Best of 2024: All Our Number Five Story Picks

Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.

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Number five stories are often the perfect escapism. They’re just what you need to lift your mood, to transport you from a long sedentary commute, or distract you from the family holiday gathering underway in the next room. Sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, always thought-provoking, they all have a certain je ne sais quoi that makes them special—something you’ll want to share with a friend. If you haven’t already, sign up to receive our Weekly Top 5 newsletter, so you have these number five stories, and our other recommended reads, in your inbox every Friday.

—Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter & Seyward

January

On Beauty and Violence

N.C. Happe | Guernica | December 11, 2023 | 5,021 words

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

A Knife Forged in Fire

Laurence Gonzales | Chicago Magazine | January 9, 2024 | 6,814 words

“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

Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet

Kyle Chayka | The New Yorker | January 13, 2024 | 3,986 words

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

Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows

Jori Lewis | Switchyard / FERN | November 25, 2023 | 4,744 words

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

February

How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs

Nicholson Baker | New York | January 31, 2024 | 6,751 words

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

What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage?

Indrani Sen | Fortune | January 30, 2024 | 3,994 words

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

The Text File That Runs the Internet

David Pierce | The Verge | February 14, 2024 | 2,992 words

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

An American Education: Notes from UATX

Noah Rawlings | The New Inquiry | February 19, 2024 | 6,839 words

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

March

The Last Stand of the Call-Centre Worker

Sophie Elmhirst | 1843 Magazine | February 2, 2024 | 4,739 words

“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

Kate Winslet Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge

Susan Dominus | The New York Times Magazine | March 3, 2024 | 4,947 words

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

‘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

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

I Lost My Life in 2006

Judith Hannah Weiss | Salmagundi Magazine | June 5, 2023 | 5,936 words

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

With Melville in Pittsfield

J.D. Daniels | The Paris Review | March 26, 2024 | 2,155 words

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

April

Dark Matter

Meg Bernhard | Hazlitt | April 3, 2024 | 5,908 words

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

Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost Break Down the Making of Shaun of the Dead, 20 Years Later

Jack King | British GQ | April 9, 2024 | 2,522 words

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

It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now

Andrew Norman Wilson | The Baffler | April 4, 2024 | 5,166 words

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

Variations on the Theme of Silence

Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | March 26, 2024 | 4,575 words

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

May

Nothing Could Prepare Me for the Bizarre ‘Live Birth’ Experience at Babyland Hospital

Joshua Rigsby | Thrillist | April 19, 2024 | 1,713 words

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

How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t)

Paul Schrodt | GQ | April 30, 2024 | 7,543 words

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

A Beloved Alley Cat Now Lives in the Watergate. Was She Kidnapped, or Rescued?

Andrea Sachs | The Washington Post | May 9, 2024 | 2,882 words

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

Surfing the American Dream

Alexander Sammon | Slate | May 23, 2024 | 5,569 words

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

June

You Wouldn’t Believe How Difficult It Is to Buy Sperm

Danielle Elliot | The Guardian | May 28, 2024 | 4,326 words

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

The Delicate Art of Turning Your Parents Into Content

Jessica Winter | The New Yorker | June 5, 2024 | 1,664 words

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

Pork, Love, and Money: Life According to La Piraña Lechonera

Abe Beame | TASTE | June 17, 2024 | 4,262 words

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

Would You Clone Your Dog?

Alexandra Horowitz | The New Yorker | June 24, 2024 | 5,529 words

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

July

I Drove a Cybertruck Around SF Because I Am a Smart, Cool Alpha Male

Drew Magary | SFGATE | July 9, 2024 | 1,964 words

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

Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business

Becky Ferreira | WIRED | June 25, 2024 | 2,276 words

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

The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet

Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | June 24, 2024 | 5,966 words

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

August

Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps

Ben Buckland | The New York Times | July 17, 2024 | 2,793 words

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

Scrabble, Anonymous

Brad Phillips | The Paris Review | May 15, 2024 | 2,489 words

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

How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town

Dan Moore | The Ringer | August 13, 2024 | 8,467 words

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

In Kosovo, Techno Is a Symbol of Resilience

Lale Arikoglu | Condé Nast Traveler | August 17, 2024 | 3,735 words

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

Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee

Anne Casselman | Hakai Magazine | August 20, 2024 | 4,395 words

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

September

Protecting the Prairie

Sarah Smarsh | Orion Magazine | August 27, 2024 | 4,071 words

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

Living In A Lucid Dream

Claire L. Evans | Noēma | July 1, 2024 | 3,921 words

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

One Man’s Journey from State Prison to a Revered San Francisco Restaurant

Nico Madrigal-Yankowski | SFGATE | September 14, 2024 | 2,118 words

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

Elevate Me Later

John Semley | The Baffler | September 12, 2024 | 3,291 words

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

October

He Handles Custody Disputes, Death Row Cases, and Biters. He’s Salem’s Dog Lawyer.*

Douglas Starr | Globe Magazine | September 5, 2024 | 3,376 words

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

My Accidental Daycare

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian | The Cut | October 9, 2024 | 6,855 words

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

Chortle Chortle, Scribble Scribble: Inside the Old Bailey with Britain’s Last Court Reporters

Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | July 11, 2024 | 4,689 words

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

The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies

Abe Beame | The Ringer | October 23, 2024 | 5,422 words

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

November

Stevie Nicks: ‘I Believe in the Church of Stevie’

Angie Martoccio | Rolling Stone | October 24, 2024 | 6,580 words

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

The Alchemists

Kim Cross | Bicycling | October 23, 2024 | 6,503 words

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

‘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

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

Last Days of Soho

Francisco Garcia | The Fence | November 12, 2024 | 3,430 words

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

December

I Am Cat Lady

Sandra Beasley | VQR | November 1, 2024 | 4,127 words

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

Jude Law’s Beautiful Disappearing Act

Sam Parker | GQ | November 12, 2024 | 5,786 words

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 Most Polarizing Thing on Wheels

S.C. Gwynne | Texas Monthly | December 11, 2024 | 4,454 words

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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