication calling it quits. Washington City Paper, which nurtured such writing luminaries as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Katherine Boo, Jason Cherkis, and the late David Carr, has printed its last-ever physical edition. In a special package, veteran staffers describe what working at the alt-weekly meant to them. The anecdotes are spectacular. Sex workers in the newsroom lobby, looking to buy ads. A reporter getting punched by a guy named Casino. Final proofs being shipped to the printer via Greyhound bus. Editors pouring their hearts and souls into young writers’ copy. WCP will continue to publish online (and you can support its work), but not everyone in the city it covers has access to the internet. This bittersweet collection of memories stands as a testament to the unconscionable harm that late-stage capitalism and its attendant greed have done to local news. (Speaking of unconscionable harm, consider also reading Rebecca Traister’s fiery essay about how feckless Democrats and their “anemic” rhetoric helped usher America to the precipice of Roe v. Wade‘s reversal.) —SD
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A Black Woman’s Search for Her Place in White, White Vermont
A moving study of the mutability of the idea of home; how the word itself can ring so differently from place to place. This piece has such an interesting take on race in America, both from afar — when the author spent time in Germany — and from deep within, at the snowbound confines of a university campus in the middle of Vermont. Romero deals with it in such a tactile, subtle way that I felt like I was coming to the subject completely fresh, feeling her confusion, hope, and frustration almost viscerally. —Rohan Kamicheril
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I Woke Up With an Allergy to Cold
“Sure,” you think. “I’m allergic to cold, too.” But this isn’t the always-need-a-sweater type of thing. It’s not that you feel cold; it’s that your body rebels against it. Itching. Swelling. Hives. And that’s just the beginning. When Alison Espach began experiencing the symptoms of what she later learned was cold urticaria, she doubted it too. Yet, the more she confronted the rare autoimmune response, the more she was forced to confront the long-past familial tragedy that may have been at its root. “Some people thought they were cured and woke up one day to find that they weren’t,” she writes. “When they least expected it, when they were out walking and a cold wind blew, their throat closed. I think of these people when I am packing for a hike, when I am headed by myself to the ocean. I wonder if I will become one of them. I wonder when tragedy will strike again.” A searching, confidently paced chronicle of a situation that’s somehow both unbelievable and all too relatable. —PR
Just How Important Is Eye Contact Between Musicians? And What Does It Signal?
I play bass in a band. When my lead guitarist and I lock eyes, it’s because a) we’re counting up to make sure we both hit the chorus of Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” correctly b) our singer decided to sing an additional verse before the guitar solo usually starts, or c) our singer accidentally skipped a verse and we’re taking the song home early. It’s these quick glances and smiles — camaraderie across the stage — that averts disaster mid-song and helps us stay in the moment with our singer, who is often deep in the thrall of the Blues. This is why I was fascinated by Ariane Todes’ dive into orchestral eye contact at Classical Music. While the members of the orchestra outnumber our little four-piece by dozens, the purpose of eye contact from the conductor to various musicians and sections conveys something quite a bit different: “Basically, a conductor only has six things to tell the orchestra: it’s either faster or slower, longer or shorter, or louder or softer, and everything else is based on that. The eyes and face are what communicates all the other things.” And, while the Blues and classical music differ vastly in style, strong eye contact among the musicians pays off in good vibes on-stage and off. “But occasionally there are fleeting moments where something passes wordlessly – friendship, encouragement, solidarity, shared endeavour, perhaps even love – and maybe that makes eye contact the very essence of music.” —KS
‘No Aliens, No Spaceship, No Invasion of Earth’
I love the movie Contact, which for the uninitiated is about a female scientist who makes contact with aliens that provide schematics for building a machine that eventually carries said scientist through a wormhole to encounter said aliens. The movie came out when I was 11, and I saw it twice in theaters. I’m pretty sure I forced it on friends at sleepovers. Later, for a high school project in which we had to compile scenes from movies that helped explain our worldview — I think we were learning about the concept of zeitgeist, and in retrospect the assignment doesn’t make much sense, but I digress — I chose at least one scene from Contact. All this is to say: I’ve been waiting 25 years for an oral history of the movie, and here. it. is. I gobbled it up. I came back for seconds. My only complaint? Not enough John Hurt. “Wanna take a ride??” Trust me, you do. —SD
I Do Not Keep a Diary
Will Rees doesn’t yet keep a diary, but he aspires to. Maybe. He carries a notebook and pen, ready for the precise set of planting conditions that would allow him to sow his thoughts and ideas. The notebook is well traveled. The cover is worn, yet the inside remains blank as he struggles with how to portray himself on the page, asking “How would I like to appear when it is only myself who is looking?” I loved this piece because I find it wholly relatable. Have you ever felt those sweet yet rare moments when you’re infused with possibility, that desire to make sense of your life and your experiences, to uncover meaning in how you spend your days? Have you ever aspired to get thoughts down before they evaporate, before that drop of inspiration or insight is gone forever? To take pride in yourself as a thinking person who makes reflection a habit? Don’t we all? —KS
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Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court?朱利叶斯·伊士曼的游击极简主义
Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement was the big Supreme Court news of the week, but don’t sleep on this disturbing story about Clarence Thomas’s wife’s many, many ties to right-wing groups and figures—including ones directly involved with major SCOTUS cases. Perhaps you read about Ginni Thomas expressing support for the January 6 insurrectionists and the lie that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election. But did you know she sits on the advisory board of a conservative academic group that filed an amicus brief in the affirmative-action suit that SCOTUS just took up, or that she was a paid consultant at a “security” organization when its leader filed a brief supporting Trump’s Muslim ban? Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg in this damning story, reported by one of the great chroniclers of U.S. political power. Above all, Jane Mayer calls much-needed attention to the fact that SCOTUS is not bound by a code of conduct, the kind of rules that would prevent such egregious conflicts of interest. —SD
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What White Men Say in Our Absence
I loved Elaine Hsieh Chou's essay — it's an unflinching, powerful examination of the writer's experiences with racism and misogyny, and it speaks to the fear and rage felt by so many Asian American women, myself included. It confronts the cultural forces that continue to feed anti-Asian hate and reminds me of the power and ferocity of our collective voice. —Yuxi Lin
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Endless Exile: The Tangled Politics Keeping a Uyghur Man in Limbo发现自己有罪的陪审员
While trying to flee persecution in China, Ayoob Mohammed, an Uyghur man, found himself in Afghanistan when the U.S. invaded the country in response to 9/11. Mohammed was among more than a dozen Uyghur men who were caught and sold to the U.S. for bounty as an alleged terrorist, held for four years at Guantánamo Bay, and finally exonerated. Still, 16 years after being released, he is still trying to prove he’s innocent. This story is exceptionally reported and told with nuance and empathy by Hylton, who traces Mohammed’s journey from his Uyghur homeland in northwest China to Guantánamo to Albania, where he has since resettled — and continues to be a victim “of politics among nations, a sacrifice to their interests.” Hylton examines the “invisible geopolitical forces” that “have bent his story to their will” and have kept him from reuniting with his wife Mailikaimu and their kids in Canada, and also shows the challenges of long-term family separation through their story. —CLR
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Rocketland他人的生活 - 返祖杂志
I dislike Elon Musk. Like, a lot. I know I’m not alone in this. So it was admittedly with horrified curiosity that I embarked on reading Loren Grush’s feature about people who’ve uprooted their lives, moved to middle-of-nowhere Texas, and dedicated their time, energy, even money to waiting for Musk’s SpaceX to bring humankind closer to setting foot on Mars. Grush quickly set me straight: The horror that colored my curiosity was wrong. She encounters a community of seekers, believers, dreamers. There’s nothing else like it on earth, and in that there’s poignancy, even hope. “Maybe inhabiting Mars will happen in our lifetimes. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it will never happen at all,” Grush writes. “In the end, you just have to have a little faith. And in this dry, flat patch of Texas, you’ll find no shortage of that.” —SD
I Lived the #VanLife. It Wasn’t Pretty.
