In 1918, Battery Cove near Jones Point Lighthouse became a shipyard where thousands of employees raced to build as many cargo vessels as possible. https://t.co/66PIsunUrN #VAHistory In 1918, Battery Cove near Jones Point Lighthouse became a shipyard where thousands of employ…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 11, 2021
World War II era matchbook cover from the Victory Trading Store on 9th Street downtown. 9th Street was a strip of vaudeville theaters, nightclubs, and restaurants. This location may have later become a Sunny's Surplus. https://t.co/Ygc503QnS0 World War II era matchbook cover f…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 11, 2021
Today in History - December 11 https://t.co/aIY51PBeIS On December 11, 1919, the citizens of Enterprise, Alabama, erected a monument to the boll weevil, the pest that devastated their fields but forced residents to end their dependence on cotton and to pursue mixed farming a…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 11, 2021
Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.
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Greg Tate | The Wire | June 2017 | 1,904 words
After the news this week that legendary culture critic Greg Tate had died, the outpouring of grief on social media was one of this year’s least surprising phenomena: He is, in too many cases to count, your favorite writer’s favorite writer. When he began writing for The Village Voice in the ’80s, no one did more to treat hip-hop — the music and the culture — with the depth and care it deserved. (Flyboy in the Buttermilk, a 1992 collection of that work, lit up the brain of many a young writer, this one included.) The Wire has lifted its paywall for all of Tate’s work, and you can’t go wrong choosing one at random, but I’m highlighting this 2017 essay about the evolution of the avant-garde in Black music because it highlights so much of his genius: encyclopedic knowledge, a mind for synthesis, and a singular voice born of the very culture he chronicled. “Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid observed as far back as 1985 and LL Cool J’s ‘Rock The Bells’ that the rage one used to hear in jazz had migrated to hiphop,” wrote Tate. A similar sentiment led this astute painter of our acquaintance to declare that jazz fell into a death-spiral as soon as it became divorced from Radical Black Politics. No one could throw a bomb quite like Tate — let alone be armed with so damn many of them. —PR
Alicia Inez Guzmán | Searchlight New Mexico | November 30, 2021 | 4,200 Words
On September 29, 1999, helicopters thundered in the sky as agents in SWAT gear descended on Chimayó, New Mexico. Chimayó (pop. 3,000) was the smallest target in a sweeping federal crackdown on drug trafficking — specifically, the flow of heroin from Mexico into the United States. The Chimayó raid, which netted dozens of dealers and their associates, was supposed to rid the village of addiction and the people who abetted it. But that didn’t happen. Writer Alicia Inez Guzmán, who grew up near Chimayó, details how the hammer of law enforcement only made things worse. “The arrests touched nearly every family,” she writes. “But one thing stayed remarkably the same after the bust…. Addiction in Chimayó is still so intergenerational that some residents can hardly envision a future without drugs and overdoses.” What also remains is the stigma, or “stamp of deviance,” ascribed to Chimayó and its environs by the media. Guzmán’s reporting offers a cautionary tale. As her own mother puts it, describing the day the feds came to Chimayó, “que lástima” — what a tragedy. —SD
Christian Wallace | Texas Monthly | December 6 2021 | 6,816 words
It’s mainly oil and gas workers posted to Loving County, Texas (pop. 64), however a handful of resilient medics also live in this “desolate frontier of sandstorms and creosote bush.” I had never considered the rawness of a life spent looking after oil-field workers and rodeo cowboys until spending time with this spellbinding essay, in which Christian Wallace details his stint embedded with the team at the Occupational Health and Safety International (OHSI) clinic. Wallace masterfully depicts the camaraderie of his team, the challenges of the work, and the characters of Loving County. Even though life is rough, there are some beautiful moments, and by the end of this essay I had a lump in my throat.—CW
Laura Hoffman | Kenyon Review | November 3, 2021 2021 | 4,749 words
“X-rays are my first form of portraiture, images of my bones bright against a background of light.” In this gorgeous essay by Laura Hoffman — her first published piece, and one that she’s worked on for eight years — she chronicles the discovery and awareness of her own body over time. Hoffman and her siblings — triplets — were born prematurely; this led to a misshapen body and a left side that was smaller than her right. She recounts a childhood full of hospital visits and medical procedures, and a body routinely monitored and studied. “Since birth I’ve been propped up like a sapling, supported with braces and splints, made to grow upright.” As a child, she knew no shame: “I am carried, cared for, not yet touched by our culture’s casting of my body as other, as divergent.” In adolescence, as her body changes, so does her self-perception, bringing embarrassment, emptiness, and silence. This is an intimate, affecting piece on body image, disability, and identity, and I love and appreciate how Hoffman has shared her experience with us.—CLR
Connie Wang | Refinery 29 | May 1, 2020 | 950 words
At Refinery 29, Connie Wang remembers the pleasures of eating fruits carefully pared, cut, and peeled by her mother. “Cut fruit tastes like love,” she says. What starts out as a fond remembrance of culinary childhood delight becomes a metaphor for life. “But more importantly, cut fruit is a gift. Life is filled with bitter and hard things. When you extract pits, piths, and peels, fruit becomes an accessible and reliable source of pure sweetness, only softness.” Participating in the ritual of cutting fruit becomes a way for Wang to cope with the loss, isolation, and frustration of the pandemic. “Cut fruit, like love, doesn’t take much to serve but patience and practice. It’s the willingness to swallow some bitterness so someone else enjoys only sweetness. I needed the reminder.” —KS
Matchbook cover from the Cellar Door. In the 1960s and 70s, the club, at 34th and M Streets NW in Georgetown, was one of the top performance venues in the country, hosting acclaimed jazz, rock, and folk music stars. It closed in 1982. https://t.co/MXrsQSwOsX Matchbook cover fr…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 10, 2021
Snoopy to Fly Aboard Artemis I via NASA https://t.co/FdpK2CbkiA https://t.co/W2iO1r2tZW
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 10, 2021
This manuscript map illustrates an area north of Mexico City and east to the city of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico. Take a closer look: https://t.co/T6Sp2F3qVc https://t.co/w7uKJFoqZH This manuscript map illustrates an area north of Mexico City and east to the city of Veracru…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 10, 2021
Photographer Matthew Brady's first D.C. client in the late 1840s was none other than Dolley Madison. https://t.co/OHLyNURXKj #DCHistory Photographer Matthew Brady's first D.C. client in the late 1840s was none other than Dolley Madison. https://t.co/OHLyNURXKj #DCHistory —…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 10, 2021
Today in History - December 10 https://t.co/F4KOkmRgaq On December 10, 1869, John Campbell, governor of the Wyoming Territory, approved the first law in U.S. history explicitly granting women the right to vote. Continue reading. On December 10, 1946, baseball great Walter J…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 10, 2021
The New Ebbitt Cafe opened at the Ebbitt House hotel in November 1910. First opened in 1856, the hotel was located on the southeast corner of 14th and F Streets, N.W., in downtown Washington, D.C. until 1925. For more about the Ebbitt, see https://t.co/AtW3Gvy7Ko …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 9, 2021
Exploring the Secrets of the Universe via NASA https://t.co/fBUmz0vg4Z https://t.co/fSJYL1hCAq
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 9, 2021
This map, published in Paris in 1890, shows the network of major trade routes across the Sahara. Explore the world's largest hot desert here: https://t.co/74K56fTJsj https://t.co/MMHxbFMG4W This map, published in Paris in 1890, shows the network of major trade routes across th…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 9, 2021
Architects' drawing of the Albert Pick Motor Inn, constructed in 1963 at 12th and K St NW. A terminal for airline shuttle buses was on the ground floor. Designed by DC architect-brothers Wendell and John Hallett, the building was recently painted black and is now @EatonHotelDC …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 9, 2021
Forrest "Lefty" Brewer was first scouted by the Washington Senators in 1938 when he was a teenager who had only played minor league baseball for a few months. https://t.co/nV8Jx0uiVV #DCHistory Forrest "Lefty" Brewer was first scouted by the Washington Senators in 1938 when …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 9, 2021
Today in History - December 9 https://t.co/MeUBtK4GSj U.S. diplomat Ralph Bunche, a key member of the United Nations(UN) for more than two decades, and winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful negotiation of a truce between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, died on…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 9, 2021
Staff curation is at the core of our work. All year long, we highlight the top longform stories on the web in our weekly Longreads Top 5, so our end-of-year series is always a busy yet delightful time to revisit and celebrate the pieces that resonated with us the most.
On Tuesday, we shared our favorite personal essays of the year; today, we continue with our picks for the best reported essays, featuring stories about love and loss in the age of AI, death and the environment, the George Floyd rebellion and a time of racial reckoning, and ecological disaster. Enjoy — and thanks so much for reading this year.
Back in 2013, I watched a haunting episode of the Charlie Brooker series Black Mirror called “Be Right Back,” in which a computer chat program uses a deceased person’s digital footprint to imitate them, allowing their loved ones to communicate with them after they die. Eight years on, and, terrifyingly, this is no longer science fiction — as Jason Fagone masterfully reports in this essay, introducing us to the bot version of the late Jessica Pereira. When she tragically died at just 23, Jessica left behind her fiance Joshua, who, struggling to manage his grief, eventually sought comfort in an artificial intelligence system that did “something they weren’t designed to do: conduct chat-like conversations with humans.” Fagone cleverly interweaves Joshua’s real transcripts with the Jessica bot into the story, as he details their love, her death, and Joshua’s eight years of grief. While I found this essay disturbing — it provides a glimpse into a future that I find uncomfortable — it is still fascinating. Fagone’s storytelling method also demonstrated something powerful: I got far closer to knowing the real Jessica through his reporting of the memories of her friends and family, rather than from the Jessica bot. As Jessica’s mother says, “I know it’s not her.” —Carolyn Wells
In this beautiful piece, Lisa Wells takes up a classic question: Where do we go when we die? But she is concerned with ethics rather than faith — indeed, she doesn’t once use the word “heaven.” By profiling the natural organic reduction industry, also known as the business of composting dead bodies, Wells considers where human remains should go in the age of climate change. Her essay is a meditation on intention and guilt; grief and fear; life and loss. Above all, it is about our species’ fraught relationship with the planet, and the potential for repair that our literal bodies might hold. —Seyward Darby
Reader Chris Sweeney on “To Be a Field of Poppies”:
I think often about the idea of a “good death” and how to ensure I have one when the time comes, and this reported essay gave me some new aspects to chew over. It also, I think, did a good job of highlighting to readers the importance of thinking about death, and what we want out of it, without being morose or mawkish.
“Police trials are rare,” wrote Tobi Haslett, shortly after Derek Chauvin had been convicted of multiple murder and manslaughter charges in the killing of George Floyd. “So is national uprising.” So begins an incendiary account of how, after Floyd’s death, “something massive came hurtling into view and exploded against the surface of daily life in the US.” Over the course of his essay, Haslett gathers a half-century of racial-justice protest in his arms, from MLK’s late-career embrace of worker revolt to the growing drumbeat of abolitionist thought that undergirded last summer’s national rebellion. But this is no sterile, scholarly disquisition; it’s dotted throughout with political critique, artistic context, and the chaos and violence of personal experience. In a year that saw no shortage of brilliant broadsides against the enormity of American racism, you’d be hard-pressed to find another that covers so much ground without ever seeming to flag. —Peter Rubin
Ariel Saramandi’s piece was one of the first I read this year. The egregious neglect and the needless, horrific long-term toll she recounts are things I’ll never forget. “Death Takes the Lagoon” describes an ecological disaster unfolding in painfully slow motion after the cargo ship MV Wakashio runs aground off the coast of Mauritius. When the government fails to take decisive action to contain the ensuing oil spill, citizens band together, making homemade booms around the clock to soak up the toxic mess. As they congregate near the site of the spill, their effort is deemed “an illegal gathering” by an embarrassed Mauritian government — one known for imprisoning citizens for “annoyances” which include even the mildest protest and government criticism. “Against all international recommendations, despite our outcry and outrage, the government sank half of the Wakashio in great haste on August 24. Two days later, melon-headed whales washed up around the south-eastern coast. Dead, mutilated, glossy bodies. Fishermen say the ship was sunk in a whale breeding ground, that some of the corpses they found were of pregnant females.” —Krista Stevens
Another essay from Granta, recommended by author Anand Gopal:
Ben Mauk’s “The Steepest Places: In the Cordillera Central,” about a volcano in the Philippines, opens with an equation — the best, or at least most interesting — lede I’ve seen in a long time:
is the sine curve that describes Mayon, the stratovolcano whose slopes form the most regular cone in the natural world. (Let c = 8.6 millimeters.) It was somewhere to our south, at the tip of the long ribbon of Luzon, glowing at night with a bulb of magma in its mouth.
The centerpiece of Pipe Wrench’s inaugural spring issue, a sermon by Breai Mason-Campbell on race, accountability, and change, is a real stunner (and the fact that this was Mason-Campbell’s first-ever published piece makes it all the more impressive). She writes about the layers of Black grief, likening it to a nesting doll, and also reflects on how the pandemic and the racial reckoning of summer 2020 had introduced white people to collective suffering. But the attention span of white people is short, and justice is seasonal, activated in choice moments via performative social posts and GoFundMe donations. Damning and passionate and timely, Mason-Campbell’s stirring and powerful words challenge Nice White Folks — and anyone who has the privilege of returning to “business as usual” in times of crisis — to act. To use the armor they’ve built up over the course of the pandemic. To make different choices. To not retreat back into their homes after a moment passes. Because, she writes, “the price for your return to normal is my life.” —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Explore our Best of 2021 collection
A lifelong pacifist, Rep. Jeanette Rankin led many anti-war marches well into her eighties. https://t.co/5MUpBhKcH1 #DCHistory A lifelong pacifist, Rep. Jeanette Rankin led many anti-war marches well into her eighties. https://t.co/5MUpBhKcH1 #DCHistory — Boundary Stones (…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 8, 2021
There was a "decades-long scrap" between the Smithsonian museum and Orville Wright after aviator Glenn Curtiss restored Samuel Langley's 1903 Aerodome and finally got it off the ground. https://t.co/fBQPK1sbIV #DCHistory #VAHistory There was a "decades-long scrap" between th…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 8, 2021
Observing a Dark Nebula via NASA https://t.co/Dni2jogNDn https://t.co/YWu3eZzyEG
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 8, 2021
This unique map of the Earth viewed from the south pole is illustrated with prominent mountain peaks and female figures representing different times of day. See the world from the bottom up: https://t.co/WmLs8ffyAc https://t.co/jyGofv0KJz This unique map of the Earth viewed fr…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 8, 2021
Circa 1910 postcard of F Street downtown, as seen from mid-block between 14th and 15th Streets. Seen are the yellow Ebbitt House Hotel on the right and the Westory Building on the left. Hear more about F Street's history in this evening's virtual tour: https://t.co/moteLLWb7X …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 8, 2021
Today in History - December 8 https://t.co/xjOzN81W9t Citizens of Louisiana ratified a new state constitution on December 8, 1879. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other historic moments.
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 8, 2021
Story by Annelise Jolley, videos and photographs by Zahara Gómez Lucini | The Atavist Magazine | November 2021 | 10 minutes (2,364 words)
This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 121, “A Feast for Lost Souls,” written by Annelise Jolley and illustrated by Zahara Gómez Lucini.
The last time Blanca Soto saw her husband alive, he blew her a kiss.
The Atavist, our sister publication, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.
When they arrived around 9 a.m., something inside Blanca told her not to get out of Camilo’s truck. But she did anyway, stepping onto the ground and closing the door behind her. “I remember that he was looking at me,” Blanca said. “He didn’t leave right away—he kept looking at me.” Camilo pressed his lips to his fingers, then turned his palm toward his wife.
Blanca moved to get back in the truck, but Camilo already had his eyes on the road. “That was when he drove away,” she said.
When she returned home on foot later that morning, Blanca was overtaken by an inexplicable sickness. First came a pain in her chest, then green vomit that rose up again and again in her throat. Later she would call this a foreboding, a warning.
She went to bed. When she woke up a few hours later, Camilo hadn’t returned. Blanca called his cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. She tried again; no answer. Next she called one of her sons—she and Camilo had three—then Camilo’s mother, father, brother, and nephew. No one knew where he was.
Blanca went to the public prosecutor’s office, where officials told her she had to wait 48 hours before filing a missing persons report. She gave them Camilo’s name; her husband was a police officer. They took down her statement as a favor. Blanca went home and waited for a call, but one never came—not from the authorities, and not from Camilo.
When people vanish in Sinaloa, they’re almost never seen again. Sometimes drug cartels are responsible; in other cases state security forces are. Often the two sides are colluding—Mexico’s police and military are notoriously corrupt. People are taken because they work for cartels or because they refuse to. Because they buy drugs, sell them, or get in the way of the business. Because they’re in criminal gangs or are believed to be. Because they might be worth a ransom. Because they’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Every morning, Blanca walked to the gate outside her house fearing that she would discover Camilo’s body dumped in the road. She considered leaving town, seeking political asylum in America. But the desire to find her husband kept her in San Blas. She tried to move forward in small ways. She bought a new bed, rearranged the furniture, donated Camilo’s clothes and shoes. She purchased new appliances for the kitchen, hoping that cooking would steady her hands and keep her mind busy.
Pork pozole, a dark, rich stew, was Camilo’s favorite meal. He liked it spicy, the hotter the better, especially when he’d had several beers the night before and was nursing a hangover. Blanca knew the ingredients by heart: pork ribs, beef, hominy, bouillon, oregano, garlic, onion. But Blanca never made pozole anymore. She missed Camilo’s presence in the kitchen, how he placed his hands on her hips and told her to add more chiles: pasilla, guajillo. How he lifted her hair to blow on her neck. She feared that cooking the dish with only Camilo’s ghost by her side would feel like opening a wound.
Camilo had become one of the more than 90,000 husbands, sons, and fathers, wives, daughters, and mothers haunting Mexico. They are los desaparecidos—the disappeared. Blanca didn’t know what circumstances had led to her husband being taken, what he’d done or not done. And like many of the loved ones of Mexico’s missing, she didn’t care. All Blanca wanted was to find Camilo so that she could grieve properly.
Nothing more and nothing less.
***
The countryside in northern Sinaloa is seared and blistered by heat. The landscape is dotted with low scrub brush and drooping palm trees, the green of their fronds muted by relentless sun. I would call the place dry, but the Spanish translation, seco, seems more appropriate—a word that siphons moisture from the back of the tongue when spoken.
As I drove toward Los Mochis on a July day, I watched Sinaloa’s scenery blur through the window. Men selling watermelons from truck beds. Roadside taco stands. Industrial complexes. Fallow fields. Soccer pitches. I wondered: Are bodies hidden there, or maybe there?
Enforced disappearances—the legal term for the abduction of individuals and the concealment of their whereabouts—have plagued Latin American countries for decades. The syntax of the problem is strained by necessity: People don’t disappear, which implies they have a choice in the matter. Rather, they are disappeared, by forces beyond their control. In Mexico, more than 90 percent of disappearances have occurred since 2006, the year then president Felipe Calderón enlisted the military to fight drug cartels. Today a maelstrom of gang and cartel conflict, as well as government and police corruption, continues to sweep up civilians, most of them poor and male. Impunity exacerbates the problem: According to national figures, there were roughly 7,000 disappearances in 2019, but only 351 legal cases were opened. Of those, two were prosecuted.
In contrast to Mexico’s highly visible violence—bodies strung up on bridges or left mutilated on roadsides as messages of intimidation—disappearances leave only questions in their wake. One day a person is there, and the next they are gone. Their loved ones are left to search for something, anything, tangible to mourn.
