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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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…

Longreads Best of 2020: Writing on COVID-19

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors featured many COVID-19 stories from across the web, and below, we’ve narrowed down 11 picks that really resonated with us. This roundup is focused on reported features; we initially included a few pandemic essays in this category, but those will instead appear in the upcoming Best of Essays list. 

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How the Pandemic Defeated America (Ed Yong, The Atlantic)

The Atlantic‘s coverage of COVID-19 was exceptional this year, and Yong’s deep, thoughtful September feature lays it all out. How did the U.S. get here? Everything that went wrong was predictable and preventable, and despite all of its resources and scientific expertise, America’s leaders failed monumentally to control the virus at every turn.

The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.

Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess (Doug Bock Clark, GQ)

Another devastating read, “The Pariah Ship” by Michael Smith, Drake Bennett, and K. Oanh Haat, recounts the nightmare journey of Holland America’s MS Zaandam.

The pandemic has exposed the flaws of tourism, and cruise ships are a symbol of the disastrous effects that COVID-19 has had on the travel industry as a whole. Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess, which departed on January 20 this year from Japan’s Port of Yokohama, was the first ship to suffer a major outbreak. Clark’s account of the voyage and subsequent quarantine of the ship’s 3,711 passengers and crew is riveting yet terrifying. He weaves stories of numerous people on board, from the more-privileged (a pair of traveling couples called the “Four Amigos”) to the overworked and underprotected (like security crewmember Sonali Thakkar). His reporting of the U.S. government’s response is superb, especially from the perspective of Dr. James Lawler, the infectious-disease expert called in to lead the evacuation of American passengers back to the U.S. We also get a glimpse of what the experience is like for the ship’s captain, Gennaro Arma, who was eventually the last person to disembark.

The Amigos, reduced now to three, along with the 325 other American evacuees, were still waiting on the buses. They had spent three hours idling on the pier and then, once they drove to the airport, sat on the tarmac for two more hours. Now, as the delay extended into a sixth hour, the passengers were nearing revolt. They were exhausted. And more problematically for the largely elderly passengers: The buses had no bathrooms.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where it was still Sunday afternoon, the fate of the waylaid evacuees was being decided. Around the time the passengers were exiting the Diamond Princess, Japanese officials had blindsided their American counterparts with the news that some of the passengers boarding the buses had actually tested positive several days before. Soon many of the highest-level members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were arguing about what to do. Representatives from the CDC continued to fear spreading the virus. William Walters, the deputy chief medical officer for the State Department, wanted to bring everyone home anyway. Those urging the evacuation noted that the planes had been prepared with isolation units to contain the sick.

As the debate raged, the evacuees were demanding to be let off the buses, quarantine be damned, to find a bathroom. Carl was breathing so hard his masked breath fogged his glasses as he strained to control his bladder. Some seniors were crying. Finally, a few were allowed to relieve themselves in bottles beside the bus or were brought to a nearby terminal.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mosi Secret, David Farrier, Ferris Jabr, Blake Butler, and Eoghan Walsh.

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1. Visible Men: Black Fathers Talk About Losing Sons to Police Brutality

Mosi Secret | GQ | December 10, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,072 words)

“We asked the fathers and father figures of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake to reflect on the violence that forever altered their families’ lives—and what it means to raise a Black man in America.”

2. Hand in Glove

David Farrier | Orion Magazine | September 10, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,967 words)

“And, formed as they are from durable polymers and loaded with toxic plasticizers and other chemicals, plastic gloves can last for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Yet in discarding them (or any plastic object, come to that), we act as if none of this touches us.”

3. The Social Life of Forests

Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | December 2, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,916 words)

“Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?”

4. Molly

Blake Butler | The Volta | December 1, 2020 | 29 minutes (7,486 words)

“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began.