Sometimes it is fun to read about someone having a terrible time. Before I am judged too harshly for this, I offer you Caity Weaver’s diverting and self-deprecating essay in defense. She spends nearly 5,000 words whinging about just how much she hated living #VanLife for a few days. (Her editor made her do it. I am glad he did.) There is something pure about such things as Weaver eating fistfuls of cheese-its in the dark when figuring out the camp stove is just too much. Her descriptions — coated in cheesy crumbs rather than sugar — are wholly relatable and throw two fingers up to the Instagram illusion. I am thankful for this, being guilty of falling into the thrall of the #VanLife tag myself, endlessly scrolling through pictures of beautiful people looking wistfully at beautiful things — all through flung-open-van-doors. I have even found myself on Craigslist looking for camper vans for sale (expensive as it turns out, I blame the tag). Fortunately, this van exposé has given me another reason to stick to my tent. —CW
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Reported Essays
Deep Time Sickness
Mexico City is built on soap. After the Lago de Texoco was drained (the coda to a centuries-long process of colonialism and development), what was left behind was a 70-meter deep layer of soil known as jaboncillo, “like moisture soap.” Jaboncillo is squishy, effectively hollow, and is no small reason why earthquakes in 1985 and 2017 so devastated the city. It also ensures that seismic damage continues to pervade the city’s landscape. As Lachlan Summers writes, CDMX “reflects the strangeness of the earth on which it sits. Footpaths undulate. Potholes suddenly appear in the street and begin consuming the road. A fissure slyly burrows under a building to do unseen work to its foundations.” Such instability also lives on in the psyches of residents, and Summers’ fascinating essay unpacks the staggering effect it has on Mexico City’s tocado, or “touched.” The tocado are beset by vertigo, loss of appetite, and a fear that one day the building they walk past every day will finally buckle and fall. Conventional medicine has no easy answer for them, dismissing such symptoms as a “cultural concept of distress,” but with insight and empathy Summers maps it as the inevitable result of human experience colliding with geologic time. Scales so disparate are never meant to overlap, of course — but as we’ve seen so many times, human intervention has a way of hastening end-time scenarios. —Peter Rubin
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Rocky Mountain Massacre落基山大屠杀
This story opens with a single gunshot, blood pooling on the snowy ground, and a missing body. The victim: a wolf. The shooter: a member of Montana’s backcountry law enforcement. Some people call what happened a ruthless kill; others say it was part of a sanctioned harvest. Therein lies the central tension of Ryan Devereaux’s deeply reported feature about the wolves of Yellowstone, and how their fate has become tangled with the politics of Montana’s ascendant right wing. This is the (exceedingly) rare environmental policy investigation that reads like a crime thriller. —SD
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The Great American Antler Boom发现自己有罪的陪审员
I found myself engrossed in Abe Streep’s account of a subculture I knew very little about — didn’t know existed, in fact — the world of the shed hunter. Initially, I suspected a shed hunter was someone who ambles into the woods to take a casual glance about to see if a deer antler catches their eye. I was wrong. Streep illuminates me with vivid descriptions of shedder social media stars, furious bidding wars, and the May hunt — which sounds more like an intense endurance race. At 6:00 a.m. on May 1st, public lands in Jackson are opened up to antler seekers, and Streep describes the ensuing mad scramble, where people “raced across the water and ascended into tawny meadows. One rider was bucked off his horse and injured himself. A teen-ager from Montana alleged that someone stole an antler he had spotted first.” This story made me consider both the foibles and ingenuity of the human race; it was fascinating to learn of the obsessions and livelihoods formed around a bone that another animal discards as waste. It is very human of us. —CW
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The Way We Lose Black Men Never Makes Sense. Losing My Father to COVID Is Another Example
Marissa Evans’ essay, written in the thick of her grief after her father passed suddenly at the beginning of this year, is a time capsule of her father's dreams, which included his children's prosperity, a refreshed hairline, and something increasingly rare: living a long, healthy life as a Black man. As the life expectancy for Black men shrinks, we continue to witness even the monied and privileged among them leaving this earth too soon. Evans writes: “My father’s death, particularly as an older Black man, is considered an inevitability we must live with. I can accept my father’s death, but I refuse to accept that the number of Black men we are losing is normal.” —Ko Bragg
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Disaster at 18,200 Feet
On an attempt to summit Alaska’s Denali, the tallest peak in North America, Adam Rawski fell 1,000 feet down the Autobahn, a dangerous slope that has claimed more lives than any other part of the mountain. Incredibly, he survived. But as Kelsey Vlamis recounts in this story, there’s much more to that day. How did Rawski end up climbing with three strangers? Why weren’t they roped for protection? The physical conditions alone on Denali — the high altitude, the extreme cold, the exhaustion — are a challenge for even the most seasoned mountaineers. But Rawski’s party also included a mix of inexperience and overconfidence, and was plagued by a lack of communication and odd team dynamics. Inevitably, their expedition was a total recipe for disaster. I’m not at all into mountain climbing, but Vlamis’ account of this adventure-gone-wrong gripped me ’til the end. —CLR
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Look Who’s Stalking: The Black Leopards of Gloucestershire
This investigation into Britain's big cat hunters is thoughtful, surprising, and, at turns, oddly touching. Jem Bartholomew's adroit exposition of his subject, Frank Turnbridge, left a lasting effect on me. When reading this article, I felt like I was traipsing through woodlands and winding country roads with Frank and Jem, nervously anticipating the impossible. This is not an investigation into big cat hunters. It is an investigation into those obsessed with the ever-encroaching beast of urbanization. —Christian Hill
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Too Much Vino and Project Veritas: My Extremely Weird Evening with James O’Keefe“不是愚蠢的生物。”牲畜以其复杂而情绪化的思维让科学家们感到惊讶
This story recounts one event — but what an event it was. Laura Jedeed details the launch of James O’Keefe’s latest book, American Muckraker, and her incredulity at what takes place oozes from her words. She describes “a 50-minute musical-theater production dedicated to telling O’Keefe’s story in song, dance, and strobe light.” Jedeed uses the visual prompts on stage (“A telephone repairman. Osama Bin Laden. A suit-and-tie journalist who interviews whistleblowers on YouTube”) to explain in detail the story they refer to, minus the reverence afforded the stage version. Jedeed admits to not thinking much of James O’Keefe’s work — his alt-right group, Project Veritas, attempts to discredit mainstream media and progressive groups — and, while still recognizing the problems with objective journalism, declares this “self-styled anti-elite crusader a lot like his musical theater: flashy, sometimes entertaining, and entirely pretend.” This essay aims to uncover O’Keefe’s end game — something I doubted would be revealed through a book launch — but in fact, the bizarre show O’Keefe dedicates to himself (and stars in) demonstrates a lot: “It isn’t about journalism. It isn’t even about fame. It’s about a boy who loves to dance and wanted to be part of a club that would not have him even as he railed against it.” —CW
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Dead Man Living
When it comes to ensuring humane treatment of those set to die by lethal injection, the Alabama Department of Corrections would like you to keep your seat and remain quiet. The signs in the witness room of the Holman Correctional Facility execution chamber say as much. Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff reporter at The Atlantic, has found that department officials are as impervious to important questions about the safety and dignity of the lethal injection process as the witness room’s cinderblock walls. This is a hard but necessary read about the lack of communication and transparency in Alabama’s capital punishment process and the egregious and completely unnecessary harms the state can cause to those condemned and the loved ones who endure the needless suffering of delayed or botched executions. “Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an educational nonprofit organization, told me that Alabama’s latest failure to carry out an uncomplicated execution represented an endemic problem. ‘This is the third execution in the last five years that Alabama has botched by virtue of their own incompetence in setting IV lines,’ offering Joe Nathan James and Doyle Hamm, who survived a 2018 lethal injection attempt in the state, as the two prior examples. ‘Each time, ADOC has denied the obvious and claimed nothing went wrong. They say they’ve followed their protocol. One of these things must be true: Either they’re unreliable, or their protocol is unreliable. Neither one is acceptable when a person’s life is on the line.’” —KS
Safer Than Childbirth
Anti-abortion advocates seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade would have you think that the practice of terminating pregnancies is a new phenomenon, brought on by the rise of feminism and the (imaginary) moral decay of America. As Tamara Dean lays bare in this essay, this is nothing short of a lie. Surveying historical literature and using Nancy Ann Harris, a woman who died in 1876 in a rural Wisconsin county, as a lens into the past, Dean shows how abortion was a legally and morally acceptable way for a woman to care for her health, until misogynistic, racist forces decided it shouldn’t be. “Every woman, including Nancy, would have known friends, sisters, or cousins who died or were debilitated while giving birth,” Dean writes. “They would have known those who took pains to avoid it.” This essay is a necessary corrective, and beautifully written to boot. —SD
Reported Essays
This House Is Still Haunted
Calling all English majors who love the horror genre and whose nation’s many ghosts keep them up at night — and anyone else with a yen for a great literary read. Adam Fales’s brilliant essay about the motif of the haunted house in American fiction and film comprises seven sections, which he calls “gables” in a nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fales casts a wide net for source material, incorporating Ari Aster’s movie Hereditary, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and many more works of art. Fales argues that the haunted house tale, a staple of U.S. culture for hundreds of years, “lets Americans concentrate the past’s wrongness,” from genocide to slavery to capitalist exploitation. Problem is, these stories have often “failed, if not outright refused, to heal the wounds they simultaneously abhor and celebrate.” What does a better haunted house tale look like? In the answer to that question might be kernels of a wider revolution in how we talk about and, indeed, stop reconstructing our collective sins. —Seyward Darby
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What Happened to Rezwan
Kartikay Mehrotra, Matti Gellman · ProPublica, The Kansas City Star · November 19, 2022 · 5,098 words · 存稿官方页存档
At the Statue of Liberty, the final line of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” reads: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” There’s no question that the Biden administration had the best intentions in evacuating Afghan allies out of the country in August 2021 when the United States turned its back on the country, 20 years into a failed war. But some of the tempest-tost of Afghanistan have found small (if any) welcome in rural America, where there is little experience in helping newcomers and immigrants to become happy, productive members of the community. In this nuanced piece jointly published by ProPublica and The Kansas City Star, reporters Kartikay Mehrotra and Matti Gellman try to unravel the bureaucratic inadequacies that failed the Kohistani family — and may have caused 14-year-old Rezwan Kohistani to take his own life. —KS
20 Days in Mariupol
“The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.” So begins video journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s account of the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine. In spare, blood-chilling prose crafted by Lori Pinnant, an AP colleague in Paris, based on conversations with Chernov, this feature recounts the extraordinary lengths journalists have gone to in reporting on Russia’s senseless bombardment of the city — and the extraordinary efforts Vladimir Putin’s forces have taken to suppress the truth. Chernov conveys the fear, shame, grief, anger, sadness, and — above all — sense of responsibility that comes with bearing witness to an unfathomable tragedy. This is war reporting at its finest, its most clear-eyed, its most humane. If you read one thing about Ukraine this weekend, make it this. —SD
