Search Results for: The Nation

The Weight of the World

Longreads Pick

“2021 kicks off the United Nations Decade on Ocean Science. Meanwhile, a local conservation group in Watamu, Kenya races to save endangered sea turtles—by enlisting human allies.”

Author: Amy Yee
Source: Terrain.org
Published: Dec 10, 2020
Length: 41 minutes (10,453 words)

‘Hue’s Hue’: Katy Kelleher’s Column on Color

(Photo by Óscar J.Barroso/Europa Press via Getty Images) (Photo by Europa Press News/Europa Press via Getty Images)

We’re huge fans of Katy Kelleher’s writing on color. She recently wrote a spot-on piece for Vogue about Pantone’s odd “color of the year” choices. (Spoiler: a drab gray, paired with a pale yellow.)

Over at the Paris Review, she does in-depth profiles of color as part of a column named — get this — “Hue’s Hue.” We’ve shared a few of these nerdy delights as editor’s picks in the past; we especially loved recent ruminations on periwinkle, russet, and verdigris. The entire series is worth your time.

Periwinkle goes by many names. You might know her by one of her more fabulous monikers, like sorcerer’s violet or fairy’s paintbrush. In Italy, she is called fiore di morte (flower of death), because it was common to lay wreaths of the evergreen on the graves of dead children. The flower is sometimes associated with marriage (and may have been the “something blue” in the traditional wedding rhyme), sometimes associated with sex work (because of its supposed aphrodisiac properties) and also with executions. I grew up calling her vinca, a pretty little two-syllable name, taken from her proper Latin binomial, Vinca minor. My mother cultivated periwinkle in our forested Massachusetts backyard, encouraging the hardy green vines to trail over the boulders and under the ferns. I would have been delighted to know even a fraction of vinca lore back then, but I knew nothing except she was poison. I could eat the royal-purple dog violets, but I was not to pick the vinca. Vinca was poison and poison meant death.

Mary Stuart was six days old when she became the Queen of Scotland. Her precious body was guarded from that moment onward, moved like a pawn on a chessboard from one castle to another. Maybe the people would have loved her if she hadn’t been spirited away to be raised in France in 1548, but perhaps they wouldn’t have. Maybe Mary was doomed to always be loathed for her femaleness and her Catholicism. By the time she returned to the newly Protestant Scotland at age eighteen, she had spent over a decade in the French court, developing a taste for elaborate gowns and flashy jewels. She was tall and graceful, beautiful according to some accounts, but this didn’t endear her to the common people. While Mary was strutting around in fine lace and velvet and elaborate lockets, her people were told that God wanted them in chaste, sober clothes. Embroidery was deemed “unseemly” as were “light and variant hues in clothing, as red, blue, yellow and such like, which declare the lightness of mind.” Instead, the Scots were told to wear simple fabrics in “grave colour,” such as “black, russet, sad grey, or sad brown.”

This depressing list comes from a summary of the 1575 General Assembly of the Kirk, recorded in the Domestic Annals of Scotland. Although the upper classes continued to wear silks and velvets and pretty bright dresses, most people wore their sad rags. It was more practical, to be dressed in dark gray and black and brown. Life for the lower classes was hard. The clothing reflected this fact.

And yet, thrown in with those drab colors was russet. In this context, russet was both a general chromatic descriptor and a specific type of rough spun cloth, colored with a mixture of woad (a member of the cabbage family that was used to make a blue-gray dye) and madder (a similarly yellow-flowered herb whose roots could be turned into a pinkish-brown dye). Russet wasn’t a bright color, but it was at least more cheerful than “sad grey,” it had a bit more life than black. While Mary, Queen of Scots reportedly wore vivid scarlet under her black mourning clothes, her people dressed like dead leaves and gray stones. At their most vibrant, they could wear the color of rust, of dirty root vegetables, of aging fox fur.

Verdigris is the ur-turquoise. The name comes an Old French term, vert-de-Grèce (“green of Greece”). It is also sometimes known as “copper green” or “earth green,” since the pigment was commonly made from ground-up malachite or oxidized copper deposits. Certainly, verdigris owes a great debt to copper (symbol: Cu), as do the gemstones turquoise (chemical composition: CuAl6(PO4)4(OH)8·4H2O) and malachite (chemical composition: Cu2CO3(OH)2). In America, we’re more likely to call these green-blue shades turquoise (from the Old French for Turkish, or “from-Turkey”) or Tiffany Blue (coined in 1845 with the publication of the Tiffany’s Blue Book catalogue and trademarked in 1998) than we are to invoke old-timey verdigris. Yet I prefer the odd old name, with its vivid consonants and slithery tail. The word sounds unstable, fittingly fluid for such a liquid hue.

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Longreads Best of 2020: Arts and Culture

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. In an unprecedented, strange, and chaotic year, we’ve leaned on writers’ reflections and commentaries on the world around us to help us make sense of moments, of our lives. We revisited a wide range of arts and culture stories featured by the team this year and selected eight favorites that resonated with us.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly Top 5 email every Friday.

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I’ve always loved how Teju Cole observes and moves through our world: a flâneur of modern life, always with a notebook or a camera in hand. Here, we follow Cole on a pilgrimage to Italy as he chases the life of Caravaggio, an artist (and fugitive and murderer) whose emotionally charged, often violent scenes and chiaroscuro technique I studied closely in my AP Art History class. In Rome and Milan, Cole revisits Caravaggio’s paintings “to learn the truth about doom” — to sit with unease, and to experience the artist’s pain and turmoil (“I would find in him the reprieve certain artists can offer us in dark times”).

Cole then travels south, to Naples and along the coast of Sicily, and later to Malta, to the places where the painter spent his exile; he captures both the mundanity and intimacy of encounters with guides and strangers, like his meeting in Syracuse with D., a young migrant who arrived by boat from Libya eight months earlier. (They share a silent, beautiful moment with “The Burial of St. Lucy.”) Part-travelogue, part-profile, part-art criticism, and part-commentary on the ills and horrors of our world, it’s a stunning piece with masterful scope, but also turns inward — a read you’ll likely sit with quietly long after you’ve finished.

I sat on a bench in the middle of the room, the two paintings set at a right angle to each other. I was awe-struck, out of breath, caught between these two immensities. The very act of looking at an old painting can be so strange. It is an activity that is often bound up with class identity or social aspiration. It can sometimes feel like a diverting, or irritating, stroll among white people’s ancestors. It can also often be wonderful, giving the viewer a chance to be blessed by a stranger’s ingenuity or insight. But rarely, something even better happens: A painting made by someone in a distant country hundreds of years ago, an artist’s careful attention and turbulent experience sedimented onto a stretched canvas, leaps out of the past to call you — to call you — to attention in the present, to drive you to confusion by drawing from you both a sense of alarm and a feeling of consolation, to bring you to an awareness of your own self in the act of experiencing something that is well beyond the grasp of language, something that you wouldn’t wish to live without.

He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. Here was an artist who depicted fruit in its ripeness and at the moment it had begun to rot, an artist who painted flesh at its most delicately seductive and most grievously injured. When he showed suffering, he showed it so startlingly well because he was on both sides of it: He meted it out to others and received it in his own body. Caravaggio is long dead, as are his victims. What remains is the work, and I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2020: Science and Nature

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. We’ve searched through our archives to find the science and nature stories that take you into ancient forests, through dark swamps, to the bottom of the sea, and right up into the stars. 

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly Top 5 email every Friday.

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The Social Life of Forests (Ferris Jabr, The New York Times Magazine)

Old-growth forests in North America are like something out of a fairytale — huge trees, luminescent with moss, with boughs arching above your head, and “gnarled roots” beneath your feet, “dicing in and out of the soil like sea serpents.” And, as Ferris Jabr discovers in this story, the magic of these trees goes beyond what we see — with intricate fungal networks weaving them together into an inclusive community that links “nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species.” This is a fascinating piece that shows you these giant sentinels are more than you expect — more than just individuals. 

