The Longreads Blog

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 17: During the coronavirus pandeimic a covid positive patient lays prone on his stomack to help his oxigene levels inside the ICU at Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital on Thursday, Dec. 17, 020 in Los Angeles, CA. ICU availability in Southern California at 0% amid deluge of COVID-19 patients. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from David Armstrong and Marshall Allen, Jesselyn Cook, Jason Sheehan, Tom Lamont, and Heather Stokes.

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1. Dying on the Waitlist

David Armstrong, Marshall Allen | ProPublica | February 18, 2021 | 22 minutes (5,663 words)

“In Los Angeles County and around the country, doctors have had to decide who gets a lifesaving COVID-19 treatment and who doesn’t.”

2. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents

Jesselyn Cook | HuffPost | January 11, 2021 | 24 minutes (6,000 words)

“What it’s like to lose the person who raised you to a far-right cult.”

3. Remnants on a South Philly Stoop

Jason Sheehan | Philadelphia Magazine | October 1, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,600 words)

Chef Omar Tate caught the attention of the food world with a pop-up celebrating the Black American food experience. He was right on the verge of blowing up. But instead, everything else did.

4. The Student and the Algorithm: How the Exam Results Fiasco Threatened One Pupil’s Future

Tom Lamont | The Guardian | Febuary 18, 2021 | 27 minutes (6,759 words)

“Bright students in historically low-achieving schools were tumbling, sometimes in great, cliff-edge drops of two or three grades, because of institutional records they had nothing to do with.”

5. Voices on Addiction: A Thief in the Night

Heather Stokes | The Rumpus | February 16, 2021 | 9 minutes (2,303 words)

Heather Stokes recounts what addiction has taken from her and her mother. To feed crack addictions, her bother and uncle stole not just possessions from the family house, they robbed the women of personal safety and any chance at stability.

“The Internet Is Inside Us”: Patricia Lockwood on the Portal, Twitter, and Her New Novel

Charlotte May / Pexels

Reading poet, essayist, and novelist Patricia Lockwood on our internet lives is a bit like falling down a rabbit hole and losing your mind. Lockwood’s musings and observations on what it’s like to be extremely online in our digital and social media age are incomparable. Her essays and lectures — like “The Communal Mind” from 2019 and her coronavirus diary from last summer — are hilarious, absurd, pure, and human. In a conversation with Gabriella Paiella at GQ, Lockwood talks about her debut novel No One Is Talking About This, the strange experience of following current events on Twitter, and how the internet is “no longer an externality” — it’s inside us.

Your London Review of Books talk “The Communal Mind” is excerpted from your book. Do you remember the turning point when you started to think of the internet as a “communal mind” and, as you put it then, “a place we can never leave”?

It did start to feel like we were locked in there. I think, honestly, it probably was 2012. It had to take a political turn. It became the place where we were imbibing the news. The point in which it turned from a communal free space of play to a place where we were getting our information was probably the difference.

We were starting out with a very bare bones, text-based version. There weren’t images. You couldn’t embed video. Ultimately, I think what changed it was the quote tweet, because that meant that as soon as you went into the portal, you were experiencing an argument first thing. You didn’t even know what these people were talking about, and immediately you were faced with the discourse. That to me was the full evolution into hell as we are experiencing it now.

I do think it’s healthy to be pulling away from Twitter at this time. But in times like this, you’re like, “Okay, I’m jumping into the portal, and I’m seeing what’s happening because it is a million eyes.” It’s the only way you can experience all sides of it. The absurd sides and the tragic sides. It’s not like it was this completely hilarious event, obviously. It’s not like it was entirely tragic either. And the portal has really evolved into a place that we can experience all those sides—the only place that you can do that.