The Texas County at the Center of a Dangerous Right-Wing Experiment
Melissa del Bosque · The Intercept in partnership with Type Investigations · October 12, 2022 · 3,479 words · 存稿官方页存档
Readers of this newsletter probably already know that I feel a great deal of despair about the future of America. Reading this excellent report by Melissa del Bosque did nothing to assuage my despondency. Del Bosque travels to a Texas county where officials are more or less invoking war powers to round up, prosecute, humiliate, fine, and in many cases deport people who cross the border. This isn’t something they’re legally empowered to do, but no matter. It’s a devastating, infuriating read, and there are two moments that made my blood run cold. The first is when an official says he wants to open “prosecution camps” (read the story to find out exactly what that means). The second is when armed militia members, eager to help county authorities on their mission, record themselves detaining a frightened migrant so that they can post the video online. “At one point,” del Bosque writes, “the Nicaraguan man asks for asylum and apoyo, or help. A militia member in an American flag headband responds, ‘Chicken?’ Finally, a Kinney County sheriff’s deputy arrives and takes him away.” The dehumanization, cruelty, ignorance, and performance of that moment is, I fear, a harbinger of our collective future. —SD
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Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place Near the River苏珊娜带你去她靠近河边的地方
Suzanne Verdal, the infamous muse and subject of the Leonard Cohen song that bears her name, is a real person. And unlike Cohen who passed away in 2016, she’s still alive. Because she’s a human being, we know that Suzanne is much more than simply a muse, but did she have artistic aspirations of her own? At Guernica, writer Lacy Warner is surprised by what she finds out about Suzanne’s true super power: “In Suzanne, I saw the possibility not only of reckoning with what muses might be owed, but the chance to strike a blow for all the women who have inspired men’s art while struggling to be recognized for their own.” —KS
The Sweet and Sticky History of the Date
I love visiting supermarkets while traveling, perusing aisles of foods both familiar and not. An Armenian grocery in the San Fernando Valley introduced me to pinecone jam. A store in Bishkek surprised me with its wide array of ketchup options. Then there was the supermarket in Abu Dhabi that boasted a bar filled with nothing but dates: big ones, small ones, stuffed ones, fresh ones — and in a rainbow of brown or orange hues. Until then, I’d had no clue there were so many varieties. Matti Friedman’s feature about the sumptuous fruit is equally surprising and instructive. It traces the date’s history from ancient times to the present and posits that the fruit tells the long, complicated story of the Middle East. Friedman takes readers on a tour of mythology, architecture, and empire; inside a Jurassic Park-style genetic experiment involving “resurrected” date palms; and into the halls of an agricultural conference about the future of the date in a fraught world and changing climate. By the end of reading this piece I felt enriched — and hungry. —SD
The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time1999 年最疯狂、最吸毒、最淫荡的邪教电影《Go》是如何制作出来的（也几乎没有制作完成）
This list is so damn fun. Starting in 431 B.C. and progressing chronologically, it levels the cultural playing field, quoting passages from Beowulf and Macbeth while also reveling in the transgressive lyrics of “Goodbye Earl.” It reminded me of at least one brilliant cinematic death that I’d somehow forgotten — before using an inhaler, make sure it’s not a gun! — and made me tear up at its description of a groundbreaking storyline in Doonesbury. Like all the best GOAT lists, it also made me consider what I would include: one of the gruesome deaths in The Omen, Mr. Jingles’ demise and resurrection in The Green Mile, Alec’s murder in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (ooooh — or the raising of the black flag at the end!?). “We’ve made this list during a pandemic, as real-life death has stalked us all, more tangible than ever,” Dan Kois writes. “One of the many things art can do is to help us navigate the pitfalls of life, and there’s no deeper pitfall than the final one.” —SD
Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade
Who knew the business of Christmas trees could be completely wild? Just read Owen Long’s entertaining story about the Christmas tree industry in New York City. Here, there are no quaint family tree farms or small neighborhood pop-ups — this ruthless industry is run by a few eccentric businessmen, called “tree men,” who spend most of the year preparing for the holiday season. There’s George Nash, an old hippie who sells trees to much of Harlem; Kevin Hammer, known as the “Keyser Söze of Christmas” and the man responsible for shaping NYC’s industry into what it is today; and Greg Walsh, who is Long’s boss (and looks exactly like Santa Claus). I don’t want to say too much — just sit down with a hot drink and dive into this festive and fascinating piece. There are some pretty hilarious lines, so be careful not to spit out your eggnog. —CLR
Features
Gazawood Dreams
It’s the rich, cinematic detail in Paul Fischer’s “Gazawood Dreams” that draws you in and holds you captivated. It’s the story of two Palestinian brothers who, despite ongoing violence around their home in the Gaza Strip, just want to make films. Fischer introduces us to Tarzan and Arab within the ruins of Gaza City’s al-Nasr movie theatre, the site where the brothers’ cinematic dreams were born. It’s been shut down since 1987. “They called their studio Gazawood. Its walls plastered in collages of images, Gazawood was like a psychological and emotional bunker, sheltering them from the fighter jets roaring overhead, the whipcrack of rockets firing in the distance, the sectarian arguments in the febrile streets.” Fischer paints more than just a portrait of two brothers trying to make films in a war zone, taking us from hardship to hope and from Gaza to Cannes as Tarzan and Arab persevere, despite violence and overwhelming government oppression. —Krista Stevens
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Coming Into Focus
Carla Ciccone · Harper’s Bazaar · September 5, 2022 · 3,231 words · 官方页
“Getting diagnosed with ADHD on the cusp of 40 brought my personal history into sharp focus,” writes Carla Ciccone in this personal piece for Harper’s Bazaar. There’s been a spike in the number of ADHD diagnoses among adult women, especially in the last several years, and Ciccone was one of them. “But women aren’t suddenly waking up with a neurological disorder,” she writes. “It’s likely been there all along, masquerading as low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, ‘she’s difficult,’ ‘she’s an airhead,’ ‘she’s unlucky,’ ‘she’s lazy,’ and other labels that tend to mark a girl as she moves through her life.” Ciccone describes her own struggles growing up — in school, in relationships, in processing traumatic events — and how her diagnosis at 39 has helped her reframe the way she sees herself, her family, and her past. It’s an honest and illuminating read, especially for those who may see their own experiences reflected in hers. —CLR
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The Haunting of a Dream House
Netflix loves a true crime miniseries and yesterday released yet another one: The Watcher. Yet to see it, I am hopeful it will be more nuanced than the endless parade of horrific murders dominating this genre. After all, the story it is based on is more spooky than gory. First detailed in 2018 by Reeves Wiedeman in his essay for The Cut, it is classic “idyllic suburbia turns creepy,” with the Broaddus family buying their dream home, only to begin receiving alarming letters to “The New Owner.” With a strong horror vibe, these letters explain the writer has “been put in charge of watching” the house and asking questions about “the young blood” living there. Wiedeman deftly builds up the suspense but also focuses on something more mundane: neighborhood politics. Fearing for their children, the Broadduses never move into the house, but this does not stop them from investigating their neighbors to find out who “The Watcher” may be. Suspicions run high, with tensions overspilling in lawsuits and town council meetings. Managing to combine mystery with paperwork, Wiedeman creates a compelling story that you won’t be able to stop reading. I hope Netflix does it justice. —CW
Getaway Driver
Initially, I thought this beautiful essay would be about Bonnie and Clyde, but it turns out they are just a side note. Hough resists any temptation to glamorize her story with the famous crime gang — instead, it is the small yet compelling details about her grandpa and the community of Shamrock that drew me in. I could envision the scene as Hough describes chatting to her grandpa on the porch, smelling his pipe tobacco as he blew “smoke rings for me to slap apart before they floated to the ceiling.” The stories her grandpa relays are pulled from the haze of the Alzheimer’s that is gradually consuming his thoughts. He is particularly animated telling his childhood tale of Bonnie and Clyde hiding in the family barn and giving him a box of chocolate bars. It could be true. Hough visits the scene in Shamrock and finds out the gang was indeed there at one point. Hough vividly paints the characters she meets in the community, who question her doubting her grandpa’s story: “‘Why wouldn’t it be true?’ Hazel responds. ‘It’s his story.’” And so is this essay — it is a touching homage to her grandpa, no one else. —CW
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Signs of Life
My introduction to French writer André Breton was in college, during a course on Luis Buñuel, which opened my eyes wide to surrealist cinema. I remember watching films like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie for the first time, slipping into worlds where dreams invade everyday life. I thought about this interplay of the familiar and the bizarre while reading this essay by Raksha Vasudevan, in which she recounts her time as an aid worker in southern Turkey. She describes the surreal experience of remotely leading a team in a war zone just 45 kilometers away in Syria, as she performed daily tasks on her laptop — like tallying civilian injuries and deaths in Excel — while holed up in a purple-walled room. “I was far from war, physically,” she writes. “But still, it wormed into my consciousness, refusing to be brushed away into the realm of things abstract and distant and therefore ignorable.” Vasudevan beautifully reflects on this time, making thought-provoking insights on surrealist art, secondary trauma, and the surreality of both tragedy and love. —CLR
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Inside One Of The World’s First Human Composting Facilities
We all die, though when someone you love passes and you’re mired in grief, reducing the environmental impact of your loved one’s body isn’t generally top of mind. Burial and cremation are standard options, but both pollute the environment. Embalming fluids can leach through a casket and contaminate the soil. Cremation requires a lot of fuel and releases carbon dioxide into the air. But, what if we could actually give back to the earth after we die to help trees, plants, and flowers to flourish? Enter natural organic reduction (NOR), or human composting, which is now legal in four states and counting. In this insightful piece at The Verge, Eleanor Cummins reports on how NOR started off as an idea in Katrina Spade’s 2013 graduate thesis and has since become a cost effective and environmentally friendly way for families to say goodbye to their loved ones. —KS
Investigative Reporting
Kate Price Remembers Something Terrible
“Even if many of us never find them again, they may never really be lost,” writes Janelle Nanos about our memories. For most of her life, Kate Price had felt, deep in her body, that she had been wronged when she was a child. When she met Nanos in 2012, Price had already spent decades interrogating her own memory and history, but together — as journalist and survivor — they embarked on a journey to make sense of Price’s childhood, and to find evidence that she was sexually abused by her father and maternal grandfather, and sold for sex to truckers who drove through Pennsylvania. It’s a challenging read about child abuse, long-lasting trauma, memory, and family, but also a remarkably told story 10 years in the making about a woman who risked everything to discover the truth, and who defied the odds and has managed to build a happy life. The piece plays eerie visual tricks on the reader’s eye, from Erin Clark’s double-exposure photos to subtly moving layouts that make you question what you’re seeing; this imagery, combined with audio clips, take you deep into this incredible story. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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What Was Brangelina?
There have been a lot of words written about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie — most of them with a tinge of hysteria. Magazines have long reveled in the drama of their love story (remember “Team Jolie” and “Team Aniston?”). This essay is refreshing, with Angelica Jade Bastién taking a calm, measured look at how the Brangelina story has played out over the years. I was never particularly enthralled by either of them, but still enjoyed this thoughtful analysis, along with the beautifully vivid descriptions of their iconic photos: “She’s unconsciously supine, made to appear in a pill-addled haze, wearing a magenta Narciso Rodriguez wool and silk crêpe dress as he, in a suit sans jacket — as if he just got home and is not quite eager to clean her mess — kneels to scoop her up.” Bastién also addresses the complicated issue of how Pitt has managed to maintain a reputation for being the good guy, despite Jolie leveling accusations of abuse against him. Their story is far from over. —CW
Investigative Reporting
Untold
There are few sports scandals more horrifying than Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky being indicted in 2011 for the sexual abuse of dozens of young boys. It killed the program’s reputation; it led to the ouster of legendary head coach Joe Paterno, a man revered in the town of State College and beyond. But decades before, the Penn State football system met another monster in its midst. Todd Hodne, a young and aggressive defenseman, was arrested for rape in 1978. Paterno ousted him from the locker room, but the end of Hodne’s football career didn’t mean the end of his atrocities. With patience and empathy, Lavigne and Junod piece together the saga in an investigation that’s something more than a magazine story. For the women who crossed Hodne’s ruinous path, it’s an exorcism, a defiant testimonial that desecration doesn’t have to mean destruction. For the reader, it’s a crucial reminder that the sports world has a way of coddling even its outcasts. And for the journalists who searched and listened and wrote this outstanding work, it’s yet another laurel in their already legendary careers. Between the ongoing true-crime podcast wave and Netflix phenomena like Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, it’s clear that our society has developed a lurid fixation with serially violent men. “Untold” will help you remember that every voyeuristic frisson comes at the price of another person’s life. —Peter Rubin
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A Marriage Story
“It is, without a doubt, one of the most moving film sequences of the past 20 years.” I saw Up a long time ago, in a part of my life I’d like to forget. I don’t remember much about that time in my life (thankfully!) or much about the movie itself, other than what it reduced me to: a sobbing heap on the couch. I don’t think the term “ugly cry” had been invented yet, but that’s an accurate description of my response. How could two animated film characters conjure such a powerful emotional response in a hapless viewer in a mere 10 minutes? At The Ringer, Up director Pete Docter and codirector Bob Peterson reflect on the care and craft that went into making Carl and Ellie, as well as the specifics of imprinting them and their shared history on the hearts of an unsuspecting audience in that seminal first part of the film. —KS
Investigative Reporting
‘These Kids Are Dying’ — Inside the Overdose Crisis Sweeping Fort Bragg
They’re young, healthy members of the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Bragg. So why are far too many of them dying by accidental fentanyl overdose? That’s the question that Seth Harp set out to answer in this deeply reported piece for Rolling Stone, but he ended up discovering much more about the needless reasons Fort Bragg soldiers are dying while stateside, despite a lack of transparency from top brass at the military installation. Is it the nature of the work at a place that houses mostly “male soldiers in combat-arms units”? Could the personality traits that make for elite soldiers make them more likely to dismiss the risks of drug use? Could the horrors of serving in Afghanistan and the recent U.S. withdrawal have spawned trauma that causes soldiers to self-medicate? In this unflinching piece, Harp does the work to try to find out and call the U.S. Army to account. Aside from the accidental overdose crisis killing soldiers at Fort Bragg, perhaps Harp’s most alarming discovery is about the most common way that soldiers stationed there die: “Forty-one Fort Bragg soldiers took their own lives in 2020 and 2021, making suicide the leading cause of death. A spokesman for the Army, Matthew Leonard, confirmed that no other base has ever recorded a higher two-year suicide toll.” —Krista Stevens
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Ikea’s Race for the Last of Europe’s Old-Growth Forest新共和
Sure, your baby’s new SUNDVIK crib is cute and modern, but do you have any idea where the wood came from? Romania has one of the largest old-growth forests left in the world, home to ancient and rare spruce, beech, and oak trees. Joining the European Union in 2007 opened Romania up to a massive market for this prized cheap timber, which fuels the fast furniture industry. IKEA, which makes big sustainability claims, is the largest individual consumer of wood on the planet; in 2015, it started to buy forestland in Romania in bulk and is now the country’s largest private landowner. But more than half of Romania’s wood is illegally harvested and, as Alexander Sammon intrepidly reports, what’s actually happening on the ground is not always legit and, in some cases, has turned violent. “Tracing any individual tree from forest floor to showroom presents a near impossible challenge,” writes Sammon. “As wood moves through the supply chain, it becomes increasingly difficult to pin down.” This is a dismal but gripping and important read. —CLR
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What Was the TED Talk?
Even at the height of the TED era, I’d never bought into the idea of a TED Talk — I could never get past the ridiculousness of it all: the thought leader du jour under a spotlight, pacing back and forth on stage, taking each step, serving up each line, even delivering each pause with emotion and passion. Their aim? To disseminate knowledge about the future of our world with other hungry minds, but also to share their bold ideas for how to be better, superior humans. (“The TED philosophy encouraged boldness of vision, but also denial of reality,” writes Schwartz. “As such, it was a magnet for narcissistic, recognition-seeking characters and their Theranos-like projects.”) I enjoyed Schwartz’s exploration of TED’s history and approach, and the rise and fall of the TED Talk, which had a very distinct format fusing interestingness with storytelling to create “inspiresting” content. —CLR
A Touch of Moss
Nikita Arora · Aeon · September 8, 2022 · 4,549 words · 官方页
This beautiful essay is a letter of recommendation to go out and touch moss. Yes, the soft green stuff growing on walls and rocks and trees, patches and carpets that grow at a glacial pace, that harken back to an ancient, pre-human world. But Nikita Arora isn’t recommending that readers commune with moss because it’s good for the soul to connect with nature — that’s too pat, too easy. Rather, Arora urges a reimagining of what it means for humans to touch the world around us. “Touch” comes from toche, French for “blow” or “attack,” and as Arora elucidates, the ability to touch has often been an extension of power and its attendant violence. “Perhaps the apparent superficiality of touch is the fiction,” Arora writes. “The histories (colonial, racial, elitist) of human relationships with the nonhuman may have whitewashed and pigeonholed touch and its potential for radical reciprocity and for reckoning with the past and the present.” —SD
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White Parents Rallied to Chase a Black Educator Out of Town. Then, They Followed Her to the Next One.