Jabr goes into the forest with Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia who has studied these systems and proved “a dynamic exchange of resources through mycorrhizal networks” between the two species of paper birch and Douglas fir. Her work has provoked a certain amount of controversy: “Since Darwin, biologists have emphasized the perspective of the individual … the single-minded ambitions of selfish genes.” Simard is proving this is not what is happening in old-growth forests; they are “neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society.” And trees are not just interacting with each other, “trees sense nearby plants and animals and alter their behavior accordingly: The gnashing mandibles of an insect might prompt the production of chemical defenses … Some studies have even suggested that plant roots grow toward the sound of running water.” 

A forest operating as a complicated, sharing society is a powerful notion. Not only does it garner more respect for this ecosystem, but it could prove that cooperation is as central to evolution as competition: “Wherever living things emerge, they find one another, mingle and meld.”  Read more…

The Hungry Bears

Pexels

In his article for Beside, Jimmy Thomson looks at the delicate ecosystem that operates around the humble salmon — and what happens when that balance is upset. Thomson visits the community of Wuikinuxv, where the relationship between salmon, grizzly bears, and humans has been knocked out of sync. With great respect for the animals they share the land with, the Wuikinuxv nation wants to do their best to rectify this, rather than come into conflict with the bears.

Carver George Johnson is putting the finishing touches on a stunning pole when I visit his carving shed. It’s built around the concept of “four,” a number that has great resonance in Wuikinuxv culture. For each of the four seasons, there’s a species of salmon. For each of the four local species of salmon, there’s an animal that catches it, just one of which is a human. At the bottom of the pole, clutching a sockeye, is a grizzly bear. And swirling up from the ground, along the haunches of the bear, is a pattern that connects it to the soil and the land.

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.

With colonization, the community of Wuikinuxv saw the opening of several canneries — and salmon numbers depleted, to a point they have still not recovered from. The last of the local canneries closed in 1957, but the salmon declined for another half-century. Part of the reason could be a loss of genetic diversity that came with a lower population, leaving the fish vulnerable to environmental changes. The reduction in salmon was accompanied by logging, replacing old-growth rainforest with a dense thicket — full of juvenile trees that do not produce berries. For grizzly bears, this has meant a reduction in two important food sources — and hungry bears are increasingly coming into contact with humans. 

The carcass is a reminder that bears remain a threat even today; accordingly, there are a few things I need to know before I step outside the Wuikinuxv lodge, according to the facility’s manager. “If you smell something, it’s a bear,” Judy says. “If the dogs are going crazy, it’s a bear.”

With instructions to get inside the nearest house in an emergency — the small cluster of houses in the village are always unlocked for this exact purpose — Judy hands me a metal, spring-loaded tool the size and shape of a pen with a plastic cylinder screwed onto it. It’s a “bear banger,” a tiny explosive like a firework intended to scare away curious bears. I am to carry it around any time I’m outside.

I run into Johnny Johnson outside the lodge. He laughs at my puny protection. “That won’t even scare them anymore,” he says. Johnson’s opinion on the matter is an educated one; not only did he grow up in Wuikinuxv, he survived a violent mauling a decade ago.

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Longreads Best of 2020: Food

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

Through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. After revisiting the food stories picked by the team this year, we’ve narrowed down our favorites. Whether you are a fan of marmalade, bagels, or sushi, we hope you find something you enjoy. 

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

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Flimsy Plastic Knives, a Single Microwave, and Empty Popcorn Bags: How 50 Inmates Inside a Michigan Prison Prepared a Feast to Celebrate the Life of George Floyd (Tana Ganeva, The Counter)

This is a story that puts you through a whole gamut of emotion — from frustration, admiration, joy, to sadness — all while discussing fried rice on a bagel.

The protagonist behind the bagel is Michael Thompson, an inmate of Muskegon Correctional Facility in Michigan, who has served 25 years of a 40- to 60-year sentence for selling marijuana in Michigan, a state where cannabis is now legal. But it is not his own plight that is concerning Thompson — he has been moved by the story of a Black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer — George Floyd.

Wanting to find a way to mark Floyd’s death, Thompson decided to share a special meal with his inmates in a “celebration” honoring Floyd’s life. Such a simple concept is a monumental task in prison — and you feel great pride in the inmates you are joining on this mission. First, there is the issue of money — Thompson wanted to feed the whole unit, but resources meant it had to be capped at 50 inmates. Some food was donated, and the rest Thompson bought from the commissary. Then there were tools — the entire operation had to be carried out using “only flimsy plastic knives, a single microwave, and empty popcorn bags.” The men struggled, tearing their hands up with plastic while cutting, but at the end, each “attendee was served one celebration bagel, a bag of chips, and a soda.” And that food was so appreciated — for some, the first cold pop they had drunk for decades.

More than just the enjoyment of the food, this meal brought the men together, even though they had to eat separately, because: “After they returned to their cells, each man sat in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. And then they began to eat.”

Why Grocery Shopping Is on Its Way Out (Cory Mintz, The Walrus)

As a food writer, Corey Mintz loves a supermarket more than most — in fact, he got married in one: “between the cash register, the root-vegetable table, a group of … friends and family, and a display of maple syrup.” In this piece, he gives us a fascinating history of the supermarket, whilst bemoaning what is unwittingly being lost by more and more people as they choose to order their groceries online.

Written just before COVID-19 hit in full force, the topic is eerily prophetic of things to come. When Mintz discusses the loss of “getting out of the house; the freedom of choice; being in a large, expansive space; the visual stimulation of all that abundance on the shelves,” he was unaware that the arrival of the pandemic was soon to rush this reality to the fore for millions. However, as mental health deteriorates alongside isolation in 2020, the accuracy of some of Mintz’s other points is undeniable: The idea that interactions with local storeowners — or “weak ties” — “improve physical and mental health and … reduces loneliness.”

This year supermarkets have been bombarded by a new wave of online customers, and the herculean feat it takes to get a delivery slot suggests that the figures in this article — that 1.5 ­percent of people in Canada and 3 percent in the U.S. order their food online — are already out of date. Now that people have discovered the delight of bananas and chocolate biscuits turning up at their door will they ever go back to their local supermarkets? If these community interactions are lost on a permanent basis, what is the long-term cost?

Mintz will certainly be hoping that in the future we remember that “while other human beings can be annoying—clipping our nails on the subway, calling instead of texting, disrespecting the unwritten rule that the middle seat on a plane gets armrest preference—we need one another.”

Marmalade: A Very British Obsession (Olivia Potts, Longreads)

This essay resonates with the pure joy that a particular food can bring, but it’s not the most obvious of foods — a bitter citrus fruit boiled in sugar to create a breakfast condiment … a.k.a marmalade.

Potts’ language draws you into the kitchen with her as she brews up her concoctions, so you can almost feel the steam and stickiness as she drops “saffron strands into a couple of the jars, stirring last minute, and they hang, suspended in the jelly, perfect threads.” The pleasure she derives from her “potted sunshine” is apparent, but more fascinating is the complicated world of marmalade that she explores. A central theme of British culture — eaten by Samuel Pepys, James Bond, and Paddington Bear — it inspires fanaticism. Invited to judge at the World’s Original Marmalade Awards, Potts discovers that “the tricky, maddening nature of marmalade is precisely why people love making it.”

Along with Potts, we brace ourselves “for the marmalade obsessives” she would find while judging for four days at Dalemain. And yes, 50 sheep were dyed orange in readiness for this year’s festival, but despite herself, Potts finds herself entranced by this eccentric world, and when she is the first to try the marmalade that ultimately won the Double Gold International Marmalade award in the artisan category, she “wanted to ring everyone I know and tell them about this stuff.” It turns out the subculture of marmalade is rather delightful.

