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The 25 Most Popular Longreads Exclusives of 2020

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

Our most popular exclusive stories of 2020. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

1. The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People

Rachel Nuwer | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)

A headline-grabbing murder-for-hire plot helped expose the dark side of exotic animal ownership in the U.S. Is there now enough momentum to reform the industry?

2. Whatever Happened to ______ ?

Anonymous | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,879 words)

Envy over her success led her husband, also a writer, to become violent. She fights every day for her safety — and to avoid being relegated to obscurity like so many writers who are mothers. Read more…

Open the Door to the Political World of Narnia

Photo by E. Charbonneau/WireImage for Disney Pictures. Getty Images.

C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. The adventures of dwarves, talking animals, and some plucky children have engaged people throughout generations — but Lewis was selling more than just stories — he was also selling Christianity, having discovered, “that a children’s book was the best way of conveying his devoutly Christian message to the world.” While Christianity is indisputably intertwined with the chronicles, according to Mark Jones, writing for The Independent, Lewis’ work also contains a less obvious theme — politics. When we walk with Lucy through the cupboard door into Narnia, we should be aware we are entering a world with a political agenda.

… The four children from England are now kings and queens of Narnia. This is how they rule: “They made good laws and kept the peace … and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live.”

I don’t know if Boris Johnson read Narnia as a child. He’d be a rare English middle-class child if he hadn’t. But the adult Johnson could easily lift those words for his next manifesto. As a summary of benign, libertarian Conservative politics, it is nigh-on perfect. And it’s the libertarians who are most on his back now. A visit to Narnia might do him the power of good.

In Narnia Lewis created a vision of these islands that Johnson, not to say Michael Gove and Nigel Farage would heartily endorse. It’s a happy, small, independent nation, bursting with neighbourliness and godliness, where the food is honest and healthy, the beer is excellent, where everyone knows their place – and they’re happy with it.

Narnia also resents modernism and progress — apparent in the third chronicle, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 

The central theme of the story is a familiar one: a priggish, unpleasant boy called Eustace Scrubb comes to acknowledge god through the figure of Aslan, learning courage, steadfastness and loyalty along the way. He has a Lewisian mountain to climb.

On that first page we discover Eustace’s mother and father are “modern parents” in the manner satirised a few decades later in Viz magazine. He calls them Harold and Alberta, not mother and father. They are “very up to date and advanced people”. Among their many sins – and there is no question Lewis does view these things as sins – they are vegetarian, teetotal non-smokers who (shame!) like to have their windows open and, bizarrely – what was on Lewis’s mind? – “wore a special kind of underclothes”.

But don’t despair of Narnia just yet. It may be full of religious and political messages you are not expecting, but it is also a magical story that children have loved for 70 years.

But there are other roads we can take. Lewis had every chance to “get at” me, in Pullman’s words: I’ve read the chronicles dozens of times as well as his adult novels and Christian apologetics. Yet I turned out to be an atheist, liberal pro-European – a Narnia-loving one.

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Castles in the Sky

Longreads Pick

“While renovating a house in San Francisco, a couple discovered a diary, hidden away for more than a century. It held a love story—and a mystery.”

Source: The Atavist
Published: Nov 30, 2020
Length: 34 minutes (8,600 words)

How Should We Talk About Suicide Online?

electravk

After her son, Junior, killed himself in April 2020, Kelli Wilson discovered that he’d been active on a “pro-choice” website — the choice in question being to kill oneself. In her deep dive into the intersection of suicide and the internet, Vice writer Shayla Love describes how Wilson is now advocating for legislation that would “increase the liability website servers have for the content on the sites they host.” Love doesn’t name the website Junior frequented “due to the concerns of experts who believe that naming it explicitly could lead to self-harm by distressed people.” She refers to it instead as “Suicide Solution.” It wasn’t an easy choice to make, Love explains, because there’s nothing easy when it comes to suicide — including assigning blame:

I wrestled with how to write about a site like Suicide Solution. Even publishing an article at this length, that includes details of what makes the site dangerous, is a controversial choice. Suicide survivors and researchers alike cautioned against publishing the site’s real name. At least one expert I spoke to was hesitant to be interviewed at all because of the fear that they would contribute to driving more people to the site. And, in fact, it might. In one thread I read on Suicide Solution about how people found the website, several users referenced a past VICE article from 2015. Our choice to not to use Suicide Solution’s real name is a reflection of the uncertainty that plagues this arena— about how the internet confers risk, how the ease of finding the site contributes to that risk, and the variability in how people will use the forum.

