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Best of 2024
Best of 2024: All Our Number One Story Picks2024 年精选：我们精选的所有第一名故事
Every story that appeared in the number one slot in our Weekly Top 5, all in one place.
All Our Number One Story Picks
The Great Serengeti Land Grab
The pastoral, semi-nomadic Maasai have lived on their land in northern Tanzania since the 17th century. But under the guise of conservation and modernization, the Tanzanian government is resettling the tribe, destroying their compounds and seizing their cattle—in other words, erasing their traditional way of life. This makes way for ecotourism, carbon offsets, and supposed conservationist efforts that work toward the goal set by global leaders to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. But is the violent displacement of an Indigenous group, one that has sustained the Serengeti ecosystem and its lush grasslands over time, necessary for such environmental progress? Setting aside this land for “conservation” also means fueling a lucrative safari industry that still sells a romanticized version of Africa, catering to billionaire trophy hunters, and partnering with powerful foreign interests, including the Dubai royal family (for whom land has been annexed as a private hunting playground). This story is eye-opening and upsetting, and Stephanie McCrummen’s reporting is admirable: she balances big players, sweeping actions, and power moves with smaller details and quiet telling moments. But it’s the emotional narrative weaved within—of one Maasai man, Songoyo, who navigates terrain that was once his home—that is most effective here. You’ll likely come to this piece to understand the larger humanitarian crisis that has unfolded, but leave it stunned by McCrummen’s gorgeous writing, which centers the journey of one herder as he feels and watches his community and culture slip away. —CLR
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Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps
Frustrated with how predictable traveling has become in the digital era, Ben Buckland decided to walk across Switzerland, relying only on hand-drawn maps from the people he met along the way, including local cheesemakers, a chef, and a farmer whose family had lived on the land since the 1600s. “I wanted to know what it would teach me about how technology and convenience have changed the way we travel,” he writes. “I wanted to be lost, and to find my way through the artwork of strangers.” At first, I found this goal as annoying as it was inspiring. Going on trips with my 6-year-old daughter has transformed the way I travel, and gone, for now, are my flâneur days, when I’d set off on foot in one direction to see where I ended up. Still, I couldn’t resist Buckland’s words and stunning photographs, his spontaneity, and his willingness to trust the people he encountered. I love his thoughts on making maps, even the simple sketches he received; reading a map is an “act of empathy,” he writes, a way to learn about a person through the details they see. By the end, Buckland walked about 250 miles over 12 days—along lakeshores, up mountains, into villages, and through the heart of Switzerland. A lovely piece on serendipity, being present in the moment, and seeing the world through others’ eyes. —CLR
Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet
In this excerpt from his new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka recalls an early internet that allowed “creative possibility” and “self-definition”—a web that many of us miss. When he tells us his AOL Instant Messenger username, “Silk,” I immediately recall my first AOL screen name, “RsrvoirGrl.” (Yes, in high school I was obsessed with Quentin Tarantino films.) When he describes posting to LiveJournal, where his writing “became a kind of public performance,” I remember my own musings on Diaryland, another early publishing platform. Those diary entries make me cringe when I read them now, but they’re also so unfiltered and passionate; I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t written with such energy since. His later experiences are just as fun to read, and remind me of a few milestones in that evolving space: the way my MySpace profile suddenly fused my online “shadow” self to my physical IRL identity; the first virtual encounter with my future spouse (I’ll never forget the first tweets my husband and I exchanged); the way Instagram initially inspired the photographer in me, and then slowly sucked all of my creativity. As with a number of pieces I’ve read recently about the broken state of the web, this essay doesn’t really say anything about the internet we don’t already know—or already feel in our bodies, minds, and attention spans. But I always enjoy Chayka’s writing, and his thoughts here on what it was like to be online when “being online wasn’t yet a default state of existence” are relatable and served up with just the right amount of nostalgia. —CLR
It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now这不是世界现在所需要的|安德鲁·诺曼·威尔逊
In this episodic essay, Andrew Norman Wilson, a visual artist who works primarily in video, takes readers on a ride through several years of his career. If you think that sounds niche or dull, I assure you it is not. This is at once one of the funniest and most distressing stories I’ve read in months—I laughed, I cringed, it became a part of me. Year by year, exhibition by exhibition, housesit by housesit, Wilson shows how the art world left him dirt poor despite his ever-growing CV, took a toll on his mental and physical health, and killed his idealism. He anchors this journey in 2016, illustrating how, in the wake of Trump’s election, art-world gatekeepers eager to burnish their social justice bona fides have disingenuously circumscribed the industry definition of what art matters, and why. “It becomes trendy to believe that images within contemporary art contexts can directly achieve the goals of political struggle,” Wilson writes. “The proliferation of bad faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering sickens me, especially when these expressions still play into the financial objectives of oil barons, arms dealers, and other vampires.” That’s a distressing bit. A funny one involves Wilson putting images of Barney (the dinosaur) on the walls of a place where he’s staying when Barney’s (the department store) comes to shoot photos of him for some reason. Another comes during a snorkeling trip, when Wilson is surrounded by sea lions: “I’ve found what I was looking for on this island. Something that feels like the opposite of scrutinizing a nondescript object in a white room and then having to read a citation-heavy press release to find out that the object is the product of prison labor, and prison labor is bad.” This essay could read as the bitter whining of a person with a bone to pick, but it doesn’t. It’s too self-aware for that. Instead, it reads as a searing and darkly entertaining indictment of late-stage capitalism’s poisonous influence on art. —SD
An American Education: Notes from UATX
If you’re not addicted to media discourse, I envy you. I also realize you might need some background before diving into this pick, so here goes: a couple of years ago, a collection of reactionary academics and journalists, hysterical about the purported “wokeness” of US higher education, decided to start their own university. It’s called the University of Austin, but it’s actually in Dallas, in an office complex owned by Harlan Crow, billionaire BFF and patron of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. UATX’s figurehead is ex-New York Times staffer Bari Weiss, who also runs The Free Press (“For Free People”), an online outlet that spends an inordinate amount of time clutching pearls about gender-affirming care for trans children. Many of UATX’s faculty and fellows have expressed support for Israel’s continuing bombardment of Gaza; at least one has couched the genocide as a matter of good versus evil. So. In this essay, which is as hilarious as it is rage-inducing, Noah Rawlings describes attending UATX’s “Forbidden Courses” summer program, which it launched in advance of actually enrolling students. Better Rawlings than I, because I would have lost my damn mind. Not when founding faculty member Peter Boghossian, who once accused his former employer, Portland State University, of being a “Social Justice factory” (quelle horreur) said he’s so good at jiu-jitsu that he could murder everyone on a bus carrying participants to the program’s commencement dinner. Not when Joe Lonsdale, who helped found Palantir, told students that the rise of AI would let humans do “more natural things” with their lives. Not when Weiss, when asked by a student why there aren’t any left-of-center faculty at a school that supposedly prides itself on illuminating truth through dialogue, suggested the left is just less interested in debate. No, I think I would have lost it when someone (Rawlings doesn’t say who) uttered the following: “If Simone de Beauvoir were alive right now, she would be very popular, like Jordan Peterson.” —SD
The Alchemists
It was tough to read anything this week, but this feature on the women who led a cycling revolution in Afghanistan was an enjoyable distraction from all the doomscrolling. Cycling was forbidden for women there, until a grassroots movement emerged. Cross introduces us to a few fearless athletes who were at the center of it: teenage girls who rode bikes despite the rocks that boys hurled at them for doing so, despite the anger it provoked in men and elders in their community. For them, a bike was not simply a mode of transport; it was a symbol of freedom. Cross chronicles their coming-of-age journeys: How sisters Zakia and Reihana, whose family owned a bike shop in Bamyan, were in natural positions to take up cycling. Or how Zahra, stubborn and confident, taught herself how to ride on an adult-sized bike when she was a girl, frustrated that boys around her could travel swiftly and freely on wheels. Zakia and Zahra became friends and began to teach others to ride: “They were simply girls teaching other girls a skill that expanded their world.” In 2013, they formed the first coed cycling club and team in Afghanistan, which then led to winning races and slowly changing attitudes. “Afghan men cheering Afghan women in sports was itself a revolution,” writes Cross. In 2021, when the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power, those freedoms gained through cycling were erased. The women and their loved ones managed to escape with the help of an American cyclist and activist who had worked in the country, and Cross recounts their evacuation stories in nail-biting detail. Ultimately, this is a story of great loss—the loss of dreams, of rights, and even one’s homeland—but it is also a story of great courage and inspiration. —CLR
Pork, Love, and Money: Life According to La Piraña Lechonera猪肉、爱情和金钱：La Piraña Lechonera 的生活
There is only a loose attempt to profile chef Angel Jimenez here: He grew up in Puerto Rico. He cut sugarcane at 14. His father ran a side hustle grilling on the beach. That’s about it. This isn’t a piece about Jimenez’s journey to get to New York; it’s about the experience he created once he got there. From a converted trailer in the South Bronx, Jimenez runs La Piraña Lechonera, a restaurant slash weekly block party where, on Saturdays and Sundays, he roasts and sells two pigs. I don’t eat meat anymore, so I did not expect a pork-focused essay to keep my attention. I hadn’t accounted for the wizardry of Abe Beame’s descriptive powers. I could hear Jimenez’s salsa music blasting over the roar of weekend commuters on the overhead intersection. Feel the atmosphere exuding from the eclectic collection of characters gathered, from tourists to local drunks, all lorded over by the effervescent Jimenez. Smell the hot fat as pork is pulled from the oven. Taste the meat itself—although things become a bit too visceral when Beame bites into flesh “glossed with fat and pig liquor, shredded without any shredding necessary, in a liminal state between solid and liquid.” Neither Jimenez nor Beame take themselves too seriously and there is a lightness to this piece, which is graced with incredulity and humor. I particularly enjoyed the bullet points on why it takes two hours to get served at La Piraña. (A key factor is the trips to check on the cooking trays of pork, “leaving the trailer unattended, which often coincide with breaks to smoke a joint.”) Jimenez could be more efficient. He could be making more money. That’s just not his style, and it’s wonderful. At one point, Beame muses, “[H]ow the fuck I could possibly describe all of the insanity I was tasting and experiencing in writing.” He nailed it, with words that ooze fun and grease. —CW
Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows
Jori Lewis · Switchyard / FERN · November 25, 2023 · 4,744 words · 官方页
Watermelon has been in the zeitgeist lately. The humble fruit is an important emblem of Palestinian resistance, which means that, over the last three months, images of it have appeared at everything from street protests to Paris fashion week. In the context of US cultural history, however, watermelon carries different connotations—racist ones. Jori Lewis examines these crude and cruel associations in her essay for Switchyard, an exciting new magazine based at the University of Tulsa. She draws on her family’s experiences to show the complicated relationship many Black Americans have with watermelon, but her piece is about much more than the harm stereotypes can do. Lewis is interested in reclaiming meaning, and as is so often the case, that requires looking beyond US borders and deep into the past. This essay is beautifully rendered, taking readers from the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt, to a roadside fruit stand in Senegal, to the agricultural fields of China, in search of watermelon as both sustenance and symbol. “The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds,” Lewis writes. Cultures have associated it with fertility, solidarity, and luck. Watermelon can both cure hunger and quench thirst, and Lewis bookends her essay with scenes where she lets a juicy slice do the latter. By the time she gets to the second instance, watermelon feels to the reader like a thing transformed. “I felt an ever so slight twinge about me in this Black body in a white man’s field and all that has ever meant. But it was hot, and I was thirsty,” Lewis writes. “I took it with my fingers, and I ate.” —SD
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Why Make Art in the Dark?
Izzy Wisher · Aeon · May 6, 2024 · 3,100 words · 官方页
Why did our ancestors draw on cave walls—in the dark? Izzy Wisher takes a fascinating look at the possible psychology behind cave drawing, and how it reflects on our way of thinking to this day. Once she invites you to imagine yourself in a cave, you will be captivated: “You’re standing in a cave, tens of thousands of years ago. The damp, earthen smell mixes with the warm smoke from your firelit torch and saturates your nostrils. The muted silence is broken only by the subtle crackles of the fire and distant drips of water that echo around the space.” —CW
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The Cloud Under the Sea
I wouldn’t call myself a hardware geek, but lately I’ve been fascinated by stories that help me understand and appreciate the infrastructure that is essential for modern society to function. Hardware that physically sits somewhere on this Earth, hidden away and inert and seemingly lifeless, like the servers in a data center on the outskirts of Dublin that store Ireland’s memories. Or the expansive networks of underwater cable, traversing 800,000 miles along the ocean floor, that run the internet. This immersive feature by Josh Dzieza, packaged with art by Kristen Radtke and photography by Go Takayama, dives deeper into the latter, weaving a riveting account of a crew aboard the Ocean Link, one of 22 cable maintenance ships stationed around the world, that raced to repair a broken cable after the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in March 2011. The engineers on this aging ship are just a handful of the thousand or so people in this highly specialized industry, doing precise and physically demanding tasks that keep the internet (and every corporate, banking, and government entity) up and running every day. These workers spend most of their time at sea, away from home, and face precarious situations, performing invisible and underappreciated labor; given the current transoceanic cable boom, the demand for their skills will only continue to grow. But it’s the adventure, sense of purpose, and incredible scale of this work that keeps them in the field. Dzieza does a fantastic job showing how indispensable they are—yet you probably didn’t even know they existed. —CLR
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Kate Winslet Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge
I was an early fan of Kate Winslet, with her unnerving performance as Juliet in Heavenly Creatures and her winsome portrayal of Marianne opposite Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. Then came Titanic. A film that launched her career into the stratosphere (and made my mother insist I take a whistle with me for any seafaring). But despite her fame, Winslet always came across as down to earth, and Susan Dominus’s lovely profile proves this to be very much the case. Known for not being precious on set, Winslet illustrates this to Dominus by being interviewed for hours in a chilly beach hut on the English coast (Winslet’s idea). I chuckled when, in response to Winslet noting she would never say on set, “I’m cold, I have to stop,” Dominus wrote, “I’m cold, I thought to myself. I have to stop.” I was also amused when Dominus got caught out by her own platitude; when she idly mentions she wishes she could have gone into the sea, cold-water swimming fan Winslet brings her back the next day to do just that. There are other tidbits thrown in—the half-eaten bowl of oatmeal Dominus spies among the detritus in Winslet’s car, the pastries she eats while expressing horror at Ozempic—that offer just as much insight as the interview itself. Not to say what Winslet recounts isn’t compelling: becoming a famous woman in the ’90s era of waif-like chic was nothing short of harrowing. But, it’s the small asides that make you come away from this piece feeling you know Winslet a little better. I’d happily swim in the sea with her, however cold. —CW
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A Shark Attack and a Terrorist Bombing: This Is a Love Story
If calamity has a silver lining, it’s that it tends to bring people together. Ask the North Carolinians and Floridians coming together to rebuild after catastrophic flooding. Ask the New Yorkers who walked toward the danger on 9/11. Ask the people in recovery who get sober and find their life’s mission in serving fellow addicts. Ask Colin Cook and Sydney Corcoran, whose lives were upended thousands of miles apart by twin disasters—and then grew toward one another, ultimately intertwining. Colin lost his leg to a shark while surfing in Hawaii; Sydney nearly bled out after shrapnel from the Boston Marathon bombing pierced her femoral artery. Separately, they groped toward healing, until their mothers met at a prosthetic center and hatched a plan. Paul Kix tells their stories beautifully for Esquire, chronicling their courtship with the same unflinching detail he uses to recount their life-altering traumas. He doesn’t just reconstruct, though. He inhabits. And in the process, he enables a feature in which you live alongside the characters, even inside them. Like this moment, capturing Sydney fighting to stay conscious in an ambulance: “I know I’m going, she thought, and I had an okay run. A spreading serene sensation. Still the low rumble of tires over Boston’s streets, still the syncopated movements of a person, or people, carrying out tasks with urgency, but now a warmth of care emanated from these others, mirroring the warmth that spread inside Sydney. This is one of the most peaceful moments I have ever known, she thought.” This is a love story, as the headline says, but it’s also a special story. It’ll make you feel things. Some horror, sure, but mostly hope. —PR
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In Kosovo, Techno Is a Symbol of Resilience在科索沃，科技是韧性的象征
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the end of the Kosovo War. In January, Kosovo joined the Schengen Zone, which marks another milestone: Kosovars are now able to travel freely across Europe without a visa. In this story, Lale Arikoglu gets a dose of Kosovo’s nightlife in its capital, Pristina: hitting up bars, clubs, and underground venues; speaking to partiers, promoters, and organizers as she hops from one hotspot to the next; and capturing the excitement and sense of possibility in the air. Kosovo’s electronic music scene, which has grown in isolation, is “driven by Kosovars, for Kosovars,” she writes, and is an essential part of the country’s rebuilding. Like Berlin—where techno-fueled nightlife emerged from the city’s ruins after the wall fell—Kosovo has found in the sound of electronic music “both its post-war struggle and collective euphoria.” In the spirit of some of my favorite rave reads, this piece is more than a lifestyle feature; it celebrates the beauty of club and rave culture across borders, and the dance floor as a space of resistance and freedom, of escape and release, of community and unity. Joined by an old friend whom she once partied with in Glasgow, Arikoglu recounts what sounds like a dizzying, sleep-deprived tour of the city, but also slows down to reflect during quiet moments: “The night is only just beginning,” she writes, “but while the dance floor has yet to fill up, the space between our bodies feels less like an absence and more like a pause amid change.” What comes next for Kosovars remains to be seen, but Arikoglu’s soulful story makes one thing clear: Kosovo dances to its own beat. —CLR