Once back at home, and in a global lockdown, Potts finds comfort in making her own marmalade: “there is something inherently optimistic about preservation, about putting something away for your future.”

Read this loving homage to marmalade, and you too will find “a small optimism, a hope of orange-colored happiness in your future.”

The Sacred Ritual of Meals with My Mother (Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Elle)

In this essay, Marie Mutsuki Mockett evokes the vivid associations we can have with food. She argues that the food of our youth — given to us by our mothers — formulates our palette for the rest of our lives. As a teenager, in the hospital with pneumonia, Mockett craved “Japanese soul food” — her mother brought her pickled sour plums, rice, and seasoned ground beef, and her “body reconstituted itself out of her nourishment.” Even today, when she is sick, she yearns for those flavors.

Now the tables have turned, and with her mother aging, it is Mockett who is bringing meals that bring her comfort, such as elegant flats of sushi with “the spinach … steamed, the water squeezed out, and the leaves placed into strips.” Despite her mother leaving Japan for the United States decades earlier, it is the food she grew up with, and taught her daughter to love, that they share — their personal and regional history interwoven.

COVID-19 has now robbed Mockett of the chance to share meals with her mother — whose nursing home was one of the first to shut its doors to visitors. She manages to express her devastation with a simple, yet searing, description: “Sometimes I get a photo of her eating her meals. There is no sushi on her plate.”

My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? (Gabrielle Hamilton, New York Times Magazine)

This year has been a struggle for many small restaurants — with so many having to shut their doors. In this piece, Gabrielle Hamilton tells the story of the closure hers — Prune — but it is the tale of many. Written from a first-person perspective this is a deeply personal essay that exposes the pain of shuttering a lifelong dream.

Prune was 20 years old when the gates were finally rolled down. A bistro in Manhattan’s East Village, when it was born “there was no Eater, no Instagram, no hipster Brooklyn food scene.” Hamilton worked seven nights a week “driven by the sensory, the human, the poetic and the profane — not by money or a thirst to expand.” However, once she cut her first payroll check, she understood, that poetic notion aside, she was running a business. When COVID-19 hit there was “one piece of unemotional data to work with: the checking account balance,” and there was not enough in it.

It took a week to shut the restaurant. A week of cleaning and “burying par-cooked chickens under a tight seal of duck fat to see if we could keep them perfectly preserved in their airtight coffins.”

Then followed weeks of paperwork — desperately applying for grants and unemployment that failed to appear. Then further weeks of idleness and quarantine, and the realization that although there was still a month of food in the freezer, what about somehow getting hurt and needing serious medical care with no insurance? More questions followed: Is Prune necessary? Will restaurants survive the pandemic?

Having decided against delivery and going online, sticking to her vision of her restaurant “as a place for people to talk to one another, with a very decent but affordable glass of wine and an expertly prepared plate of simply braised lamb shoulder,” Prune’s shutters are still down.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2020 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2020: Business Writing

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

Through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. After revisiting hundreds of business stories picked by the team this year, we’ve narrowed down our favorites. Enjoy these nine reads, including coverage of the wildest startup collapses and in-depth explorations of pandemic insurance, TikTok content houses, 5G, and the state of the fossil fuel industry.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

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Unlucky Charms: The Rise and Fall of Billion-Dollar Jewelry Empire Alex and Ani (Aaron Gell, Marker)

Carolyn Rafaelian spent 15 years building a jewelry empire, making her company, famous for its $30 expandable wire bracelets, one of the fastest-growing fashion brands ever. But what led to Alex and Ani’s fall? Aaron Gell’s piece has it all: an odd alliance between a spiritual “earth mother” founder and an Army major-turned-CEO, business decisions influenced by astrology and New Age practices, a $1.1 billion gender discrimination lawsuit against Bank of America, and even a spinoff into a “university”that was meant to share the company’s life lessons with the world.