Read the interview

Taking Your Butt to a Higher Level

Getty Images

A decade ago, a BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift) was a relatively rare occurrence, but in her piece for The Guardian, Sophie Elmhirst discovers that since 2015 the number of butt lifts performed globally has grown by a whopping 77.7%. Kim Kardashian can take a big chunk of the credit for this, as the proud owner of the most famous bottom in the world, “a bottom so scrutinized, so emulated, so monetized, that it no longer feels like a body part, but its own high-concept venture, its own startup turned major IPO.” However, no one knows how long the fashion for a bottom that resembles “a bauble wrapped in skin” will last, or what will happen when it ends. While it remains in vogue, there are many women willing to run the gauntlet of having fat strategically molded into their rear ends — and some have paid for it with their life.

A patient has to wait weeks before they know what their bottom will ultimately look like. The fat takes time to settle, and Glancey has to remind her patients that at best, only about 50% of the fat “takes”. The rest is absorbed by the body and ejected through the lymphatic system. To optimise the amount of fat that survives in the body requires a surgeon’s skill. Glancey compares it to creating a garden: you can’t put plants too close together, they need space to thrive. “When I say this to patients, they just say put more in,” she said. “And I say, well, it doesn’t work like that.” Glancey sticks to the UK guidelines and limits how much she will insert – 300cc per buttock, a little less than a can of Coke. She tells her patients to complete the BBL over more than one operation, adding a little at a time.

In Turkey, the most popular destination for cosmetic surgery patients travelling abroad in Europe – and the third most popular in the world, after Thailand and Mexico – the limits are less conservative. Some surgeons openly advertise on social media that they will insert more than 1,000cc into a patient’s buttocks. Glancey says that she regularly sees patients who have returned from Turkey unhappy with the results, often because a significant quantity of fat has died and left them lopsided or misshapen.

The risk involved in performing a BBL is not only about the quantity of fat, but how it is inserted. (Also, whether it is fat being inserted at all: a number of recent deaths associated with buttock augmentation occurred because the patient was being injected with silicone.) During the operation, the danger occurs at a very precise moment: the insertion of the cannula into the buttock. As it goes under the skin, the cannula has to remain above the gluteal muscle. If it goes below, and fat enters the bloodstream, fat droplets can then coalesce, travel through the blood and cause a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lungs – the cause of death in the case of the British woman, Leah Cambridge, who had a BBL at a private clinic in Izmir in 2018.

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Dear Mom & Dad: We Need to Talk about QAnon

Andrew Lichtenstein

“A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” That is the core tenet of the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory—and nearly one-fifth of Americans think it’s true. A recent poll shows that just 47 percent of the country believe the notion is false. The rest don’t know what to think.

Also baffled: the children of QAnon followers. Jesselyn Cook of HuffPost spoke to nine such people about the confusion and pain that comes with losing a parent to a right-wing cult. “Some are desperately trying to deradicalize their moms and dads—an agonizing process that can feel maddening, heartbreaking, and futile,” Cook writes. “Others believe their parents are already too far gone and have given up trying to help them. A few have made the painful decision to cut off contact entirely, for the sake of their own mental health.”

One of the children, Daniel (a pseudonym), described how his mom, a two-time Obama voter, lost her grasp on reality. He tried to fact check her, but it didn’t work. He tried listening to her calmly, only to find she wouldn’t do the same when the tables were turned. He was stymied:

Daniel used to work in Democratic politics and, years ago, worked directly for one of the members of Congress who had to take shelter in the Capitol as rioters forced their way inside on Jan. 6. It was a difficult day for him on a personal level: He feared for his former boss’s safety and was so distressed by the insurrection as it unfolded live on television and social media that he took the afternoon off work.

When he spoke to his mom about it a couple of days later, she seemed unbothered by what had happened. Daniel couldn’t believe it. So he tried a new way to break through to her: telling her, candidly, exactly how her behavior was making him feel.

“I love you,” Daniel told his mother, “but with your inundation of fake news, you have created a reality for yourself that doesn’t exist, and by doing so, you are actively distancing yourself from your family. It is making it harder for us to connect with you because, unfortunately, we feel that you are just not living in the world that we live in, and it’s frightening for us.” 

His mom’s response laid bare the degree to which QAnon had warped her worldview: “Oh, honey,” she said. “That’s how I feel about you.”

Read the story

The Big Bear Reading List

Image: Carolyn Wells

Growing up in England, my knowledge of bears largely came from Yogi Bear cartoons, and on a childhood holiday to North America, it wasn’t Disneyland, but the thought of seeing a real-life Yogi that I was most excited about. However, despite my parents stoically driving a hire car down treacherous mountain roads as I lounged in the back bemoaning the lack of performing bears, it never happened.

It wasn’t until I moved to Canada many years later that I saw my first bear. I just turned a corner and there it was, a young black bear casually munching grass, completely unphased by my open-mouthed awe. Several years on, I have seen countless black bears; in fact, they rather enjoy relieving themselves on my front lawn after overindulging in next door’s apple trees. But my childhood wonder of them remains.

I am not the only one drawn to the subject; bears have inspired some wonderful articles, so I’ve compiled a reading list of six stories that not only look at bears, but the emotions and issues that they provoke.

1. Where Now Grizzly Bear? (Brian Payton, Hakai Magazine, January 2021)

In this article, Brian Payton shows grizzly bears to be intrepid explorers “destined to wander” — with male grizzlies swimming up to seven kilometers to find new territories. I found myself hypnotized by a map included in the piece, which tracks a grizzly bear as it travels an incredible 850 kilometers over five months. The positive side of grizzly bears turning up in new places is that, after decades of persecution, their numbers are finally improving and young males are looking to move away from “all these big dudes.” On the other hand, this means potential human conflict: “We know they will coexist with us. Their survival depends on our willingness to coexist with them.”

A bear emerges from dense vegetation and pauses on the shore. It’s early spring, and the young grizzly has only recently roused from hibernation, ravenous and driven. He lifts his head and gazes out across the falling tide to the opposite shore, where forested slopes are close enough to make out individual trees. The bear stands and sniffs the air.

Grizzlies can see about as well as we can, but it’s their olfactory powers—at least 2,000 times more acute than ours—that most likely set them in motion. We’ll never grasp how they perceive the world, let alone what they’re thinking. For some reason, this bear falls back on all fours, ambles away from prime habitat, and wades into the sea.

To reach the far shore, he dog-paddles west across Johnstone Strait, one of the narrowest navigable channels that make up the fabled Inside Passage. This stretch of water separates the North American mainland from the largest island on the Pacific coast, British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. It’s only three to 4.5 kilometers across but anywhere from 70 to 500 meters deep. Swift tidal currents can reach 15 kilometers per hour. Vessels of every description pass through, from kayaks to freighters, to cruise ships carrying thousands of passengers. At this time of year, the water temperature averages about 8 °C, but the bear has almost no fat left to insulate him from the cold.

2. Grizzlies at the Table (Jimmy Thomson, Beside Magazine, December 2020)

One place in which grizzly bears are more prevalent than ever is in Wuikinuxv, British Columbia. Jimmy Thomson’s beautiful piece highlights the respect that this First Nations community gives their frequent visitors. The bears are valued as an important part of the ecosystem: “In eating the salmon, the bears bridge the gap between the deep ocean and the treetops, dragging the wriggling essence of one ecosystem into another.” This article is full of such powerful imagery, and Thomson’s respect for the people who wish to defend these animals is apparent.

Adam Nelson pulls the band’s truck into the small landfill less than a kilometer from the village, as he does three times a week to keep bear attractants out of people’s homes, and honks his horn to avoid startling any nearby bears. He and Corey Hanuse toss the village’s garbage bags into the landfill and wait. Minutes later a large grizzly is tearing the bags apart.

An electrified fence around the landfill, installed at great expense, lasted three days. The bears pulled it open like a can of sardines and it hasn’t been repaired. Later, someone stole the batteries. The bears have become accustomed now to the easy food the dump has on offer, and most days it’s possible to find them snacking amongst the detritus. Better there than roaming the village.

3. Barbearians at the Gate (Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, The Atavist Magazine, May 2018)

Bear intrusions are not so welcome in other areas. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s article documents life in Grafton, New Hampshire, where residents believe “in untethering themselves from institution, foraging for food, and hunting game with guns, arrows, and knives.” Hongoltz-Hetling discovers a deep-rooted conflict in Grafton between man and bear, explaining the drama with a colorful array of local stories — about eaten cats and bear-fighting llamas, for instance — that tell us as much about the characters and colloquialisms of Grafton as about the bears themselves.

With bears reaching peak boogie man status, Hongoltz-Hetling also hears whispers of a darker side to the conflict — vigilante posses embarking on clandestine hunts of bears sleeping in their dens, even though “a person was (and still is) much more likely to suffocate in a giant vat of corn than be killed by a bear.” This article is an intriguing insight into small-town life — told through the bears.

Can bears be calculating? Babiarz and other Grafton residents I spoke to sure seemed to think so. Dave Thurber, a Vietnam War veteran who lives up the road from Jessica Soule, recounted how, one dark winter night, he had a feeling that something wasn’t right. He peeled back a corner of the curtains covering his living room windows and peered out at the front lawn, where he spotted a bear delicately licking sunflower seeds from a bird feeder. When a car approached, the bear flattened itself against a snowbank like an escaping prisoner evading a watchtower spotlight. After the car passed, the bear resumed eating.

Rumors of the bears’ cunning had planted unsettling questions in the minds of Grafton residents: How close are we to a bear right now? Could one be just beyond someone’s front door or hiding behind a nearby tree, casing a pet or, worse, someone’s child?

4. A Death in Yellowstone (Jessica Grose, Slate, April 2012)

How do you manage conflict between humans and bears when it escalates? That’s a dilemma faced by many park rangers. In the Yogi Bear cartoons, Yogi was a cheeky chap who loved to steal the odd picnic basket from guests at his home in Jellystone National Park. In this article, Jessica Grose discovers the stark reality that a fed bear is often a dead bear — for national parks are, ultimately, a human creation: “Its boundaries are built and monitored by the government, and the rangers are responsible for keeping its … visitors safe.” If a bear gets too close, the rangers have to play judge and jury on its life.

This was the case with Grose’s subject — the Wapiti sow — a bear thought to have been responsible for two deaths in Yellowstone National Park. Grose’s piece is a harrowing look at bear attacks and how rangers weigh up a bear’s guilt like a criminal case, with “ non-acidic envelopes for storing evidence, tweezers for picking up multicolored grizzly bear hairs, tape measures for measuring bear tracks.” The death penalty is based on whether a bear was acting in a naturally aggressive way or not. But what exactly is natural? The penal code for wild animals is a hard one to decipher.

Wildlife biologists like Kerry Gunther help the park’s crime-scene investigators by speculating on a bear’s emotional state. Based on the evidence at hand, he tries to determine whether a given act of bear aggression might have been a natural behavior—the result of being startled while feeding on an elk carcass, for example, or seeing someone approaching her cubs. If a bear appears to have followed a hiker down the trail instead of backing off, or if it attacked campers while they were asleep, that would be more unusual—the result, perhaps of a deranged grizzly mind.

In a mauling case like that of John Wallace, in which there are no living (human) witnesses, sorting out these categories of bear aggression can be especially vexing. But there’s one piece of circumstantial evidence that almost always leads to euthanasia: a half-eaten corpse. Under normal circumstances, the grizzly diet in Yellowstone is about 60 percent vegetarian—roots and nuts, with the remainder coming from pocket gophers, trout, elk, and bison. If the rangers have good reason to believe that a bear killed a human being and then consumed his body, that bear’s behavior will be deemed unnatural—and its crime a capital offense.

5. Lessons From a Bear Attack (Eva Holland, Cottage Life, December 2020)

Not all bears are given a guilty verdict after an attack. When Mya Helena Myllykoski and her son were charged by a grizzly bear, the bear received a reprieve for acting naturally to defend a moose carcass. In her interview with Eva Holland, Myllykoski describes her relief that the bear was spared, and how instead of paralyzing her with fear, the attack inspired her to fight to protect bears. Holland explores the fascinating psychology behind Myllykoski’s “post-traumatic growth,” as well as describing the attack itself in spine-tingling detail. Her account demonstrates great respect for the wilderness she is writing about — in a previous piece, “When a Fatal Grizzly Mauling Goes Viral,” Holland discusses her reluctance to report on bear attacks at all: They are incredibly rare, and she questions whether writing about them is anything more than voyeurism for those outside of bear country. This perspective brings sincerity, thoughtfulness, and understanding to her work on the subject.

When she shares that detail—that she has felt a grizzly bear’s hot breath on her face—I feel something unexpected creeping up inside me, a little green shoot alongside the larger growth of fear and fascination as I listen to her story: envy. Irrationally, against all logic or instinct for survival, I envy that experience, just a little. When she tells me that she regrets not having a memory of that smell, I understand what she means. I want to know what the bear smelled like too.

We crave vivid and authentic encounters with the wilderness. That, in part, is why we go out there, why we leave the city behind for an afternoon or a weekend, or more. We want to see the stars turn overhead and hear loons, owls, and coyotes; we want to watch the mist burn off a river’s surface, or a thunderstorm roll across a lake. We want to smell crushed spruce needles and wet, decomposing logs and that sweet dirt scent when the mushrooms begin to pop up.

Wilderness can feed us. It can fill our lives up with rich sensory memories. But we take risks in going there, and we bring risk with us for the animals that live there too. Sometimes we pay a price for our curiosity and our desires—but more often, they pay the price instead.

6. This Man Protected Wild Bears Every Day for 13 Years — Until He Made the Ultimate Sacrifice (Nick Jans, Reader’s Digest, June 2019)

Timothy Treadwell took the meaning of bear advocate to a whole new level. I first learned about Treadwell through watching Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, an incredible film that uses sequences extracted from more than 100 hours of video footage shot by Treadwell during the last five years of his life — years he spent living amongst grizzly bears in Alaska. Nick Jans has also written a beautiful book about Treadwell, The Grizzly Maze, depicting the journey that led Treadwell to the bears, and the stunning, eerie landscape of Alaska that is their home.

In this excerpt for Reader’s Digest, Jans explains how Treadwell was a controversial figure, a self-styled “bear whisperer” who refused to accept bears as dangerous animals, and “gave them names like Thumper, Mr. Chocolate, and Squiggle. He would walk up to a half-ton wild animal with four-inch claws and two-inch fangs, and say, ‘Czar, I’m so worried! I can’t find little Booble.'” Jans provides a moving portrait of Treadwell, culminating in a gut-wrenching description of his final demise — mauled by a bear. Accustomed to recording his life, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, had a camera turned on during the attack: “Treadwell did not die quickly. The tape runs roughly six minutes, and his cries can be heard two-thirds of that time.”

While many believe Treadwell encroached on the life of the bears, rendering his end inevitable, he was still a remarkable, larger-than-life character, and Jans manages to capture him with his elegant prose.

Those searching for the meaning in what happened to Timothy Treadwell offer compelling theories, impossible to either prove or refute but containing flickers of insight. Bear-viewing guide Gary Porter says, “I think Timmy made a fundamental anthropomorphic error. Naming them and hanging around with them as long as he did, he probably forgot they were bears. And maybe they forgot, some of the time, he was human.” Porter points out that old, dominant males generally avoid people and are intolerant of other bears. A subordinate bear that refuses to move is attacked and, if it doesn’t retreat, is often killed and eaten. Biologist Larry Van Daele calls such an event “apparently more of a disciplinary action than predatory.”