The Last Stand of the Call-Centre Worker
“It reminds me of processed cheese, Sophie,” says Gary, a call center worker, during his chat with Sophie Elmhirst on AI technology. Gary tells it how it is. I love Gary. An instantly endearing character, he epitomizes the sense of personality that could be lost as call center work edges further into the realm of the robot. Don’t get me wrong—we don’t always get a Gary when we call a customer service line. Elmhirst recounts, with her trademark dry humor, some of her less enjoyable calls (you will relate). But Gary from Vision Direct has her laughing as he guides her through ordering new contact lenses like they were “engaged in some kind of high-stakes joint project.” Roping him into an interview, she discovers more about the infectious joy he brings to customers, even after 20 years of working in call centers. Can AI ever replicate this? Perhaps. Developments are happening faster than the public or regulators can keep up with, and automating empathy is already in the works. In fact, as Elmhirst notes, ChatGPT recently scored better on standardized emotional awareness tests than the general population, according to a paper in Frontiers in Psychology. (Not sure if that says more about ChatGPT or the general population.) As is often the case with AI, there is much talk of hybrid roles, but inevitably, there will be less room for the traditional call center worker. The topic of AI use in customer service calls had the potential to be incredibly dull. Elmhirst makes it wildly entertaining. Gary makes it human. —CW
Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost Break Down the Making of <em>Shaun of the Dead</em>, 20 Years Later
It took a moment for me to forgive Jack King for making me feel very old with this interview. It’s been 20 years since Shaun of the Dead was released. Yes, 20 years since a motley group of Brits chose to ride out the zombie apocalypse at their local pub. (A plan I always admired.) A bastion of understated humor, the film is full of lines I can still quote today, and if I ever receive a zombie bite, I’ll aim to state, “I’m quite all right, Barbara, I ran it under a cold tap.” King honors the passage of two decades by bringing together the stars of the film, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, along with the director, Edgar Wright, to talk about the making of this first-ever zombie romantic comedy (rom-zom-com). There are fascinating insights into how the film got commissioned and went on to spawn two further spoofs, and I particularly enjoyed learning of the debate over which vinyl records to fling at zombie heads, and the real tears that were shed when Shaun’s mum—the aforementioned Barbara—became a zombie and died. Pegg and Frost are as baffled as I am by how much time has passed, remarking how bizarre it is that they are around the same age as actor Bill Nighy was when he made the film. (They describe Nighy as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” of the film shoot; imagine realizing you are now the same age as your Obi-Wan.) But the trio remembers the filming vividly, and warmly, with time not diminishing the dry sense of humor they share. While reading this, I felt like I had wandered into The Winchester for a pint and a chinwag with Shaun and Ed. I didn’t want to leave. —CW
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When the Arctic Melts
For The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert visits Greenland to witness climate change firsthand. Her first stop: N.S.F. Summit Station, a research facility that sits more than 10,000 feet above sea level. There, she begins to explain the volatile history of our planet’s climate. As Kolbert notes, scientists believe there have been at least 10 ice ages over the past 2.5 million years, initiated by Jupiter and Saturn’s influence on Earth. The big planets can shift Earth’s orbit slightly, and how our planet reacts to this interplanetary tug can set new temperature patterns in motion. At Summit, there’s so much to learn—even from the snow that has fallen on Greenland over the past 2,000 years. While climate change reading is almost always understandably and justifiably fraught, the tone here leans more toward wonder; Kolbert pairs deep curiosity and respect for the Earth, and offers much-needed context on our planet’s ever-changing ways. “Much of the new science suggests that the climate is, all on its own, unstable, prone to dramatic and sometimes sudden shifts,” she writes. While humans have undoubtedly helped accelerate global warming and changing weather patterns, it was sobering to learn that our role is but one piece of a very large, complex, and fascinating puzzle. —KS
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Locked In, Priced Out
Ramen that’s more than three times as expensive than it is at Target. Water prices that shot up 50 percent in a year. Peanut butter marked up 70 percent. These are just a few of the findings from a nine-month investigation of prison commissaries. This project comes with a searchable database, so that you can get acquainted with the costs incarcerated individuals are forced to bear to access items they need. —SD
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40 Acres and a Lie
Alexia Fernández Campbell, April Simpson, and Pratheek Rebala · Mother Jones · June 14, 2024 · 3,550 words · 存稿官方页存档
We think of reparations for slavery as something that has yet to happen in the US. In truth, reparations did once happen: in 1865, the federal government issued land titles to a number of freed Black people along the coastlines of South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida. The titles were to plots as small as four acres and as large as 40. But then, during Reconstruction, the government turned on its heel and returned much of the land to former slaveowners. (Andrew Johnson: bad president, or the worst?) A team of reporters at Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal delved into records of these stolen land titles, which were only recently digitized, to grasp the true scale of the injustice. “There would’ve been a territory ranging from the Sea Islands to northern Florida that would’ve been essentially a coastal Black belt community,” a Duke historian tells the reporters. “That would’ve had very significant implications for Black economic wellbeing as well as Black political power.” Instead, economic inequality between Black and white people became the norm in the region. This remains the case today: the team found that wealthy communities—places with manicured golf courses, gleaming McMansions, and mostly white residents—exist on land once owned by freedmen, many of whose descendants have no idea their forebears were cheated out of an explicit foothold in the American dream. “40 Acres and a Lie” is a fine example of how to make a historical, document-based investigation feel vivid, tangible, and urgent. —SD
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The Most Polarizing Thing on Wheels
A few weeks ago, I came across my first Tesla Cybertruck. I was ambling over to the local pet store in the sleepy little mountain town where I live when the incongruous silver beast glided into the store’s tiny car park, sliding between a rusty pickup and an F-150 laden with hay bales. I stopped and gawked, half expecting Marty McFly to nip out for some cat food. Since then, friends have texted me of further sightings around the area. Cybertrucks are here, and we are fascinated by them. But why the interest? And why are people actually buying a truck that looks like an origami project gone too far? S. C. Gwynne tries to answer these questions in his Texas Monthly piece on Elon Musk’s passion project. Cybertrucks shouldn’t be successful: They arrived behind schedule and cost twice what Tesla said they would. Worse, as Gwynne writes, people found them to be “a compendium of defects and malfunctions. The list includes: dying batteries, sticky accelerators, wheel covers that gouge the tires, warping tailgates, trim pieces that fall off, malfunctioning wipers, software that seems to work only when it wants to, and body panels that don’t come close to fitting.” Musk himself has also become an increasingly controversial figure, with some Tesla drivers buying bumper stickers that read, “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.” Nevertheless, last July, the Cybertruck surged “to become the third-best-selling electric vehicle of any kind in the United States.” People seem to want a truck that could survive a Mad Max-type scenario (as long as it doesn’t involve a steel ball). Gwynne notes it was perhaps not an accident the Cybertruck debut coincided with Musk’s political turn to the right; this is a truck of the time. There is fun in this piece, with Gwynne test-driving different vehicles Top Gear-style (Cybertrucks are pretty fast), but he doesn’t shy away from the real reasons these trucks are coming to a mountain town near you. It shouldn’t have worked, but there’s something about Tesla. Even now. —CW
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Paradise Redux
In November 2018, the town of Paradise was devastated by the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. Five years after they first visited Paradise in the wake of that apocalypse, J. Matt went back to take the measure of the town’s rebirth, and to consider what the Camp Fire continues to mean for those living in the WUI (wildland-urban interface). There’s much to mourn here, but there’s also hope for how we might fare in the face of ever-increasing wildfire risk—and the solace we might find in one another. —PR
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What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage?
I started reading this essay in a cafe, with a bottle of sriracha sitting on the table across from me. Staring at the iconic bottle—the bold rooster motif, the cheerful bright green cap—I tried to remember when I first heard the rumors of the “Great Sriracha Shortage.” I believe the mutterings started at a dinner party, whispered tales of bottles selling for $80. Getting home, I opened my cupboard to check my stash—relieved to see two full bottles snugly in place. I would make it. Secure in my immediate supply, the sriracha dilemma fell from my mind, until I came upon this essay and realized I had no idea what actually caused the shortage. I was ready for Indrani Sen to dish the dirt. She begins by artfully filling us in on the history of the sauce, its unexpected rise to fame (it’s never even run a marketing campaign), and the deal between two companies that secured its future with a quality supply of chilies. But this deal—between Underwood Ranches (the chili farmer) and Huy Fong Foods (the sauce maker)—ultimately led to the problem. An argument about money caused a fiery end to the 28-year relationship, costing both companies millions. As Sen writes, the two “soft-spoken patriarchs” remain at odds, even though it leaves: “One man with thousands of acres of pepper fields, but nobody to buy his peppers. Another with a massive pepper factory, and not enough peppers to keep it running.” A Shakespearean-level feud. This hot mess makes for a fascinating read, and hold onto your bottles: it’s still a rocky road. —CW
Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business
Ever thought about what might happen if you passed a bowel movement in space? (My guess is no.) Here on Earth, gravity pulls your poop down, and flush toilets immediately whisk it away. On the moon, where would it go? Let this squeamish thought sink in, and then buckle up as you read Becky Ferreira’s fun Wired story. “At the dawn of the Space Age,” she writes, “American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module.” More than 50 years ago, the first astronauts on the moon left nearly 100 “poo bags” across six landing sites—and they’re still sitting there today. I didn’t count how many unexpected phrases and laugh-out-loud lines there are in this piece, but I was thoroughly entertained from Ferreira’s opening paragraph to her last line. Potty humor aside, she provides a fascinating look into this less-appealing aspect of space travel. For NASA and other space agencies to return to the moon, and for companies and billionaires like Richard Branson to launch a new era of tourism, a solid waste management system (pun intended) must be in place. And what about those very old Apollo poo bags left on the lunar surface, teeming with microbiota? What can they tell us about the emergence of life in outer space? “Answers to some of the most profound and ancient questions about our place in the cosmos,” writes Ferreira, “may indeed be waiting in Neil Armstrong’s 55-year-old spent diapers.” A worthy addition to this 💩 reading list. —CLR
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They Played Football as Children. Now Their Families Mourn.
All over the US, school is starting back up, which means football season is nigh. In fact, for many players, it’s already begun: high schoolers are toiling in intense preseason practice sessions known as two-a-days, and kids as young as five have been enrolled in Pop Warner’s tackle football offerings since the beginning of August. My feelings about this annual juncture can be summed up in one word: why? We know all too well at this point about the ravages of concussions sustained on the field. We’ve heard about the scientists studying former professional players’ brains, read the headlines about suicides committed by once-famous men with declining cognitive function, seen the maudlin but well-intentioned Will Smith movie about the doctor who faced breathtaking backlash for exposing a public health crisis funded and manufactured by the NFL. But as Alex Morris shows in a tremendous story published a year ago—I missed it while I was on a work sabbatical—young kids whose parents put them on the field are at risk, too, and diagnosed concussions aren’t the only concern. So are “repeated, seemingly benign assaults to brain tissue, little ‘dings’ that could occur dozens of times in a single game and that a player may not even clock but that nonetheless cause damage at the cellular level—microscopically torn blood vessels, disconnected neurons, jumbled tau proteins (the building blocks of the fibers that carry nutrients and messages from cell to cell).” Through the stories of several young men, all of whom are now dead, Morris illustrates the toll football can take even if players pack up their helmet and cleats after high school. “America’s greatest game is hurting our children in insidious and incalculable ways,” Morris writes. “Addressing the issue might mean fundamentally changing the way we teach a game that has become fundamental to America’s sense of self.” That’s one approach. Another is to stop letting kids—or anyone—play the game, period. I realize that’s never going to happen, because this is America, and our society thrives on a shared death drive. But a girl can scream into the void. —SD
A Family Ranch, Swallowed Up in the Madness of the Border
In December, Tucson’s Border Patrol saw nearly 20,000 migrants each week, marking a 300 percent surge from the previous year. Just south, near the US-Mexico border, lies Chilton Ranch: a sprawling expanse of 50,000 cattle-grazing acres in the Arizona desert owned by the same family for four generations and currently managed by Jim and Sue, a couple in their 80s. Five-and-a-half miles of their ranch run along the border wall. Here, footprints in the dirt reveal tales of survival and desperation. Accompanied by Erin Schaff’s emotive photography, Eli Saslow’s dispatch from this family ranch is masterfully reported, showing what its owners and cowboys encounter each day and night: Young children screaming for help, or arriving at their doorstep, their parents dead. Guides paid by the Sinaloa cartel, leading people through one of numerous gaps in the wall. Women who’ve been assaulted, mistaking their home for a Border Patrol station. A pregnant Sudanese woman, possibly in labor, exposed to the cold on a 36-degree night. Migrants, from all over the world, caught on camera footage traversing some of the 150 smuggling trails on the property. As many as 250 people a day wander onto their ranch from remote entry points—a microcosm of a nation facing an immigration crisis and humanitarian disaster—and the Chiltons are in the midst of it all. While Saslow paints a dismal bigger picture, the ordinary individuals in this story show compassion, even in the threat of their own safety and security. Many pieces on immigration feel abstract, impersonal; this is quite the opposite. —CLR
Most People Are Disgusted by These Animals. These New Yorkers Are Filling Their Homes with Them.
“The Merv Griffin Show” is a perfect Seinfeld episode: Kramer finds discarded pieces from the show in a dumpster and sets them up in his apartment, Jerry is obsessed with his girlfriend’s toy collection, Elaine is annoyed by a new coworker who “sidles” up behind her and takes credit for her work, and George . . . well, George. In one scene, he and his girlfriend are driving through the city. She asks him to watch out for pigeons in the road, but he dismisses her, saying they’ll get out of the way. They don’t, and he hits them. “Don’t we have a deal with the pigeons?” he later asks Jerry. On a subsequent ride, poor George faces the same predicament—but when he swerves to avoid a pigeon, he ends up hitting a squirrel. While reading this delightful piece by Benji Jones about the people in NYC who rehabilitate injured or abandoned creatures like rats, baby opossums, and stray birds, I couldn’t stop thinking about this pact that George mentions—the idea that we and the wild critters we live alongside in cities have some kind of understanding, one that favors humans: we’ll let you live on our streets as long as you don’t bother us or invade our personal spaces. In contrast, the rehabbers who care for these small animals out of their own pockets are incredibly kind and humane; after spending time with these folks, Jones begins to understand why they do this intense work, often for free. “They view these species not as pests but as part of nature—as part of the New York City ecosystem. As part of their home.” Sure, some critters can be dirty, destructive, or diseased. But is pigeon poop so terrible? Has the subway rat brought real harm to society? Why do humans hold such contempt and disgust for these tiny creatures? Jones shows how giving them respect, love, and the space to heal has, in turn, enriched these people’s lives. Personally, I’ve always felt a kinship with squirrels, but there’s an underlying dividing line between “us” and “them” that has somehow conditioned me, like most people, to think they are less worthy of compassion than, say, a cat or a dog. Jones writes that we need to be better stewards of our environment. But that can only happen when we truly see these critters as living beings, too, trying to survive just like us. So perhaps, the next time I’m driving and see a creature on the road, I won’t assume it’ll move. And better yet, I’ll slow down, even stop, to acknowledge it—and be grateful that our world is full of such a wonderful variety of life. —CLR
He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough.地方检察官说他是无辜的。无论如何，他可能会在监狱里度过一生。 — ProPublica
Investigative juggernaut Pamela Colloff has dedicated the last several years of her career to examining the intersection of junk science and criminal justice. In her latest piece, she tells the story of Russell Maze, a Tennessee man who was put in prison for life after a jury found him guilty in 2004 of killing his infant son. The verdict rested on a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, which has since come under a huge deal of scientific scrutiny, so much so that a new department in the Nashville prosecutor’s office dedicated to post-conviction relief took up Maze’s case and argued in favor of vacating his conviction. But as Colloff shows, even when scientific evidence casts serious doubt on a guilty verdict, and even when prosecutors are the ones saying that a defendant is innocent, the justice system can be intractable. In other words, despite what many popular true crime podcasts and docuseries would have you think, science isn’t a surefire remedy for past injustice. Colloff’s feature is a bracing reminder of how dangerously prone US justice is to doing things the way they’ve always been done, to relying on what’s familiar instead of what’s true. As an added bonus, in Colloff’s hands, an extended courtroom scene that’s all dialogue feels like something from a novel. The climax of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold comes to mind. —SD
Best of 2024
A Year in Reading: The Dark Side of Progress阅读一年：进步的阴暗面
We're moving farther, faster, than ever before. But we're also destabilizing crucial areas of human experience.
The Stories You Missed
Care, Out of the Closet
It’s no secret that the state of elder care in the United States is disastrous. Nursing homes have long been under-staffed and under-resourced; the private-equity boom—to say nothing of the pandemic—has only made things worse. Here, Ann Neumann links this crisis with the specific concerns of aging LGBTQI+ people. —SD
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I Am Cat Lady
I’ve had my two cats, Kaia and Ashira, for nearly a decade, but it feels like a lifetime, as if they have always been part of our household. Life with them doesn’t always feel linear, though, and they look and act exactly the same today as they did when we adopted them. Sandra Beasley’s VQR essay on cats and being a cat lady follows a double abecedarian structure: the first letter of each paragraph is guided by alphabetical order, from A to Z and then from Z to A, which plays on this timelessness. Beasley writes about her own cats, Whisky and Sal, and on the sorts of things that we human companions think about. Between me and my husband, am I the cats’ favorite human? Where will we draw the line on the cost of their veterinary care and medical treatments? Sprinkled into some of these alphabetized vignettes are Beasley’s reflections on marriage and life without children. One line in particular gave me pause: “Cats sense grief, a friend tells me, and move toward it.” Still, there is a delightful lightness and randomness throughout, such as the detail about a man at the 2018 Wichita Cat Fancy Cat Show who “wore his cinnamon-and-white Sphynx draped across the back of his broad shoulders,” or the image of young Beasley trying to teach her childhood cat Iditarod commands: “I ran circles around our basement, leash in hand, all the while shouting ‘Mush!’ at a confused cat.” While you don’t need to be a cat person to appreciate Beasley’s piece, I’ll bet one of my cats’ lives that you’ll enjoy it more if you are. —CLR
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The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty发现自己有罪的陪审员
In this riveting braided feature for Texas Monthly, Michael Hall unravels how it all went wrong for Carlos Jaile. In the ’80s, Jaile had been living the American dream in Texas as a successful Kirby vacuum salesman who embraced the sales motto “persistence over resistance.” Suddenly, one day, the police showed up at his office to take him away, allegedly for raping a young girl. Estella Ybarra sat on Jaile’s jury. She’d voted him guilty, but felt pressured into the decision by two fellow jurors—pushy white men who could not be talked down. Hall gives you all of this up front: we’ve got a miscarriage of justice, a remorseful juror, and a man incarcerated for decades for a crime he did not commit. We think we know what happened, but we don’t know precisely how it happened. Hall’s brilliant pacing spurs your need to understand how egregious detective work, grievous police errors, and two loudmouth jurors put Jaile away for life plus 20 years; his exceptional storytelling rewards you for tracking Estella Ybarra as she confronts her conscience to embrace “persistence over resistance” to free an innocent man. “Everyone involved in Carlos’s case found a reason to look the other way,” writes Hall. “Everyone, that is, except for one woman determined to do the right thing.” A wrongful conviction overturned is always a bittersweet read. And while the most beautiful thing is that Carlos Jaile does go free, it’s Hall’s deep craft that does justice to his story and to an emotional and poignant conclusion you will not forget. —KS
The Opus Dei Diaries
Teena, Anne Marie, Monica: the three former Opus Dei assistant numeraries at the heart of Antonia Cundy’s investigation are the first women to speak publicly about their treatment in the Western world. Their stories are not unique; Cundy interviewed 40 former and current Opus Dei members for this piece, just part of her meticulous research into the decades of exploitation carried out by this Catholic organization, a fictionally heightened version of which many learned first about through The Da Vinci Code. Her case studies are now in their 50s and 60s, but as girls, they gave their lives to Opus Dei as domestic workers, part of an army of free labor used to prop up the powerful institution. It may not be Dan Brown, but Cundy still hints at mysterious dealings (such as how Opus Dei’s massive London headquarters near Kensington Palace are owned by the Netherhall Educational Association, whose trustees are all Opus Dei members, despite no reference in the name). However, the primary focus here remains the women behind the scenes who have kept operations running through the mundane of cooking and cleaning, and woven among their narratives is Opus Dei’s history as young conscriptees learn it themselves—a well-honed piece of indoctrination. Domestic work may now be shared, but as Cundy writes, it was only in 2021 that “Monica and 42 other former assistant numeraries from Latin America accused Opus Dei of enslavement in Argentina.” The shield of mystery around Opus Dei still needs to be fully removed. May investigations like this one keep chipping away. —CW
Best of 2024
All Our Number One Story Picks
The Road to 1948
I was visiting my parents this week, helping them pack up the home where they’ve lived for almost 39 years, and one evening, our conversation turned to Gaza. While we didn’t see eye to eye on everything, we agreed that one of the most important steps that we as outside witnesses to this tragedy can take is to direct our attention beyond the headlines, statistics, and slogans. We must look at the roots of the conflict, but not as they’ve been sanitized and presented to Western audiences for far too long—we must look at the roots as they actually are, ugly and gnarly. A perfect starting point is this discussion, moderated by Emily Bazelon, which examines the period between 1920, when the British mandate for Palestine was established, and 1948, when Palestinians were forced from their homes to make way for the state of Israel. I read the piece after the conversation with my parents and was particularly moved by Nadim Bawalsa’s description of his family’s experience of the Nakba. “Since December 1947, no one in my family has entered our home in Jerusalem,” Bawalsa writes. “My grandparents were able to briefly return to Palestine with their children to live with my grandmother’s family in Ramallah during the period of Jordanian rule until 1967, but they were not allowed to go to the west side of Jerusalem. Following 1967, we’ve only been able to go back as U.S. citizens—tourists.” Now, as I tape up boxes full of cherished objects, I can’t stop thinking: my parents will miss their home, but at least they are choosing to leave it. —SD
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I Lost My Life in 2006
Back in 2006, Judith Hannah Weiss suffered a serious brain injury after a drunk driver crushed her parked car. Before the accident, language had been her livelihood—clients paid her to create clarity. She wrote for big-name glossy magazines and was set to ghostwrite a book for a famous doctor. After it, plagued by aphasia and amnesia, she had to relearn to speak and write, tallying the accident’s toll in the words and memories it instantly obliterated and in relationships forever altered. In this cogent essay she does the impossible: convey what it’s like to live with a brain recovering from trauma. “Imagine you are trying to speak and no one can understand you. That’s what it’s like to live with aphasia. Imagine you are with other people and you can’t understand them. That’s what it’s like, too,” she writes. “Like twenty words are twenty kids playing twenty different sports at the same time, in the same space, in my skull.” Over time as she relearns to walk, speak, and write, Weiss becomes “we,” an amalgam of her pre- and post-accident selves. Once the writer who met with famous clients, she is also the woman who has worked hard to navigate life with brain damage—proving that we as humans are always far more than the sum total of what we have lost. —KS
Jude Law’s Beautiful Disappearing Act
One of my favorite festive movies is The Holiday, in which jolly antics ensue after Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz swap their homes for the holidays. Judging by the number of TikTok videos, I am not the only one getting ready for this annual indulgence, and Jude Law (Cameron’s love interest) is getting top billing. Eighteen years on, Law still has that famous mega smile: In this absorbing British GQ profile, Sam Parker notes that when Law orders a drink he “can’t help but flash the waitress a smile so full-watted it is frankly a bit much, like watching someone pay for a pack of gum when all they’ve got on them is a £50 note.” But the smile is now more sparing, at least on camera. Over the last few years, Law has moved away from heartthrob, into darker fare. Parker explains how in the historical film Firebrand, for example, Law plays Henry VIII “as a doleful, distracted tyrant, prone to sudden and revolting acts of violence.” Law was so committed to the role he even wore perfume during filming to make himself smell like rotting flesh. (Intrigued after reading this piece, I watched Firebrand: Law is indeed unrecognizable; no charm or flirtatious looks in sight.) While this story is gentle fare—nothing too deep or personal to find here—it is still a fascinating look at Law’s career trajectory. Parker has also done his homework, reaching out to Law’s colleagues such as Natalie Portman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Rober Downey, Jr. So if you, too, are an acolyte of The Holiday, have a read before this year’s watch—you’ll appreciate that smile even more. —CW
The Stories You Missed
ChatGPT Goes to Church
Arlie Coles, a machine learning researcher, wonders whether language models have a place in the church. Can a church leverage ChatGPT to organize its materials like sermons and documents, or complete administrative tasks? Are there responsibilities that should be left to humans—including writing sermons, interpreting texts, and generating Bible discussion questions? This is an essay full of thoughtful questions, from the unique perspective of a churchgoing AI researcher. —CLR
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Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain
Kate Wagner · Road & Track · March 1, 2024 · 5,474 words · 官方页
I can’t claim with 100% certainty that this is the first time Longreads has ever recommended a piece that doesn’t actually exist, but 99% is good enough. In case you missed the media scandal of the week, Road and Track published this piece, then immediately nuked it. Pulled it right off the site. (Hence the fact that this writeup links to an archived version via the Wayback Machine.) Why did they do it? Hard to say. The editor in chief claims it was assigned before he became EIC, and he would have killed it in utero had he known about it. Either way, you won’t find a better example of the Streisand Effect this year. The premise was simple: R&T sent Kate Wagner—who cycling fans may know from her newsletter Derailleur, and others might know from her blog McMansion Hell—on a press junket to a Formula 1 race in Austin, Texas. This was, as Wagner reminds the reader about fiftyleven times, a setup for culture shock. Wagner is used to abiding strict ethical guidelines while covering professional cycling; the petrochemical company funding the junket sent her first class to Austin. Wagner’s a socialist; the F1 paddock is a scene of ultrawealth. The ironic juxtapositions continue. But it’s really the piece’s gonzo approach and Wagner’s unrelentingly crisp descriptive writing that makes the piece work, even after the me-versus-them stance wears thin. “The unfurling of the apparatus of the setup, groups peeling back one by one until there are only these alien cars, these technological marvels kissing the ground,” she writes of the pre-race flurry. “Before the heartbeat, they respirated.” She applies this where, at least for a car magazine, it really matters: the cars, the racing, the racers. Had this story been only an eat-the-rich critique, sure, it may still have gotten a flurry of attention. But what makes it a great piece, a memorable piece, is how Wagner gets inside the magic of spectacle. —PR
Coercive Care
About 100,000 people in the United States have sickle cell disease. Roughly 90 percent of them are Black. And many of them have harrowing, even devastating experiences with reproductive health care. For this investigative feature, Eric Boodman, one of the finest writers covering science and medicine today, speaks to 50 women with sickle cell disease about their experiences. They describe being pressured into having tubal ligations, hysterectomies, and abortions. “Some stories carry echoes of ‘Mississippi appendectomies’ of the mid-20th century, in which Black women would go in for a different procedure and wake up to learn that their uterus had been removed,” Boodman writes. His sources also talk about being judged, scolded, and shamed by doctors, which Boodman describes as “a kind of verbal sterilization, when doctors express the pernicious belief that people with sickle cell disease cannot or should not have kids.” Boodman examines the meaning of “informed consent” and reveals how the strict definition of the term can be exploited by doctors, protecting them from liability while still ruining the lives of patients. This story is beautifully written to boot, amplifying its impact. It is the first in an ongoing series. I am excited—and terrified—for the rest. —SD
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Protecting the Prairie
When we bought a patch of prairie land nearly 30 years ago, we wanted to be careful with it. Clearing space for the cabin that is now our home, we did it by hand: handsaw, chain saw, and a beat-up lawnmower to deter tree sprouts. We preserved as much bush and as many trees as we could to minimize any adverse effects of our presence; as a result, our carefully culled canopy of ash, oak, evergreen, and poplar has always shaded us from summer heat while neighbors rely on air conditioning. For Orion, Sarah Smarsh writes about the hard work and missteps involved in clearing her property in Kansas. In removing eastern red cedars, she’s letting the light in, reclaiming space for tallgrass prairie that was born after glacial retreat, but eventually choked out by “woody encroachment” humans fostered in the name of agriculture. “In contrast to the European colonizer’s idea of a vast ‘nothing’ in the middle of the country, the prairie is among the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world,” she writes. I fell in love with Smarsh’s writing after reading her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Her voice is strong and lyrical, laden with purpose. It’s also distinctly no-nonsense; nothing is wasted. She understands and acknowledges her privilege: “The meaning that animates my life is a connection to this place—where my own farmer ancestors, poor white immigrants and beneficiaries of genocide and land theft, helped dismantle the ecosystem I now feel called to protect.” In revealing how the prairie was consumed by colonization and agricultural practices time has proven detrimental, Smarsh’s piece is equal parts fascinating history and ecology lesson. To be good stewards of the land, she and her husband are working hard to turn something back into nothing. —KS
‘It Wasn’t Sexual in Any Way!’ 50 Years of Streaking – By The People Who Dared to Bare All
Simon Hattenstone · The Guardian · November 6, 2024 · 4,755 words · 官方页
I would happily go for a drink with any of the people featured in this illuminating piece on the history of streaking. Not in the hope that they would whip their clothes off, but because each has a certain joie de vivre, rare to find nowadays. Although streaking can be used to draw attention to various issues, Simon Hattenstone focuses on the people who have bared all just for a laugh. There are different levels of the fun-seeking streaker. Michael O’Brien, for example, unveiled himself just once, drunkenly, at an England-France rugby match, before pursuing a quiet career as a stockbroker. Then there is Mark Roberts: 583 streaks and counting. Yes, Roberts has trotted his beer-toned body across a public arena 583 times. (He claims if he were an Adonis he would “be a poser.”) This stalwart of streaking has a career ranging from Wimbledon and the Olympics to the Super Bowl. (He even branches out from sporting events on occasion: “I did the Queen three times!”) Erika Roe, another one-and-done-streaker, made such an impression at her Twickenham rugby match dash that it’s still what she is best known for, 42 years later. She isn’t thrilled by this, which leads to possibly one of my favorite quotes of all time: “I couldn’t give a monkey’s rusty fuck about being written off as a streaker or what people think of me.” Hattenstone nods to some serious stuff—legal ramifications, etc.—but mainly revels in the delightful characters and butt-based puns painted on people’s wobbly bits. There are photos for when your imagination fails you, and I particularly enjoyed the ones of flustered-looking British policemen attempting to cover people’s modesty with their helmets. We need a treat, so this week please bask in the warm glow of a full moon. —CW
Living In A Lucid Dream
Claire L. Evans experienced a lucid dream for the first time after a long night of sleeplessness. Then she did what writers do: she followed her curiosity and wrote about it. For Noēma, Evans researches history’s lucid dreamers, visits online dream communities, and surveys modern science as a prelude to personal experimentation. She discovers that with a little practice, she could occupy that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness at will. (I won’t spoil the seemingly easy method to entering lucid dreamland. I’ll just say that the door to wakeful altered reality involves a mindfulness activity.) This piece is brain-bending in more ways than one; it explores not only lucid dreaming but the definition of consciousness itself, all along its curious spectrum from deep sleep to daydreams. “Dreaming and waking perception are both illusory; they’re models constructed by our brains that turn sensory stimulus, or its absence, into meaning,” writes Evans. “In waking life, short of a heavy psychedelic experience, that illusion is all-encompassing; there’s no other level of consciousness to ‘wake up’ into. But in lucid dreams, we can examine the construction closely. Does this make a lucid dream more conscious than waking?” Perhaps. While lucid dreaming can feel real and it may be enticing to learn how to enter them, Evans reminds us that dreams—as amazing as they can be—are strictly solo and somewhat lonely. Now, if only there was a way to share the experience with someone else. —KS
Best of 2024
Best of 2024: The Stories You Missed2024 年精选：您错过的故事
It's been a busy year: Here are some noteworthy pieces that may have passed you by.
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Stevie Nicks: ‘I Believe in the Church of Stevie’史蒂维尼克斯：“我相信史蒂维教会”
Sometimes I look for escape in my reading, a much-needed break from the news cycle. If I’m lucky, I’ll find the shift in perspective I seek and a little inspiration to boot. Enter Angie Martoccio’s lengthy Rolling Stone interview with Stevie Nicks. I loved this piece for a couple of reasons. It’s clear that Martoccio has done her homework. She establishes such a strong rapport with Nicks that this transcends a mere interview; it feels like a conversation between friends. Nicks and Martoccio tread a lot of ground, though one refrain is about being bold enough to make choices that are right for you as a woman: Nicks talks about not looking back after ending her relationship with Lindsay Buckingham; she discusses the abortion she had while in a relationship with Don Henley in the ’70s; and she relates advising Katy Perry to leave the internet to avoid toxic musical rivalries. Fleetwood Mac may be no more, but Nicks suffers no lack of creative outlets. In addition to writing songs, she wants to spend more time drawing after being on the road for two years. (Nicks was diagnosed with wet macular degeneration and she’s worried she won’t be able to draw if she loses her sight.) “I have so much poetry that just doesn’t make it to the piano,” says Nicks. “Or makes it to the piano and I realize that it’s really just not meant to be a song.” After a lifetime as an artist, Nicks is living proof that inspiration doesn’t happen to you—it’s a happy byproduct of putting in the work. —KS
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Inside Ukraine’s Wartime Salons苏珊娜带你去她靠近河边的地方
As the war in Ukraine enters its third year, beauty salons in the country have become symbols of perseverance and resistance. Salon owners go to work despite the constant threat of missile strikes. They’ve moved their businesses underground. When they have no access to electricity and water, they run on generators and use bottled water. They’ve also adapted to working in the dark, painting clients’ nails under the glow of headlamps. Unfazed by air-raid sirens, they’re accustomed to calculating risks. Sirens can sound up to a dozen times a day, a cosmetologist from Zaporizhzhia, a city close to the frontlines, tells Sophia Panych: “At that rate, it would take all day to finish just one facial.” In this piece, Panych asks, “Does beauty even have a place in a society at war?” For many salon owners in central and eastern Ukraine, the answer is an emphatic yes. Many Ukrainian women have felt a deep sense of patriotism and duty to jumpstart the economy, while salon patrons get their hair cut and nails done to take control—and find normalcy—in an unstable time. “Every blowout, every massage, every pedicure they provide is a statement of defiance against an enemy that wishes to see them destroyed,” writes Panych. They’re also communal acts of self-care. A longtime beauty editor with Ukrainian roots, Panych had been looking for a way to write about the country since 2022, but she hadn’t found an appropriate angle. But her reporting here, on the unexpected resilience of Ukraine’s beauty industry, comes together beautifully in an inspiring piece on the courage and resourcefulness of ordinary citizens in a time of war. —CLR
The Stories You Missed
How to Love an Oyster
A quick question for raw bar aficionados on the West Coast: Where did your oyster come from? Turns out most Pacific oysters grew on the coast, but are originally from Japan—and they’ve crowded out the once-ubiquitous Olympia species. That’s where researchers come in. Brendan Borrell turns in an engaging feature about Olys’ many ecological advantages, as well as the race to help them re-establish a shellhold in the reefs of the West Coast. —PR
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My Unraveling
Sometimes it feels like medical mystery stories are everywhere. Long COVID. Rare disorders. The New York Times’ ever-popular “Diagnosis” column. It’s a genre to itself, and by now we know that genre’s beats: onset, frustration, revelation, closure. Tom Scocca’s own experience, though, enjoys no such arc. From the moment he notices symptoms—innocuous at first, but not for long—uncertainty is his only constant. “I’ve told the story over and over, to various doctors, till it almost sounds like a coherent narrative,” he writes. It’s not a coherent narrative, of course. That’s not how these things work, no matter what similar stories may suggest. But Scocca meets the incoherence head-on with spare, even wry, prose: “I started buying five-pound bags of rice from H Mart instead of ten-pound ones. Then I just started getting rice delivered.” His malady takes root during a professional down period, and financial dread lurks in the background here, making each new physical issue that much more harrowing. He finishes a recruiting call before going to the ER; he has a phone interview hours after he wakes up from a muscle biopsy. All the while, his body betrays him in novel and confounding ways. That’s not to say he doesn’t find some measure of relief. He does. What he doesn’t find is answers, which is exactly what makes this piece so destabilizing. “This is what disability advocates have said all along,” he writes, “not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” —PR
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Last Days of Soho
I used to work in a post-production house in Soho, London. I remember self-importantly carrying tapes between edit suites (yes, tapes) and eating a lot of free biscuits meant for clients. I thought I was pretty cool. I wasn’t—Soho was the cool one. The narrow streets emanated vibrancy from every colorful nook and bustling alley. Drinking warm beer on a street corner outside a packed, steamy pub, I would watch deals go down (business and drugs on equal cadence), pity lost tourists peering at the street names set hopelessly high on brick walls, tut at young fops in salmon-pink trousers and raised collars meandering over to Soho House, and feel the warmth of couples embracing under historic arches. It felt alive, on the cusp of something more. Transient. Not once did I consider the actual residents of Soho—until now. In this piece for The Fence, Francisco Garcia explores the underlying tensions in this tightly packed square mile of central London, reporting on a “three-way stand-off between ‘business,’ local authority, and residents.” (Pedestrianization and al fresco dining are particular points of contention.) The steady gentrification of Soho drastically diminished residents from the heady days of 1881, when they numbered 16,608. Only 2,600 or so stalwarts remain, many of whom are “long-term social housing tenants, rather than recalcitrant millionaires.” But despite depleted numbers, a robust community organization called The Soho Society is still taking umbrage at many new development plans, much to the chagrin of property developers like Soho Estates (run by John James, the larger-than-life son-in-law of a former Soho porn baron). I appreciated Garcia making me think about this area in a new way—and making a land dispute fascinating. I was filled with nostalgia as he entered those magic streets, walking along as “[p]ost-theatre punters spilled out of the theatres, to mingle with the spirited dregs of the post-work crowd,” reaching a “pile of fresh sick . . . proudly splatted outside the entrance to Tottenham Court Road.” Good times. —CW
The Stories You Missed
The Many Lifetimes of an Old Red Bike
Iain Treloar's great-great-grandfather built the “old red bike” in the early 1940s, but it wasn't until this year Treloar finally learned of its history. In a beautiful essay, he explores themes of family and aging through the lens of a bike passed down through generations. Treloar narrates his family's history with respect and self-awareness, a reminder to honor our family treasures and their origins. —CW
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The Venture
When someone first suggested that her boyfriend might be trafficking her, Kayla Goedinghaus was incredulous. She was being abused—beaten, drugged, denied money—but trafficked? In time, as Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan detail in this gripping story, Goedinghaus came to understand the truth about her situation, which was far from unusual. “As of 2020, an estimated 39 percent of sex-trafficking victims in this country were brought into it by intimate partners,” Johnston and Quinlan write. “Through physical force, manipulation, or fraud, those victims are compelled to engage in sex acts for the trafficker’s benefit. That could mean posing for nudes he secretly sells to cover his gambling debts or sleeping with random men off the street so he can score drugs or letting the landlord watch sex acts through the bedroom window as a form of rent payment.” In Goedinghaus’s case, her boyfriend, Rick, was peddling her as a commodity among his friends, who allegedly included powerful men such as Trammell Crow Jr., an heir to a massive real-estate fortune (and brother to Harlan Crow, the conservative donor who’s been bankrolling Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lifestyle for years). This piece, then, serves as a corrective to widespread assumptions about trafficking, including who perpetrates it and who is hurt by it. Narratively speaking, the story’s crux is an unlikely friendship. Before Goedinghaus, Rick trafficked his ex-wife, Julia Hubbard, and the two women encountering each other changed everything—indeed, it made this feature possible. “Setting eyes on each other for the first time,” Johnston and Quinlan write, “Julia and Kayla were zapped with an eerie sense of mutual recognition, as though they were standing on opposite sides of a looking glass: Kayla as the new Julia and Julia as the former Kayla. They even looked alike.” —SD
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He Handles Custody Disputes, Death Row Cases, and Biters. He’s Salem’s Dog Lawyer.
Raise your hand if the first thing you thought of when you saw this headline was Walt, the lawyer from Detroiters who’s terrible at DUIs but “kind of a mack when it comes to dog bites.” Just me? Fine. The point is, attorney Jeremy Cohen is also kind of a mack when it comes to dog bites, but not quite in the same way. He argues on behalf of the dog, and has managed to save a number of not-very-good boys from enforced euthanasia. This profile starts as a curio, but very quickly becomes fascinating. When a dog bites a human or attacks another dog, is it irredeemable, or are there in fact multiple factors that can account for the violence? Cohen may have been voted “most likely to need a lawyer himself” in law school, but his genius is unpacking those factors without also condoning the dog’s behavior; behavior training is a constant in the deals he strikes, but so is placing the burden of the dog’s behavior on the human owners. And time after time, everyone leaves the courtroom—or, as is more likely, the town government select board meeting—satisfied that justice has been done. Douglas Starr hits his marks ably, establishing Cohen’s arc and motivations (and F. Lee Bailey friendship?!) alongside his legal exploits, which elevates this from novelty weekend read to something both entertaining and thought-provoking. Belly scratches for all! * Subscription required. —PR
How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t)1999 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）
I can’t remember if I saw the movie Go in the theater, but I’m guessing I didn’t. (Not many did, thanks in large part to The Matrix sucking up all the oxygen at the multiplex around that time.) I have seen it approximately eight gazillion times since then, however, which made Paul Schrodt’s oral history for GQ even more of a delight than it would have been anyway. The gang’s mostly all here: director Doug Liman (who made this in his transition from Swingers indie golden boy to The Bourne Identity franchise A-lister); screenwriter John August; the cast, save for Katie Holmes and Taye Diggs. But crucially, the piece communicates how much fun it can be to make a movie outside of the tentpole factory. Improvisational shoots, handheld cameras, and a crew of rising stars who are utterly sold on the director’s vision—it all makes clear that the movie’s enduring cult success stems from the “dance like no one’s watching” ethos of its creation. People tend to compare Go to Pulp Fiction because of its nonlinear timeline and crime elements, but it’s really more like Wet Hot American Summer—small, scrappy, and overflowing with the love the cast and crew had for the project. That’s a rare thing these days outside the arthouse circuit, and I have a feeling that number eight gazillion and one is right around the corner. —PR
With Melville in Pittsfield与梅尔维尔在皮茨菲尔德 - 巴黎评论
I’ve never read Moby Dick. I know that’s considered a grievous sin in certain circles. However, to those people, I say: well, how familiar are you with Pittsfield, Massachusetts? That’s what I thought! Not to brag, but I saw Dumb and Dumber in a mall there. Anyway. J.D. Daniels has read Moby Dick. Many times, apparently. Which is why he drove to Pittsfield to tour Herman Melville’s one-time home. Thankfully, you don’t need to have read Moby Dick to appreciate Daniels’ short but transportive piece. It would help if you like driving on back roads, or fried chicken, or art’s ability to influence your life. Or passages like “You want to be careful what you wish for. Inspiration means breathing. Fish breathe by drowning.” There’s plenty of Melville in here, sure, but you’ll absorb everything you need by dint of Daniels’ own fervor. A heartbeat thrums behind every knowing recitation, every memory, every word. And when you actually arrive at the tour, surrounded by people who, like me, haven’t read Moby Dick, you’ll fully understand Daniels’ numb disbelief. How can the world be full of people who have yet to experience such all-consuming beauty? —PR
Elevate Me Later
When my husband announced that he’d gotten us tickets to see the movie Longlegs one weekend a few months back, I was thrilled. I love horror movies—so much so, I once drove away a roommate who couldn’t take all the screaming coming from the TV in our living room—and this one was getting great buzz. Fast forward to today, and I still haven’t seen Longlegs. My husband and I got ticket refunds in advance of the showing we were due to attend. Our decision was based on a wave of disappointment that swept through fellow horror heads who got to Longlegs first. Without exception, these friends told me it wasn’t scary. And if a horror flick isn’t scary, what the hell is the point? As John Semley argues in this very smart essay, Longlegs is in keeping with a trend in the genre, which “prize[s] aesthetic sheen and psychological depth over typical hallmarks of the genre, like gore, jump scares, or heavy-breathing serial killers in dinged-up goalie masks.” Problem being, this can—and often does—strip the genre of its unique allure. Great horror doesn’t do analytical work for you; rather, it begs you to analyze it on your own, perhaps in the dark, and certainly after your heart rate has gone back to normal. “Where many of the classic horror films felt like they were smuggling meanings into them, these new cycles pushed (or ‘elevated’) any buried subtext to the level of text,” Semley writes. Now, there are some movies that Semley groups in the elevated category that I will defend to the death, chief among them Robert Eggers’s The Witch, a near-perfect, utterly terrifying movie with an ending so good I had to see it in theaters more than once. But he articulates precisely why I wasn’t enthralled by The Babadook, It Follows, or Midsommar; why I hated the remake of Suspiria with a fiery passion; and why a recent rewatch of Hereditary left me cold. It’s time to let horror be horror. Let my monsters go. —SD
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Spreadsheet Superstars
Even before I read this feature about the Excel World Championship, I had been charmed by its design. The visuals are chef’s-kiss perfect: paragraphs rendered as spreadsheet cells; an old-school palette of green text on a black background; bitmap-style illustrations that chunk together as you scroll them into view. Even the footer and credits tab feel considered, consistent, and—most importantly—not so assertive that they overwhelm the reading experience. (Achieving a balance between spectacle and legibility is all too rare in the post-“Snow Fall” era.) Thankfully, the piece’s creative director, Kristen Radtke, shares byline billing with author David Pierce. But don’t ignore Pierce’s role in a fantastic story. This is a scene piece of sorts, in which he heads to Las Vegas for his completely unrealistic shot at the big prize, but it’s also a surprisingly lyrical meditation on what makes a program like Excel both powerful and poetic. “In a spreadsheet world,” Pierce writes, “everything is comparable, reducible to some base figure that eventually explains everything if only you know how to ask. Spreadsheets promise the world isn’t actually complicated — you just have to know the formulas. I don’t know if that’s beautiful or bleak or both, but it’s certainly big business.” What’s so lovely about the project as a whole is that the story and art work in perfect concert. Neither takes itself too seriously, yet both execute at the highest level of their form. I smiled as soon as I opened the tab, and I didn’t stop until I finished the last word. An easy formula to hope for, but a hard one to accomplish. —PR
‘We’re Living in a Nightmare’: Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town
There are 137 bitcoin mines in the US, many of them located in remote and rural places in Texas, “home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians.” After a massive bitcoin facility started operating in the town of Granbury, people of all ages began to experience a range of unexplainable medical issues, including hypertension, chest pain, heart palpitations, migraines, vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, and panic attacks. Even the community’s nonhuman residents—from dogs to chickens to a family’s backyard oak tree—exhibited strange symptoms. At first, no one knew what was making them sick, but they knew they had one thing in common: the inescapable “dull aural hum” from the mine. The buzz, generated by 30,000 computers and thousands of fans running to cool them, is constant. And the noise, which residents have consistently recorded at over 85 decibels, is over the state’s legal limit. (On top of this, Texas’ noise law is the worst in the nation—one that seems to protect noise polluters, not its citizens.) In this eye-opening story, Andrew R. Chow shares the medical struggles and stories of more than 50 Granbury residents affected by the noise, and reports on how the community is trying to fight back against Marathon, the mine’s owner. As crypto and AI fuel the data center industry’s growth, however, this very scenario is repeating itself in other states, including Arkansas and North Dakota. “Ultimately,” Chow writes, “Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.” —CLR
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A Knife Forged in Fire
Laurence Gonzales · Chicago Magazine · January 9, 2024 · 6,814 words · 官方页
“What makes a good knife?” In trying to answer what appears to be a simple question, former chef Sam Goldbroch was “swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force” in becoming a bladesmith in Skokie, Illinois. In this gorgeous profile for Chicago Magazine, writer Laurence Gonzales commissions a knife from Goldbroch and invites us to shadow the master at work. Gonzales does what few writers can; he uses keen observation to recast an industrial space into a place of magical transformations. Read this piece and see the tangerine flame. Hear the forge roar, feel its heat, and revel in the alchemy of your tiny 6,000-word bladesmith apprenticeship. “A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes. ‘This is the moment of truth,’ Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. ‘This is when it becomes a knife.’” You’ll enjoy the science and history rendered in detailed scene work, but the most beautiful thing about this story is that it celebrates and exemplifies dedicated craft—in forging handmade knives and in revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. —KS
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From the Encampments
Columbia Law Students for Palestine; CUNY Law Student Against Genocide; Maeve Vitello; Rita W. Wang; Mehrdad Dariush, Chisato Kimura, Chloe Miller, and Rachel Vogel; Alaa Hajyahia and Seetha Tan · The Law and Political Economy Project · May 2, 2024 · 4,342 words · 存稿官方页存档
If you read one thing this week about the protest movement sweeping US college campuses, make it this. Drowned out by hysterical concerns about campus safety and anti-Semitism—terms that the mainstream media is largely (and irresponsibly) allowing the opposition to the movement to define—are the protesters’ voices and specific demands. Despite what CNN would have you think, these aren’t impetuous children screaming about a conflict halfway across the world they know little about and have no way of influencing. These are young people who, in the tradition of student opposition to South African apartheid and other odious regimes of the past, know full well that they can have an impact by demanding that their institutions divest from weapons manufacturers and other entities that are currently enabling the genocide in Gaza. They represent a generation that, in no small part thanks to the education they’ve received at the schools now inviting police to brutalize them, sees clearly how various systems of violence and extraction—colonialism and capitalism, for instance—are intertwined. In this collection of short pieces, protesters at Columbia, NYU, Yale, and the City College of New York explain in their own words why they are putting themselves on the line. They know the stakes, and they know what they are capable of. “When students link arms with faculty, New Haven residents, encampments nationwide united under the vision of the ‘Popular University for Gaza,’ and in ultimate solidarity with Palestinians, they make possible a different kind of university that leaves the current administration and Trustees behind—to their great fear,” write four Yale law students. —SD
The Squatters of Beverly Hills比佛利山庄的占屋者
When I first started reading this piece, I wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or amazed. Last September, realtor John A. Woodward IV listed 1316 Beverly Grove Place for just under $5 million. When the pool guy asked whether the new owners might keep him on, Woodward knew something was up—no one had bought the house. Raucous parties complete with thumping bass were said to take place five nights a week. Jittery, glassy-eyed partygoers spotted in daylight signaled debauchery. Unsatisfied with a “suggested donation” as the price of admission, the cons started to rent out rooms in the mansion they didn’t own. LeBron James—who lives nearby—was among a growing number of concerned neighbors. Who was living at this Beverly Hills property? For Curbed, Bridget Read spins a cinematic story of deception and intrigue worthy of a blockbuster movie. This piece features multiple grifters experienced in a variety of scams, and Read does a terrific job unraveling the twisted tale for gobsmacked readers incredulous at the perpetrators’ audacity. “The latest accused fraudsters to take up residence were louder, more obvious, and more desperate than their predecessors,” she writes, “but the mansion had long been in the possession of people who got it by lying and stealing.” Let’s hope The House of Deception eventually comes to a movie theater near you. Maybe they can get Quentin Tarantino to direct. —KS
The Fever Called Living
Evan Malmgren · Harper’s Magazine · September 12, 2024 · 6,063 words · 官方页