This was the scariest story I read all week. Cecilia Lewis was hired in 2021 by the Cherokee County School District in Georgia to be its first-ever administrator focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. But she hadn’t started the job — indeed, she hadn’t even moved down South from her longtime home in Maryland — before a mob of white parents decided she had to go. They sent her racist messages, spread lies about her, and screamed at school board meetings to get their way. And when Lewis took a different job, one county over, they didn’t stop. Nicole Carr’s feature is a searing reminder of just how vicious the right-wing war on progressive education in America has become, and a revealing look at the kind of people — white parents, riding a wave of national bigotry — who are leading troops into battle. —SD
Profiles
The Woman Who Killed Roe
I knew as soon as I read this piece in May that I would pick it for Longreads’ Best of 2022. Not because the subject, Marjorie Dannenfelser, is from my hometown, went to the same university I did, and got married in the Catholic church attached to my middle school. All that made me feel eerily close to the piece, sure, but what makes Kerry Howley’s work worthy of inclusion here is that she uses a magazine profile as a vehicle for challenging the tropes and omissions, the lies and distortions of America’s anti-abortion movement. “If we are by now accustomed to discussing ulterior motives and the well-documented history of legislators using abortion rhetoric to consolidate the right,” Howley notes, “we speak less of how the rhetoric works: by triggering in its subjects a stomach-churning horror.” And: “Almost all social movements work to erase context contrary to the cause. In this case, the context is a woman.” Howley shows how Dannenfelser, a powerful, single-minded activist, orchestrated a generation’s worth of horror and erasure, leading directly to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. —Seyward Darby
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My Friend Goo
“In March 2020 the entire human world was out walking,” begins Deb Olin Unferth’s charming, tender essay. We all remember that time; in those earliest days of terrifying mystery, the only thing we could do was find whatever unoccupied bit of the planet we could, and move through it. While most of us did so to avoid anyone and everyone, however, the writer found connection — with a massive goose she names Goo. There’s more to this story, as she reminds us throughout: a long-dead older brother, a strained relationship, the hostile vagaries of the natural world. Above all, as she recounts her growing intimacy with Goo, the essay serves as a paean to the idea of difficult friendship. There’s less of a wallop here than a prolonged, low-grade emotional ache; Unferth draws you through her life and loss with an unerring sense of pace, and from the very beginning you sense that there’s only one place this path can end. It does, of course, at least in a way. But that doesn’t mean you won’t hold your breath waiting for the punch to the gut. —PR
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No Escape From Guantánamo
The United States began detaining men at Guantánamo Bay 20 years ago this week. Nearly 800 prisoners have spent time in the facility’s cells; today 39 men still remain behind bars there, 27 of whom have never been charged with a crime. This haunting, must-read story is about men who’ve been released and resettled in third countries — a Tunisian in Slovakia, for instance, and a Yemeni in Serbia. Abigail Hauslohner describes them as “the discarded men of one of America’s darkest chapters.” After enduring torture and other horrors at Guantánamo, they’ve been forced to live hundreds or thousands of miles from any family or friends. They face persecution and poverty, as well as the lingering effects of trauma. If they can rely on anything, it’s each other. “They trade advice, news and jokes in text-message chains,” Hauslohner writes. “And when things get bad, they call each other.” —SD
Features
Two Fathers“这就像一个战区”：波特兰将芬太尼合法化后发生了什么
Humboldt is a farm town of about 5,900 in central Saskatchewan, Canada. In Humboldt, hockey is a religion. In Humboldt, everyone is proud of The Broncos, the junior hockey team. It was on April 6, 2018, that a lorry crashed into the Broncos’ team bus, killing 14, and leaving the close-knit town devasted. In this essay, Mitch Moxley, while still telling the story of the day of the crash, focuses on what happened in the years afterward: A community left in shock, families grieving, and a high-profile court case where the driver of the lorry, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, is charged with 29 counts of dangerous driving. It's a heartwrenching read, but Moxley is careful and compassionate in his portrayal of the different paths grief can take you down. One father who lost a son advocates for Sidhu to be deported to his home country of India after his prison sentence. Another father forgives him, writing letters to support his stay in Canada. Moxley’s description of Sidhu meeting the man who forgave him — down on one knee, sobbing — will make your emotions somersault. There is no clear right or wrong here, whether to forgive or not. Grief has no clear answers. A powerful essay that looks beneath the surface of a tragedy, examining the complicated tangle of issues beneath: forgiveness, family, community, immigration, unfair work practices, and tremendous loss. —Carolyn Wells
Reported Essays
On Death and Love
In this poignant and incisive essay at Emergence Magazine, Melanie Challenger grapples with grief and loss in her life and the irony of a general human ambivalence to death in the plant and animal kingdoms that has allowed us to harm the planet over time. Speaking of grief, my own life has changed exponentially since I first read and shared Challenger’s piece back in January. I met death face-to-face when it came calling in August, and like Challenger, “I didn’t leave that room the same person.” She’s right when she suggests that we hurt so much when someone dies because we are so very privileged to love: “Among the many lessons Hannah taught me that day, and in the days to come, was the significance and seriousness of grief in human lives — which is another way of saying the significance of love in our lives, because it is the fever of our attachment to one another that charges grief with its intolerable brilliancy.” Now, if only we could love the planet the way we love and grieve for one another: “When we are closer to the animals and plants that accompany us in this life, we share in their demise and in their aim to flourish, which raises the force of their deaths and softens the force of our own.” —Krista Stevens
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A Texas Teen Wanted an Abortion. Now She Has Twins.
If I were a journalism teacher, I would assign this story to my class immediately. Not only because it is wrenching — and my god, it is — but also because it demonstrates the value of beat reporting, editorial foresight, and covering the ripple effects of major news stories. Caroline Kitchener writes about abortion for one of the biggest newspapers in the country. The so-called “heartbeat bill” in Texas went into effect nine months ago, which means the first women in the state who couldn’t get abortions because of the law are now having babies. Therein lies the seed of a story idea, in the form of a question: What happened to those women? Kitchener found one of them, a teenager who gave birth to twins several weeks ago, and crafted an intimate narrative that simmers with pathos yet lets the facts speak for themselves. I won’t soon forget the scene in which antiabortion activists hold up the subject of Kitchener’s piece as a political victory — even lighting a candle in her honor — without any knowledge of what their shameful advocacy has meant for her well-being, her sense of self, or her future. This is complex, award-worthy storytelling. —SD
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An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat That Is Really About My Own Shit溜走
Meet Joe Black is a bad movie. It’s long, and slow, and pretentious. But it has one thing going for it, and that is Brad Pitt eating. Specifically, Brad Pitt licking peanut butter off a spoon, considering it with his tongue, and then asking for more. Watching this scene in the theater in middle school was a seminal moment in my sexual awakening. Needless to say, I clicked fast when I saw the headline of this essay. And I wasn’t disappointed: Lucas Mann uses Brad Pitt eating — in a number of films, but starting, rightly, with MJB — as a lens through which to consider his relationship to his own body and to the bodies of others, some of which he knows intimately, others of which he knows only from watching them on screen. It’s a lovely, surprising piece that makes me crave peanut butter, straight out of the jar. —SD
The Bronc-busting, Cow-punching, Death-defying Legend of Boots O’Neal
“This morning’s chore: Boots and three of his Stetsoned coworkers must round up some two dozen bulls scattered across a vast grazing pasture, drive them to a set of pens about a mile away, and load the one-ton beeves into a livestock trailer so they can be hauled to another division of the Four Sixes, the legendary West Texas ranch that sprawls across 260,000 acres…To an outsider, this might feel like a scene straight out of Lonesome Dove. For Boots, this is Tuesday morning. He’s repeated this task countless times—his career began during the Truman administration and has now spanned seven decades—but if given the chance to be doing anything on earth, this is what he would choose every time.” Now is probably a good time to mention that this particular Boots, out on a horse rounding up Angus bulls in rural Texas, is 89-years-old. While Boots (a.k.a Billy Milton O’Neal) has decades on me, I am at the age where I’m starting to think more about aging not just with grace, but also vitality and a side of sass. What are the keys to aging well? If you take some pointers from Boots in this superlative profile by Christian Wallace at Texas Monthly, aging well means not just doing what you love, but being intentional, and becoming part of a community of people who share your joy. Oh, and let’s not forget the dancing. “Boots and Nelda were happy together. Perhaps more than anywhere else, they found common ground on the dance floor. They would dance to country music, waltzes, and rags, and they loved to two-step.” —KS
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A Plane of Monkeys, a Pandemic, and a Botched Deal: Inside the Science Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of
In May 2020, a plane full of monkeys intended for COVID-19 research was supposed to depart Mauritius. But it never did. Who purchased the monkeys? Where were they supposed to go? When Jackie Flynn Mogensen looked into the failed flight, and began to investigate the secretive global trade of research monkeys, she found there was an even bigger story: The U.S. is experiencing a primate shortage, and there aren’t enough monkeys for research across many areas of medicine. Primate research has led to life-saving discoveries over the decades, but it remains controversial, with no guarantees, despite animal testing guidelines, that animals are treated properly. “But no matter how you or I feel about it,” Mogensen writes, “it’s clear the practice has saved—and is saving—human lives.” This is a fascinating dive into the monkey trade and the players within it, like Matthew Block, who’s been a target of animal rights groups for years and, as you’ll read, is the owner of the company who arranged the flight. Mogensen also reports on a few alternatives, like lab-grown organs, but we’re still a long way from a world without animal testing. —CLR
Best of 2022
Reader Favorites
Family Membership
A lovely, and sometimes funny, story about a male friendship told narratively while shopping at Costco. — Monica Prelle
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A Child Star at 7, in Prison at 22. Then She Vanished. What Happened to Lora Lee Michel?
Barbara Wright Isaacs has been looking for her sister, Lora Lee Michel, for nearly 55 years. What makes her disappearance particularly baffling: Lora Lee once had the eyes of the world on her. In the ’40s, she appeared in films alongside Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, and Olivia de Havilland. So what happened? Stacy Perman finds out in this meticulously researched piece for the Los Angeles Times, brought to life with photos and film clips of the adorable, precocious child star. Beginning with the well-known half of Lora Lee’s life, the story races along at whip-cracking speed, twisting and turning, before culminating in a high-profile custody battle between Lora Lee’s biological and adoptive mother. When Lora Lee leaves Hollywood for Texas, aged 10, things become hazier, forcing Perman to resort to her own research. By tracking down dozens of individuals and public records, she finds, as she writes, “a woman lost in a maze of short marriages and perpetual misfortunes.” Perman takes Lora Lee’s sad tale back to Wright Isaacs. It’s not the story she had hoped for, but still closure on what happened to her sister. I was impressed by Perman’s dogged determination to find answers for this family — and more impressed that she did. —CW
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How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?