5. If Proust Ate Pringles — On Memory, Loss, and the Persistence of Heineken

Eoghan Walsh | Good Beer Hunting | December 8, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)

“That was the definitive goodbye, but when a loved one dies of a terminal illness they don’t die just once. They are, instead, dying over and over again, as grim milestones accumulate with you powerless to arrest the dawning inevitability of the final, conclusive death.”

On Trees as Social Creatures and Fungi as the ‘Fabric of the Forest’

Photo by Lukas Hartmann

In Ferris Jabr’s story on the interconnectedness of trees at The New York Times Magazine, take a stroll through the old-growth forests of British Columbia with Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist whose research has changed our understanding of trees. (Simard was the inspiration for Patricia Westerford, the dendrologist in Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory.)

Trees were once viewed as individual and solitary organisms, competing with other trees for resources. But the forest ecosystem is supported by mycorrhizal networks: an underground fungal web through which trees exchange carbon, water, and nutrients and communicate with one another. “It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society,” writes Jabr. “There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity and perhaps even selflessness.” It’s a fascinating dive into the social life of forests, and you will never look at trees the same way again.

She handed me a thin strip of root the length of a pencil from which sprouted numerous rootlets still woolly with dirt. The rootlets branched into even thinner filaments. As I strained to see the fine details, I realized that the very tips of the smallest fibers looked as though they’d been capped with bits of wax. Those gummy white nodules, Simard explained, were mycorrhizal fungi that had colonized the pine’s roots. They were the hubs from which root and fungus cast their intertwined cables through the soil, opening channels for trade and communication, linking individual trees into federations. This was the very fabric of the forest — the foundation of some of the most populous and complex societies on Earth.

Trees have always been symbols of connection. In Mesoamerican mythology, an immense tree grows at the center of the universe, stretching its roots into the underworld and cradling earth and heaven in its trunk and branches. Norse cosmology features a similar tree called Yggdrasil. A popular Japanese Noh drama tells of wedded pines that are eternally bonded despite being separated by a great distance. Even before Darwin, naturalists used treelike diagrams to represent the lineages of different species. Yet for most of recorded history, living trees kept an astonishing secret: Their celebrated connectivity was more than metaphor — it had a material reality. As I knelt beneath that whitebark pine, staring at its root tips, it occurred to me that my whole life I had never really understood what a tree was. At best I’d been aware of just one half of a creature that appeared to be self-contained but was in fact legion — a chimera of bewildering proportions.

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Longreads Best of 2020: Music Writing

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

A long, long time ago / I can still remember / How that music used to make me smile
—Don McLean, American Pie

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Like A Shovel and a Rope (David Ramsey, Oxford American)

In the before times, a little over a year ago, we traveled to Savannah, Georgia, for a music festival. It was fall, but still sweltering. We stood for hours directly in front of the stage, shoulder-to-shoulder with sweaty strangers who, too, love music. This seems like a heat-induced fever dream, an act now incomprehensible. The day’s highlight was seeing Shovels & Rope — the husband-and-wife duo of Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst — play live. The energy and intensity of their performance outshone the sun on that humid Georgia afternoon.

At Oxford American, David Ramsey’s intimate portrait of the hardest-working couple in rock ‘n’ roll is a love letter written in 40 short parts. Ramsey captures not only the je ne sais quoi of Shovels & Rope, he documents the down and dirty, the ordinary sleepless exasperation of raising a family while writing, recording, and touring.

Many of their best songs have a deliberateness on the topic of how to build a life, both wistful and hard-edged. “Making something out of nothing with a scratch and a hope,” they sing on “Birmingham,” their origin-myth anthem, “two old guitars like a shovel and a rope.”

There is a way of singing that is a distant cousin of the temper tantrum. A sound that simmers at the bend and snap of the spirit, fragile and fierce. We are peculiar animals that sing songs to each other, but we are still animals.

I think what got me hooked on the way that Cary Ann sings shares something of this current, the way something so powerful could have such brittle edges. Shovels & Rope is like this, too—they seem to conjure in each other a kind of frenzy, grease and fury, tender cries at the edge of a scream. They are an anthemic band, but their medium is the fragility of the anthem: Something about to break.

The thing that they do, I hesitate to say that you have to be there, but—there is an intimacy and devilment to their live performance, a lift and crash, that has been hard to capture on record. So that their art, like the lives they have carved out for themselves, is a thing on the move, uncatchable as a storm. Home and the road and home on the road.

Pure Magic: The Oral History of Prince’s Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show (Alan Siegel, The Ringer)

When I think of Prince, I remember his musical genius. How when he did something, he did it his own way and how his way was always a sharp cut above, a sneak peek into his brilliance, which seemed to radiate from him like heat from the sun. His approach to the 2007 Superbowl half-time show was no different, from how he secured the job and created the setlist, to how he ignored the traditional pre-event press conference requirement to play a few songs instead. Then of course, there was his legendary game-day performance — in the pouring rain, to boot. A truer artist there never was.

Meglen: We had a little meal, just the four of us. At the end of the meal, Prince reached down, and he had a little portable DVD player, because that’s what you had at the time. We weren’t going online at that point. He had a bunch of the previous Super Bowl halftimes. And he basically was critiquing them, saying, “This was good but I wouldn’t have done this.”

Hayes: This is what his thing is: “I don’t care about how you did it before. This is how I do it.”

Meglen: Which finally prompted Saltz to go, “What would you do?” He looked at Saltz, and in his normal Prince way, said, “Sir, follow me, please.” And the three of us followed him upstairs into the living room. And the entire band was standing there in position.

Hayes: He tried to give us a heads-up just to make sure we were on point. Just so, like, everybody knew their stuff.

Meglen: He went over, put on his guitar, and said, “Hit it.”

Arzate: He gave us actually all a private show. The cleaning people, myself, and the executives.

Mischer: When we said, “You’ll have to have a press conference. They would like to interview you,” Prince point blank said, “I don’t do interviews.”

Mischer: He said, “I’m just gonna play for them.” And we said “OK.”

Shelby J.: As we’re walking to the stage I’m like, “I think I’m gonna be sick.” All I can see ahead of me is all these cameras. And so there were these doors over to my left, I didn’t say a word to anybody. I just kindly excused myself for a moment. There were bushes outside. I literally got sick, stood back up, and was like, “OK.” And people were [there] in their Super Bowl garb, but they don’t know me from a can of paint, so I was cool with that. I shut the door and came back in.

Adande: Prince and all his people come out and kind of pick up their instruments, and take their positions.

Flanked by Australian dancers Nandy and Maya McClean—the Twinz—Prince stepped up to the microphone in a salmon-colored suit, thanked Mischer, and addressed the reporters sitting in front of him. “We hope we don’t rock your ears too much,” he said. “Contrary to rumor, I’d like to take a few questions right now.” At that moment, someone in the crowd blurted out, “Prince, how do you feel about performing …”

Adande: I think it was a plant.

Gongaware: It was one of the sportswriters.

Adande: Before he could even finish [the question], Prince just breaks into “Johnny B. Goode.”

Push Play (Chris Dennis, Guernica)

Throughout our lives, most thinking human beings struggle with the question of who we are. As Chris Dennis so eloquently puts it, “We align ourselves with some predominant pattern to alleviate not just our own loneliness, but the perceived loneliness of others around us—until some wild, original thing appears and, against our simpler nature, we leap for it.” For Dennis, loving the music of Dolly Parton and her unabashed conviction in being her made-up, bouffant, silicone-enhanced self helped him understand his own identity.