Buzzwords aside, the curriculum mostly aimed to impart an essential truth behind Alex and Ani’s appeal: Its products were not just glittery trinkets but spiritual armor designed to protect, inspire, and ennoble the bearer as she made her way through the world. Retail employees at the company’s “bangle bars” were known internally as “bar tenders” for their patience and empathy. They’d draw out customers’ personal stories — what AAU president Dennis Rebelo called “story birthing” — prescribing just the right stones and talismans (the Eye of Horus for protection, light, and reason; the dragonfly for grace, change, and power) for each unique journey.

Read more…

Trapped in Limbo Down Under

Stadtratte

They came with what few possessions they could carry when they fled their homes: a watch, a copy of The Alchemist, a few pieces of clothing. Many were still children; others were barely adults; all of them were refugees. Yet the place where they were headed saw them, as journalist Lauren Martin writes, as little more than “cause for alarm.” In “Temporary,” a longform multimedia project published by the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, Martin explains how a decade ago powerful politicians in Australia insisted on preventing asylum seekers from reaching their country’s shores. The initial result was the establishment of detention camps on poor South Pacific islands. When those filled up, some people were let into Australia, only to be told to keep waiting, indefinitely, for an answer about where they would be allowed to live their lives. Now some 30,000 people are in a state of legal limbo — “they have been mostly lost across one of the world’s wealthiest countries, notorious for its punitive treatment of people seeking its protection.”

In “Temporary,” Martin introduces audiences to several members of Australia’s “legacy caseload.” Among them is Zaki, a teenager when he fled Afghanistan on the heels of his brother’s beheading and his father’s disappearance, both at the hands of the Taliban. Zaki is now a marathon runner:

Forty, fifty kilometres, “it’s not an easy process,” he admits. He doesn’t say how it began, this running for hours a day. But he proudly recalls that crossing the finish line in his first race, raising thousands of dollars for children with cancer, “was a very rewarding moment.”

He also clearly recalls telling his mother, when he first arrived in Australia as a teenager, “I don’t have to run from anything anymore.”

He can still remember the place he left, his village where a mountain river flows, and playing as a happy child with a happy family who was “there for me no matter what.” He remembers the killings that made his mother run with her remaining children to Kabul. But the Taliban found them there, too, delivering warnings—on Taliban letterhead—about him, the oldest surviving son.

So Zaki started running. Onto his first airplane. Through jungles. Into small, dark rooms, where he was confined, hungry, thirsty and very frightened. As he ran from Afghanistan, he was beaten, threatened, he made friends and walked for days and nights on end. He made it to the sea, where he was tossed until he went into shock in a broken boat, and then, finally, he made it to an Australian outpost called Christmas Island. He was blistered by the sun and wind. Tired.

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Longreads Best of 2020: Crime Reporting

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

Through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. After taking a plunge into the murky world of crime, we narrowed down our favorites. Enjoy these Best of Crime reads, showcasing gripping tales and insights into the human psyche. 

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly Top 5 email every Friday.

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I Hope Our Daughters Will Not Be Punished (Justine van der Leun, Dissent Magazine)

Van der Leun’s piece details the plight of Kwaneta Yatrice Harris — who, incarcerated for killing an abusive partner, wrote her letters from solitary confinement in a Texas prison. 

This year a lot of us have spent vast expanses of time isolated from family and friends — and so for many, this story will strike a chord. When van de Leun discusses pandemic lockdowns, she states, “Those who were alone began to physically throb for human connection.” This is a powerful concept — if we, with all the distractions of Zoom and Netflix and pets, can still ache for human connection when isolating, consider what it must feel like for those locked in solitary for months, with their senses so deprived of stimulation they magnify to “smell the guard’s perfume, hear the click of shoes echoing from far away.” 

By talking to Harris, van de Leun gives us an inkling of what it is like to live in a condition that is “classified as torture by the United Nations, serves no rehabilitative purpose, and causes mental health to deteriorate in as few as ten days.” A registered nurse, Harris is terrified of COVID-19, and the unsanitary conditions she finds herself in — her unit is rarely cleaned, and she showers in one of three showers shared by forty-two women. 

This essay also echoes another horrific event of 2020 — the death of George Floyd, killed during his arrest in Minneapolis. The racism that Black people experience at the hands of the police can extend to prison wardens. In Texas in 2015, a Black man named Mark Sabbie was feeling unwell — he was given a disciplinary ticket for “creating a disturbance” by “feining [sic] illness and difficulty breathing.” He was cuffed in his cells and left alone — and found dead the next morning. 

An emotional read: but an important look at how the challenges wider society has faced in 2020 are magnified inside the microcosm of a Texas prison.

Pleas of Insanity: The Mysterious Case of Anthony Montwheeler (Rob Fischer, Rolling Stone Magazine)

What does it mean to be “criminally insane”? The official answer sounds simple — to have a mental illness that impairs you from telling the difference between right and wrong. But mental illness is a nuanced spectrum — and, to many, it seems impossible to decipher someone’s state of mind during a crime. This story is a fascinating exploration into the complexities of the insanity plea in the United States — which, even though there are “lots of tests and things you can do to kind of back up your intuition … in the end, it’s kind of this gut feeling.” 

Using the case study of Anthony Montwheeler,  Fischer explores what can happen when a gut feeling isn’t enough. Montwheeler apparently played the system. Charged in 1996 with kidnapping his wife and son at gunpoint he was found “guilty except for insanity.” Twenty years later, he claimed he faked mental illness by studying a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and mimicking behavioral traits — to avoid incarceration in favor of a state psychiatric hospital — and now wanted to be discharged. After he spoke at a hearing for a total of eight-and-a-half minutes, a review board decided Montwheeler was “no longer affected by a qualifying mental disease or defect,” and the state was legally required to discharge him. Had Montwheeler been pretending all those years? It seems no one really knows for sure, but what we do know is that after his release he went on to murder his third ex-wife, Annita Harmon. 

This case is a rarity — the insanity defense is pursued in fewer than one percent of all criminal trials. But, however hard to define, mental health is still an obvious factor in crime: “37 percent of prisoners and 44 percent of jail inmates have been told by a mental health professional at some point in their lives that they suffer from a mental disorder.” Fischer shows that while the insanity defense may be flawed,  there is still a clear link between mental health and criminality — with a lack of mental health care, and the resulting issues, apparent.

The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet (Andy Greenberg, Wired)

Greenberg is meticulous in his detailed analysis of Marcus Hutchins’ character, a hacker who some view as a criminal, and others as the savior of the internet. It’s a thrilling story, with many twists and turns, but also an exploration into people’s moral complexities.

Hutchins stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen — christened WannaCry. In the space of an afternoon, it destroyed, by some estimates, nearly a quarter of a million computers’ data — before Hutchins found the kill switch. He was celebrated as a hero, but Hutchins himself knew “what it was like to sit behind a keyboard, detached from the pain inflicted on innocents far across the internet.” Three years earlier he had been the chief author of Kronos — a type of malware focused on stealing banking login credentials. 

After disabling WannaCry, Hutchins’ previous work with Kronos was discovered and he was arrested. The hacker world rallied in support — which left Hutchins ravaged by guilt for what he had done, but even the judge in his trial concluded that “one might view the ignoble conduct that underlies this case as against the backdrop of what some have described as the work of a hero, a true hero.” This is a thought-provoking insight into the gradual descent into a criminal world, the climb back out again, and the layers of gray in between.

The Wind Delivered the Story (Josina Guess, The Bitter Southerner)

It feels jarring to put the terms “beautiful” and “lynching” in the same sentence — but this personal essay about the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle is beautifully written. Guess’ writing is almost lyrical — as she explains how the wind blew “history into my path” in wonderfully descriptive language.