And he, too, agrees there may be something to the theory, especially given “the strange, ambiguous signals Timothy sent to bears.”

“Maybe that big guy figured Timmy was just another bear,” Porter suggests. If so, it was a final, ironic compliment to a man who strove, among bears, to become as much like them as possible.

“A Series of Small Collapses Caused by Continual Neglect”

CLEVELAND, OHIO, UNITED STATES - 2020/09/29: Protesters wearing masks march through University Circle while holding up placards and banners during the protest. In reaction to the presidential debates being held in Cleveland, protesters gathered to protest against President Donald Trump and show support to black lives. The initial protest began with speeches at Wade Lagoon, and proceeded with a march throughout University Circle that ended at Wade Lagoon. Stragglers from the initial protest went downtown towards the intersection of 105th St. and Chester Ave. where police were stationed. (Photo by Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

In this deeply moving essay at The Baffler, Hanif Abdurraqib reflects on the protests of last summer and the ongoing fight for equality with a mix of grief and pride. As he considers those who protest systemic racism in America, he says “… yes, it is thrilling to see a generation that has harnessed their firsthand knowledge, their resources, their steadfast care for each other, and their rage, and channeled it into multilayered action.” But he yearns for a day when the time and energy and fortitude required to protest can be “freed up not only for other fights but for other endeavors that make newer uses of their time.”

What pushes people out into the street and what pushes them to organize might be sparked in a single moment, but before that moment, and often stretching on long after, is a series of small collapses caused by continual neglect.

A series of small collapses is how they come to be radicalized.

We were there because it was necessary that we be there. Because someone we loved was in the streets and they needed protection or care or simply someone else they knew to add to the long braid of someones blocking traffic and holding the line when cops descended with their sprays or their horses or their hands on their weapons.

The grief of this moment, this life, is torrential. More for some than others, of course. But in the midst of it, one small, distinct grief that I have been focused on is the grief that sits alongside the immense pride and excitement I feel watching young activists step fully into themselves and realize they are entirely unmoved by and unafraid of power. I had that inside of me when I was a teenager, and a lot of the people I lived with and hung around did too. But so few of us actually knew what to do with it. We knew we hated that cops were in our schools and in our neighborhoods—their primary function to inject fear into the day-to-day movements of largely marginalized kids from largely marginalized communities. But it didn’t seem like there was much to do with that rage except funnel it back into our own ecosystems, our own selves. We knew our anger but not our capacity to organize.

Read the essay

Life Goals: Power Couple Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - JANUARY 27: Power couple, USWNT forward Megan Rapinoe and Seattle Storm guard Sue Bird enjoy the game at the Alaska Airlines Arena on January 27, 2019 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo by Alika Jenner/Getty Images)

Superstar athletes Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird have given their lives to soccer and basketball, respectively. At GQ, Emma Carmichael reports that now, as their sports careers reach their conclusion, the couple is using their considerable influence and profile to further equality — for women’s rights (in and out of sports), the Black Lives Matter movement, and for other members of the LGBTQI community.

There is no precedent for the pastel-haired international soccer star who courted the ponytailed all-American point guard and went on to live happily ever after. For now, the “cross-sport lesbian power couple” template begins and ends with Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird. And they are not just stars in their sports—they have set the standards to which future athletes will be held. Between them they have more championships and gold medals than most couples have steak knives: At 35, Rapinoe is one of the most decorated American soccer players of all time, with two World Cup titles and an Olympic gold medal to her name. Bird, 40, is considered one of the greatest basketball players of all time, having won multiple championships at every stage of her career—from her two championships during her fabled UConn days to her quartet of rings with the Seattle Storm and four Olympic golds with the national team.

