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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: 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.

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…

A Box of Meat and $100 For Your Life

A sign for The Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in South Dakota, one of the countrys largest known Coronavirus clusters, is seen on April 20, 2020 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. - Smithfield Foods pork plant in South Dakota is closed indefinitely in the wake of its coronavirus outbreak. (Photo by Kerem Yucel / AFP) (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)

As Nick Roberts and Rosa Amanda Tuirán report at The Counter, the meat packing industry — given basically unlimited liability protection from President Trump under pandemic health guidelines they wrote themselves — not only failed to protect workers from contracting COVID-19, they actually ramped up production to take advantage of the opportunity to increase sales and profits.

One plant, One World Beef, offered incentives to employees to work six days a week without missing a day for paltry bonuses of up to $100 and a box of meat.

In April, as the first wave of Covid-19 infections began to spread across the U.S., the nation’s largest hotspot wasn’t in New York City. It wasn’t in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, or any major urban center. It was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a small city of about 190,000.

Specifically, it was in the Smithfield Foods pork plant on the north side of town, nestled into a bend in the Big Sioux River. By April 16, 644 cases had been traced back to the plant—44 percent of all the cases in South Dakota at the time—pushing Sioux Falls to the top of the New York Times’ list of single-source hotspots. The initial outbreak only grew as the weeks and months went on. As of September, Smithfield’s Sioux Falls plant had reported nearly 1,300 coronavirus cases among its employees, about one-third of the plant’s total workforce. Four of those workers died.

For a brief period, the crisis at the Sioux Falls plant was front-page news—a stark indication of the growing problem in U.S. slaughterhouses. But the nation’s attention had largely moved on by September 10, when the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) finally cited Smithfield for failing to protect its workers at Sioux Falls. The announcement of this corrective action was, in a sense, historic: Smithfield was the first meatpacker to be fined by OSHA for a coronavirus-related violation. Yet the fine itself—a mere $13,494—told a different story. The amount translated to less than $10.50 for every worker who contracted Covid-19 from the Sioux Falls plant.

Under the previous owners, Brawley Beef (National Beef), the plant had the capacity to slaughter between 1,600 to 2,300 cattle on a daily basis. When One World Beef took over in 2015, CEO Eric Brandt said the company’s focus was on the quality of the meat over quantity, and would run a more streamlined operation—building gradually to a 700- to –1,200-cow daily capacity over the course of several years.

One OWB worker said that on a regular five-day week before Covid-19, employees would slaughter between 800 to 1,200 cows a day. But in spite of the ongoing pandemic, production at One World Beef Packers increased in the spring. In March, April, May and June, on average 1,500 cows were slaughtered every day, six days a week according to an employee who works in fabrication, the last stage of production at the plant.

In other words, the company cranked up its output during a time when it was likely to be financially advantageous to do so. U.S. cattle slaughter rates dropped precipitously during that four-month span; at its lowest point in late April, beef processing was at 60 percent of its previous year’s capacity. At the same time, and likely as a result of plant closures, wholesale beef prices jumped markedly during the period between April and June. For packing plants that managed to stay open, processing as many cattle as possible could be highly lucrative—even if it posed serious risks to worker health.

As fears around the pandemic grew, more and more workers began staying home from work, leaving One World Beef understaffed. In an attempt to maintain the brisk rate of production, the company offered weekly bonuses throughout April. Workers who came to work Monday through Saturday without missing a day were given a bonus of $50, later raised to $100, which was accompanied by a box of meat valued at $200 to $300.

Workers were told if they were scared to enter the facility, they could refrain from coming to work, but multiple employees told us they were warned by supervisors they might be transferred to another area of the plant, be demoted, or replaced altogether if they chose not to come.

