Eva Holland

What it’s like to race in the 445-mile Yukon River Quest—paddling through pain and hallucinations.

Guest reading list from Eva Holland: “This year’s awards were up for grabs among 326 nominees from 80 publications, spread across 43 categories. ‘Gold’ and ‘silver’ winners get awards, and the balance of the nominees receive honorable mentions. That spawns the occasional joke about how in Canadian magazines, everyone gets a medal for participation, but—go ahead, call me biased (I was a nominee/honorable mention in the ‘society’ category, for ‘The Forgotten Internment’)—I like the way our format lets us celebrate many different sorts of work, not just the ‘biggest,’ most ambitious features.”

Eva Holland explores what it means to comprehend and embrace your limits —to know yet avoid the precipice between courage and humility—on a climbing expedition to the Yukon Territories’ famed Cirque of the Unclimbables.

How Ta-Nehisi Coates built the best comment section on the internet—and why it can’t last.

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

The little-known story of the U.S. internment of Alaska’s indigenous Aleut people during World War II: “‘She’s right. My wife is right. We were treated like animals.'”

Reconciling our love of sports with the risks associated with them:

When I graduated after four seasons of high school rugby, and prepared to head off for four more seasons in college, I felt transformed. I no longer called myself a tomboy, and rugby was no longer a crutch.

So much for the revenue side of the balance sheet. Rugby had, for a time, given me everything. But around the same time I’d begun to outgrow my need for it, I’d also begun to understand its potential cost. I racked up pulled muscles and strained ligaments, and chipped a bone in my ankle that still aches under pressure, more than 15 years later. I played with women sporting twin scars on their knees from ACL surgeries. I saw a man come off the pitch one afternoon with his ear torn half off. I helped concussed teammates stagger off the field, unable to remember their own names, and suffered one concussion myself — a minor one, but still an injury with the terrifying power to reach back in time and erase my memories from even before the hit. I had one friend, on my college’s men’s team, who swore he would quit after three concussions, but he only counted the big ones. Once, I saw him pick himself up after a collision and line up alongside the wrong team. And then, finally, I watched that young man break his neck under the floodlights on a cold night in northern England. I was haunted by the question of my own potential regrets.

Raphael Pope-Sussman (@AudacityofPope) is the managing editor of News Genius and a founding co-editor of BKLYNR

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Eva Holland (@evaholland) is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory.