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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 Hungry Bears

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In his article for Beside, Jimmy Thomson looks at the delicate ecosystem that operates around the humble salmon — and what happens when that balance is upset. Thomson visits the community of Wuikinuxv, where the relationship between salmon, grizzly bears, and humans has been knocked out of sync. With great respect for the animals they share the land with, the Wuikinuxv nation wants to do their best to rectify this, rather than come into conflict with the bears.

Carver George Johnson is putting the finishing touches on a stunning pole when I visit his carving shed. It’s built around the concept of “four,” a number that has great resonance in Wuikinuxv culture. For each of the four seasons, there’s a species of salmon. For each of the four local species of salmon, there’s an animal that catches it, just one of which is a human. At the bottom of the pole, clutching a sockeye, is a grizzly bear. And swirling up from the ground, along the haunches of the bear, is a pattern that connects it to the soil and the land.

In eating the salmon, the bears bridge the gap between the deep ocean and the treetops, dragging the wriggling essence of one ecosystem into another.

With colonization, the community of Wuikinuxv saw the opening of several canneries — and salmon numbers depleted, to a point they have still not recovered from. The last of the local canneries closed in 1957, but the salmon declined for another half-century. Part of the reason could be a loss of genetic diversity that came with a lower population, leaving the fish vulnerable to environmental changes. The reduction in salmon was accompanied by logging, replacing old-growth rainforest with a dense thicket — full of juvenile trees that do not produce berries. For grizzly bears, this has meant a reduction in two important food sources — and hungry bears are increasingly coming into contact with humans. 

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.”

With instructions to get inside the nearest house in an emergency — the small cluster of houses in the village are always unlocked for this exact purpose — Judy hands me a metal, spring-loaded tool the size and shape of a pen with a plastic cylinder screwed onto it. It’s a “bear banger,” a tiny explosive like a firework intended to scare away curious bears. I am to carry it around any time I’m outside.

I run into Johnny Johnson outside the lodge. He laughs at my puny protection. “That won’t even scare them anymore,” he says. Johnson’s opinion on the matter is an educated one; not only did he grow up in Wuikinuxv, he survived a violent mauling a decade ago.

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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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Motherhood on the Line

Migrant women and children, like Fania and her infant son Bilfani, seek care at the Mother and Child Hospital and refuge at the Path of Life (Senda de Vida) shelter, both in Reynosa, Mexico. Photo by Jacky Muniello.

Alice Driver | Longreads | December 2020 | 12 minutes (3,442 words)

 
FANIA*

* Fania’s last name is withheld for privacy.

The doctor made a uterine incision on the woman’s body to extract the fetal arms, then grasped the baby’s feet and pulled him from the womb upside down, delivering him into the era of coronavirus. Fania, 33, had traveled 1,726 miles from Haiti to Reynosa, Mexico. She had not planned to become pregnant nor imagined giving birth during a pandemic. “In my life, I did not want to have children. I was very careful, and I managed for four years with my husband. The idea was not to have a child who is suffering,” she explained.

When Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello and I met Fania on August 3, 2020, in Reynosa, Mexico, her C-section scar was fully healed. Muniello and I had worked together in Reynosa on several projects, and we were familiar with the risks of working in a city controlled by cartels, one whose militarized streets suggested a city at war with itself. This, however, was our first time working in the city during the pandemic, walking its streets in N95 masks. We found citizens wary, on edge, suspicious, anxious, and struggling to process the coronavirus death news cycle alongside the conspiracy theories spreading like wildfire on social media. 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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‘Anyone Can Walk in the Woods, But Who Truly Knows Them?’

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Tristan McConnell‘s recent essay at Emergence Magazine just might be the deep breath you need amid your busy week and a chaotic, never-ending cycle of news. In “Illuminating Kirinyaga,” McConnell takes us on a journey into the shrinking forests of Mount Kenya and writes about the land, coexistence, and the people who commune with the trees.