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Find Yourself

Photo Collage: "Find Yourself" by Stuart Horn/ Carolyn Wells

Elizabeth Isadora Gold| Longreads | September 2020 | 4,633 words (18 minutes)

It was 1981, in the Olde City section of Philadelphia. I was six. My parents were artists — my dad a cellist/composer/arranger and my mom a potter and teacher — and our tiny bathroom showed it. On one whole wall, my mom hung a poster of the San Francisco baths circa 1890, with lots of gents in one-piece suits and ladies in frilly bathing bonnets. By the toilet, on cinder block-and-board shelves, were stacks and stacks of magazines, New Yorkers, mostly. Postcards framed the mirror over the sink, fleshy vintage nudies with bobbed hair, standing in chorus lines.

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In Absentia

Getty Images

Matthew Bremner | Longreads | July 2020 | 12 minutes (3,429 words)

Clementina doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know her nine children, her grandchildren, or the names of her mother and father. She doesn’t know where she lives, where she has lived, or where she is now. People she has never met tell her that they love her. They say they are her daughter or her son. They assure her they used to play cards together — make wine in the bodega across from her house and chorizo on the patio after the local matanzas (pig slaughters). But Clementina doesn’t trust these people; she doesn’t know what they are talking about.

She didn’t trust me either when I first met her seven years ago. I was at my girlfriend’s family home in Villaveta, a dusty hamlet of dilapidated houses in the hinterland of Castilla y León, Spain. We were preparing lunch for the whole family. Clementina sat at the head of the table next to me. She was hunched by her 93 years, and her skin was wrinkled like a date. “Who are you my boy? she asked, squinting through creamy cataracts.

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A Beautiful and Brutal Truth

OAKLAND, CA - JUNE 1: Douglas Briscoe, of Oakland, raises his fist from the sunroof of his father Doug Briscoe's SUV as thousands of protesters march down Broadway from Oakland Tech High School to Frank Ogawa Plaza during the fourth day of protests over George Floyd's death by the Minneapolis police in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, June 1, 2020. (Ray Chavez/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)

Parenting young people who need you and think they’re smarter than you and love you and are embarrassed by you and who are filled with energy and whose lives are ruined on a biweekly basis is challenging in the best of times. None of us currently live in the best of times; Black Americans never have. In an essay in the New York Times Magazine — ultimately hopeful but profoundly heartbreaking — the always-excellent Carvell Wallace lets us deep inside his experience of being a Black man parenting Black teenagers in the United States.

I can think of nothing else to do but tell them the truth. “I’ve been seeing these videos my whole life,” I say. “You want to know what my trauma is? It’s this.” It is a sentence that feels reckless, sharp in my mouth. I don’t know why I say it. Maybe just because it’s true. I don’t know if they understand. I don’t know if I do. I only know that it is incredibly sad to admit to your children that you’ve been seeing videos of black men being killed since you were their age and that you haven’t been able to stop it. I only know that I have spent a long time avoiding loving myself so that if I am killed it won’t be that great a loss. I only know that it is hard to show them how to love everyone if you’re not even sure how to love yourself. I know that it is time to tell them the truths that I have been afraid to tell them until now.

They say nothing. The conversation doesn’t end until we’ve handled some logistics. I’m taking them to do laundry tomorrow. What’s our plan for Mother’s Day? Can I help my daughter with her math homework? Of course I can. They tell me they love me.

To be asked for life advice in one moment, and to be told you are a bad parent and have ruined your child’s life the next — this is what parenting is. It is a thing that you do alone, because your kids cannot and must not understand all of what you are living. It is terribly painful that my son thinks I have ruined his life. He’s not entirely wrong. I am a wildly imperfect parent. I have lost my temper, neglected his emotional needs, taken his normal childish behavior as a personal attack. I have made tremendous mistakes. Perhaps the biggest mistake was bringing him into a world where we all have to wear masks, where riot squads assemble in front of our minivan, where the climate is on a collision course with the destruction of the human race, where the encampments of houseless people grow larger and wilder every day, where he can watch himself be murdered over and over again just by clicking a link.

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This Week in Books: Farewell Longreads! I’m Taking This Rodeo to Substack.

This is how many books you'll be able to read about if you subscribe to my new substack. (Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash)

Dear Reader,

It’s been a wonderful five years! But sadly after today I will be leaving Longreads.

Let me tell you about how you can read my “This Week in Books” newsletter going forward, since I know you would all surely be bereft without it.

