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Longreads Best of 2020: Essays

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant essays published on the web. Because of the wide range of writing across many topics and themes, it was a challenge to sift through them all over the past several weeks to compile a definitive Best of Essays list. As I shortlisted stories, I realized there could be many different versions of this list, but, in the end, these eight reads really spoke to me.

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

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Mississippi: A Poem, in Days (Kiese Makeba Laymon, Vanity Fair)

Kiese Makeba Laymon was on a book tour when the pandemic hit in the U.S. In this stunner of a piece that unfolds over 14 days, the author writes on fear, racism, death, and home amid a moment of awakening. We follow along on the journey, from event to event in Ohio and West Virginia, with Laymon’s observations and thoughts interspersed with daily COVID-19 death counts and the latest words or orders from Donald Trump and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. It’s a powerful meditation, one that will stop you in your tracks.

We are awakened, I want to believe.

75 miles from the armed confederate statue in Oxford, Emmett Till’s childish body was destroyed. 70 miles from that armed confederate statue, Fannie Lou Hamer was nearly beaten to death. 160 miles from that armed confederate statue, Medgar Evers was murdered as he enters his home. 80 miles from that armed confederate statue, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis.

It took way too much Black death to get here.

I am wandering around the spiritual consequences of materially progressing at the expense of Black death. I want to be courageous. I wonder, though, when courage becomes contagious—when courage is credentialized, subsidized, and incentivized—if it is still courage at all.

Today, as I prepare to push send, and I lather my hands in sanitizer, it feels a bit too much like cowardice.

Maybe I’ll wait to send tomorrow. Maybe I won’t send at all.

The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors, a group of white men, unanimously vote to keep the armed confederate monument in the middle of Oxford, the town where I live, teach, and write.

Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel.

It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

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The Alarmist: Is One of the Pandemic’s Loudest Scientific Voices Helping or Hurting Public Health?

AlexSecret

How should scientists balance the need to raise the alarm about a health threat with the complexity and methodical pace of research required to understand that threat? How do you weigh potential harm done versus good achieved when deciding what to tell a frightened public? These aren’t new questions, but in 2020, they’ve come into sharp focus. No one embodies them more fully than scientist Eric Feigl-Ding, a Twitter sensation for his urgent threads about the coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps you’ve read some of his viral tweets — the most famous ones begin with phrases like “BLOODY HELL” and “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” In less than a year, his following has grown from 2,000 to more than 250,000 Twitter users. Jane C. Hu profiles Feigl-Ding for Undark, asking whether he’s the town crier the internet needs or just another purveyor of disinformation:

Even when his public exclamations are technically accurate, Feigl-Ding’s critics suggest that they too often invite misinterpretations. In a thread about the first study of a COVID-19 outbreak on an airplane, for example, Feigl-Ding failed to mention the important caveat that researchers suspected all but one case occurred before people got on the airplane. In another, Feigl-Ding appeared to summarize a Washington Post piece on a coronavirus mutation, but omitted crucial phrases—including the fact that just one of the five mentioned studies was peer-reviewed. It wasn’t until the sixth tweet in the thread that Feigl-Ding mentioned the important detail that the “worrisome” mutation doesn’t appear to make people sicker, though it could make the virus more contagious.

To Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, this represents a pattern. “[T]his is his MO,” she wrote in an email. “He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.”

Such critiques of Feigl-Ding’s particular brand of COVID-19 commentary are by no means new, and previous articles—in The Atlantic as far back as January, for example, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer in March, the Chronicle of Higher Education in April, and in The Daily Beast in May — have explored questions about his expertise in epidemiology (his focus prior to COVID-19 was on nutrition) and whether his approach to public health communication is appropriate or alarmist. But as his influence has grown, and as the pandemic enters a much more worrying phase, critics have continued to debate whether Feigl-Ding, for all his enthusiasms, is doing more harm than good. Some complain that Feigl-Ding’s army of followers can be hateful when other scientists publicly disagree with his tweets. Others say that Feigl-Ding himself has been known to privately message his critics—a tack that some found unwelcome.

For his part, though, Feigl-Ding says many of his critics’ disagreements with him have come down to a difference in style. “Sometimes it’s a matter of a philosophical approach about tone: Should I say ‘whoa’ or ‘wow?’” he said

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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.

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Longreads Best of 2020: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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

Returning the Gaze

Longreads Pick
Source: Rest of World
Published: Oct 6, 2020
Length: 18 minutes (4,749 words)

Deconstructing Disney: Motherhood and the Taming of Maleficent

Wiki Commons/ Carolyn Wells

Jeanna Kadlec| Longreads | October 2020 | 3,234 words (12 minutes)

How do you tame a witch? Historically, you don’t: You kill her. Burn her. Hang her. In tales, the witch is often a her. A she-devil, if you will, a woman who sleeps with Lucifer, who is Satan’s mistress, who bears a demonic mark. Read the 15th-century witch-hunters’ Malleus Maleficarum, it’ll tell you. Her very existence, her body itself, is a portal from this world to others, and she must be put down, lest she tears a rip in reality itself.

Wicked witches, the stuff of historical legend and nightmarish fairy tales, inspire a terror that verges on the sublime, that feeling Edmund Burke articulated so long ago — of standing on the edge of a cliff where you feel the simultaneity of danger and spectacular awe. Mountains are sublime. Milton’s Satan is sublime. Sublimity only exists in things that could kill you, which bring you to the edge of yourself. The untamed feminine, then, surely falls into this category: Witches exist on the margins, in the shadows, ever threatening to invade and disrupt the sanctity of the social order.

These days, Disney doesn’t kill witches — at least, not as often as they used to. These days, Disney is interested in the ultimate rehabilitation project: How do you make these archetypal wonders, this sublime femininity, less frightening? Less powerful — particularly to people invested in women and queers behaving in normatively gendered ways?

You make the witch a mother.

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What They Saw

Longreads Pick

“In all likelihood they will come for you at night, after you’ve gone to bed.” Part of a special Buzzfeed investigation into China’s detention camps for Uighurs.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Aug 27, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,200 words)

Fire/Flood: A Southern California Pastoral

Photo: Mitch Diamond (Photodisc/Getty Images)

Yxta Maya Murray | Longreads | August 2020 | 4,990 words (20 minutes)

 

— with thanks to Dr. Alex Pivovaroff

1.

Chaparral spreads its hard, green shine over the hills and valleys of Southern California. This tough-leafed shrub community established itself as part of the local plant landscape millions of years ago. It flourishes during the area’s rainy springs, and survives droughts by plunging its sturdy roots deep into granite bedrock, which can hold a surprising amount of water.

Chaparral also bears a reputation for fire. These plants have adapted to the types of blazes Southern California’s semi-arid landscape has historically endured, and some varieties of chaparral evolved a literally incendiary mode of survival: their seeds need to burn in order to sprout. After wildfires scorch the land, the chaparral bursts into a glossy biome, hosting fire-follower poppy blossoms that fan out over the blackened hills.

2.

Los Angeles has always lacked an adequate supply of indigenous water.

This problem brings out the worst in its settlers, who adapt to the landscape with as much scorched-earth ingenuity as does the chaparral.
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“Do You Get Shit for Your Name?”

hand showing Pakistani passport
Image credit: Daniela Duncan / Moment / Getty Images and iStock / Getty Images Plus

Osama Shehzad | Longreads | August 2020 | 3,543 words (14 minutes)

“Passport please,” asks the security officer, an Indian-British woman, at London’s Heathrow airport.

I hand her my green Pakistani passport, and she thumbs through it to get to the page with my visa. I am travelling to America where I’ve lived since 2009 on either student or work visas.

As she examines my passport, she frowns and then lifts her head to look at me.

“Osama?”

I reply with a nod and a small wry smile, as I always do when people ask to confirm my name.

She leans over and asks in a hushed voice, “Do you get shit for your name in America?”

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I was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, where Osama was — and still remains — a popular name.

My grandfather, a poet, named me Osama because he wanted a name without a harsh stop at its end, a name that would flow smoothly off the tongue to my last name, Shehzad.

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My elementary school Koran teacher, Qari Sahab, tells me Osama is an ancient Arabic name that translates to “lion.” It is popular throughout the Muslim world because Prophet Muhammad chose that name for his adopted grandson.

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“What is your name beta?” asks the uncle, an old friend of my father who is over at our place with his wife for tea. The uncle emigrated to the U.S. in the ‘80s and has rarely visited Karachi since. This is my first time meeting him.

“Osama,” I reply.

“Oye, you are hiding here in Karachi and Bush is looking for you everywhere,” replies the uncle and everyone in the drawing room gives out a courteous chuckle for his attempt to lighten the mood.

“Good luck getting a visa to America,” his wife adds.

“You should change your name,” the uncle instructs me.

“Chai piyo aur niklo,” I feel like telling him, but instead reply with a polite “Okay.”
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The Endgame of the Olympics

burning torch next to smoking torch
imagedepotpro / Getty Images

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,722 words (23 minutes)

A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.

The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.

They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.

Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.
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