In the fall of 1986 I turned seven years old, and my father gave me a used black Magnavox boombox. It was sitting on the coffee table when I came home from school. “Push play,” my dad said, and the look on his face confused me, until I realized that the surprise—the actual gift—was the cassette tape he’d already put in the player. So I pushed play. Looking back, it’s obvious that he had fast-forwarded to the song he knew I would immediately recognize and want to hear, because I’d heard it on the radio in the car several times and sang all the words. But when I pushed play, I suddenly felt embarrassed, uncertain, because I loved the song very much and the gift meant that my dad knew: that he saw me, and approved of my loving it. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted my dad to understand me in this way. I had some ineffable sense that loving Dolly Parton might be something I should hide.

Meet the Revolutionary Women Strumming Their Way Into the World of Flamenco Guitar (Lavinia Spalding, AFAR)

I started to study guitar four years ago, finally making good on a dream I’d put off and denied myself for decades. A few years later, I started studying bass too. Of all the decisions in my life, committing to music has had a profound influence on me, on how I perceive my limitations and my potential. It’s a daily labor of love, where focus and concentration bring small, yet regular rewards from learning to read music, playing songs, training my ear, and working on rhythm and timing. While I’ll never achieve mastery, Lavinia Spalding’s piece at AFAR immediately resonated with me. A child guitar prodigy, she gave up playing in her teens. In a bid to reclaim her music skills and reconnect with her late father, Spalding travels to Spain to study with three tocaoras — the oh-so-rare female Flamenco guitar masters. This piece reminds me of the sheer joy of learning music and how powerful a good teacher’s encouragement can be.

You don’t need to read music to play flamenco, she says. “Flamenco is ninety percent improvisational,” she explains. “It comes from the houses; it’s deep inside the people. It’s an ethnic music, not a scholastic music.” She suggests I simply follow along while she plays falsetas, or soleares melodies. Then her hands explode across the strings like fireworks, and all I can do is stare. And panic. And realize how unprepared I actually am.

Fortunately, she’s as encouraging as she is talented and tenacious. “You’ve got it!” she says again and again during our hour together. She repeats this praise even when it’s abundantly clear that I have not, in fact, got it. Toward the end of our lesson, she suggests I record a video of her playing slowly. Back in my rented apartment, I watch the video 50 times and practice fanatically—once for six hours straight—until I memorize the falsetas. And when my fingertips start tingling, I’m euphoric. I run my thumb over them like they’re a row of tiny talismans.

“I miss my body when it was ferocious”: The Transfiguration of Paul Curreri (Brendan Fitzgerald, Longreads)

Imagine that there is a thing you are put on this earth to do, and then suddenly, you’re no longer physically able to do it. This is exactly what happened to singer-songwriter Paul Curreri, who was cut down in his musical prime, sidelined by permanent injury. “Paul Curreri gives what few songwriters can,” Matt Dellinger wrote in The New Yorker in 2002. “It hits you soon and hard that you’re hearing something exquisite.” In this deeply researched and carefully crafted Longreads feature, journalist Brendan Fitzgerald documents Curreri’s uneasy relationship with his body and his art after suffering damage to the primary tools of his trade — his fretting hand and vocal chords.

In 2008, Curreri’s body began to mutiny. A vocal hemorrhage canceled a tour; another silenced him for more than a year. He self-produced two more studio albums, then he and his wife left Charlottesville. They tried Berlin, and then Austin, Texas. In 2012, while working on demos for a new album, Curreri injured his voice a third time, after which his body seemed all at once to come undone. A twinge in his fretting hand appeared overnight and did not resolve; a doctor told him the pain would not improve. Both arms became inflamed and ached in such a way that, for a time, Curreri found it hard to turn a doorknob or hold a fork. He shelved the new songs and moved with Sproule back to Charlottesville.

Curreri’s appeal, for me, had always lived in his brazen standoffs with limitation, failure, and dissolution. “Beauty fades — it goes a-crackin’ and a-juttin’,” he sang on 2004’s The Spirit of the Staircase. “Some folks go slow, some all of a sudden.” For years, Curreri’s work had shouted, and so he became a shouter of singular beauty. Then, he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

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

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. 

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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.

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.

The Secrets of a Hidden Diary

Courtesy of Christina Lalanne

When writer Christina Lalanne bought an old house in San Francisco, she was sure it had a story to tell. What she didn’t expect was that the story would come to her in actual words. As Lalanne details in “Castles in the Sky,” her story for The Atavist Magazine*, the words were written in a diary and in letters that fell from the ceiling of the house’s basement while she and her husband were renovating it. The documents had been hidden for more than a century, stashed away by the man who built the house in 1910. His name, Hans Jorgen Hansen, was inscribed in the diary, which was mostly composed in Danish, but he wasn’t the only person to write in it. So did a woman named Anna—a fact Lalanne found odd, given that Hans’s wife was named Christine:

What drama or scandal was locked in these pages? Handwriting is a funny thing, not least because few people read it much anymore. Anna’s was neat, polite, and comfortably contained by the page. Hans, whose writing made up 90 percent of our find, had a bolder stroke. His flourishes veered maddeningly into indecipherability. In places, the pressure he exerted on his pen had made the ink pool and the letters bleed.

I sent a few diary passages to various Danish friends of friends, but while the language was theirs, none wanted to spend the time required to decipher such baroque penmanship. Frustrated, I made out the letters as best I could and typed the words they seemed to form into Google Translate. At first what came back was gibberish. But the longer I spent with the words, the more of them I got right, and the more the translator divulged actual language. I was also becoming familiar with Hans’s scrawl. His “D” was the longest, most elegant version of that letter I’d ever seen. It marked the beginning of the diary entry in which he lovingly recalled meeting Anna when they were children.

I eventually typed every word from the diaries and letters—some 20,000 in all—into the translator, and a picture of Hans and Anna’s story began to come into focus. Mat and I also did some genealogical research, amassing supporting facts. I found documentation of Anna and her grandmother’s 1897 passage to New York via Ellis Island. I found the household in St. Joseph, Michigan, where Anna was employed. I found evidence of Hans’s departure from Denmark after his stint in Faaborg—a voyage to Sydney, Australia, and onward to Brisbane—as well as his death certificate and a record of his grave just outside San Francisco, which we visited. We reconstructed Hans’s family tree and found a great-grandson on Facebook. We learned that Hans had three children with the woman named Christine, and that their marriage ended in divorce.

I was sure I knew why: Hans and Anna could only love each other. What then had kept them apart?

“Castles in the Sky” is a love story intertwined with Lalanne’s meditation on her relationship with the past, including the loss of her parents when she was still in grammar school. Through dogged sleuthing and poignant reflection, she seeks to unravel the mystery of what happened to Hans and Anna:

I have a vivid memory, early one morning when my father was in the hospital, of my uncle making his way up the carpeted stairs to the bedrooms where my siblings and I slept. I was nine years old. I knew my uncle was bringing bad news. How is that possible, to just know? Maybe his steps were slower or heavier than normal. Or maybe you can feel someone you love slipping away from this world.

Every few years I have a different experience of knowing. I’ll be in a crowd or walking down the street, and I’ll catch a glimpse of my mother or father. Something about the way they move or hold themselves or brush their hair from their face makes me certain. I’m wrong, of course, but the joy is true. If only for a moment, something I want seems real.

A similar thing happened when I finally found Anna. My trip to Denmark had furnished me with the facts that follow a person during their life, no matter where they end up. I knew Anna’s date of birth and the village where she was born and her date of entry into the United States. I knew that her father was Danish, her mother Swedish. I found her application for a passport. I looked at her picture, her dark hair and mournful eyes. She signed her name in the same meticulous way she had in Hans’s diary.

These facts are what made me sure that the Anna I came across on Ancestry.com was unmistakably, irrefutably her. My heart leaped in my chest. Then it fell, because of where I found her and what it might mean.

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*The author of this post is the editor in chief of The Atavist, which is Longreads’ sister publication.