A harrowing, intimate story with incredible details. Most importantly, it connected one baby's tragic journey with the biggest stakes of the U.S. in Afghanistan, a year after the withdrawal. — Jonathan Guyer
Profiles
An American Girl
“It had been 100 days since Caitlyne hid in a classroom, listening to a stranger slaughter 19 fourth-graders and two teachers across the hallway at Robb Elementary,” writes John Woodrow Cox. “Caitlyne knew them all.” I revisited Cox’s profile of 10-year-old Caitlyne Gonzales, one of the survivors of the school shooting in Uvalde, on a week when I was touring public elementary schools, since my 4-year-old will be entering kindergarten next fall. As I visited classrooms, I pictured my daughter sitting on a rug, listening to the teacher reading a book; I imagined her coloring at her desk. My eyes well up as I read details about Caitlyne and her classmates’ lives: the things they like, the things they do. Watching TikToks, doing cartwheels. The things that 10-year-olds are supposed to do. Cox does what he does best: He immerses us in Caitlyne’s day-to-day life and, with care and respect, tells an incredibly moving, human story of loss and resilience. So much of this story hurts to read, particularly lines that reveal the impossible reality and trauma our children face in a country that values guns over their lives. Caitlyne shouldn’t have to wear a lanyard with the photos of her dead friends. She shouldn’t know more about ballistic windows and bulletproof backpacks before knowing how to ride a bike without training wheels. She shouldn’t have to travel to the nation’s capital to beg this country’s leadership to do something to make our schools safer. (“I’m gonna go meet Joe Byron,” she says at one point, which is at first funny, but also deeply disturbing.) Caitlyne should be playing, learning — not fighting for action and accountability. It has now been 212 days since the Robb Elementary School shooting. This is just a reminder so we don’t forget. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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Anatomy of a Murder Confession
“They put us together…and tell us that we can do whatever we want, as long as we solve cases.” That’s what James Holland, a Texas Ranger and media-dubbed “serial killer whisperer,” once said about the Rangers’ work on unsolved murders. The person he said it to was James Driskill, a suspect in a cold case, and Holland wasn’t kidding: To pin the murder on Driskill, the Rangers used hypnosis, deception, a “hypothetical” confession, and other investigative methods criticized by criminal justice experts and advocates as dramatically increasing the risk of convicting an innocent person. Which is exactly what Driskill, now serving a prison sentence, and his legal team say happened to him. Maurice Chammah’s story about Holland’s questionable techniques, which aren’t isolated to Driskill’s case, is as jaw-dropping as it is expertly crafted. —SD
The Man Who Paid for America’s Fear
This is the definitive story of Hamid Hayat, a man wrongfully convicted of terrorism, sentenced to prison on his 25th birthday, and finally set free after 14 years behind bars. It is a profile, yes, but it is also a deep, unflinching examination of just how ugly and far-reaching Islamophobia became in America after the 9/11 attacks. True to form, author Jason Fagone — whose work was featured in our Best of 2021 collection — offers readers a master class in structure. When I read the closing anecdote, I said aloud, to no one in particular, “Damn.” —SD
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Into the Depths
According to academic research, the transatlantic slave trade comprised at least 36,000 voyages — that’s how many trips it took to forcibly transport some 12.5 million Africans from freedom to bondage. But 1,000 or so of those ships likely sank, taking with them the bodies and stories of the people on board. A remarkable group of Black divers is now searching for these lost ships. When writer Tara Roberts joined them — quitting her job, giving up her apartment, and dipping into her savings to make it happen — she learned more than she ever thought possible about the power of history, including her own family’s roots. Roberts’ beautiful piece documenting her journey complements a six-part podcast about the slave trade and its shipwrecks. There’s a moment in the piece I won’t soon forget, when divers pour soil from the island where a group of slaves was captured over the waves near Cape Town where 212 of them perished in a capsized ship. “For the first time since 1794,” a diver tells Roberts, “[these] people can sleep in their own land.” —SD
Investigative Reporting
How a Massacre of Nearly 300 in Syria Was Revealed
This piece instantly came to mind when I thought about investigative reporting. It’s haunted me. A harrowing read, it begins with a description of the videos that inspired Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud to start the investigation: two men, in broad daylight, executing 41 civilians and dumping the bodies in a pre-dug pit prepared with car tires for incineration. Detailed vividly, I warn it contains upsetting descriptions of violence. The callousness of these videos stood out for Üngör and Shahhoud, even though, as researchers of mass violence and genocide in Syria and elsewhere, they have watched thousands of hours of distressing footage. For previous research, they had created a Facebook profile of a young, pro-regime woman from an Alawite middle-class family — “Anna” — and used her to interview dozens of Assad’s perpetrators. After narrowing their scope with on-the-ground research, they scoured Facebook with this profile, finally recognizing the main shooter from the videos in a photo. Friending him on Facebook messenger, “Anna” leads him on a catfish dance for months before finally approaching the topic of the massacre and convincing him to confess that he “killed a lot of people.” Tracking down a killer and getting him to admit the soul-destroying acts he has committed is an impressive feat. But it took a toll, and to learn more about what Üngör and Shahhoud went through during the investigation, listen to The Guardian‘s podcast series “Searching for the Shadow Man” — they could not keep “Anna” alive for much longer. —Carolyn Wells
Reported Essays
Super-Prime Mover: Britain’s Most Successful Estate Agent
A delightful piece by the ever-witty Sophie Elmhirst, plucked from the murky depths of time — January 2022. Before the war in Ukraine. Before sky-rocketing bills. Early 2022 was a whole different landscape. Rereading this essay, I wondered how things had changed for Gary Hersham’s British real estate company, Beauchamp Estates: Russian Oligarchs, fond of buying up London properties, are now sanctioned, and interest rates in the U.K. (and around the world) have reached giddy heights. Despite this essay feeling like a time capsule, I still loved revisiting the indomitable Hersham. He has operated through ups and downs for decades; I bet he is doing just fine. Elmhirst tags along as he blusters his way through viewings, sales, interactions with his “fantastic” secretary, and many, many phone calls. It’s a riveting insight into a world where who you know absolutely matters, and Britain is sold as a brand. As Elmhirst eloquently puts it, “[a] slice of fictional England, a portal to aristocracy, yours for £10,000 a square foot.” While we glimpse Indian billionaires and Chinese industrialists, it is Hersham who remains the most fascinating character. He is another snapshot in time, confidently telling Elmhirst: “‘I always call it WhatsUp.’ As if the app had got it wrong.” —Carolyn Wells
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The Untold Story of the White House’s Weirdly Hip Record Collection
Did you know that the White House has an official record collection? Can you imagine Ronald and Nancy Reagan doing the Electric Slide on music night? (Apparently that never happened as the records were put in storage not long after Reagan took office. Sorry for creating that image / nightmare in your mind.) Although the collection includes everything from Perry Como to the Clash, the vast majority of the albums have never been played and the last time it was expanded was in 1981. If you had the chance to update the collection with records from the previous 40 years, what would you choose? What would you want to put into the ears of the sitting president, their administration, and all the administrations to come? John Chuldenko, President Jimmy Carter’s grandson, once shot footage for a documentary about the White House’s record collection and is keen to add to it. “…it would be a blast to bring the collection into the 21st century. The White House record library ‘is a treasure, and people need to know about it,’ Chuldenko says. ‘We need to update this. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’” “And there, finally, was the collection: record-filled boxes stacked up in front of the movie screen. The LPs had been kept in their original sleeves, which were inserted into color-coded binders (light blue for pop, yellow for classical, etc.). Each was adorned with the presidential seal and a foil stamp that read WHITE HOUSE RECORD LIBRARY. The whole thing reeked of gravitas and respectability—except that inside a binder, rather than some speech delivered by FDR in the ’40s, you might find a mint-condition copy of Macho Man by the Village People.” —KS
The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life
Could it be? After conversations with Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), engineer Blake Lemoine maintains that the bot has achieved sentience. Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas has dismissed Lemoine’s claims, despite the fact he has “argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness.” Lemoine’s on administrative leave from Google and decided to go public. While the story sounds like it comes straight out of science fiction, Lemoine is not alone. “Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.” Detractors, though, say that making sense is far from sentience: “Most academics and AI practitioners, however, say the words and images generated by artificial intelligence systems such as LaMDA produce responses based on what humans have already posted on Wikipedia, Reddit, message boards, and every other corner of the internet. And that doesn’t signify that the model understands meaning.” Stories like this, as well as “Ghosts,” Vauhini Vara’s incredible essay about feeding the linguistic engine GPT-3 prompts about her late sister (highlighted in Longreads’ Best of 2021), would make any skeptic think again. —KS
In the Court of the Liver King
At the nexus of Influencer and Extreme Fitness Bro lies Brian Johnson, a man who drags unholy amounts of weight through the Texas woods. A man who does burpees on crowded New York subway cars. A man who, along with his family, sleeps without mattresses in order to better mimic the behavior of his primal ancestors. A man who eats a pound of raw liver a day — yes, a day. It’s hard for me to type these words without laughing, yet the joy is nothing compared to that derived from reading Madeleine Aggeler’s rollicking profile of the man known to millions only as The Liver King. Will you leave feeling sorry for his poor kids, sparring in their mansion’s living room and taking a fork to pigs’ heads in some Lord of the Flies fever dream of prepubescence? For sure. But if a magazine is going to give multiple pages to a bearded madman and his paleolithic worldview, you could do a lot worse than this vivid (but still humanizing) portrait. And a word of warning to my vegetarian friends: maybe look for a text-only version, lest the many photos of glistening organs and animal parts drive you to apoplexy. —PR
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The DIY Duo Behind the Amazon Labor Union’s Guerrilla Bid to Make History亚马逊工会游击队创造历史背后的 DIY 二人组
Amazon workers in Staten Island made history last week by voting to establish the company’s first union. The grassroots effort was led by two men, Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer, who faced all manner of racist and classist indignities, often as a matter of policy created by Amazon officials to derail unionization. On the eve of the vote, The City, a non-profit newsroom, published this fantastic behind-the-scenes look at what was going down on Staten Island. It’s essential reading at a pivotal moment in U.S. labor history, full of rich detail and blistering reminders of why Amazon unions are necessary. For example: “[Smalls] was fired for allegedly stealing two minutes of company time, which he attributes to ‘human error’ for punching in his work time incorrectly.” And: “Sun-faded prayer candles commemorate a 24-year-old [Amazon worker]…killed by a driver in November as she crossed the street during her near-midnight lunch break.” —SD
