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Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2021

Author Kelly Link (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

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The Case of the Disappearing Bucatini

Bucatini pasta photographed by Amy Brothers/The Denver Post/Getty Images.

The year that was 2020 is officially over, and even though we already shared our picks for the year’s best investigative reporting, Rachel Handler’s absolutely delightful dive into the mysterious shortage of bucatini squeaked through last week and deserves a special, honorary slot on that list.

Handler’s Grub Street investigation into the disappearance of this thicker, luxurious noodle with a hole from shelves in New York and beyond is the end-of-year/new year read you didn’t know you needed.

Being educated noodle consumers, we knew that there was, more generally, a pasta shortage due to the pandemic, but we were still able to find spaghetti and penne and orecchiette — shapes which, again, insult me even in concept. The missing bucatini felt different. It was specific. Frightening. Why bucatini? Why now? Why us?

I’d like to go a step further and praise its innate bounciness and personality. If you boil bucatini for 50 percent of the time the box tells you to, cooking it perfectly al dente, you will experience a textural experience like nothing else you have encountered in your natural life. When cooked correctly, bucatini bites back. It is a responsive noodle. It is a self-aware noodle. In these times, when human social interaction carries with it the possible price of illness, bucatini offers an alternative: a social interaction with a pasta.

But the problem, I would learn, was not limited to New York. In the fall, I was speaking with my mother, a longtime resident of suburban Chicago, and, as it often does, the conversation quickly turned to pasta. “Rachel,” my mother said gravely. “I haven’t been able to find bucatini anywhere at home. Do you have any in New York?”

My heart stopped.

When Handler discovers the bucatini shortage is a much wider problem, she becomes determined to solve the mystery, first reaching out to De Cecco — her mother’s favorite bucatini brand — then going down a rabbit hole of email inquiries and phone calls with organizations like the FDA (which, as you can imagine, was a bit busy with vaccine- and pandemic-related issues), the National Pasta Association (yes, this indeed exists), and other noodle manufacturers, like Barilla. While digging deep into the history and inner workings of Big Pasta, Handler does find some answers, but she’s ultimately left with more questions.

But I sensed something more sinister was afoot, specifically regarding De Cecco–brand bucatini and its alleged skirmish with the FDA. Rosario expressed surprise at this, telling me he hadn’t heard anything about any kind of situazione with the FDA. “Maybe we’ll find some conspiracy, some worldwide thing,” he said, delighted. “That would be phenomenal. You would be remembered as the whistle-blower of the bucatini world crisis.” When I told him that De Cecco’s rep had been ignoring me, he gasped. “Maybe he’s been silenced!” he said. Rosario said he’d get back to me when he’d done his own internal investigating — and he did, mere moments later.

Carl didn’t say it, but I was pretty sure he thought about calling me “the Bernstein of Bucatini” and that my work will now help to fix the standards-of-identity issue that has long plagued our fair continents. I had confirmed that the bucatini shortage was real and understood that the bucatini shortage was a combination of factors: the pandemic’s pasta demand, how hard it is to make bucatini because of its hole, De Cecco’s strange and untimely barring from the U.S. border. But these victories felt lacking.

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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.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly Top 5 email every Friday.

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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: 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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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.

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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A Fond Farewell to a Friend: the Arecibo Telescope

The Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. (Getty Images)

We’ve been fortunate to publish Shannon Stirone at Longreads. Read “The Hunt for Planet Nine” and her latest for us, “An Atlas of the Cosmos.”

At Slate, science writer Shannon Stirone pays tribute to the Arecibo telescope, the massive, 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope that will be decommissioned after two critical cables that hold up the 900-ton device suffered irreparable damage this past summer.

At 57 years old, Arecibo has helped us look deeply into space, at light, stars, and entities beyond our planet. In doing so, it has helped us better understand ourselves as humans and our place in the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos. Stirone credits Arecibo with sparking her interest in science.

Built in the early 1960s, Arecibo was initially designed to study the Earths ionosphere, the chemically active layer in the upper atmosphere that is ionized by solar radiation.

In the decades since, it has contributed to our understanding of pulsars, near-Earth asteroids, and planets within—and beyond—our solar system.

In the world of space and astronomy, Arecibo means different things to everyone, but at the heart, it seems to hit the same for us all—this telescope meant a level of access to the cosmos that we simply can’t find anywhere else.

Losing Arecibo—or any telescope of this magnitude, or any spacecraft—drives home something I think we tend to forget: Telescopes and spacecraft aren’t just tools. They are extensions of ourselves.

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Shades of Grey

Getty Images

Ashley Stimpson | Longreads | October 2020 | 26 minutes (7,001 words)

It’s been nearly a decade since the numbers were tattooed in her ears, but they remain remarkably legible. In the right one, dots of green ink spell out 129B: Vesper was born in the twelfth month of the decade’s ninth year and was the second in her litter. The National Greyhound Association (NGA) gave that litter a unique registration number (52507), which was stamped into her moss-soft left ear. If I type these figures into the online database for retired racing greyhounds, I can learn about her life before she was ours, before she was even Vesper.

Smokin’ Josy was born to a breeder in Texas, trained in West Virginia, and raced in Florida. Over three years, she ran 70 races. She won four of them. In Naples on May 12, 2012, she “resisted late challenge inside,” to clinch victory, according to her stat sheet. In Daytona Beach on April 17, 2013, she “stumbled, fell early.” Five days later, after a fourth-place showing, she was retired.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

NEWTOWN, CT - MARCH 31: The exterior of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, CT is pictured on March 31, 2019. The new school building was completed in 2016. (Photo by Nathan Klima for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from John Woodrow Cox, Nathaniel Penn, Len Necefer, Aymann Ismail, and Michael Venutolo-Mantovani.

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1. Only One of Their Children Survived Sandy Hook. Now School Posed a New Threat: The Virus.

John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | October 7, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,762 words)

“After losing their 6-year-old daughter in a mass shooting, can Isaiah Marquez-Greene’s parents bear to let him return to high school during a pandemic?”

2. The Last Patrol

Nathaniel Penn | The California Sunday Magazine | September 27, 2020 | 78 minutes (19,500 words)

“In 2019, President Trump pardoned Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who was serving a 20-year sentence for ordering the murder of two Afghan civilians. To Lorance’s defenders, the act was long overdue. To members of his platoon, it was a gross miscarriage of justice.”

3. Water is Life

Len Necefer | Alpinist Magazine | October 5, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,391 words)

“As I climbed and skied over rapidly receding snowfields, the journeys felt akin to doing final rounds of visits with my elders who are sick and soon to walk on into the next world.”

4. The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd

Aymann Ismail | Slate | October 6, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,862 words)

“A teenage clerk dialed 911. How should the brothers who own CUP Foods pay for what happened next?”

5. From Tragedy to Trailblazer

Michael Venutolo-Mantovani | The Bitter Southerner | August 25, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,152 words)

“After three of her dear friends were murdered in 2015 — a case that drew national attention and triggered calls for stronger hate crime legislation — Nida Allam took to politics.”

“The Final Five Percent” Wins 2020 Science in Society Journalism Award

Tim Requarth, author of "The Final Five Percent."

We’re delighted to announce that Tim Requarth‘s piece, “The Final Five Percent,” won the 2020 Science in Society Journalism Award in the Longform Narratives category. For Tim, who holds a PhD in neuroscience, “The Final Five Percent” is both personal and professional. It recounts how his brother has coped in the decade since a traumatic brain injury permanently altered his personality. Here’s what the National Science Writers Association and the judges had to say about Tim’s piece:

“In ‘The Final Five Percent,’ published by Longreads in October 2019, Tim Requarth chronicles the catastrophic motorcycle accident that befalls his brother and the debilitating changes to his brother’s personality that emerge as he recovers most of his brain function in the weeks after the accident. The essay interweaves an intimate portrayal of the complexities of his brother’s life both before and after the accident, and of their sibling relationship, with what’s known about neuroscience of recklessness. ‘The Final Five Percent gripped us from its first paragraphs,’ write the judges. ‘This piece tackles the serious health mysteries around brain injury and explores the human consequences of that science in a way that is clear, nuanced, and emotionally devastating.'”

Be sure to check out Tim’s work elsewhere:

This piece was edited by Michelle Weber, fact checked by Sam Schuyler and Jason Stavers, and copy edited by Jacob Gross.