The Secret Group Trying to Topple North Korea’s Regime

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When writer Suki Kim heard on the news that there had been a break-in at North Korea’s embassy in Madrid, led by a young man named Adrian Hong, she “sat upright.” She had known Adrian for several years. They had crossed paths at a Korean Students Conference in 2003, after which Kim went on to write the book Without You, There Is No Us, about her time as an English teacher in Pyongyang, and Adrian became an activist who spread awareness about human rights abuses in the Hermit Kingdom. Now he was being hunted by two governments. When Kim texted Adrian, he agreed to meet with her at a barbecue restaurant in Times Square. He told her that, yes, he’d led the break-in, but for good cause: He was now a leader of Free Joseon, a secretive international network of activists seeking regime change in Pyongyang:

“Regimes like this don’t collapse slowly. It happens instantly. Every revolution is that way, and this will be the same,” Adrian told me. “I don’t mean a revolution in a figurative sense. I don’t mean the revolution of the mind. Or some kind of fantasy where five hundred thousand people protest in Pyongyang and the regime just packs their bags and leaves and some transitional government comes in place. This is not like any other country, where offering them enough money will mean they will liberalize—any opening or reform will result in their insecurity. The only way to make them change is to force them to change.”

Adrian had no formal protection for his actions, not even from the U.S. government: If he was apprehended in New York for what happened in Madrid, he could be extradited and face up to 28 years in prison. In her New Yorker feature “Follow the Leader,” Kim recounts how Adrian went from working at NGOs to risking his life in the name of freedom alongside likeminded activists. One of them is Chris Ahn, who Kim called on to help with a high-profile defection. Ahn was traveling at the time:

“Holy shit, it’s perfect,” Adrian said, when Chris told him that he was in Manila. “You know what’s happened with Kim Jong Nam, right?” Chris did. The day before Adrian’s call, the eldest son of Kim Jong Il had been assassinated at the Kuala Lumpur airport, by two women who smeared a nerve agent on his face. The killing was assumed to have been ordered by Kim Jong Un, his half brother, in the interest of eliminating a potential rival. Adrian told Chris that he had just received a call from Kim Han Sol, who is believed to be Kim Jong Nam’s eldest son. According to Adrian, they were introduced in Paris, around 2013, by a mutual contact. Han Sol, who was wearing a pair of Gucci shoes, told Adrian that he was aware of his work with North Korea. The two men kept in touch. Adrian told me, “Never met a kid with so much money. Kim Jong Nam had stashed away a lot of cash during his life.” Immediately after his father’s death, Han Sol noticed that the Macau police who typically guarded his house had disappeared. He called the mutual contact to tell Adrian that he, along with his mother and his sister, needed to get out of Macau as soon as possible. It was easy to see why Han Sol would be of interest to various countries and their intelligence services. Considered by some to be the rightful heir of the former Great Leader, Han Sol represented valuable leverage to whoever captured him, dead or alive—Adrian called this a “zero-sum game.”

Adrian, who was in the U.S., asked Chris, “Can you go meet them at the airport in Taiwan tonight, and make sure that no one is following them?” Chris threw some clothes in his backpack and headed to the airport. It was after midnight when he arrived in Taipei. He had Han Sol’s flight number, and he found a small noodle stand by the gate, where Han Sol and his family could sit while he scanned the crowd for threats.

The family arrived early that morning, wearing sanitary masks to cover their faces, which wasn’t unusual in Asia even then. Han Sol was about five feet ten inches tall, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a coat, and rolling a suitcase. His mother was a pretty middle-aged woman, who reminded Chris of his own mother. Han Sol’s sister, who was wearing jeans, looked to be in her late teens. Adrian had told the family that Chris would be wearing a black T-shirt and a Dodgers cap and would answer to the name Steve. Han Sol spotted Chris and said, “Steve?” Chris nodded and said, “Let’s go.”

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