They have set the agenda off the field too: Both have been active in the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements as well as the ongoing fights for equal pay and treatment that have revolutionized their sports. In January, after months of campaigning that started at the WNBA’s pandemic site in Florida, Bird celebrated Rev. Raphael Warnock’s victory over Atlanta Dream co-owner Kelly Loeffler in one of Georgia’s crucial runoff Senate races. They are pushing things forward, as none other than Billie Jean King tells me. “We were always afraid of the unknown,” she says. King lost all of her sponsorships in 24 hours when she was involuntarily outed in 1981. Things are different now. “This is why having Megan and Sue out in front like this, being comfortable in their own skin, is so huge. It allows other people to be more comfortable.”

Every person I interviewed for this story is an LGBTQ+ professional (or formerly pro) woman athlete. All seemed to over-explain their work—Bird taking pains to describe why she and her fellow WNBA stars had to play in Russia, Harris and Krieger making sure I understood they’d spent many years playing with Rapinoe, even King laying out how she and the Original 9 of women’s tennis fought for better prize money in the ’70s. The tendency probably comes along with being a conscientious, media-trained athlete and public-facing woman, but I also wondered if the instinct was learned: from having to make the case for yourself constantly, from being forced to convince the skeptical that what you do has merit.

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

May 31, 1977 —Cambridge, MA — Photographs of American slaves, possibly the oldest known in the country, have been discovered in the basement of a Harvard University museum. Among the previously unpublished daguerreotypes discovered are these (L-R): a Congo slave named Renty, who lived on B.F. Taylor's plantation, "Edgehill"; Jack, a slave from the Guinea Coast (ritual scars decorate his cheek); and an unidentified man.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lise Olsen, Jaya Saxena, and Emma Carmichael.

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1. Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

Clint Smith | The Atlantic | February 9, 2021 | 29 minutes (7,250 words)

“The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.”

2. Grief’s Anatomy

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Baffler | January 4, 2021 | 8 minutes (2,074 words)

“Hope awaits organizers like a trap.”

3. Undetected

Lise Olsen | Texas Observer | February 8, 2021 | 15 minutes (3,762 words)

“Prior to his arrest, local authorities had dismissed nearly all of those incidents as an unusual spike in natural deaths—a run of bad luck. But public records and interviews reveal that, time after time, investigators in Dallas made critical mistakes and overlooked or ignored signs of foul play.”

4. The Limits of the Lunchbox Moment

Jaya Saxena | Eater | Febuary 8, 2021 | 13 minutes (3,400 words)

“The story of being bullied in the cafeteria for one’s lunch is so ubiquitous that it’s attained a gloss of fictionality.”

5. Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird Are Goals

Emma Carmichael | GQ | February 9, 2021 | 21 minutes (5,324 words)

“Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe both had Hall of Fame–worthy careers before they met. But to reach new, boundary-obliterating levels of achievement on and off the field, they needed each other. And, as they tell Emma Carmichael, their work is just getting started.”

Justin Townes Earl: The Saint of Lost Causes

Justin Townes Earle (Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images)

We saw him live once, almost exactly two years ago. Just one guitar, one man, and his heart, laid bare for all to see through his songs. Justin Townes Earle’s singular, percussive playing style was both rhythm and harmony to the melody of his voice at that small venue in the middle of a cold Canadian winter. When a string broke on his guitar on the first song, there was no tech to do the fix, no second guitar to reach for. Earle rummaged through a case, grabbed a spare string and made the change, chatting amiably with the audience the whole time. It felt like you could get to know him. We knew he’d struggled hard. You could hear it in his entire song catalogue. But of course, there was so much we didn’t know, couldn’t know, don’t deserve to know.

In this tribute for Rolling Stone, Jonathan Bernstein interviewed 30 people, including friends, former bandmates, and Justin Townes Earle’s widow, Jenn Marie Earle, who share what Justin meant to them, six months after his death. They paint a portrait of a generous and loving man, who was not able to offer that same generosity and love to himself.

Onstage, Earle was an electrifying presence: six-foot-four, dressed in vintage suits, playing in a fiery style of finger-picking he’d picked up listening to the bluesman Mance Lipscomb. He assumed the public persona of a world-weary troubadour, one worthy of his cursed namesake, the self-destructive country-folk genius Townes Van Zandt, a friend of his father.

Justin was locking himself inside a dark room off the basement for hours to write, communicating with Jenn Marie through a grate connected to the kitchen upstairs. “If you need me,” Justin would shout, “just stomp your hoof, my little dear.”

“I’d seen him starting to become more distant, in many ways,” Jenn Marie says. “That song, to me, was an admittance, of choosing the fate of being locked away from what means the most to you.” The album Justin was writing in that unlit basement study, the last album released while he was alive, would be called The Saint of Lost Causes. “I think he was admitting that he was defeated, in a lot of ways,” Jenn Marie says.

As the years passed, Earle’s insecurities grew. “There was a huge part of Justin that didn’t believe in himself,” says Jenn Marie. “He saw the music business changing. . . . When his [2014 and 2015 albums, Single Mothers and Absent Fathers] came out, he was disappointed they didn’t do so well. I think that’s where a lot of his darkness, his struggles with substance abuse and addiction, started to come to the surface in the last few years: him feeling like he wasn’t good enough.”

“We have for so long looked at people who had addiction problems … we ask them the wrong questions,” he said in 2018. “We say, ‘What is wrong with you?’ The problem is, they hurt. So you don’t ask them, ‘What’s wrong with you.’ You ask them, ‘Why do you hurt?’”

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Getting Up When You Fall From the Sky

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Mountains can hold a great allure, and for some, the pull is so strong that they build their whole lives around them. This was the case for Erin Tierney, who left her family and friends to pursue a career as a heli-ski guide. It was a job that came with sacrifices and risks, but for Tierney, the feeling of “floating down the mountain through widely spaced trees, smashing through pillows of snow, and dropping into a bottomless white room without another track in sight” was worth it. That is until she fell from the sky. In this personal account for Outside, Tierney details the trip that ended in disaster — when the helicopter she was flying in with her group crashed onto the mountain. 

Time seemed to stop. I was suddenly in a dream state, suspended, watching myself stare open-mouthed at Jim. He allowed his training to take over and skillfully put the machine into an autorotation to prevent a catastrophic nosedive into the mountain. I didn’t speak. I felt like I was floating on a cloud and watching a film strip of green, white, and gray unravel before my eyes. I thought, “This isn’t so bad.”

Then, in an instant, I felt the hardest impact I’ve ever experienced. A jolt of pain and energy spiked through my back, traveling up my spine. My hands flew up like I was on an amusement park ride, momentarily suspended in the air while they fought gravity. The clipboard I’d been holding in my lap bounced up. I tried to catch it with my hands. The metal edge of it grazed my pinky finger, drawing blood. I slammed down in my seat.

Everything was white. Then dark. And silent. Except for the voice inside my head wondering if this was the moment I was going to die.

Tierney had three compression fractures in her thoracic spine from the crash. That explained her pain, but what was not explained were the other symptoms she continued to experience: her exhaustion, her anxiety. Tierney’s accident occurred at the brink of a new awareness of the complicated nature of concussion and PTSD, but it still took a long time for her to obtain this diagnosis, and many more years for her to understand the intricacies of this hidden trauma — and what it would take to ever get back into a helicopter. 

 My body and nervous system were in a constant state of fight or flight, running constantly from the “what-ifs” and “almosts” that consumed my thought patterns. I craved sleep, but it only made me more tired. I wanted silence, but the pressure in my head felt so loud. Quiet walks in the woods should have been healing, but the visual overload of colors and patterns made me dizzy and stumble. There were no casts, no crutches, no evident reason for my state. My injuries were invisible, except for the fading scar on my finger.

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