Saying Goodbye to My Chest
Tuesday was National Coming Out Day, making this a fitting week for Naomi Gordon-Loebl’s essay about top surgery to make its debut. The piece operates in multiple registers, juxtaposing humor and gravity, hope and elegy, romance and pragmatism. The result is a brave, moving, and defiant piece of writing, one that quietly urges readers to set aside their assumptions about trans identity and much more. “I never hated my chest. It’s a perfectly fine chest; a good one, and I’m fond of it, even,” Gordon-Loebl writes. “It needs to go now, not because it is wrong, or something worth despising, but simply because it is standing in the way of a life I can no longer postpone.” —SD
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On Winter
I was born and have lived all my life in a place known for the harshest winters outside Siberia. When people in other places say it’s cold out, I try to stay quiet. (After all, cold is relative and it’s all about what you’re used to.) The radio announcer declared yesterday a beautiful day. (It was -20 Celsius / -4 Fahrenheit. It was a lovely day.) But at this point in February, when winter is well ensconced and spring is still a distant dream, we start to think of moving somewhere, anywhere warmer. Matt Dinan, in his piece at The Hedgehog Review, understands reality in a winter community and my thinking around this time of year: “But if we are being honest, it really is quite hard to sustain the illusion that there is anything good about winter after the hundredth day or so of temperatures below freezing.” This terrific essay looks at cold through the lens of poetry and literature, as Dinan collects winter reflections from Henry Miller, Emily Dickinson, and others, and of how the people of winter communities regularly faced with heavy snow and dangerous conditions help one another to get through it: “When a snowstorm is coming, we’re called on, in a relatively low-stakes way, to evaluate, deliberate, and decide—together…Schools, businesses, government offices, sports teams, choirs, volunteer groups, families, friends—every part of civil society needs to decide whether it’s worth staying open, going out, or hunkering down at home…The edifying character of winter, then, has less to do with heroic individualism than with its capacity to force us into something less common: community.” —KS
Reported Essays
Our Animals, Ourselves
From a young age, we’re shown and sold the bucolic version of a farm, but in reality, a modern factory farm is a horrific place of reproductive violence on a massive scale. What would it mean to truly respect and honor animals? What will it take to radically shift the way we think about animal consumption, and to break up and abolish Big Meat and Big Milk? In this thought-provoking essay, Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor call for cross-species solidarity and make a socialist-feminist case for veganism. “We are all caught in the same racist, sexist, colonial, and ecologically catastrophic capitalist system,” they write. Vegans get a bad rap, but the authors urge people, especially those on the left, to join alongside them — and to expand their visions of democracy, reproductive choice, and egalitarianism to include pigs, cows, and other animals that we exploit for profit. This is an eye-opening piece making clear that the liberation of humans and the liberation of non-human animals are interconnected. I’ve returned to it numerous times this year during and after tough conversations with loved ones, and often think about it as I reconsider my own habits. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Features
The Assassination of Drakeo the Ruler
Categorizing a piece like this can feel like an impossible compromise. Jeff Weiss’ gut punch of a story about the killing of Los Angeles rapper Drakeo spills across nearly every journalistic genre imaginable. It’s deeply reported and essayistic, a nearly inescapable combination when the reporter in question is also an eyewitness. It’s a dispassionate profile written from within the clinch of a genuine years-long friendship. But ultimately, only the word “feature” can accommodate the many ways it plumbs facts and grief with equal acuity. When Drakeo rose to prominence in the city that put gangsta rap on the map, it was because he was the herald of something unapologetically new. But when 113 people ambushed him backstage at an outdoor music festival last December, it was because of something much, much larger. “To begin to understand why it happened,” Weiss writes, “is to grapple with the most corrosive aspects of humanity: the need for revenge and hatred of the other; our capacity for rage, ego, and jealousy. It is the boomerang of racism, police corruption, and the worship of violence. Yet it is also a condition of the spiritual and material poverty that infects most aspects of modern American life. Only here, under a deranged spell of nihilism, greed, and lust for fame, can all the codes and compasses that once governed us become meaningless.” This story won’t make you feel good. It certainly won’t restore your faith in human nature. It might, though, help you understand why an artist like Drakeo moved the way he did. Why he refused to stop fighting, even while marked for death by both the state and the street. Why he stepped out of the car that cold December night, knowing what awaited him — if not immediately, then still far too soon. —Peter Rubin
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Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album
The news of 2022 is like an anvil weighing down on our collective psyche. This week, I found myself hungry for a read that felt like a relief — a collection of words that would inspire delight, not despair. This essay delivered. It’s the quintessential example of a factoid-filled piece you read and then find yourself immediately (and perhaps annoyingly) telling people about. Me to a friend: “Did you know that seaweed collecting in 19th-century England was a feminist activity?” Also me: “It’s possible that seaweed collecting inspired George Eliot to start writing fiction.” Me again: “Tweens once exchanged seaweed albums like kids now trade Pokemon cards!” Sasha Archibald writes with grace and humor, and she shows how, far more than just a charming pastime, the bygone practice of seaweed collecting intersected with the wider currents of history. It’s a breath of sea air. —SD
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How The “Mother Of Yoda” Conquered Hollywood — And Why She Disappeared
Falene Nurse · Inverse · May 3, 2022 · 2,767 words · 官方页
Growing up, two of my favorite films were The Dark Crystal and The Labyrinth. The worlds they created enthralled me — filled with magic, weirdness, and ethereal beauty. Iconic to this day, they were pulled from the impressive imagination of Jim Henson, but, behind the scenes, there were other magicians at work — the puppeteers. In this profile of Wendy Froud, Falene Nurse explains how she sculpted The Dark Crystal’s puppet leads, Kira and Jen (her first job out of art school, no less). In The Labyrinth, she lent not just her talent to the production; her baby, Toby Froud, played the child kidnapped by the Goblin King (a.k.a David Bowie in leggings so tight they came with a free anatomy lesson). Froud was even part of the force that created a certain little Jedi, earning her the nickname “the Mother of Yoda.” Yet, after this gluttony of ’80s icons, Froud seemingly disappeared for many years; Nurse reveals how CGI gradually destroyed the art of the puppet and Froud’s disdain for the Hollywood scene. Then in 2019, some new magic happened: Netflix commissioned a prequel series, The Dark Crystal: The Age of Resistance. Froud was brought back on board to help recreate the elegance of that world — real puppets and all. And guess what? Baby Froud, now all grown-up and freed from David Bowie, worked with his parents on The Age of Resistance as the Design Supervisor. Now that’s a Hollywood ending. —CW
It’s 10 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is?
I am writing this blurb with my cat, Trouble, sitting on my lap, as is her wont lately during work hours. Once upon a time she preferred to nestle between my husband’s arms while he typed on his laptop. What changed? Who knows. Cats are fickle. They are wonderful. They are also, as this essay details, murderous. With equal doses of love, humor, and scientific data, Egill Bjarnason illuminates the danger that free-roaming (aka outdoor) cats pose to other species they see as prey — birds, namely, which are especially vulnerable on islands like Iceland, where Bjarnason lives. In cultures accustomed to letting cats prowl in yards and alleys, coming inside only when they please, the notion of keeping them indoors at all times or, as some towns in Iceland are making a matter of policy, after an evening curfew can feel like a betrayal. How to navigate this conundrum? Bjarnason offers some suggestions. I for one am happy to keep Trouble in our apartment, where she routinely directs her killer instinct at the mice that sometimes take up residence under our stove. My husband once claimed, his eyes wide in horror, that he witnessed her swallow one of them whole. RIP Mr. Mouse, but better you than a rare bird. —SD
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It Was a Secret Road Map for Breaking the Law to Get an Abortion
Jason Fagone and Alexandria Bordas · The San Francisco Chronicle · July 10, 2022 · 6,195 words · 存稿官方页存档
Before Roe vs. Wade, there was “the List”: a secret document that helped 12,000 people get safe abortions in the 1960s and ’70s. Created by Patricia Maginnis, a former U.S. Army nurse, the List began as an activist project and evolved into a clandestine yet well-organized health care system that spanned multiple countries, notably Mexico, which was viewed as the best, most affordable option at the time. Fagone and Bordas sift through a trove of Maginnis’ documents, including letters from desperate women seeking access to competent providers, and describe what some of these women had to go through to get the vital care they needed. “If you don’t know about the past, you cannot learn from the past,” said Karen L., one of the women who got an abortion in 1968 with the help of this underground network. The List, a “road map for breaking the law” when abortion was illegal, now provides a blueprint for the present. —CLR
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The Unlikely Rise of Slim Pickins, the First Black-Owned Outdoors Retailer in the Country
Recent years have seen an explosion of discussion around racial gaps in outdoor recreation — finally. Despite rapidly proliferating groups like Outdoor Afro and the Major Taylor Cycling Club, retail brands and shops seemed almost inertially resistant to reaching beyond their assumed audience. (“I love Patagonia products, but their marketing materials make the luxury of intentionally living in your van seem admirable, even altruistic,” Nicholas Russell wrote in 2020. “The activities that outdoor companies present, whether climbing or running or snowboarding, isn’t correlated to what’s possible; it’s more about who fits the concept of that activity, who is likely to afford to buy into it.”) It’s that pattern that Jahmichah Dawes has sought to disrupt, opening an outdoors shop in small-town Texas. As such, Dawes has found himself a poster child of sorts, a symbol of something far bigger than just a man and his dream — whether he wanted to be or not. But as Ian Dille’s Texas Monthly profile makes clear, it’s a challenge he’s met with perseverance and mission clarity. And outdoor enthusiasts everywhere are better for it. —PR
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Meet the Lobbyist Next Door