Choosing between Mulder and Scully has always felt like an unfair binary. Like Mulder, I want to believe; like Scully, I have a hard time actually doing so. Though I love listening to conspiracy and high-strangeness podcasts—hell, being a guest on Coast to Coast AM remains a highlight of my professional life—I’ve also never had much truck with cryptids or chemtrails or the idea that cell phone towers are scrambling our brains. Yet, reading Evan Malmgren’s Harper’s feature about people struggling with environmental illness made me feel like my skepticism may have veered into coldheartedness. There’s no question that the folks Malmgren spends time with are suffering. There’s also no question that the air and our bodies are filled with signals and substances that simply didn’t exist until relatively recently. Who am I to dismiss conditions like electromagnetic hypersensitivity or multiple chemical sensitivity out of hand? What makes this piece so compelling is that Malmgren gives free voice to his own struggle between distrust and acceptance. Like anyone, he has questions about the nature of these conditions, but his curiosity doesn’t mean ridicule. That leads to something truly rare: a compassionate, good-faith investigation into something that’s nearly impossible to quantify. The truth is out there, even if we never find it. —PR
Disposable Heroes
In 2022, I published a story about four women who, as teenagers, were groomed and sexually abused by teachers at their acclaimed public high school. I agonized about how the story would affect their lives. So did they. The teachers who hurt them—and other teachers who knew about the hurt—were beloved. How would the women’s peers react to their childhood mentors being exposed as predators? How would the subjects cope with seeing their pain committed to the page? I’m proud of the story and believe it had a positive impact. One of the women got the first letter of the pseudonym I used for her tattooed on her arm as a symbol of empowerment. I heard from dozens of readers who said the story prompted personal reckonings with the wrongdoing that persisted at the school in all but plain sight. An additional survivor of abuse came forward to file a lawsuit. But I also communicated with other victims, and with people aware of other victims, who didn’t want to come forward. I understand that decision, and I thought about it while reading this devastating essay by Moira Donegan. While technically a review of a memoir by Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during high school, Donegan’s piece is really a much larger project. It’s an indictment of the triumphalist narrative of the #MeToo movement, a reminder that for many survivors, the decision to speak out brought on new forms of pain: bullying, death threats, PTSD. Ford realized that she would forever be narrowly defined in the public eye by her testimony. “You can never be anything else now,” a PR rep told her. Meanwhile, justice has been elusive for many survivors, including Ford. Since his confirmation to the court, Kavanaugh has helped to restrict women’s rights. I fear—as I suspect Donegan does—that other abusers have only gotten savvier about avoiding scrutiny for both past and current wrongs. What, then, was the public spectacle of so much of #MeToo for? “The plundering of public survivors’ psyches…their vulnerability and humiliation, their drained emotions and bank accounts, their curtailed prospects and usurped identities, their rage and grief and degradation,” Donegan writes, “appears, in retrospect, to have been less about our edification than about our entertainment.” —SD
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Emma Carey: The Skydiver Who Survived a 14,000-foot Fall谁想射杀大象？
Eleven years ago, Emma Carey plummeted 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem jump with her skydiving instructor went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith takes us through Carey’s life-altering fall. “Emma Carey is flying, and she is so happy,” he writes. “She is 14,000 feet above the earth, gripping the straps of her parachute pack like an excited kid on the way to her first day of school. Oh my god, I’m going to become a skydiver, she thinks, not knowing that just about the most terrifying thing a human being can experience is about to happen to her.” Her accident could have easily taken center stage in this piece. Hockensmith is a skilled reporter and writer who uses evocative detail to tell us so much more than the basic facts of Carey’s accident and the aftermath. He introduces us to Emma and her best friend, Jemma Mrdak. The duo is a “package deal” who did everything together, including skydiving. It’s unclear precisely what happened during Carey’s jump. All she knows is that the main and safety chutes became entangled and neither opened as expected; her instructor landed on top of her, unconscious. She does not blame him for what happened and has kept his name out of news reports in the aftermath. The premise of this story is compelling, but what I loved most is that Carey’s attitude is almost a full-fledged character in this piece. “She began toggling between moments of tremendous gratitude that she’s alive, and tremendous anger at the accident, at the world, at her body, at everything. Sometimes she had a good morning and a bad afternoon. Other times it was a bad 1:52 p.m. and a good 1:53, then a bad 1:54. She just tried to keep getting to 1:55,” Hockensmith writes. This is a gripping story of pure will and determination. While Emma may have lost feeling and partial use of her legs, she is here to tell you that as a person, she is absolutely whole. —KS
In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.1967 年，一名黑人和一名白人妇女买了一套房子。美国政治将永远不会一样。
The starting point for this mammoth feature by Zack Stanton is a little-known incident from the summer of 1967: a white mob tried with all their might to drive Carado and Ruby Bailey, an interracial couple, from the suburban Michigan neighborhood where they’d recently bought a new home. Drawing on interviews, public records, and press accounts, Stanton describes the horrors the Baileys and their daughter endured, including a cross burning, racist graffiti, and harassment by vigilante PTA moms who sound a whole lot like the women trying to ban books and marginalize transgender youth in schools today. But that’s not the whole story, or even half of it. In cinematic detail, Stanton shows how the battle over the Baileys’ home reached all the way to Washington, DC, where it might have shaped federal policy for the better if not for profound conservative backlash that instead helped usher in Republicanism as we know it today. I gobbled up this thick slice of forgotten history and was moved by the turn at the end when Stanton lets his sources directly address Ruby, now 95, a widow, and still living in the home she refused to leave. One source “admires your principle in the face of imminent danger,” Stanton writes. Another “wants people to understand that America isn’t simply a story of bad things that have happened; it’s the story of people trying to make things better.” Then there is the neighbor who watched from her window in ’67 and did nothing—today, she is ashamed. “When I asked what she would say to you if given the chance,” Stanton tells Ruby, “she broke down in sobs, a half-century’s worth of pain tumbling out.” —SD
Best of 2024
Best of 2024: All Our Number Five Story Picks2024 年精选：我们精选的所有第五名故事
Every story that appeared in the number five slot in our Weekly Top 5, all in one place.
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The Cousin I Never Knew
When the storytelling is this compelling in a 7,500-word profile, time evaporates in an instant. Reporter Sophie Vershbow was 4 days old when she attended a funeral for her cousin, Jeffrey Bomser, who died on Monday, August 14, 1989, at age 38; he’d fallen into a coma after surgery to treat an AIDS complication. For Esquire, Vershbow mined diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings, and spoke to many people in Jeff’s circle to tell his story: he and his brother Larry contracted HIV and died within six months of each other in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Vershbow learns that Jeff was bisexual. He never knew whether he contracted the virus from sex or by sharing needles with his brother. Jeff became a staunch, outspoken support for others navigating HIV infection. He fought stigma and advocated for clinical trials to find promising treatment. Above all, he helped people live out their remaining days with peace and grace, at a time when an HIV diagnosis often meant fear, shame, and isolation. “Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and people who had it, the better chance there would be of finding a cure,” she writes. “He was aware of his privilege as a charismatic, straight-passing, sober, middle-class white man dealing with a diagnosis mostly shared at the time by gay men and disadvantaged IV drug users who were being systematically ignored.” Vershbow excels at helping readers remember the stigma society imposed on those living with HIV and AIDS, highlighting exactly why Jeff and his contributions were extraordinary. What Vershbow makes clear in this riveting profile is that it’s not about the dysfunctional and dangerous path you once walked or what befalls you as a result. It doesn’t matter where purpose originates, it’s what you do with it that counts. —KS
Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand
David A. Taylor · Scientific American · February 1, 2024 · 3,485 words · 官方页
My favorite subplot of Barry? The romantic relationship between Chechen mafioso NoHo Hank and Bolivian crime boss Cristobal. In season four, ostensibly in an attempt to move away from criminal life, they decide to import sand. When I watched the episode in which they hatch a plan, I’d thought it was an inspired comic bit; only once I read David A. Taylor’s story did I realize that sand mafias are very real. Sand is one of the main ingredients in concrete, and given that construction worldwide has been booming for decades, we could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. In this piece, Taylor writes about the devastating impact of sand mining and looting on ecosystems that are already fragile, and on vulnerable communities in places like Mozambique and Kenya (and how one woman in Kenya’s Makueni County successfully fought the sand cartel in Nairobi and introduced a regulated, sustainable approach). Stories of organized crime aside, it’s really the simple yet eye-opening details that make this piece, like the fact that China used more cement in just three years than the United States used in the entire 20th century. Or that half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined. Or that sand from rivers and lakebeds, not coastal areas, is ideal for building, and builders who skimp on better sand end up constructing buildings that are flat-out dangerous (just look at the destruction in Turkey and Syria from the February 2023 earthquake, one expert tells Taylor). A fascinating story on a global issue that more people should be talking about. —CLR
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The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies
When vinyl record sales began to rise in the mid-’00s, the phenomenon was dismissed as a hipster affectation. After 17 straight years of that rise, however, the truth became clear: people enjoy engaging with art in a meaningful way. Dropping the needle, flipping an LP at the end of a side, reading liner notes, even just looking at the art while you listen; it’s all part of treating music with intention, rather than relegating it to the noise of a background stream. That same energy animates Abe Beame’s illuminating story on the resurgence of repertory theaters in the post-COVID cinema world. Whatever’s at play here—and Beame investigates multiple factors—it’s more than just nostalgia. It’s a rebuke of Hollywood’s franchise/remake/sequel addiction, of theatrical chains pumping digital files onto ever-bigger screens, of movies being an afterthought as people text through the screening. Rep cinema’s survival, Beame writes, “speaks to the essence of cinema and what many want out of it—not to simply consume a piece of content, but to get something deeper, richer, and more communal.” That realization is one more and more theater owners are having in more and more areas. In the beginning, it was easy to look at revival screenings in LA and Brooklyn and Austin and think of it as vinyl for movies. It is that, absolutely. But it’s not vinyl in 2006; it’s vinyl now. —PR
The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet塑造我们星球的神秘深层微生物
Deep within the Earth’s crust, an ancient underworld teems with intraterrestrial microbes. They’re tiny but mighty, and different from their cousins above ground—breathing rock instead of oxygen, for one. They’re also extraordinary, having carved massive caverns over time, “engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth,” writes Ferris Jabr. They’ve survived the planet’s cataclysmic events over billions of years, possibly even helping to form the continents and lay the foundations for terrestrial life. I’m drawn to writing about Earth that frames its vast geological history in an accessible and beautiful way, and Jabr does exactly this, bringing inanimate rock, and these amazing microbes dwelling deep within it, to life. He explores some of the principles of Earth-system science, which studies Earth and life as a single self-regulating system, and the idea that living creatures—humans, animals, plants, microorganisms—aren’t just products of evolutionary processes, but participants in their own evolution. In other words, he writes, we are Earth. My favorite science writing informs as well as awes. Much like Jabr’s story on the social life of forests, this piece reminds me of the interconnectedness of all things, and challenges and shifts my understanding of this wondrous physical world we live in. —CLR
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The Invisible Man
You’ve read reports about the homelessness crisis. You’ve heard the voices of those experiencing homelessness and seen the analysis of the many, many factors that have contributed to the surge. But you’ve likely not read a more searing firsthand account of what it’s like to be unhoused in this country. Patrick Fealey has been a writer for his entire life; first as an award-winning newspaper reporter and critic, then as an unemployed one struggling with manic depression, then as one living in his car in a coastal Rhode Island town, writing all day on an old laptop plugged into the lighter and sleeping in a Walmart parking lot at night. Fealey has no illusions about the medications he needs to function, or the beer he needs to cope with his current circumstances. He also has no illusions about the parade of police officers who confront him under shaky pretense, the social safety net that’s never enough, or the people who avoid even acknowledging his existence. “If ‘I think, therefore I am’ is true,” he writes, “we are people who are. We are, and we stand on this ground. If you deny us ground, you are denying us our ‘I am.’ Isn’t that negation of our existence? We are here and we are you and we are yours.” Fealey saves his lyricism for his fiction and poetry; his prose needs no embellishment to cut through your defenses. The uncertainty, the instability, the danger that pervades his life worms off the page and into your brain. I don’t know if Fealey is still on the street, or if the payment for this story helped him get out of his car and into some permanent housing. But I do know that even if he’s somewhere warm and safe, there are many hundreds of thousands who aren’t—and his piece makes sure no one who reads it will ever forget that fact. —PR
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My Accidental Daycare我客厅里的意外日托
At the start of this piece, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is busy sniffing out a strange smell wafting from her kitchen, which—spoiler—turns out to be dog excrement. That beginning sets a candid tone for an essay in which Abrahamian throws the door wide open to a chaotic period of her life. Evicted by a cartoon-villain-esque New York landlord, her children’s daycare shuts down, leading Abrahamian to take in a pod of displaced under-fours (some of whom enjoy feeding her dog diarrhea-inducing tidbits). Take a moment to reflect on the maelstrom one small toddler can inflict upon a home. Now imagine as many as seven of them. In a two-bedroom house. Every day. Turning her home into a temporary daycare was meant to help stressed-out parents for a few days, but weeks go by as Abrahamian watches her old nursery struggle against the endless bureaucracy required to reopen at a new location. Wading into the fray, she develops a forensic interest in the rules around emergency exits, student-teacher ratios, and background checks. Her disbelief at bureacratic pedantry reaches a fever pitch as her desperation increases, resulting in a scene reminiscent of Judy Hopps and Flash the Sloth at the DMV in Zootopia. If you are wavering on reading over 6,000 words on the woes of parents who have the resources to pore over daycare rules and regulations, I can assure you that the level of emotion brought to this child-sized saga is worth it. —CW
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Inside Israel’s Fight to Make Fathers of Its Dead Soldiers
Among the most morbid decisions we humans have to make is what to do with our bodies once we’re dead. Do we want to donate our organs? Do we want to be buried, cremated, or composted? Here, Jenny Kleeman pulls back the curtain on a different kind of corporal decision. Since beginning its relentless assault on Gaza last year, the Israeli government has offered the families of biologically male soldiers who die in action the option of postmortem sperm retrieval (PMSR). Kleeman positions the phenomenon as uniquely Israeli. “In a country where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors, family continuation is deemed paramount,” she writes. PMSR can be requested by a dead person’s spouse or parents, regardless of what he may have wanted, and that makes the policy an ethical minefield. Kleeman does a brilliant job mapping it. She interviews medical professionals tasked with preserving sperm, a lawyer vigorously promoting PMSR, families who’ve requested retrieval, some who have used sperm to conceive a child, and an academic who has polled soldiers about the policy. This story doesn’t miss a beat. When the PMSR advocate says, “Don’t ask me about the child’s rights, because there is no such thing,” Kleeman writes, “Of course, I do have to ask her about the child’s rights. . . . When I suggest that a child created in these circumstances might feel the burden of the hopes and expectations of grandparents who fought so hard to have him or her, she bats the idea away. ‘This is bullshit. It’s very nice to be born in a great family that loves you, that worked so hard to have you.’” I can’t stop thinking and talking about this story; there’s just so much to unpack legally, ethically, and otherwise. Ultimately, Kleeman confronts readers with another morbid question: what do the dead owe the living? —SD
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Secret in the Walls: Hidden Letters Reveal Love, Lust, Scandal in 1920s Baltimore Society隐藏的信件揭示了 20 年代巴尔的摩社会的爱情、欲望和丑闻
I read a lot this week, but not many pieces spoke to me. Frankly, I think I craved something different. So it was easy to get swept away by this Baltimore Banner story: a tale of “lust and scandal and fortune” and, ultimately, a love triangle between a woman and two men. Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh recount how Joanna Meade, a resident of Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood, discovered a black tin full of juicy love letters inside the wall of her house during a bathroom renovation. All 67 letters were addressed to a woman named “Mrs. R.A. Spaeth,” and all except one were postmarked in 1920 or 1921. Reading the cursive penmanship and old-fashioned language was difficult, but Meade was quickly hooked; “It was like eavesdropping,” she tells the authors. She enlists the help of her neighbors, as well as the Banner’s staff, to decipher the correspondence and gather clues from across city archives and the internet to piece together the mystery: Why were these letters stashed away inside her house? Who was Mrs. Spaeth? Who is “R,” the man writing to her? The scans of envelopes, letters, photographs, and newspaper articles enhance the read, like we’re discovering each detail as it’s uncovered in the newsroom. While the story’s premise is not new—it reminds me, in fact, of a piece in our sister publication called “Castles in the Sky”—there’s so much here to like: Secrets hidden in an old house, waiting to be found. A community working together to uncover information (through Nextdoor, of all places). And the power and sway of writing, of these words handwritten on delicate paper, more than a century later. —CLR
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In Every Nelson He Visits, Jeff Truesdell Finds the Man He Loved杰夫·特鲁斯戴尔每次拜访尼尔森时，都会找到他所爱的人 - Nelson Star
How do you deal with loss? For Jeff Truesdell, remembering his husband, Nelson Figueroa, means traveling to different towns and communities called Nelson. At each Nelson he visits, Truesdell poses a cardboard cutout of his partner at local landmarks and also speaks with residents about their town—and their own experiences with grief. This is an unexpected, feel-good read about loss, love, and the power of connection. —CLR
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Maylia and Jack
On its surface, this is a story about a drug dealer and one of her customers, who overdosed on fentanyl he bought from her, thinking it was Percocet. But Lizzie Presser’s latest feature isn’t a clear-cut story about a perpetrator and victim. It’s far more tragic than that. Maylia and Jack are both kids, two of the untold number of minors caught up in one side or the other of the burgeoning fentanyl trade afflicting the US. Maylia didn’t know the extent of the harm she was abetting when she sold pills; Jack didn’t know the danger he faced when he crushed and smoked what he bought from her. And how could they? Institutions failed them left and right, providing virtually no knowledge or other resources that might have saved either of them from their respective fates. In Maylia’s case, there was a dysfunctional, abusive family who provided her no life guidance, and the police, who knew the pills she was selling were fentanyl but didn’t stop her from doing so. In Jack’s case, there was the aforementioned police, who might have saved his life, as well as educational and rehab systems that didn’t sound the alarm bells that he (and his now-grieving mother) so desperately needed to hear. Both Maylia and Jack were failed by a criminal justice system woefully under-equipped to grapple with the impact of illegal drugs on children. Presser tells a tough but necessary story—one without heroes or answers, but with compassion to spare. —SD
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Scrabble, Anonymous隐藏的信件揭示了 20 年代巴尔的摩社会的爱情、欲望和丑闻
My husband and I have played an ongoing game of Wordfeud, a Scrabble clone, for over five years, so I was powerless against Brad Phillips’s Paris Review piece, in which he recounts playing speed Scrabble against a bot every day for the past 25 years. On one particular day, he played 19 three-minute games before breakfast, 13 of which he won. Matches were limited to three minutes. Scrabble is Phillips’s obsession, a not-necessarily-healthy replacement for alcohol addiction, a compulsion that holds a hint of shame. The game isn’t about improving Phillips’s vocabulary, it’s about instantaneous anagrams, strategy, and rote memorization. Apparently this is true for the most serious professional players. “When playing Scrabble, language explodes then settles quietly on your rack, having been decommissioned,” he writes. “Each letter is a weapon only in the service of point accumulation and can no longer convey meaning by joining with its fellow letters. A word on a Scrabble board is a mathematical fact, not a unit of expression.” In addition to a litany of fun anagrams I attempted to memorize—CAUTIONED also spells EDUCATION, for one—I enjoyed the twist this piece takes when Phillips goes on the road to a meeting of the New York Scrabble Club. Up until this point in his life, he’d never played against strangers in person. There were actual Scrabble boards to play on, tiles stored in purple velvet Crown Royal bags. The whole vibe feels almost calming. There, Phillips played four opponents head-to-head, and for the first time in a quarter century, he learns something new about how to play the game. —KS
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Opioids Ravaged a Kentucky Town. Then Rehab Became Its Business.