I will continue this project at my new substack, which over the weekend, in a galaxy-brained mania, has… evolved… beyond a simple newsletter. I would like to unveil to you, dedicated reader, the wonder and ruin that awaits you at… The End of the World Review; a micro magazine and teensy tiny literary review that is deeply alarmed by the imminent end of the world, but meanwhile just vibing. The End of the World Review will feature some of my favorite writers from Longreads plus new voices, as well as my classic weekly books newsletter, as seen in your inboxes since time immemorial.

You can choose to receive just the books newsletter (it’s still free), or you can support my new aspirational apocalypse magazine! Either way, to subscribe, go here. To follow on twitter, go here.

If you are short on cash but want to be counted among the elect, DM me @endworldreview or email me endworldreview@gmail.com and I’ll give you a code for a $1/month subscription or a free one if you need it.

If you are long on cash, then you might as well subscribe; after all, it is the end of the world.

I want to thank Mark Armstrong, Mike Dang, and the whole wonderful team at Longreads. It’s been a great few years, and I’ll really miss it. I’ve really loved every minute of my Longreads career: working with brilliant writers to produce accolade-accruing essays; working with yet more brilliant writers to produce book reviews, author interviews, and reporting on important topics like the climate crisis; excerpting cool new books by yet more brilliant writers; writing this nerdy as all get-out newsletter. I’ve loved it so much that… I’m not stopping.

So long and see you soon,

Dana Snitzky
@danasnitzky

 

1. “From Woe to Wonder” by Aracelis Girmay, The Paris Review

This is an exquisite essay, all its bends elegant, its turns refined. Drawing on Gwendolyn Brooks and Kamau Brathwaite, Aracelis Girmay describes her careful attempts to shield her young son from being touched by the malevolent hand of Whiteness for as long as she can; it’s disturbing to read how his white classmates have already succumbed to its perverse logic.

It does not occur to us to talk to our kids about Whiteness just yet, but increasingly I think we must. For example, I am startled, in February, by my son’s White schoolmate who runs into the hall to announce to his parent that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed because of the color of his skin. These months later I am again startled by the very young White children who speak openly and, it seems, without fear about George Floyd’s murder.

We are on a Zoom call with my child’s class. One of his White classmates has gone to a march with her family, in the middle of a pandemic, to march for Black Lives. The power of this is not lost on me. I am moved by their family’s investment and risk, a risk I do not take. I study the child’s face. The baby still in her voice, her cheeks, the way she holds her mouth. She says, “George Floyd was killed because…” And I click the sound off. My youngest says, “I can’t hear, Mommy.” Just a second, I tell them both, just a second.

2. “The Celebration of Juneteenth in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Juneteenth’” by Troy Patterson, The New Yorker

Troy Patterson writes about the sermon at the heart of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, which “exhort[s] worshippers to approach it as something like Passover—a day of deliverance on which to tell stories that keep history alive in memory.”

3. “Our First Authoritarian Crackdown” by Brenda Wineapple, The New York Review of Books

Brenda Wineapple reviews Wendell Bird’s Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a study of early American legal history which reveals that under the Adams Administration, the Alien and Sedition Acts were used to prosecute way more people than previously believed — not just newspapers and editors, but also regular people who spoke against Adams on the street. “When the very tipsy Luther Baldwin of New Jersey cried in a ‘loud voice’ (according to the indictment) that President Adams ‘is a damned rascal and ought to have his arse kicked,’ he was arrested for seditious speech. (He pled guilty and was fined $150 plus court costs.)”

4. “The History That James Baldwin Wanted America to See” by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., The New Yorker

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., writes about James Baldwin’s sympathy to the Black Panther philosophy and his dedication to telling an honest version of American history rather than one of triumphant progress. Glaude points to an impromptu speech Baldwin gave in 1968 — an introduction for Martin Luther King, Jr., at an S.C.L.C. fundraiser hosted by Marlon Brando: “By 1968, when [Baldwin] gave his speech [introducing King] in Anaheim, he saw clearly how the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, a few years earlier, might offer white America the sense of self-congratulation that Black Power was now denying it. He knew that the civil-rights movement could easily be conscripted into the story of how Americans, in their inherent goodness, had perfected the Union. The history being made could be bent in service of the lie.”

In July of 1968, just a few months after King’s assassination and against the backdrop of American cities burning, Baldwin gave an interview to Esquire. He set the tone of the exchange from the very start:

Q. How can we get the black people to cool it?

A. It is not for us to cool it.

Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most?

A. No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest.

5. Post-377: LGBTQ Literary Culture in India” by Saikat Majumdar, Los Angeles Review of Books

Saikat Majumadar writes about the explosion of queer literature in India after the decriminalizing of gay sex in 2018; Majumadar argues that after the legal victory, there was social pressure for writers to make celebratory and “out” narratives of queer life.

The celebratory narrative of post-377 India found clearest voice in the publication, by Penguin India, of Afghan-American journalist Nemat Sadat’s debut novel, The Carpet Weaver, a bildungsroman about a queer boy growing up in the masculinist, patriarchal culture of Afghanistan amid the warring currents of global ideologies. Sadat has been fond of telling the story of how his novel, rejected by US publishers, found ready acceptance in India, where the recent decriminalization of homosexual love made readers eager for this sort of narrative. Fiction was now expected to celebrate this newfound freedom and legitimacy, a fact that was brought home to me personally when the queer activist Chintan Girish Modi, in his popular column “The Queer Bookshelf,” gently accused my own novel, The Scent of God, of hushing queer love, pushing it back into the closet.

6. “Her Sentimental Properties” by Sarah Mesle, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Sarah Mesle reviews Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Woman Slave Owners in the American South, which I can attest is a deeply messed up read; the book is about white enslaver women’s tradition of “gifting” black people to one another on special occasions. It reads like a horror novel, not through any stylistic effort of the author, but just because the dry recounting of these things is freaky as hell. As Mesle writes, Get Out is a horror movie; They Were Her Property is historical scholarship. But when it comes to America’s racialized past, horror and history are hard to keep apart.”

7. “On Horseback” by Nell Painter, The Paris Review

Images of black protestors on horseback remind Nell Painter of her childhood rides with her father and bring her closer to her Western roots, which the whitewashed version of American history had made it difficult for her to claim. “Like so many facets of U.S. history, cowboy history has been lily-whited-out, via the movies’ exaltation of the cowboy as a white man. In so many ways, too much of U.S. history reads as a story of white men…. This is about to change. Although the current upheavals have begun with reforming policing, that’s only a start. History is being remade, including the history of the West. This new history, visualized in images of black women and men on horseback, brings me into more personal, more intimate connection with the political protests that demand wide-ranging, far-reaching improvements in our national life.”

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India’s Journalistic Source of Narrative Nonfiction 

Muzamil Mattoo/NurPhoto via Getty Images

First published in 1940, Caravan ceased operations in 1988 and was relaunched in 2010 by a new set of ambitious staffers as India’s only magazine dedicated to narrative journalism. For Virginia Quarterly Review, writer Maddy Crowell profiles the monthly magazine and its driven executive editor, Vinod Jose, who she describes as ”one of India’s more subversive journalists,” ”practically inseparable” from his journalism. She knows. She interned at Caravan six years ago. She explores the magazine’s unique identity, its history, and its inspiration.

For India’s young intellectuals, the magazine quickly became an essential venue, cutting an anomalous figure in a media environment rife with sensationalism and government flattery. “Caravan is this lonely but incredibly brave beacon in this unending toxic sewage, fake news, social media violence,” said Deb. “It has been going it alone as far as Delhi is concerned.” It was neither entirely a literary magazine nor a newsweekly nor just a book review, but a combination of all three in the form of a periodical that, as Mishra put it to me, “analyze[d] the news with adversarial politics.”

She also examines its future. Revisiting it in 2020, she finds a magazine facing dangerous challenges to its existence and freedom. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the powerful Hindu-nationalist organization, is building its New Dehli headquarters outside the magazine’s headquarters. Caravan and RSS have a tense adversarial relationship, partly due to the magazine’s frequent investigations into the organization, partly due to the magazine’s defense of Indian democracy. Threats of violence are taken seriously. ”Living under a constant, simmering threat is, for Jose, evidence that he’s doing something right as a journalist,” Crowell writes. The situation is worsening.

As tense as the atmosphere was for India’s free press following Modi’s first election, things have only worsened since. A number of editors claim to have been bullied by Modi loyalists seeking to remove online coverage that was critical of the BJP; newspapers that have published negative stories have been penalized financially, often through the loss of government-funded advertisements. At the same time, journalists at mainstream outlets have become ever more explicit, if not boastful, about their political connections. When Arun Jaitley, the BJP’s finance minister, died in August 2019, a reporter from one of India’s largest television channels, Times Now, tweeted: “I’ve lost my Guiding Light my mentor. Who will I call every morning now?”

Most sinister of all, the censorship of Modi’s critics has escalated into violence. Since he first came into office, twelve journalists have been killed because of their work, and at least nine have been imprisoned. In 2017, the prominent journalist and editor Gauri Lankesh was gunned down in the early evening in front of her estate in Bangalore. Lankesh, an outspoken feminist and human-rights activist famous for her left-wing tabloidesque attacks on Hindu-nationalist figures, was a close friend of Jose’s—the two had worked together covering contentious riots in Goa in 2005. Her death confirmed the seriousness of what Indian journalists were up against under the new regime. Not long after, a right-wing nationalist followed by Modi on Twitter posted: “One bitch dies a dog’s death all the puppies cry in the same tune.”

After Lankesh’s murder, Jose began implementing protocols for Caravan’s staff to follow: All communications are now handled on encrypted channels, such as ProtonMail or Signal (WhatsApp, he believes, is compromised in India), and reporters working on sensitive stories are instructed to be especially vigilant in protecting their sources. And yet, like almost everyone else I spoke with at Caravan, Jose wasn’t all that interested in talking about the government’s intimidation. “You can’t slow down your work just because something has happened. There are certain requirements of the job.” Rather, he was eager to know whether I’d been following their coverage of the mysterious death of Indian special-court judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya (twenty-eight stories and counting), or whether I’d read their cover story about how the RSS had been systematically infiltrating India’s intellectual spaces.

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How Covid Is Decimating British Music Journalism

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Few countries have a more robust culture of music journalism than England. “Music is such an inescapable part of the British cultural landscape,” journalist Pat Long writes in the book about the famous music weekly NME, “that it’s strange to think of a time when it wasn’t ghettoised in a weekly newspaper, when families didn’t spend their summer attending well-provisioned inter-generational rock festivals, when parents didn’t swap music with their teenage children.” Imagination is no longer necessary. British listeners have no concerts to attend. Advertisers have no events to sell. And with few stores open to sell physical issues of magazines, Covid-19 is threatening UK music publications, from Uncut to Metal Hammer, the way it has so many communities and business. For The Guardian, Laura Snapes writes about how British music publications are struggling during the pandemic, how they are working together, and what it might take to survive.

Music magazines have “been on the edge of sustainability” for a long time, says Douglas McCabe, of the media research group Enders Analysis. Print advertising has dwindled. There are plentiful free online publications. Key titles have closed: in 2018, NME axed its 66-year print incarnation (the brand survives online). Every year brings headlines about shrinking sales figures.

But many British music magazine editors and publishers say they were thriving in straitened times, at least before the pandemic. “The huge drop-off that most magazines experienced in the early 2010s has, relatively speaking, flattened out for many brands,” says the editor of Metal Hammer, Merlin Alderslade. “Most of our issues in 2019 were actually up year on year.”

Paul Geoghegan, the editor of global music magazine Songlines and managing director of Mark Allen Group music publications including Gramophone and Jazzwise, said the brand’s titles were sustainable before March. Stuart Williams, the publisher at Future Publishing – home to publications including Classic Rock and Metal Hammer – said its 13 music titles were profitable in April 2020, “when half the shops in the UK were closed and the population was barely allowed out.”

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