Still, [April] Foreman [ a psychologist on the executive board of the American Association of Suicidology], said that it makes sense to think that if we just control all the information online about suicide, then people won’t die by suicide anymore. But Suicide Solution’s many incarnations throughout the decades are enough proof that a community like this one may never fully disappear. Trying too hard to stifle it could only drive it back to the Dark Web, out of sight.

“Suicide was a leading cause of death for youth before the internet and before social media, before bulletin boards,” Foreman said. “It has gone up some, but it was a leading cause of death before all of those things because something else is going on. At the end of the day, you could get rid of that website. And I don’t think that you would see an appreciable change at all in in suicide deaths.”

Instead, she thinks the more critical question to ask is: What need is Suicide Solution meeting—even dangerously so—and how do we create systems and supports around the person so that they don’t have to turn only to the internet to feel supported?

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The Promise That Tested My Parents Until the End

Longreads Pick

“As long as he is here, their story, however unlikely, is not yet over. She cries because the end of him is the end of a possibility. And I think, not for the first time, how little I still know about love.”

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 23, 2020
Length: 15 minutes (3,852 words)

‘Transforming Craft Into An Act of Protest’: Embroidery In Response to Femicide in Mexico

Photo by Eva Elijas

In “Memory Weavers,” a piece in Hazlitt on the femicide crisis in Mexico, Amandas Ong writes about Bordamos Feminicidios, an embroidery collective that sews the stories of murdered women and, through their handmade creations, raises awareness of female-targeted violence.

There are only three basic requirements to be part of Bordamos Feminicidios, and for Minerva to assign you a story to embroider. First, the embroiderer must tell the narrative in first person. “I want them,” she says, “to really try and imagine the life of this woman, who we only know in her last moments.” To honor her is to build a profound empathy with the fantasy of a life fuller and more complex than a broken body. Second, the embroidery should be done on a pañuelo, a standard white handkerchief, though Minerva has begun allowing deviations to this rule, because she finds it endearing when the embroiderers add personal touches to their work. “I have received tablecloths or fabric of all shapes and sizes, stained with coffee and wine, with little cats and flowers sewn into the bottom,” she says. “I love it. It means that these women are working on the embroidery everywhere and whenever they can, and the decorative details are like little kisses to the deceased.” The third rule, she says, is that the words must be in purple.

Transforming craft into an act of protest against indifference, against the lack of willpower to reverse or address a societal ill, is something that Mexican women, and women around the world, are familiar with. For centuries both in reality and the literary imagination, women have been the faithful scribes of tales revealing personal and social resistance to injustice or oppression. They did not do this with pens, or quills, or rigid implements that were good for scratching script onto stone—all of these were traditionally believed to be instruments that wielded real power in the realm of the public, where only men’s words counted. Instead women spoke through the objects they had created with their hands, some of which would never cross the threshold of the home.

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‘My Tongue Swallowing the Taste of Home Soil’: On Filipino Food, Family, and Identity

WASHINGTON DC - September 5TH: Sisig from Purple Patch shot on September 5th, 2017 in Washington DC. (Photo by Goran Kosanovic for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

At The Margins — the online magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) — writer, filmmaker, and photographer Jill Damatac explores identity, colonalism, and memory through the lens of family and Filipino food. In “Dirty Kitchen,” Damatac shares two recipes — tinola, a ginger chicken soup; and sisig, a diced-up pork dish seasoned with calamansi juice, onions, and chili peppers — and weaves cooking instructions throughout sharp, sensory prose.

On the taste of tinola, and memories of her childhood:

When I was little, before I departed the sunny, Pacific chaos of our world for the chilly, Atlantic silence of the new world, we often had tinola for Sunday lunch at Lolo and Lola’s house, where I would spend weekends. In the early mornings, Lolo and I would stroll the barrio streets to buy fresh pandesal from the local bakery, me skipping along in mumbled song with the roosters, him punching the air with calisthenic fists, just as he had done with the American GIs during the war. In Pennsylvania, where he had followed us a year after we left, he would walk me to and from school, the two of us passing a bag of sticky, sour sampalok between us, spitting out the smooth, shiny seeds into our palms. He always wore his pristinely white Reeboks and sometimes his ten-gallon cowboy hat. I still remember my shame on the days he would arrive in that hat.

It was during those early years in the land of the free and the home of the brave that I first felt shame, which is a hunger for pride, and loneliness, which is a hunger for belonging. Tinola’s plain, clear-brothed, ginger-laced embrace helped to sate these hungers, my tongue swallowing the taste of home soil.

Sauté the garlic, ginger, and onion in oil in a large pot, stirring until soft. 

On sisig, but also colonialism, home, and identity:

“You want to know why my sisig is special?” Tito asked me recently over a sizzling plate. We were sharing a meal next to the volcano, Taal. I had just returned to the islands after twenty-two years of undocumented American exile.

“Because I make it with pork belly. Usually it’s made with the cheap parts of the pig, ha. Why should we eat only cheap parts? And love. I cook it with love.”

Sisig is no longer made with just the discarded cuts, but its poisonous effects remain. The Americans are gone, but their imperious scars linger. No longer trapped by our colonizers, we trap ourselves. We transform to survive, but we still bear the boiled, charred, gristled remnants of our past. I will continue to exist in a hungry space between longing and belonging, for my body, exported from its country of birth, deported from its country of growth, now has only sense and memory to call home.

Serve immediately, using two large spoons to stir in the eggs to cook. Enjoy with garlic fried rice. 

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There She Goes: How to ‘Feminize’ a Face

Morsa Images

When most people think of the medicine of gender reassignment, hormone therapy and genital surgery likely come to mind. In a thoughtfully written feature in The Guardian, journalist Jenny Kleeman describes a new frontier: facial feminization surgery, or FFS. Kleeman introduces readers to trans women who, unsatisfied with — or traumatized by — the way they are perceived physically, visit surgeons who shave jawlines, plump cheeks, lift brow lines, and perform other procedures that can make faces read as more feminine. “I’m not trying to make myself beautiful,” says Sophia Drake, the main subject of the story. “I see testosterone as a poison in my body, a poison that I had to deal with for 20 years. I want to put my face to the way it would have been if testosterone had never been [there].” Her surgeon, Dr. Keith Altman, operated on Drake in October 2019:

There was no more easy chatter between the doctors when Altman returned to the theater to operate on Drake’s brow and forehead. This was the most difficult part of the surgery. It would remove the parts of Drake’s face she thought were most male, the features she hated so much. Altman brushed sterile aqueous iodine over her face and hair, rendering her first rusty red and then yellow. He made an incision into her hairline with a swift, steady hand.

He drew back her skin in either direction from her hairline until it gathered in folds on one side at the tip of her nose, and draped back across her crown on the other. With a tiny steel mallet and a chisel, Altman set to work carefully chipping away her brow bone, before filing it with a tiny drill bit. Then he stopped, and everyone in theatre craned in to see the difference.

When he was satisfied with the result, Altman changed his gloves and turned his attention to her forehead. The MRI on the lightbox showed Drake had a large sinus cavity with a thin wall; the challenge was to saw the bone down without perforating the sinus, and the best way to do this was to remove part of her forehead entirely. Altman drew a 5cm by 3cm rectangle on to her skull with marker pen. He sliced into it with another fine tool, then prized out the section of bone. He held it in his hand as he filed it back, turning a flat plane into a gentle curve. When he put it back in place, he pulled the skin over it, tilting his head to the side to check his work. Finally, the piece of forehead was fixed back in the skull with two 4mm titanium plates, which his trainee, Maini, secured using a tiny screwdriver. Drake’s skin was smoothed back for a last time. “Good,” Altman nodded.

As Kleeman details, FFS raises challenging questions about privilege and beauty standards. The surgery is expensive and not covered by the National Health Service in most of the United Kingdom. According to Juno Roche, author of Trans Power, FFS contributes “a kind of two-tier system where, on the whole, the most successful trans people are beautiful people that pass. People who are proud to be trans, and those people who can’t afford the surgery, fall into a separate category. That’s most people. And we have to create safety for everyone.” Then again, Roche adds, “Trans people deserve an easy life. This is a tough gig.”

For Drake, the results of FFS were life-changing. Kleeman interviewed her two months into post-surgery:

The change was almost imperceptible to me, at first. But I could soon detect a new poise: her face seemed narrower, and strangely her shoulders did, too. Her dimples were more prominent, her eyes looked brighter and more expressive. There was a faint, pale pink sliver of a scar along her hairline, mostly covered by the dark roots of her fringe.

“It was just enough, without being too much,” she told me. “The hairline frames my face better. I find that my eyes aren’t sunken, they’re further out. I feel that I’ve got a lot more expression in my eyebrows now. Other people spot this”—she cupped her hands around her jaw—”more than I do. But when I go back and look at old pictures, I see a massive difference.”

The biggest change was in Drake’s demeanor. She no longer sat with her arms across her chest or played with her jewelry. She was open, at ease, comfortable.

“It’s made me so much happier. Calmer. I can sit and relax in ways I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to,” she said. “I don’t walk around any more worrying that people are looking at me.”

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The Mysterious Case of a Nameless Hiker

Big Cypress National Preserve, Naples, Florida. (Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

He was known on the trail as “Mostly Harmless.” He started his journey in a state park north of New York City and simply went south — down to Virginia, then to northern Georgia, and finally to Florida — his route pieced together through accounts from fellow hikers and others he encountered. At Wired, Nicholas Thompson recounts the story of this friendly nameless hiker, eventually found dead in a tent at Nobles Camp in Big Cypress National Preserve on July 2018, 600 miles south of where he started.

Since the discovery of this man’s body, no one has been able to figure out who he is. But now, with advanced DNA testing technology and cutting-edge genomics from a company called Othram, the mystery may soon be solved.

She told him everything she knew. And she shared the original post, and her photo, all over Facebook. Soon there were dozens of people jumping in. They had seen the hiker too. They had journeyed with him for a few hours or a few days. They had sat at a campfire with him. There was a GoPro video in which he appeared. People remembered him talking about a sister in either Sarasota or Saratoga. They thought he had said he was from near Baton Rouge. One person remembered that he ate a lot of sticky buns; another said that he loved ketchup. But no one knew his name. When the body of Chris McCandless was found in the wilds of Alaska in the summer of 1992 without any identification, it took authorities only two weeks to figure out his identity. A friend in South Dakota, who’d known McCandless as “Alex,” heard a discussion of the story on AM radio and called the authorities. Clues followed quickly, and McCandless’ family was soon found.

Now it’s 2020, and we have the internet. Facebook knows you’re pregnant almost before you do. Amazon knows your light bulb is going to go out right before it does. Put details on Twitter about a stolen laptop and people will track down the thief in a Manhattan bar. The internet can decode family mysteries, identify long-forgotten songs, solve murders, and, as this magazine showed a decade ago, track down almost anyone who tries to shed their digital skin. This case seemed easy.

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Roxie Laybourne: the World’s First Forensic Ornithologist

Starlings (Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

If you love birds, you’ll enjoy “Bird Man” by Eva Holland. It’s a deeply researched essay on extreme birding and the innate human need to classify the world around us.

Using her deep knowledge of bird anatomy, she solved crimes of passion and busted poachers. She helped reduce bird-strike-induced aviation accidents and disasters. At Audobon, Chris Sweeney introduces us to birder-extraordinaire Roxie Laybourne, the world’s first forensic ornithologist, who died in 2003 at age 92.

As part of a nine-month investigation, officials sent the bird remains to the Smithsonian Institution, where they made their way to the desk of Roxie Laybourne. Laybourne had been at the Smithsonian for 15 years and during that time had prepared thousands of bird specimens from around the world for research purposes. Over all that time and all those birds, she had started homing in on the subtle differences in the structure of feathers. It wasn’t hard for her to confirm that the birds hit in Boston were European Starlings.

The FAA’s final accident report, issued in July 1962, concluded that Flight 375 had struck a large flock—perhaps as many as 20,000 starlings—as it lifted off. This, in turn, caused three of the four engines to malfunction in a way that was impossible for the pilot to recover.

For most people, the accident report closed the books on Flight 375. For Laybourne, it marked the start of a remarkable scientific journey that was at times as thrilling as it was bizarre. She’d go on to establish the field of forensic ornithology, and the methods she developed for feather identification would be used to prosecute murderers, bust poachers, and inform conservation efforts. Most importantly, her work would entirely reshape our understanding of the threat birds and airplanes pose to one another—a threat that continues to hang over every airplane in the sky today.

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