When I was growing up in southern Indiana, schoolyard jokes habitually came at Kentuckians’ expense. This was apparently just one link in a cruel chain; I later learned that Michiganders did the same thing with us Hoosiers, and I assume Kentucky kids cast Tennesseeans as the backward yokels in their versions. I bring this up not because any of these characterizations are true, but to show that we’ve all had our humanity distorted by other people’s stories. Oliver Whang’s deeply reported feature about Louisa, a small town in eastern Kentucky, avoids this trap by never acknowledging such distortions in the first place. Louisa, like so many other places in the region, has been hollowed out by opioids. Yet, it’s also become a company town predicated on rehab. Addiction Recovery Care treats substance abuse disorders, and then trains those recovering from substance abuse for gainful employment. It does so successfully, but ARC isn’t necessarily viewed as a savior by the rest of Louisa. Whang deftly unpacks ARC’s missions and its contradictions, profiling its CEO and its trainees—particularly an odd-couple pair of friends who give the piece its beating heart—with equal care. You can tell when a journalist has parachuted in and helicoptered out, and you can tell when a journalist has spent a significant amount of time somewhere gaining the trust and confidence of his sources; it’s clear in the candor of Whang’s conversations and insights that he falls squarely in the latter camp. And by the time you reach the end of the piece, and you’ve found your breath caught in your throat, you’ll know that whatever jokes you told or heard as a kid, the truth is very, very different. —PR
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Nothing Could Prepare Me for the Bizarre ‘Live Birth’ Experience at Babyland Hospital没有什么能让我为巴比兰医院奇异的“活产”经历做好准备
Reading this piece, my first reaction was: “What?” Joshua Rigsby’s visit to the Cabbage Patch Kids Babyland General Hospital is truly bizarre. But bizarre is often brilliant, and Rigsby had my rapt attention as he explained how, in a building that looks like a plantation house in Cleveland, Georgia, Cabbage Patch doll “babies” are “born.” For the measly sum of $120, you can have a complete birthing experience (the “Planned Parenthood” option). Rigsby, not ready for full Cabbage Patch parentage, takes the free tour instead—but still gets to witness a birthing ceremony, his description of which left me with fundamental questions about the human race. Upon the birthing announcement over the tannoy, guests gather around a tree on a plaster mound, in which, as Rigsby explains, electronic Cabbage Patch Kids are buried neck-deep, swiveling “their heads in permanent smiles like a scene from Dante’s Animatronic Inferno.” An employee in hospital scrubs declares Mother Cabbage fully dilated (it remains unclear if Mother Cabbage is the tree, the mound entombing the dolls, or some other deity). Everyone has to shout “push” and the “faithful pump their toddler fists and sway, pleading with the plush baby to emerge from the dilated tree vagina, as the Dante robot heads swivel and writhe.” That was a sentence I needed to read twice. Rigsby takes pains to emphasize that this is all done unironically. Kudos to the staff here. Cabbage Patch Kids sells a lot of dolls: their marketing, including this experience, obviously works (I refer again to my questions about humanity). While I am never going to visit the dilated tree vagina, I am glad Rigsby did—he recounts this extraordinary place delightfully. —CW
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Into the Wind
Disillusioned and drained after dancing for a living became too much, Laura Killingbeck packed up her bike and bought a one-way ticket to Alaska. Cycling and the outdoors brought her true solitude. In those she encountered, she found generosity, kindness, and what she needed most: human connection and community. —KS
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Variations on the Theme of Silence
Blessed silence. Quiet time. The absence of small, empty talk. That’s the kind of silence I had in mind as I read Jeanette Cooperman’s thoughtful essay for The Common Reader. I hadn’t contemplated other kinds of silences, but as she notes, there are many. Consider the silent treatment, where someone chooses to inflict pain by withholding their words. Silence becomes fraught and tense. Consider a moment of silence, usually for a life or lives lost. That silence signifies a deep, collective pain. “Silence like a cancer grows, whenever power refuses to hear truth,” she writes. “Silence is an unblown whistle, a disappeared activist, a dismembered journalist. Silence slides down one generation to the next, keeping pain a secret. Silence is what neighbors remember about the shooter.” I hadn’t considered the litany of ways in which silence harms. But in addition to giving me so much to think about, Cooperman reminds us of silence’s ability to heal, a welcome reprieve from the hollow cacophony of life which depletes me. “Yet as far as I can tell, every wisdom tradition since time began has praised silence. The stillness they urge is a letting-go, a slowing down, an unclenching of our hands and our stubborn, intractable desires. It empties us, yet is far from empty.” We often define silence by what is missing, an absence. But in many cases—mine included—silence is what fills us up. —KS
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Black Earth
Patrick Chandler Brown was born a few months after his father was arrested for protesting against North Carolina; the state dumped 40,000 tons of toxic, PCB-laden soil into his community anyway, contaminating the land and water. “That’s how I got my name, PCB — Patrick Chandler Brown,” he says. “I was named after what happened.” Today, Brown farms industrial hemp and vegetables as the owner of the Oakley Grove plantation, land on which his great-grandfather was once enslaved. Industrial hemp helps remediate soil and Brown favors organic and regenerative methods over pesticide-reliant crops such as tobacco. He supports a community hard-pressed to access fresh food with a vegetable box program and works to open up opportunities for Black farmers and entrepreneurs. Christina Cooke’s story flourishes detail by original detail. She uses small brushstrokes of vivid color to paint a portrait of Brown, his farming operation, and his climate and social advocacy work, alongside his family’s long history of community service and activism. “’Now I own it,’ he says, holding in his palm the weighty set of skeleton keys that unlock the doors of Oakley Grove house and the outbuildings surrounding it,” Cooke writes. “While his ancestors were forced to inhabit this place, he is choosing to, and transforming it into a space that serves his needs.” This story is rooted in toxic aggression and environmental racism. But Patrick Chandler Brown has turned the soil. Where once oppression grew and proliferated under the horrors and injustices of slavery, where once the state of North Carolina literally dumped poison on the land, today Oakley Grove plantation is fertile with a new sustainable crop—hope. —KS
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How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town
It wasn’t that long ago that Oakland was a major-league sports mecca. The Warriors and A’s enjoyed dynasties in basketball and baseball, and despite recent irrelevance, the Raiders boasted one of the most committed fanbases in American football. That has changed drastically over the past five years; now, only the A’s remain, and they’ll be gone come October. Regardless of your feelings about sports, you can imagine the effect this mass emigration has had on folks in The Town—and as one of them, I’m here to tell you your imagination’s not lying. That’s likely why I was so charmed by Dan Moore’s story about the birth of the Oakland Ballers. The baseball team is the latest in a series of community-minded clubs that have popped up in multiple sports across the country, but you can bet that none of those other teams went from an idea to Opening Day in the space of nine months. On paper, it makes no sense. Two childhood friends just . . . make a team? They win the trust of city council, community leaders, and cultural ambassadors alike? They secure a contaminated public park and manage to clean it and erect a stadium in less than five weeks? Thankfully, Moore was there to chronicle the entire against-all-odds process, and his admitted homerism is part of what makes the piece so appealing. He, like Ballers founders Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, grew up an Oakland sports fan. He knows the heartbreak. He also has no illusions about the impact a minor-league sports team (a sub-minor-league team, if you want to be brutally accurate about it) can reasonably expect to make on a city’s psyche. But when you get to that first game, Moore sitting in the stands with the other 4,200 fans, high on the sense of possibility, you’ll probably react like I did: heading straight to the Ballers’ website to score some tickets. —PR
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The Powerful Potential of Tiny Conservation Plots
Joanna Thompson writes about the interdependence of life on planet Earth and the importance of fostering biodiversity in our urban gardening efforts. Today I learned that small plots can be carbon-intensive if we’re not careful. When we’re trying to grow food to feed ourselves and cool urban spaces to aid climate change, we need to remember the bees, butterflies, and other pollinators we depend on to grow food. Nurturing biodiversity can mean leaving just a small space in the garden or on the balcony for native plants and perennials that feed and provide habitat for the insects we share the plant with. —KS
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There Is No Place like Home, Whatever That Is无论那是什么，没有一个地方比得上家 - 普通读者
In my 20s and 30s, rootlessness made life more exciting. I traveled solo around the world, exploring cities that I decided to call home for months at a time. In between these trips, I always returned to California, back to my parents’ nest. Jeannette Cooperman encapsulates this nicely: “I fancy myself rootless—yet the isotopes of my childhood home are locked inside the enamel of my teeth.” I’ve since slowed down, but still feel like I haven’t planted roots anywhere: my husband and I have moved six times in 10 years. In this essay, Cooperman examines home from different angles, suggesting that people have their own definitions of the word, which evolves as our lives do. “In the first years of life, your home is your entire universe,” she writes. That childhood home might be familiar and comforting, as mine was (and still is, despite the bit of dread that’s inevitably tied to any parental visit). Or, as with Cooperman, it may not. “My great aunts lived upstairs and my grandparents downstairs, with me and my widowed mother tucked into the second bedroom,” she writes. “We always felt like boarders, though only now can I articulate that.” She also writes about finding home within her partner, Andrew: “He is home for me. And I hate that fact. I love my husband with every ounce of energy I possess, but if he is my home, what happens if he dies first? I am homeless, adrift forever?” Home, too, can extend beyond your front door to your neighborhood, where we “bond by territory,” where we find a community in which we belong. It’s this type of network that I continue to search for as an adult, and now a parent, in a time when people retreat into their private spaces more and socialize less. I appreciate Cooperman’s ruminations here because I think, perhaps obsessively, about what would make my ideal home. It’s an exercise that feels more urgent in times of despair—a constant wondering of where our true home is in the world, or if a perfect place exists for us. “If you have someplace like that to return to,” writes Cooperman, “why would you not?” —CLR
Beautiful Plan of Your Future
If you asked me to identify experiences that have left an imprint on me throughout my writing life, I’d note three: The first screenplay I wrote, by hand, at 14; my second script, typed out and saved to a floppy disk, at 17; and the unpublished nonfiction manuscript I completed during my MFA program, nearly 20 years ago. I have no idea if the handwritten script or the floppy disk still exist, but I hope to stumble on them someday, perhaps in a box stored at my parents’ house. In this Baffler essay, Ed Park describes just this sort of discovery. In the spring of 2020, when Park and his family were locked down in a 10th-floor Manhattan apartment, he found a manuscript he hadn’t seen in years: an unpublished memoir that he’d written in a few months in 1998, “a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again.” In a closet-turned-office, during the height of the pandemic when “time lost meaning,” Park transcribed all 214 pages, reengaging with the words of his younger self. “Pandemic isolation brought a degree of introspection to everyone but not, I wagered, like this,” he writes. “In a few months I would be fifty, and Three Tenses was all I could read, a prismatic self-portrait at twenty-eight.” I love how Park reflects on the creative process behind it, including its structure (composed of 1,478 fragments he calls “tiles”), its sentences (which all start with “In”), its randomness and lack of chronology, and his experimentation with tense. He shares passages from the manuscript that read like short vignettes, seemingly unrelated. “But there in my closet, it was easier to defend than disown such concatenations,” he writes. “I saw a writer searching for connections, an American tethered to the idea of Korea, and above all the shape of a life lived in books.” It’s one thing to read your past writing and cringe. (Hello, that’s me!) But it’s quite another to have a meaningful dialogue with your past self in the way Park does, and over time gain the needed perspective about your work. I’m now tempted to dig up my early writing—to see how I’ve grown, to give those ideas the space to breathe again. —CLR
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How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs
Close Encounters of the Third Kind filled me with wonder as a kid, and an ’80s childhood provided no shortage of material to keep that wonder alive: Flight of the Navigator; The Last Starfighter; E.T. But despite being primed to believe, I’ve never been able to fully accept any of the countless UFO sightings and reports that have emerged over the decades. I never knew why, only that it all felt … vague. And then I read Nicholson Baker’s lively, informed takedown in New York. Oh, I thought. Duh. Regardless of where you land on the believer spectrum, there’s a lot to like here. (Well, maybe not for the full-throated evangelists like Avi Loeb, who claims skeptics and critics “behave like terrorists.”) Baker’s stance is clear from the get go, but his fiction career serves him well, leavening his skepticism with crackling phrases like “wiggy-sounding.” He’s dismissing, but not dismissive, which can be a tough needle to thread. He reports generously, not simply combing through archives but connecting with many of today’s ufology luminaries. None of that, though, shakes his well-grounded thesis: our entire flying-saucer mythology is derived from Cold War weapons research, carried out via high-tech balloons. Sure, I’ll still wonder about what might be out there—hell, it’s logically impossible to think we’re the only sentient lifeforms around—but until there’s something a little more undeniable, I’ll be living on Baker Street. —PR
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You Wouldn’t Believe How Difficult It Is to Buy Sperm
Danielle Elliot · The Guardian · May 28, 2024 · 4,326 words · 官方页
I have had two sets of friends go through the intrauterine insemination (IUI) process, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of buying sperm. I have already been confused—when, on being shown a donor, I was presented with a picture of a child (sperm banks use pictures of donors when they were children). I’ve been flabbergasted—at the cost of a single vial of sperm. Been dismayed—when it didn’t work. Delighted when it finally did. But, as knowledgeable as I thought I was on this topic, Danielle Elliot showed me I still had much to learn about this world. Sperm is a hot commodity, with low stock levels post-pandemic and a screening process that accepts only about 4 percent of donors. Elliot’s piece is a rollercoaster ride as she races to meet her ovulation cycles. With securing a vial of sperm akin to getting a Taylor Swift ticket, I felt my stress levels rising as Elliot dithers on the phone during plummeting stock, wanting to yell, “Just buy it!” at her. Even when sperm is secured, there are many hurdles to cross. One particularly frustrating moment is when Elliot misses a cycle because, as a doctor informs her, “The woman who facilitates sperm shipments will be on vacation next week.” Navigating logistics and expense, Elliot begins to consider other options: after all, $16,723 in, she is no closer to having a baby. Written with a searing honesty, you will find yourself deeply invested in this journey. —CW
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What I Learned From Destroying Myself at the NYC Marathon在爱自己之前我就喜欢《德州电锯杀人狂》 - 电动文学
I read this piece on Wednesday. This is an important fact. All I wanted to read on Wednesday was something that affirmed the idea that decency existed in the universe. Is that histrionic? Probably a little. Does it matter? Probably not. Because Will Leitch’s story about running the NYC Marathon is eminently decent. It is about the very real, very uplifiting sensation of being cheered on in a very difficult pursuit. Look, the people running a marathon are not the healthcare workers heading back to the hospital in the spring of 2020. (I’m sure some are, but you know what I mean.) For the most part, they’re not heroes simply because they’re running 26.2 miles. (Again, some are.) But on race days like this one, the air is suffused with something special. “Much has been written about the joyous lovefest that is the New York City Marathon, but I’m not sure it can be emphasized enough,” Leitch writes. “People can be mean and cruel and inconsiderate; we all see it every day. But this was something basic and elemental: human beings supporting other human beings, simply because they are other human beings.” It feels good to be cheered, especially when you’re in mile 19 and you feel like the next seven miles are an impossibility, but it also feels good to cheer. It feels good in a way that is, sadly, rare. It feels like community. And it’s exactly what I needed to be reminded of. —PR
The Eviction Cure