We immediately meet Joseph Mbaya, a man who lives in Kiambogo, a village on the edge of the forest. Mbaya forages for medicine among the trees and finds treatments for everything from arthritis to indigestion; the sap he collects from a red stinkwood tree can help treat an ear infection or a toothache, for example. There’s also Samson Thureinira, an elder living in the foothills, “still strong as a cedar’s trunk,” writes McConnell, and who moves “on a timescale more akin to trees than humans.” The indigenous saplings in Thureinira’s tree nursery are part of a reforestation program led by the Mount Kenya Trust that will, hopefully, help to protect these forests long after he and Mbaya are gone.

They, and other foresters of this landscape, understand that the forest can be used without destroying it.

Mbaya’s visits to the high forests mark him out. While the swirling centrifugal forces of modernity have sucked so many others into a prison of quotidian constraints, Mbaya’s forest walks are a portal to a different, slower, and more meaningful world. Anyone can walk in the woods, but who truly knows them? As we strode, paused, scrambled, and sat, Mbaya painted the forest with his knowledge; trees and plants were illuminated by their names and made more vivid in their value and uses. To see the forest through his eyes— however fleetingly and partially—is to be granted a rare glimpse of an understanding that feels as inaccessible as Mount Kenya’s soaring peaks. But appreciation and preservation of the mountain and its forests is dwindling.

DEEP INSIDE THE fractured forests that still ring the mountain, a hallowed sense of wonder persists. One morning, soon after the sun burns mist from the mountainsides and clouds shroud the peaks, I visit part of the mountain’s few remaining areas of old-growth woodland with a pair of young Kenyan foresters from the Mount Kenya Trust. Marania Forest, on the mountain’s northern fringe, is a revelation: thickly towering trunks of eight-hundred-year-old rosewood reach overhead, the trees’ crowns held up to the light of the canopy, pencil-straight cedar and craggy-barked olive are draped with lichen, and moss carpets the earth, muffling sound to a church-like silence. It is dark, crowded, and otherworldly—the ground soft underfoot, the trunks damp to the touch, the trees centuries old, the sunlight breaking through in narrow shafts. At our feet, fallen trunks breach the understory like shipwrecks, gradually decaying and returning to the soil—to its subterranean fungal networks and the spreading roots of neighboring trees—as food for the rest of the forest. We all smile, the foresters and I. It is a routine venture out for them, and my first to these old forests, and yet our reactions are the same: joy and reverential wonder. We instinctively drop our voices to a whisper. We walk and talk, feet sinking into the damp, spongey soil as the foresters teach me about the trees.

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The Digital Security Threat Inside Jameson Rich’s Body

Pacemaker, The University Hospital In Lille, France, Pacemaker And Heart Defibrillator. (Photo By BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

For the past four years, author Jameson Rich has had a small defibrillator implanted in his chest. Its job? To detect and prevent an arrhythmia that could end his life.

At OneZero Rich reports on what happens when the cure itself brings a whole host of new problems. The defibrillator, called an ICD, is part of the internet-of-things, sending data to his doctor and updating its software to patch vulnerabilities. Despite empty assurances from device manufacturers, anything on the internet can and will eventually be hacked. Is it only a matter of time before malicious people hack the very device that protects his heart’s rhythm?

The ICD would be a fail-safe, a tiny defibrillator inside my body that could go everywhere that I went.

When I came across an FDA safety notice warning that some ICDs, namely those made by a company called St. Jude, could be hacked, I was only days away from surgery. Once hacked, the devices could allow an external actor to gain control of the ICD, reprogram its functions, and inflict all kinds of damage—even trigger death.

In the past 13 years, these devices have also been fully integrated into the so-called Internet of Things—millions of everyday consumer items being programmed for and connected to the internet. Once connected to the internet, the devices ease the work of physicians and hospitals, who can now manage the device and monitor the patient’s condition remotely. Patients are typically charged each time their device sends data to the hospital. Think of it as a subscription—for your heart.

ICDs are just one increasingly popular medical gadget in a rising sea of clinical and commercial wireless health devices. Whether it is the growing suite of cardiac-monitoring devices available at home and on the go or an Apple Watch outfitted with diagnostic software, we are outsourcing more and more of our health to internet-enabled machines.

Having now lived with an ICD for more than three years and a pacemaker for the preceding 14, I understand intimately the consequences of being a body paired to the grid. If your smart fridge loses connectivity, maybe your food goes bad a few days early. But if a wireless ICD experiences a failure, the result could be lethal. I am stalked by the fear of the device misfiring and have wondered endlessly whether the documented security risks posed by these devices could end up harming me.

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‘You Just Have to Have a Strong Mind’: Shantonia Jackson on Working in a Nursing Home During the Pandemic

Photo by Matthias Zomer / Pexels

This summer, Gabriel Winant, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, interviewed Shantonia Jackson, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) who works at City View Multicare Center in Cicero, Illinois. CNAs like Jackson provide general care (making sure patients eat and shower) and are often the only people that offer support and companionship when residents need someone to talk to.

City View experienced a major COVID-19 outbreak: 253 residents out of 315 contracted the virus, and many of them died. Jackson’s colleague, a 64-year-old woman named Camelia Kirkwood who was supposed to retire in June, was among those who contracted COVID-19 and died. Before coronavirus, the two oversaw 35 residents apiece. Now on her own, Jackson provides care for 70 men in an all-men’s unit.

Winant and Jackson’s conversation in Dissent reveals what it’s like to work in a nursing home, and the challenges and exploitative conditions hardworking healthcare workers like Jackson face, especially during the pandemic.

She describes how she felt after her colleague, Camelia, died from the virus, and the lack of support from the nursing home’s management:

It just devastated me when she passed away. I really, really took that very hard. But I had to come back and explain it to the residents, because they wanted to know where she was. They were hearing that she was sick or she died, but one by one I would talk to them and let them know she was in a better place. And you have to do that with psych and behavioral patients, because they can kill you. They could take the fire extinguisher off the wall and just bash it up the side my head, you know what I’m saying? So I develop a rapport with them.

Management never came upstairs on the floor with me to see what I was dealing with. They would come upstairs and yell at me, “Well, you need to give a shower.” I already gave thirty showers out of seventy people. I can’t make sure seventy take a shower. Because I’ve got to still pass trays. I’ve got to still make beds. It’s hard.

Even with the kitchen. Even with laundry. Who wants to have bugs? It’s supposed to be clean, but the nursing home industry is so cheap. We sometimes don’t have a housekeeper on our floor. It’s like, really? Call somebody in. But you don’t want to, because you don’t want to pay them. That’s crazy.

It’s common for nursing home workers like Jackson to juggle more than one job, often at other care facilities or in people’s homes, which is one of the ways the virus spreads.

I took a leave, because I felt like I didn’t want to take the virus from City View, with 253 infections, to Berkeley, which didn’t have one case. So I took it upon myself. And the nursing home industry is so fickle, and selfish, and disrespectful, because they were actually angry at me for leaving. I thought my director of nursing would be appreciative, because what if I came over here and I transmitted to all these elderly people? They all would have died. And they have the nerve to be mad at me, and calling me, saying, “You’re not going to come back?” No! I’m dealing with 253 cases over here. I want to be careful for the grandmas and the grandpas.

Later in the interview, Winant asks: “If you could make nursing homes change in any way, what would be your vision?” Jackson describes:

My vision would be to make sure that every CNA had at most only five residents. I would make sure it would be properly staffed. And that way we can comb their hair, brush their teeth, lotion their body, change them every two hours, make sure they get their needs, so we can do what we were put there to do, when their family members couldn’t do it. The residents would get proper food. You should see some of the food that they feed them. I wouldn’t feed that to my kid. Why would you feed them this? In America, we don’t care about the elderly; they’re about to die anyway, we don’t care. We should have respect, because they have wisdom.

When Winant asks how Jackson manages to care for all her patients, she responds, “I’ve got a strong mind. You just have to have a strong mind. It’s all I can do.”

Read the interview

Shades of Grey

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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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Longreads Honored with 14 Notable Mentions in ‘Best American’ Series

Longreads is delighted to announce 14 notable mentions for 13 pieces across the spectrum of the 2020 Best American series, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Please see below for the full list of pieces included in each edition and those honored with notable mentions. Congratulations to all!

The Best American Essays

Included in the anthology:

Notable mention:

The Best American Science and Nature Writing

Included in the anthology:

Notable mention:

The Best American Travel Writing

Included in the anthology:

Notable mention:

The Best American Food Writing

Included in the anthology:

Notable mention:

The Best American Sports Writing

Notable mention: