Best Of 2024: All Our Number One Story Picks

Since 2015, we’ve published 543 editions of the Weekly Top 5 newsletter. While we do have some unwritten guidelines on how we order our selections, the number one story of the week will command your heart and mind. They’re often serious but always unforgettable. What’s more, you can browse our Top 5 archives and trace the course of history, week-by-week, with these topical pieces.

—Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter & Seyward

January

My Unraveling

Tom Scocca | New York Magazine | January 2, 2024 | 6,677 words

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

In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.

Zack Stanton | Politico Magazine | December 22, 2023 | 17,959 words

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

The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty

Michael Hall | Texas Monthly | January 16, 2024 | 9,962 words

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

Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand

David A. Taylor | Scientific American | February 1, 2024 | 3,485 words

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

February

The Venture

Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan | Cosmopolitan | January 30, 2024 | 3,899 words

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

A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld

Patrick Radden Keefe | The New Yorker | February 5, 2024 | 14,311 words

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

The Road to 1948

Moderated by Emily Bazelon | The New York Times Magazine | February 1, 2024 | 9,019 words

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

A Family Ranch, Swallowed Up in the Madness of the Border

Eli Saslow | The New York Times | February 18, 2024 | 4,159 words

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

March

Inside Ukraine’s Wartime Salons

Sophia Panych | Allure | February 22, 2024 | 4,531 words

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

Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain

Kate Wagner | Road & Track | March 1, 2024 | 5,474 words

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

The Squatters of Beverly Hills

Bridget Read | Curbed | March 12, 2024 | 6,005 words

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 Opus Dei Diaries

Antonia Cundy | Financial Times | March 16, 2024 | 7,704 words

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

“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

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

April

‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza

Yuval Abraham | +972 and Local Call | April 3, 2024 | 8,066 words

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

The Great Serengeti Land Grab

Stephanie McCrummen | The Atlantic | April 8, 2024 | 8,385 words

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

The Cloud Under the Sea

Josh Dzieza | The Verge | April 16, 2024 | 8,856 words

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

Most People Are Disgusted by These Animals. These New Yorkers Are Filling Their Homes with Them.

Benji Jones | Vox | April 22, 2024 | 3,267 words

“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

May

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

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

Full Metal Sponcon

Jasper Craven | The Baffler | April 3, 2024 | 4,546 words

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

Secret in the Walls: Hidden Letters Reveal Love, Lust, Scandal in 1920s Baltimore Society

Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh | The Baltimore Banner | May 8, 2024 | 2,467 words

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

Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother

Mark Follman | Mother Jones | May 16, 2024 | 14,073 words

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

June

Coercive Care

Eric Boodman | STAT | May 21, 2024 | 7,009 words

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

Spreadsheet Superstars

David Pierce | The Verge | June 12, 2024 | 7,191 words

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

The Cousin I Never Knew

Sophie Vershbow | Esquire | June 18, 2024 | 7,436 words

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 Snapchat’s Teen Opioid Crisis

Paul Solotaroff | Rolling Stone | June 16, 2024 | 9,164 words

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

July

The Eviction Cure

J.K. Nickell | Texas Monthly | June 10, 2024 | 10,640 words

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

Disposable Heroes

Moira Donegan | Bookforum | July 2, 2024 | 4,344 words

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

Emma Carey: The Skydiver Who Survived a 14,000-foot Fall

Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | June 26, 2024 | 5,538 words

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

August

‘We’re Living in a Nightmare’: Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town

Andrew R. Chow | TIME | July 8, 2024 | 4,250 words

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

Ukraine’s Death-Defying Art Rescuers

Charlotte Higgins | The Guardian | July 30, 2024 | 5,856 words

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

From Silicon to Slime

Willa Köerner | Dark Properties | August 5, 2024 | 2,879 words

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

He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough.

Pamela Colloff | ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine | July 11, 2024 | 8,853 words

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

They Played Football as Children. Now Their Families Mourn.

Alex Morris | Rolling Stone | September 9, 2023 | 8,154 words

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  

September

The Canary

Michael Lewis | The Washington Post | September 4, 2024 | 11,268 words

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

40 Acres and a Lie

Alexia Fernández Campbell, April Simpson, and Pratheek Rebala | Mother Jones | June 14, 2024 | 3,550 words

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

The Fever Called Living

Evan Malmgren | Harper’s Magazine | September 12, 2024 | 6,063 words

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

The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ryu Spaeth | New York Magazine | September 23, 2024 | 7,165 words

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

October

Maylia and Jack

Lizzie Presser | ProPublica | September 28, 2024 | 7,738 words

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

When the Arctic Melts

Elizabeth Kolbert | The New Yorker | October 7, 2024 | 8,090 words

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

A Shark Attack and a Terrorist Bombing: This Is a Love Story

Paul Kix | Esquire | October 14, 2024 | 8,689 words

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

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

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

November

Inside Israel’s Fight to Make Fathers of Its Dead Soldiers

Jenny Kleeman | FT Magazine | October 24, 2024 | 5,282 words

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

What I Learned From Destroying Myself at the NYC Marathon

Will Leitch | New York Magazine | November 5, 2024 | 2,186 words

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

There Is No Place like Home, Whatever That Is

Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | September 30, 2024 | 5,484 words

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

The Invisible Man

Patrick Fealey | Esquire | November 14, 2024 | 9,552 words

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

December

Black Earth

Christina Cooke | The Bitter Southerner | November 25, 2024 | 8,027 words

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