As we all know, the US housing market is a nightmare. Property prices and interest rates are sky-high, rendering the prospect of buying a home unthinkable for many people. Renters face a dire landscape, too: according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, “affordability conditions are the worst on record.” (I urge you to look at the data in that JCHS link; it’s jaw-dropping.) Policymakers are doing little to remedy the burden of housing costs, even for the most vulnerable, or to protect renters from landlords who—excuse my language—don’t give a crap about the people living under their roofs. But in Dallas, Texas, woe is the landlord who finds themselves on the radar of a local lawyer named Mark Melton. When readers first meet Melton in this superb profile by J.K. Nickell, he’s wearing “a sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap . . . [and] an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans.” In my imagination, that T-shirt is emblazoned with the phrase “ENOUGH!” because that, in a word, is Melton’s mantra. Since 2020, Melton has been doing everything in his power to stop unlawful evictions in Dallas County. He’s recruited an army of people to help him—attorneys who literally intercept renters on their way to eviction hearings before justices of the peace, elected public servants who “are not required to have a high school diploma, much less a law degree.” (Seriously?!) These advocates demand that landlords follow the law by, say, providing due notice before kicking someone out of their home. As for lawful evictions, ones based on policies that seem intended to punish people when they fall on hard times, Nickell shows that there’s little reason for hope: renters in Texas shouldn’t expect the law to change soon, if ever. This fact clarifies Melton’s character. He’s a person doing what he can with what he has rather than being daunted by the big picture. It’s not everything, but it’s something—and for the people he helps, it’s a lot. I tore through this story, fueled by admiration for Melton and by rage against Texas’s eviction machine. —SD
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The Delicate Art of Turning Your Parents Into Content让父母满意的微妙艺术
In this piece, Jessica Winter discusses great examples of adult creators using their parents in films and TV shows over the years. Think back to John Cassavetes’ 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence. Or the amazing scene in Goodfellas when Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry have a meal with Tommy’s mother—played by Martin Scorsese’s real-life mother, Catherine—right after they kill and stuff a dead guy in a trunk. Or, more recently, the Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, in which the gay comedian interacts with various people on his quest for love and connection, including his parents, who’ve struggled to accept his sexuality. I initially dismissed Winter’s piece as a Top 5 contender because it’s shorter than most longreads. But I kept returning to it, and to one beautiful line in particular: “[It] can be a twentysomething rite of passage to realize that your parents are more than your parents; that they had a life before you; that they were beautiful and moved beautifully and were desired, and still are.” It’s a profound realization, and one that’s taken me into my 40s to really grasp. (For this reason, I got a kick out of the recent wave of #80sDanceChallenge clips in which TikTokers filmed their dancing parents, moving like they did in the ’80s, to the unmistakable beat of “Smalltown Boy.”) For a while now, I’ve wanted to do something similar—not record my parents letting loose to catch a glimpse of their younger selves, but to sit down with them, and all of my aunts and uncles, to ask them questions about their lives, especially their early years: their childhoods in the Philippines, their many firsts. As Winter explores here, the process of turning our parents and elderly family members into entertainment fodder can be fun, emotional, and rewarding, but it may also become tense and uncomfortable, revealing complex generational and family dynamics. This is a quick yet thoughtful read, with a few must-click links that go to Francesca Scorsese’s delightful TikToks, in which she records herself with her famous filmmaker dad in genuinely warm and funny exchanges, like this one where she asks him to identify feminine products. —CLR
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From Silicon to Slime从硅到史莱姆
Ever since reading this Ferris Jabr story about subterranean microbes, I’ve kept thinking about Earth’s tiniest organisms: simple life forms that are incredibly complex, doing invisible yet powerful work. It’s easy to overlook life that emerges and unfolds at a smaller scale. This illuminating conversation between Willa Köerner and Claire L. Evans on the growing overlap between biology and computing is a nice follow-up to Jabr’s piece. Evans, a writer we’ve featured in previous Top 5 lists, has written about science fiction, ecology, and technology—the work of an interdisciplinary mind with an inspiring view of the future. Here, Evans challenges our outdated notions of computation; she says that every living thing processes information, or computes. “At some point,” she tells Köerner, “I think we’ll fully realize that what’s happening in the natural world is more computationally efficient, inventive, and resilient than anything we could create from silicon.” Could a tree, roots and all, be a computer? An ant colony? Is imagination a form of computation? What would be possible if humans looked to nature for more sustainable solutions that are cooperative rather than exploitative? This thought-provoking dialogue makes one thing clear: computers of the future won’t be made of metal and plastic. —CLR
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Would You Clone Your Dog?
My lasting takeaway from this piece is that nearly 30 years (!!!) after Dolly the sheep, cloning mammals still feels like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. Alexandra Horowitz’s excellent reporting on cloning pet dogs includes a sinister trifecta of creepy twins, a company with the Dr. Evil-sounding name of “ViaGen,” and hidden donor dogs. She starts with the twins, which are really clones: a pair of neatly trimmed dogs named Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine, part Shih Tzu and part Lhasa Apso, each with a different misaligned eye so that they mirror each other as they “pant in tandem.” They are clones of an original dog named Princess, rescued by retired police officer John Mendola. When Princess succumbed to cancer, Mendola contacted ViaGen, which has a patented dog cloning technique, to recreate her. To discover more about the process, Horowitz travels to the company’s hundred-acre ranch in Texas to meet its president, Blake Russell, who says things reminiscent of Jurassic Park’s John Hammond: “One day, my pastures are going to be filled with baby rhinos in draft mares[.] Would that not be the coolest thing ever?” The cloning process involves surgery on two other dogs—one to provide the eggs, one to be a surrogate. ViaGen doesn’t own these dogs; they rent them from what they call “production partners.” (It is not clear what later happens to these “production” dogs.) As a scientist who studies dog behavior and cognition, Horowitz is a worthy guide through this world, and her concern for “the unseen animals whose bodies are used in making a clone” is apparent. So, too, is her skepticism on whether the owners, longing for the return of a beloved pet, are getting a true replica, explaining that “[t]here can be no cloning of the world that shaped the original, no repetition of the scenes and smells they encountered. Life leaves its mark.” This thought-provoking piece will have you digging out your old copy of Brave New World. —CW
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Inside Snapchat’s Teen Opioid Crisis
Snapchat’s clandestine features—notably, messages that vanish after they’re viewed—are especially appealing to its younger users, from tweens to college kids. Unfortunately, this makes it a perfect platform for drug dealers to sell lethal concoctions of Oxycontin, Xanax, and other sought-after pills to these younger users. In 2020, more than 950 kids died from drug overdose; in the first half of 2021, another 1,150 died. The majority of these deaths were from fentanyl and synthetics, both of which are used in fake pills sold online. Paul Solotaroff spent eight months reporting this harrowing feature, and presents two different perspectives: the heartbreaking accounts of families who lost children after they’d bought and ingested counterfeit pills from dealers on Snapchat, and then the version of this story from the social media giant itself, which points to its zero-tolerance policy regarding drug dealers and claims its teams are doing everything possible to make the platform safe. Alongside excellent reporting on the evolving drug trade (which is booming on social media) and the legal landscape (in which companies like Snapchat have immunity from crimes committed by their users), Solotaroff follows one activist mother who mobilized after losing her son, a bright 14-year-old boy named Alex Neville. She’s since connected with dozens of families of other victims, working with law firms on their case and fighting to hold Snapchat—and Big Tech—accountable. This is a nightmarish but important story, whether or not you’re a parent. (I also read a Noema interview with the author of The Anxious Generation this week—a very different yet complementary read that discusses mental health and anxiety in today’s youth and the rewiring of childhood due to apps like Snapchat.) —CLR
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Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee
Imagine the thrill of discovering a new species—a creature no one else has ever documented. For Hakai Magazine, Anne Casselman introduces us to the melittologists (bee biologists) who are doing just that with surprising regularity. Amid the poetic litany of plants in the west Kootenay region of British Columbia—purple onion grass, bitterroot, limestone hawksbeard—we meet Rowan Rampton, then a graduate student at the University of Calgary who stumbled upon Hoplitis emarginata, a relative of the mason bee seen only a handful of times in northern California and southern Oregon. Bee identification can be tricky, but rewarding. As Casselman explains, the field guide Common Bees of Western North America groups specimens into comical categories such as “bees that are extremely large” or “bees that are very hairy.” For his winged wonder, Rampton turned to his mentor Lincoln Best, an expert taxonomist with the Master Melittologist Program at Oregon State University, who identified the bee under a microscope. I learned much from reading this piece, but what I found most fascinating was the singular symbiotic relationship between a bee and their preferred plant. For example, Proteriades (a subgenus of mason bees) has a love connection with a plant called Cryptantha. Their “stems are like pale green miniature pipe cleaners that twist up and end in curved sprays of minuscule flowers, which open like popcorn kernels. . . . These bees have evolved Velcro-covered tongues to scrape the pollen out of the flower’s narrow corolla, and special brushes on their legs to comb pollen into a pile that it then packs onto its belly to take back to the nest for its larvae, which specialize in digesting this one plant’s pollen.” Discovering these beautiful relationships are critical to conservation efforts. Only when you understand which plants bees prefer and why, can you devote time and energy to protecting them and their habitat. The more you know, the more you can bee a friend to the pollinators among us. —KS
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The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Once among the most prolific political and social commentators in the US, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been relatively quiet for the last decade. (Emphasis on relatively: Coates has written a best-selling novel and several comic books; guest-edited an issue of Vanity Fair about race, violence, and protest; and dipped his toe into screenwriting.) Next week, he’s turning up the volume once again with the release of his new book, The Message. According to the publisher’s description, Coates’s book “is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.” Central among those truths is Israel’s violent, decades-long subjugation of Palestinians, and US institutions’ complicity in sustaining what Coates sees as a system akin to Jim Crow. As Ryu Spaeth explains in this wise, probing profile, which doubles as a necessary piece of media criticism, many of those same institutions have championed Coates. This positions The Message as a professional risk, but Coates is more concerned with morality than he is with power, something that far too few people in media can rightfully claim to be. As Spaeth shows, Coates is an unusual public intellectual in his willingness not just to change his thinking about an issue but to put that evolution on display. He’s open to learning, to critique, and to using the process of writing to work out what he means to say. In an era when people with platforms tend to be obsessed with their own certitude, facts be damned, this is a breath of fresh air. —SD
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The Text File That Runs the Internet
I read stories this week that elicited an acute emotional response, and I read stories this week that dazzled with prose. But nothing I read this week felt more urgent or important than David Pierce’s explication of robots.txt, that snippet of code on every webpage that allows (or doesn’t allow) search engines to catalog its content. See, robots.txt has effectively functioned on the honor system: search companies agreed not to send their automated web crawlers into sites that expressly disallowed them, and everyone was more or less happy. Thirty years later, though, there’s a new breed of web crawler in town. These new bots swarm websites not to catalog content but to feed that content to AI, a technology that threatens to replace search as the default means of online discovery (and does so by digesting and regurgitating the content in a monstrous, unciteable form). Even worse, AI crawlers don’t necessarily respect robots.txt—and there’s nothing legally compelling them to do so. Pierce frames the conundrum perfectly: “As the AI companies continue to multiply, and their crawlers grow more unscrupulous, anyone wanting to sit out or wait out the AI takeover has to take on an endless game of whac-a-mole. They have to stop each robot and crawler individually, if that’s even possible, while also reckoning with the side effects. If AI is in fact the future of search, as Google and others have predicted, blocking AI crawlers could be a short-term win but a long-term disaster.” For three decades, websites large and small have depended on search to help build their readership; now they’re caught in a philosophical quagmire. Trust the robots, or sink into oblivion? —PR
Best of 2024
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Surfing the American Dream
I’ve always wanted to learn how to surf. I’ve lived near the California coast for most of my life and have traveled to many places where beginner lessons are plentiful, but I still haven’t taken the opportunity. What if there was a more accessible and less intimidating way to get me closer to my goal? In this enjoyable Slate read, Alexander Sammon visits the American Dream mall, a massive entertainment complex in New Jersey, to ride the artificial waves at Skudin Surf, the largest indoor surfing wave pool in the US. I expected Sammon, who grew up surfing outside in San Diego, to dismiss the chlorine-filled, Shrek-themed experience in a climate-controlled dome as completely soul-stripping, and to write a piece bemoaning another beloved activity now commodified, privatized, and optimized. But Sammon is thoughtful and nuanced, with insights on today’s youth, the future of IRL retail and the American mall, the death of subculture, the unique pastime of surfing, and ultimately, the things we choose to do that bring us joy. He writes that his $250 surfing session was a silly and manufactured experience, but it was also sort of fun and memorable: “[D]espite seeming like the fakest fucking thing imaginable for an activity obsessed with authenticity, there was actually something somewhat legit in the root of the experience.” —CLR
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A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underwo
I didn’t read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing when it first came out. Not because I wasn’t interested—rather, I knew that I was going to like it so much, that it was going to be so annoyingly good, that I needed to crack it open when I had time to get lost in its pages. It was one of those leave-me-alone-I’m-reading books. In the case of PRK’s latest feature for The New Yorker, I waited two days to dig in: I finished a long, complicated edit, a bunch of admin work, and household chores, then found myself with a solid stretch of an hour to just read. The story is about Zac Brettler, a young man in London who posed as the son of a Russian oligarch and wound up dead in the Thames after jumping from the balcony of an apartment owned by a gangster; his death appeared to be suicide, but it might have been something else, and we’ll never know for sure because the gangster, who was the last person to see Brettler alive, is now dead too. As I suspected, I had to read the piece in one gulp. Every inch of it is fascinating: the twists and turns of Brettler’s story, the portrait of London as a playground for conmen and fabulists, the revelations that stunned Brettler’s family after he was gone. Needless to say, when you can, clear your own plate and get to reading. —SD
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Chortle Chortle, Scribble Scribble: Inside the Old Bailey with Britain’s Last Court Reporters
Sophie Elmhirst · The Guardian · July 11, 2024 · 4,689 words · 官方页
This week, I have reached back and pulled a piece from the heady summer days of July. I missed it then, and maybe you did, too. Even if not, it is worth a second look. I’m a longtime fan of Sophie Elmhirst and her wry and dry character studies, and she does not disappoint here. Her main subject is Guy Toyn, a court reporter for the Old Bailey, who suits its creaking machinations perfectly. With a booming voice that lacks a filter, Toyn relays court life by mimicking various characters, including Idiot Judge, Pretentious Barrister, Moaning Gen Z, and Miscellaneous Drunk. He is unapologetically old school—which seems to put Elmhirst a bit on edge—but also wonderfully theatrical. Elmhirst watches him pull trousers over his red shorts and T-shirt to go into court and chuckle loudly over a smuggling case that involved cocaine secreted inside bananas. This world is portrayed with delightful aplomb: Elmhirst’s descriptions of the press quarters, a “suite of rooms in terminal decline,” made me feel I could see the “disconcerting” yellow stains on the red-swirled carpet, detect the light smell of toast, and feel the bizarreness of the “museum-worthy beige laptops” stacked amongst old shoes and ladders. Toyn takes his job seriously—after all, he is, as Elmhirst explains, reporting on what happens in these courts “in all its variety and ugliness, because people should know what was happening on their streets, in their towns, in the darker recesses of society.” Not all of Toyn’s stories get picked up by the national press (as Toyn notes, they want stories of “a woman killing a man, ideally a middle-class white woman killing a man”), but on his website, Court News UK, he reports what happens behind every door. Toyn cannot take his eyes off the kaleidoscope of stories these courts hold. His own story is just as fascinating. —CW
Best of 2024
Best of 2024: The Most Popular Editors’ Picks of the Year2024 年精选：年度最受欢迎编辑精选
Our readership has spoken! This list compiles the most-viewed stories we recommended in 2024.