When Guess moved into her farmhouse in Georgia she found a box of old newspapers from the mid-1940s through the early 50s. She stored them in the woodshed until a blustery autumn storm disturbed them and scattered them about the property. One headline that appeared, like “a bird I had been expecting in this landscape that carries memories of racialized violence,” read “State Seeks Death Sentence For All 31 Lynchers.” Not ready for the emotional toll of exploring this incident further, Guess tucked the paper away, but the story wanted to be told, and a few weeks later the wind blew the conclusion across the garden: “28 White Men Get Blanket Acquittal in South Carolina Mass Lynch Trial.” It was Willie Earle who was killed, to avenge the fatal stabbing of a cab driver named Thomas Brown. Arrested, then almost immediately kidnapped from jail, Earle had no opportunity to stand trial — his guilt or innocence was never proven. His murderers were given that chance, but despite ample evidence and confessions, were found innocent.

Guess’ work focuses on dismantling racism in Georgia, so it seemed fate that this story, literally, landed at her feet. She went on to research the history of the Willie Earle murder, discovering it was considered the last lynching in South Carolina, and, although the trial was a miscarriage of justice, it marked the end of mob violence and the beginning of a rumbling that eventually became the Civil Rights Movement.

The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People (Rachel Nuwer, Longreads)

Amongst one or two other things, 2020 was the year people learned the names Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. The Netflix series Tiger King landed on our screens at the same time that many of us were in lockdown due to COVID-19, and was binge-watched by millions. This story by Rachel Nuwer was written before we met these characters on Netflix while clutching our loo rolls and hand sanitizer, and her piece sheds a brighter light on their complicated personalities.

Nuwer’s piece explores the murder-for-hire plots that Exotic instigated against Baskin, but her focus also remains firmly on the animals around which the story revolves. Exotic was not only convicted of murder-for-hire — but of 17 wildlife crimes, including illegally killing five tigers and trafficking them across state lines — a significant conviction when there is still no oversight over big cat ownership by the federal government. This investigation goes beyond the larger than life characters and the human drama, and actually shows us the lives of the animals that are owned by America’s big cat people.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2020 year-end collection.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

LANSING, MI - DECEMBER 02: U.S. President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, a member of the president's legal team, arrive for an appearance before the Michigan House Oversight Committee on December 2, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan. Giuliani and the president's legal team are claiming widespread voter fraud in Michigan and other closely contested states in the November 3 presidential election. The hearing will not change results of the vote in Michigan, which has already been certified. (Photo by Rey Del Rio/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Tim Alberta, Jane C. Hu, Katy Kelleher, Jimmy Thomson, and David Marchese.

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1. The Inside Story of Michigan’s Fake Voter Fraud Scandal

Tim Alberta | Politico | November 24, 2020 | 29 minutes (7,400 words)

“How a state that was never in doubt became a ‘national embarrassment’ and a symbol of the Republican Party’s fealty to Donald Trump.”

2. COVID’s Cassandra: The Swift, Complicated Rise of Eric Feigl-Ding

Jane C. Hu | Undark | November 25, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,200 words)

“The scientist has gained popularity as COVID’s excitable play-by-play announcer. But some experts want to pull his plug.”

3. Verdigris: The Color of Oxidation, Statues, and Impermanence

Katy Kelleher | The Paris Review | November 24, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,213 words)

“Verdigris is emblematic of that movement. It’s a blue-green, yes. But more importantly, it’s a quality. It is hard to give it a hex code because it’s not flat. It’s a color made from change.”

4. Grizzlies at the Table

Jimmy Thomson | Beside | November 23, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,149 words)

“The carcass is a reminder that bears remain a threat even today; accordingly, there are a few things I need to know before I step outside the Wuikinuxv lodge, according to the facility’s manager. ‘If you smell something, it’s a bear,’ Judy says. “If the dogs are going crazy, it’s a bear.'”

5. Yo-Yo Ma and the Meaning of Life

David Marchese | The New York Times | November 20, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,132 words)

David Marchese interviews cellist Yo-Yo Ma on music, politics, culture, the pandemic, stereotypes, and the meaning of life.