A business feature that doubles as a horror story, Benjamin Wofford’s chilling piece could be the premise for a Black Mirror episode. Wofford profiles Urban Legend, a tech startup that has built “the Exchange,” an interface connecting advertisers looking to promote political ideologies with influencers ready to peddle for a price. Urban Legend’s CEO, Ory Rinat, who previously worked in the Trump White House, and his colleagues like to talk about trust, authenticity, and empowerment, but as Wofford skillfully shows, there’s no heart to their business model — there’s only a black hole, a moral vacuum. The dread of it all crept up on me as I read, which is a testament to the writing. Now excuse me while I go scream into the abyss. —SD
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The Secret MVP of Sports? The Port-a-Potty体育界的秘密MVP？便盆
There’s nothing quite like it. You’re out an outdoor event when nature calls; looking around, your heart sinks when see that your only option is a flimsy plastic shed, behind the door of which untold horrors lurk. Odd as it is, though, you might fear that prospect a bit less after reading Hockensmith’s breezy tour through the history and importance of port-o-potties (and, crucially, the professional maintenance thereof). Whether following a crew of Buffalo sanitation workers undertaking a frenzied early-game half-suck in the parking lots around the Bills’ stadium or speaking with academics about the future of equitable sanitation, the piece never strays from its founding charm. By the time you’re finished, you may not be ready to leave indoor plumbing behind, but you’ll have a newfound equanimity the next time you do have to hazard a trip to the Box of Uncertainty. (Not always, though; as Hockensmith knowingly writes, Sometimes the cost of having to hold it isn’t as bad as the price of getting to go.) And no matter how much pre-gaming you’ve done, I promise you this: you’ll never try to run across the roof of one. —PR
The Mushrooms That Ate Luke Perry
I confess, it was the headline that drew me in. I wasn’t a Beverly Hills, 90210 fan, never got suckered by Luke Perry’s squint-smirk combo. But I couldn’t resist that monster-movie construction, so I read it — and I’d urge the same of you, regardless of your feelings about Aaron Spelling primetime soaps. This piece starts with Perry’s death, but Casey Lyons uses the actor’s green burial as a springboard to trace the remarkable arc of his life as well, and in doing so to explore what we seek from our corporeal end. “Luke Perry knew about desire, having been buried in a laundry hamper to escape it,” Lyons writes. “He also knew it as the holder of a notion about physical erasure from the planet, that our bodies don’t have to harm the earth when we die. We all know desire. Death is a muse, but desire is a blunter sort of thing.” Regardless of whether the mushrooms feasted the way they were supposed to (spoiler: they didn’t!), you’ll walk away with a fuller sense of the man inside the suit, and maybe even of your own plans for that inescapable day. —PR
Nicolas Cage Can Explain It All
Gabriella Paiella · GQ Magazine · March 22, 2022 · 6,673 words · 官方页
As someone who’s been on the journalist side of plenty of celebrity profiles, believe me when I tell you that it’s not easy to break people out of autopilot press mode. Just because you sat in Jennifer Lopez’s house or walked around with Shia LeBeouf or enjoyed a cordial but stilted breakfast with Eric Bana (all real examples) doesn’t mean you’re going to leave having gotten a single milligram of candor from them. But not every celebrity is Nicolas Cage. And not every writer is Gabriella Paiella. Paiella, whose GQ profiles of Diplo and Lil Dicky have already cemented her as the magazine’s preeminent anthropologist of White Dudes, captures Cage at the perfect moment: coming off a tear of 46 movies to pull himself out of bankruptcy, and looking to the future. Yes, as a subject he delivers everything you hope he might — the guy opens the door in a goddamn kung fu suit — but it’s Paiella’s assiduous secondary reporting and lovely arm’s-length affection that makes the piece a gem. “Nothing about him feels like an affectation,” she writes. “Not the kung fu suit, not the talking crow. He is a true eccentric holdout in the increasingly banal landscape of American celebrity. You never see him posting on social media, flashing his veneers above a faux self-deprecating or inspirational caption, or giving pithy sound bites on a red carpet. The man is physically incapable of pith.” You already knew Cage was in National Treasure; now you’ll know he’s one himself. —PR
The Weird, Analog Delight of Foley Sound Effects拟音音效的奇怪模拟乐趣
There is something lovely about an essay that includes the phrase, “I need more ka-chunkers,” and Anna Wiener’s dive into the bizarre world of Foley sound effects is endlessly delightful. I love learning about things that I never even knew were a thing. I assumed that sound effects were always added post-production in some soulless studio. I was wrong: The sound of E.T.’s movements — just one example — is raw liver sliding around in a packet and “jello wrapped in a damp T-shirt.” Wiener finds that although “technology has changed the process of recording, editing, and engineering sounds … the techniques of Foley have remained stubbornly analog.” Wiener spends time with the Foley artists at Skywalker Sound, and their passion is infectious. As I read, I found myself starting to listen differently: Could slurping this cup of tea be an alien slug sliding off his chair in his intergalactic spaceship? Could munching this packet of crisps be centaurs rustling through the forest? Our soundscape is truly amazing, and this vivid, information-rich article will truly make you hear. —CW
Investigative Reporting
“We Need to Take Away Children.”
In my original blurb for this story, when it was featured in Longreads’ Top 5 newsletter, I wrote that Caitlin Dickerson’s “examination of the Trump administration’s family separation policy is a reporting tour de force and an American horror story that should be read and studied as long as the republic stands.” I remain steadfast in this belief. Assign it in journalism classes, government seminars, law courses, social work degree programs. Every American should know this story and grapple with its devastating contents. And, lest we act like we’re past the cruelty that Dickerson so masterfully unveils, family separation is still happening. Read this story, then use it to fuel demands that policymakers and law enforcement cease family separation once and for all. —Seyward Darby
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Under The Big Sky
As a teenager, I loved the Baz Luhrmann song “Everyone’s Free to Wear Sunscreen,” but it was not until much later that I learned to appreciate the line, “Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they are gone.” A couple of ski accidents and a knee surgery later, I sure do miss those springy youthful knees. These lyrics were in my head reading this beautiful essay. Like the song, it is a lesson on how to get the most out of life — even when your body does not work in the way it once did. It’s a gentle piece — Drew Magary simply reminiscing about skiing with his Dad, his friends, and his family — but the writing draws you in, letting you share his happiness. Over the years, this joy becomes peppered with frustrations as new limitations appear: “I could feel my thighs and spine ready to burst as I held crucial turns. When I felt myself going too fast, I reflexively dragged my poles behind me, as if that would slow me down any. Skiing will expose you like that.” But, even while dragging his poles, Magary is still awed by simply being on a mountain and declares he will keep skiing even as his body and ability deteriorate, “It’s not about conquering the mountain. It’s simply about going there. A mountain is a god.” A sentiment with which I concur — even with my dodgy knees, I also still ski. —CW
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Drugs Killed 8 Friends, One by One, in a Tragedy Seen Across the U.S.</a>*</h3> <p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>Lenny Bernstein and Jordan-Marie Smith | The Washington Post | December 2, 2022 | 3,289 words</em></p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph">This story is about my hometown. It could be about yours, too. Not because an outsize percentage of readers are from Greenville, North Carolina, a small, unremarkable city situated in the flat plains of what was once tobacco-growing country. It could be about where you’re from because stories like this are ubiquitous: stories of opioid overdoses depleting families and friend groups; of beloved mentors like Joe Hughes, my middle school history teacher, quoted in this piece, who has spoken at the funerals of three of his former students and attended five others; of natives like reporter Jordan-Marie Smith, who on trips home heard that a person she grew up, then another, then another had died. Smith is younger than I, as are many of the dead in this story. But just two weeks before it was published, over drinks, I asked a childhood friend if I was crazy in thinking that a lot of people who were in our year in school had died of suspected or confirmed overdoses. I could think of three off the top of my head; she added a fourth to the list. This is their story, too. —<a href="http://twitter.com/seywarddarby">SD</a></p> <p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>* Subscription required</em></p> <p class="has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph">* * *</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://projects.oregonlive.com/the-safest-place/?src=longreads">The Safest Place
If you need a reminder of why we need strong local newsrooms, look no further than this powerful project. Reporter Noelle Crombie spent a year at Rosemary Anderson, an alternative high school in Rockwood, a neighborhood in Gresham, Oregon, buffeted by racism, poverty, and COVID-19. Her goal: to document the impact of skyrocketing gun violence on the students, teachers, and support staff. The result is a four-part series, of which this article, about the death of student Dante McFallo, is the first entry. “Five students, including Dante, have died in shootings in the past 2½ years,” Crombie writes. “Another student died in a stabbing and two died in car wrecks. All were young men of color, just 18 or 19. Gunfire wounded at least two other Rosemary Anderson students; both survived.” Make sure to spend time with the photos and videos that accompany the story. —SD
The Mystery Behind the Crime Wave at 312 Riverside Drive
Michael Wilson · The New York Times · September 14, 2022 · 3,229 words · 官方页
I don’t know what your usual media diet looks like, but there’s a little upstart out of Gotham that’s been serving up some riveting stories lately — and at the front of the pack is this empathetic profile from Michael Wilson. Every month, 911 dispatchers in New York City field dozens of calls about crimes in progress at an Upper West Side apartment building. Robberies. Stabbings. Self-harm. Elder abuse. All those calls are from a single man named Walter Reed. The thing is, the hellish edifice he’s calling about doesn’t exist. There is no 312 Riverside Drive. Wilson doesn’t string you along to learn that truth as a twist, though. Instead, he gets it out there immediately, so that he can spend the rest of the feature explaining what’s driving Walter Reed’s inescapable compulsion, and how the city’s social safety net is unable to get him the lasting help he so clearly needs. It’s not a mystery at all; it’s a frustrating tragedy. But it’s also a perfect example of the mind-changing, emotionally affecting journalism a newspaper feature can deliver. —PR
They Were Labeled Witches. They Just Had Dementia.他们被贴上了女巫的标签。他们刚刚患上了痴呆症。
“Do you know any witches?” This is a question that retired pastor Berrie Holtzhausen asks when out searching in Namibia for people with dementia. After once caring for a man with advanced Alzheimer’s, Holtzhausen researched all he could about the disease, and then turned to a life of advocating for those with dementia, who are often accused as witches in Namibia’s tribal populations. “Most Black Namibians,” writes Shara Johnson in this piece from last year, “have been raised in communities where witchcraft is as real and relevant to their world as Jesus is to Christians.” Ndjinaa Ngombe, a Black Namibian of the Himba tribe, is but one example: Her family had her locked in chains for 20 years, until Holtzhausen removed the shackles. Johnson tells a compelling story of an extraordinary man with a mission, seeking justice for a “misunderstood demographic.” —CLR