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Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother
In 2014, Elliot Rodger murdered six people, wounded 14 others, and killed himself in Isla Vista, California. As Mark Follman shows in this thoughtful, compassionate feature, Rodger was an unwell, unstable young man whose actions—like those of many mass shooters—were likely preventable. The key component of any prevention strategy for gun violence is reducing people’s access to firearms, but Follman approaches the matter from a complementary angle: one focused on a troubled person’s experiences, needs, and risks. “Many mass shooters remain ambivalent about killing themselves and others—and most engage in observable warning behaviors well before they attack,” Follman explains. If these red flags are documented and reported, what’s known as “behavioral threat assessment” can kick into gear: “Made up of psychologists, administrators, law enforcement, and other trained practitioners who meet regularly to handle cases, the team conducts interviews and gathers information to gauge the danger. Then, over weeks or months, they use constructive tools like counseling, social services, and education support to guide the troubled person away from what the field calls ‘the pathway to violence.’” Follman delves into threat assessment as a growing field of study and action through the lens of Rodger’s mother, Chin, who became interested in it a few years after her son’s crime. Chin is now using her son’s story and her experience as his mother to help experts better understand what compels mass shooters to act and what it takes to stop them. In a profound act of grief, love, and generosity, she has made herself a case study. Follman’s piece is essential reading, going beyond the headlines and assumptions about mass shootings to illuminate root problems and cracks in various systems—social, familial, educational, therapeutic—that people like Rodger too often slip through. —SD
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One Man’s Journey from State Prison to a Revered San Francisco Restaurant一个人从州立监狱到旧金山一家受人尊敬的餐厅的旅程
In 1995 at the age of 16, Michael Thomas killed 14-year-old Gabriel Alcazar Jr. and was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison. While incarcerated, Thomas fell in love with baking as part of his work in the prison kitchen but never dreamed he’d be able to cook and bake on the outside. Today, he’s honing personal recipes and working four days a week as a prep cook at Flour + Water in San Francisco’s Mission District. You must make time for this beautiful and moving essay about what can happen when someone chooses to see the best in us. —KS
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Ukraine’s Death-Defying Art Rescuers
Charlotte Higgins · The Guardian · July 30, 2024 · 5,856 words · 官方页
After a seemingly interminable period of creeping despair, it’s been strange the last few weeks to feel hopeful about the world. There’s a lot that’s still terrible—Gaza and climate change top my list, and perhaps yours—but the shifts in the US presidential race, with an assist by the bonhomie of the Olympics, have made me feel uncharacteristically buoyant. So I was primed to love this story about Leonid Marushchak, who has made it his mission to save Ukraine’s art from the front lines of Russia’s invasion. Simply put, Marushchak is a hero, one who doesn’t wear a cape and who has to ride shotgun: because he doesn’t have a driver’s license, when he decided to start hauling his country’s irreplaceable heritage westward, he enlisted friends and loved ones to help him. He’s stowed paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and other objects into vans and trucks, then ferried them away from danger, covering tens of thousands of miles in the process. “On one trip, what at first felt like an enormous pothole turned out to be the shock waves from a supersonic bomber, which all but knocked the van over,” Charlotte Higgins writes. “Another time, a Ukrainian tank almost crushed them by accident.” This piece is both a propulsive adventure story and a tender celebration of Ukrainian art, filled with beautiful writing about the objects Marushchak has rescued. Here is Higgins on babas, huge statues carved by Turkic nomads a millennium ago: “Age has blurred their facial features into inscrutability. Beside them, you feel a little smaller, a little more what you really are, which is to say a flimsy, short-lived creature of bone and muscle and soft tissue.” Swoon. —SD
Full Metal Sponcon拟音音效的奇怪模拟乐趣
In 2018, Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL, was court-martialed for allegedly murdering a prisoner in Iraq. If you followed the high-profile case, or listened to the excellent podcast about it, called The Line, you likely know that Gallagher was acquitted after a key witness changed his story on the stand. The only charge that stuck pertained to Gallagher posing for photographs with the prisoner’s corpse. (He texted one image to a friend in California, with the message, “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”) Gallagher was feted by conservative media and quickly pardoned by Donald Trump. And where has he been since? Apparently, hawking seasoned salt—as well as gun silencers, knives, and jiujitsu clinics. As Jasper Craven shows, Gallagher has spent the last several years turning himself into a brand—when he’s selling stuff, he’s really selling himself. He’s also written a book, started a podcast, and launched a foundation to support police officers and service members accused of crimes; among the beneficiaries to date is Daniel Penny, the former Marine who in 2023 choked an unarmed Black man to death on the New York subway. Gallagher embraces the backlash against his history of violence—in fact, it’s central to his appeal to consumers. Craven positions Gallagher in a “weird world” of influencers that includes “the likes of acquitted Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, who has written a memoir and recently partnered with a body armor company, and disgraced General Michael Flynn, who gives speeches, sells merch, and promotes a precious metals exchange.” This incisive feature offers a window into the commodification of right-wing aggression, anti-wokeness, and Trumpism. Call it warrior-culture capitalism, and call it gross, because that’s what it is. —SD
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On Beauty and Violence安娜·斯图布尔菲尔德奇案
It can be appealing to try to blow the dust off the old you and reinvent yourself in a place where you’re a stranger. As N.C. Happe recounts her move to Canada in this beautiful but sometimes difficult read for Guernica, she recalls her Minnesota childhood and her father’s dark moods and explosive temper alongside the casual—and sometimes invited—violence of the playground. Cinematic details make this essay an immersive read. You can hear a dying deer bleat and imagine its accidental and untimely death. You can feel the author’s cracked dry lips; you can taste the copper when they bleed. “The realization dawned: violence runs in the blood of everything, everywhere,” she writes. “For me, it took leaving the country to learn this. For the doe from my childhood home, it had been as simple and as quietly done as jumping a fence.” What Happe shows us through this thoughtful piece is that while sometimes you can jump the fence and leave home, you might be surprised by what you’re unable to leave behind. —KS
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“To the Train Lady with Dark Brown Hair …”: Extraordinary Stories of Four Couples who Found Love via Small Ads
Amelia Tait · The Guardian · March 16, 2024 · 3,828 words · 官方页
Imagine an encounter that changes your life, a random meeting in which you find your person. Amelia Tait’s fun piece highlighting four couples who met by chance was exactly what I needed. Tait’s story surprises as much as it entertains. Did you know that placing ads to find that missed connection goes back at least 300 years? “Though he may not have been the first, Samuel Reeves did it in 1709,” writes Tait. “Writing in the British periodical Tatler, Reeves sought the attention of a woman he had helped out of a boat. He ‘desire[d] to know where he may wait on her to disclose a matter of concern,’ he said, and provided an address where he could be reached.” Tait profiles four couples who—despite missteps, redirections, and the randomness of life—managed to reconnect and begin a long-term relationship. Each is worthy of a Hallmark movie but together, these stories are much more than just a series of meet-cutes. This piece is about the thrill of possibility as it is about the couples themselves; it’s about taking a risk in striking up a conversation, something that happens less and less often as we hide in plain sight behind our mobile devices. After all, you can’t lock eyes with your special-someone-to-be if they’re locked on your phone. —KS
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A Beloved Alley Cat Now Lives in the Watergate. Was She Kidnapped, or Rescued?
Welcome to the story of Kitty Snows, who lived in Foggy Bottom. While this may sound like the start of a fairy tale, it contains considerably more lawyers and strongly worded letters than Hans Christian Andersen tended to include. Kitty Snows is a cat who participated in the Blue Collar Cat program, a scheme to rehome strays that cannot be domesticated (having witnessed too much on the streets). Kitty gets adopted by the community of Snows Court in Foggy Bottom, belonging to “everyone and no one.” She lives in a box on a lawn until two locals—Tom Curtis and Barbara Rohde—find her with sores on her nose and take her to the vet. With the vet deeming her unfit for outside life, they move her to Rohde’s fancy apartment. As Andrea Sachs points out, no one knows how Kitty felt about her relocation from a box to a 14th-floor condo with “impressionistic paintings of a Russian forest . . . [and a] baby grand piano backed up against soaring windows.” (When two detectives turn up at the door, they are informed that Kitty is “unavailable.”) What we do know: the Foggy Bottom Association is not pleased, and the fight boils down to whether Kitty was stolen or rescued. The legal ramifications of this neighborhood dispute could have made for a dry read, but Sachs maintains a wry tone and delivers every detail delightfully. I am sure that, if available for comment, Kitty Snows—no longer of Foggy Bottom but of Watergate West—would agree. (Don’t worry, the “Kittygate” reference is there.) —CW
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The Canary
This week, The Washington Post began a series in which journalists go long on government workers. Not politicians, not elected officials. Workers. The men and women who actually make the wheels of bureaucracy turn. (“[The journalists’] only brief,” says a note about the series, “was to go where they wanted, talk with whomever they wanted, and return with a story from deep within the vast, complex system Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss and celebrate.”) And while future installments will include stories from luminaries like Geraldine Brooks and Dave Eggers, the inaugural piece by Michael Lewis sets an unimaginably high bar. Searching for a subject—a story in its own right, and a thoroughly entertaining lede—Lewis happened upon Chris Mark, a former coal miner whose research revolutionized safety in the underground mining industry. Sounds dry, right? So did baseball statistics before Moneyball. Just as Lewis’s beloved book found humanity in seemingly impenetrable data, so too does Chris Mark’s lifelong quest become as riveting as a rescue mission. It helps that Mark is dream profile material even beyond his work: self-examined, articulate, and thoroughly uninterested in bullshit. A mix of archival and contemporary photography perfectly contemplates the proceedings, with cave-ins of the 1940s giving way to Mark as a doctoral student and then again to him as an éminence grise of sorts, revisiting the sites where he first began answering the questions that no one had bothered asking. So often we dismiss government by pointing to the creeping pace of change; with Mark’s life and work, that’s kind of the point. Only by moving as slowly and methodically as a mining machine has he been able to transform risk in such a dangerous industry. —PR
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Dark Matter暗物质|黑兹利特
Meet Frank Warren, the creator and curator of PostSecret.com, a site that displays the most private thoughts of anonymous contributors in postcard form. As Meg Bernhard reports for Hazlitt, the project emerged out of deep pain: not long after college a close friend took his own life, Warren began volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline. There, he learned how to listen carefully to callers as they recounted their despair. “Frank realized that people needed a way to talk about the messy topics often off limits in everyday conversation,” writes Bernhard. PostSecret became an in-person art exhibit and a website devoted to the cultural taboos that keep us silent, a way for us to unburden ourselves of what’s unspeakable in public and within our closest relationships. Bernhard’s piece is part profile, part delightfully nerdy deep dive into what secrets mean and why we keep them. “What is a secret?” she asks. “Knowledge kept hidden from others, etymologically linked to the words seduction and excrement. To entice someone to look closer; to force them to look away.” In revealing some of her own secrets, she invites us as readers to look closer, at the risk of us turning away. Since beginning the project in 2004 by distributing 3,000 self-addressed postcards at metro stations in Washington, D.C., Warren has collected and curated over 1 million fears, desires, and quirky notions for public display. Over time, he’s expanded the project into books and public events where attendees share their secrets with the audience, breaking that all-important fourth wall of the project’s anonymity. PostSecret arose out of a life lost tragically to inner turmoil; for those who crave judgement-free emotional release, it’s a lifeline. —KS
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‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza
The biggest news out of Gaza this week was the deaths of seven aid workers affiliated with the non-profit organization World Central Kitchen. The incident was nothing short of perverse: Israel targeted and killed people trying to make a dent in the imminent famine that Israel itself has engineered as part of its strategy to demoralize and destroy, in whole or in part*, the Palestinian population. (*Yes, this is a reference to the international community’s codified definition of genocide.) Perverse was the word that again came to mind when, shortly after the attack on WCK, +972 and Local Call published a blockbuster investigation revealing the extent of Israel’s reliance on artificial intelligence to select targets in Gaza for assassination. Except select and assassination make it sound like the AI systems are precise, which they decidedly are not. Lavender, as the main program is called, “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants” in the early weeks of the siege, and “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” Israel is also using AI—including a system named, I kid you not, “Where’s Daddy?”—to track targets into their homes and then drop bombs, no matter the risk of collateral damage. Which is to say, no matter the risk of killing other people who happen to be in the home, including children. As technology journalist Sam Biddle wisely put it on social media, this essential investigation, one of the finest published since the war began, shows that “the value of military ‘AI’ systems … doesn’t lie in decision-making, but in the ability to use the sheen of computerized ‘intelligence’ to justify the actions you already wanted.” —SD
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I Drove a Cybertruck Around SF Because I Am a Smart, Cool Alpha Male
If you’ve seen a Tesla Cybertruck in person, you know that photos can only do it partial (in)justice. It’s massive. It’s massive. It looks exactly like what a seventh-grade boy would draw in his notebook alongside pictures of, like, throwing stars. It looks like it comes with a preinstalled vanity license plate that reads B4D4SS. It looks like a can of energy drink became sentient and watched Starship Troopers without noticing the subtext, then designed a car. Yet, it exists. People own them and drive them down the street, seemingly without shame. Drew Magary is not one of those people. He is also not an automotive journalist. He’s a columnist and a very funny writer who happens to resemble the quintessential Cybertruck owner. And when he rents one, the result is the perfect piece for a hot summer week: short, breezy, and refreshing. “You know how Apple will occasionally confuse the world by doing away with standard features like a headphone jack?” he writes. “OK, well, imagine a car built entirely out of that kind of gimmick.” Magary’s experience with the car is as entertaining as you’d imagine, even when people aren’t giving him the finger simply for driving it. He’s offended by its fighter-pilot steering wheel. He can’t figure out how to turn off the one giant windshield wiper. He nearly crushes himself with the retractable roof. But really, it’s his disdain for Elon Musk and the Cybertruck’s obvious target audience—“the kind of men who use speakerphone on airplanes”—that really animates the proceedings. Writing about people rather than things is where Magary has shined since his Deadspin days, and this piece is no exception. Will it make Cybertruck owners happy? Definitely not. Will it make you happy? Massively. —PR
‘All These Normal People, Packed Into a Human Lasagne’: My Glamour-Free Night at the Oscars
Stuart Heritage · The Guardian · March 11, 2024 · 1,908 words · 官方页
This year was my first time watching the Oscars live. Partly due to being in the same timezone, and partly—I’ll admit it—because I wanted to see Ryan Gosling sing “I’m Just Ken.” (It did not disappoint.) During the show’s many pans to the audience, I noticed the eye-popping frocks, the clapping dog, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie sweetly holding hands, and, now and then, up above the glitzy auditorium, hints of faces peeking down from the ether of the mezzanines. A glimpse into the shadow world. Although vaguely surprised that the audience above the shiny people was so vast, my concentration whipped back to a naked John Cena. Stuart Heritage returned me to the heights with this delightful piece for The Guardian. Only the A-listers saw Al Pacino up close as he skipped all the nominees to quickly growl Oppenheimer for Best Picture. (He probably had to get back to that new baby.) Up above, it’s a whole different crowd. I am a sucker for a bit of irreverence, and I thoroughly enjoyed Heritage’s take on spending the Oscars with “the normal people.” In the mezzanines, Heritage joins other press members, crews from nominated departments, and friends and family of nominees. Initially, sitting beside a woman mindlessly scrolling through red carpet selfies, he is unimpressed by this version of the Oscars, but as he begins to recognize the groups of people championing particular films, his view shifts. For these people, the stakes are high. Heritage muses, “It might lack the star wattage of the lower levels, but there is something beautiful and human about going through it surrounded by people who are invested in the outcome.” This essay is a lovely reminder of the hugely collaborative effort behind the films, and what they mean to those who don’t make it to the floor of the Dolby Theatre. A reminder that made this my favorite piece of Oscar coverage. And don’t worry—Heritage doesn’t leave without a celebrity encounter (by getting in the wrong lift). I’ll let you read to find out who. —CW
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How Elderly Dementia Patients Are Unwittingly Fueling Political Campaigns
Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard, Casey Tolan, Lou Robinson, and Byron Manley · CNN · October 22, 2024 · 3,984 words · 存稿官方页存档
Some days I feel like I receive more texts and emails from political candidates and campaigns than I do from friends and family. Last week, I was invited to sign Kamala Harris’s birthday card on a website where I was also asked to “chip in” to her campaign coffers. In August, Ted Cruz asked if I could spare a dollar, and he apologized that it wasn’t the first time he’d come begging. You’ve probably had this experience, too. The use of people’s personal contact information to solicit political donations en masse is out of control, and the tone of the requests is creepy. Sometimes a message is awkwardly intimate (I am not your “friend,” Mark Kelly); other times it’s scolding (“Despite texting you MANY TIMES…”). I usually ignore the messages, as I suspect most people do; I’ve also found that replying “f— off” gets you an automatic unsubscribe. But, as this CNN investigation reveals, this public nuisance has an exploitative underbelly that warrants scrutiny. There are vulnerable people who engage with the messages in earnest. They really think they’re being contacted by some of the most powerful people in the US, and that the fate of the country is in their hands. These people are elderly Americans with dementia. They’ve hemorrhaged life savings and put their children in debt by donating huge amounts to campaigns. Often, they’ve unwittingly signed up for recurring payments on popular donation platforms thanks to pre-checked boxes and fine print that they either don’t notice or read and forget. “Recurring donations only multiply as confirmed donors become valuable political currency—their names and contact information quickly swapped and sold,” the authors of the investigation explain. “And once WinRed or ActBlue has a donor’s financial information, donations can be triggered by actions including a response to an online survey, an order of campaign merchandise, or a one-word reply to a text message.” I uttered “oh my god” under my breath a lot while reading this story, but that passage made me say something else, at volume: “f— off.” —SD