The impulse to bury the dead is ancient. It may even predate our species: In South Africa, paleo-archaeologists discovered fossilized bone fragments of Homo naledi in deep, nearly inaccessible cave chambers, hinting that pre-humans as far back as 300,000 years may have deliberately laid one another to rest. Early Homo sapiens made burial a rite. They interred bodies with shells, arrowheads, bird wings, and jewels. In Austria, the remains of babies some 27,000 years old were found buried with ivory-beaded animal skins under the shoulder blade of a mammoth, as if for protection.
Today burial is seen as the final physical act of tenderness the living can offer the dead. It provides a sense of completion, of having accompanied someone as far down the road of life as we can go with them. Funerary rites enshrine stories of faith, love, and sorrow, and graves offer the grieving a place they can return to again and again. “Just as the living need places to inhabit, so it is often in the nature of our memory-making to wish to be able to address our dead at particular sites of the Earth’s surface,” writes Robert Macfarlane in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey. “The grief of those who have been unable to locate the bodies of their loved ones can be especially corrosive—acid and unhealing.”
This is the double cruelty of enforced disappearances: First comes the loss of a life, and then comes the denial of any chance to lay the body to rest.
I traveled to Sinaloa to meet a women-led collective determined to reclaim that chance. They call themselves Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte (The Trackers of El Fuerte), and they are part of a long legacy of civilian women leading campaigns to find Mexico’s disappeared. Rosario Ibarra was the pioneer. When her activist son vanished in 1975 from Monterrey, Nuevo León—he was allegedly abducted by state police—Rosario began searching for him. Along with other mothers and wives of missing persons, she formed Comité Eureka de Desaparecidos (Eureka Committee of the Disappeared), which demanded investigations and justice. Forty-six years after he vanished, Rosario’s son is still missing. Now more than 60 civilian groups across the country are searching for the disappeared.
Formed in 2014, Las Rastreadoras is one of these groups. It has some 200 members, most of them women from El Fuerte, a municipality in northern Sinaloa. They’ve all been touched in some way by enforced disappearances. Many have lost husbands or sons.
Criminal groups across Mexico dispose of bodies in distinctive ways—some burn them, others dissolve them in acid. In El Fuerte, the disappeared tend to be buried in shallow unmarked graves in the countryside. So Las Rastreadoras search the landscape with basic tools: shovels, machetes, spades, picks. The women dig in the dry earth, knowing that to properly bury their dead, they must unbury them first.
They don’t call what they’re looking for bodies, corpses, or remains. To Las Rastreadoras, the dead are tesoros—treasures.
***
Blanca Soto first heard about Las Rastreadoras before Camilo was disappeared. “I felt admiration for them, and at times sadness,” she said. But once her husband was gone, she was scared to join the women. She was paranoid that her own life might already be in danger, and she was wary of drawing attention to herself through public advocacy. Though Las Rastreadoras don’t seek to expose killers or put them behind bars—they only want to find and inter the dead—members of the group have received death threats. It wasn’t until April 2017, five months after Camilo was taken, that a cousin and a friend in Las Rastreadoras convinced Blanca to join a search.
Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, the group scours El Fuerte for human remains. Women who have yet to find their loved ones wear T-shirts printed with the slogan te buscaré hasta encontrarte (“I will search for you until I find you”). Women who have found their missing wear shirts that read promesa cumplida (“Promise fulfilled”).
Mirna Medina is the founder of Las Rastreadoras. A retired schoolteacher who talks fast and commands attention, Mirna has an uncanny memory for dates; her friends say that she remembers the day and year of every disappearance someone in her group is grieving. Mirna’s own date is July 10—the last time she saw her son Roberto alive. Three years to the day after he vanished, she found his remains: four vertebrae and a shard from an arm bone, identified by DNA analysis. Roberto’s was the 93rd body recovered by Las Rastreadoras. He’s now buried in a cemetery, where Mirna visits him. She lights candles, arranges flowers, and presses her fingertips to the photo on her son’s headstone.
Las Rastreadoras regularly receive tips about where bodies might be located. Sometimes the information is shared anonymously or by the police. In other cases a local resident spots something suspicious, such as a patch of turned soil. The women head out to these puntas (points), often accompanied by armed security. They trouble the earth with their tools, then plunge metal construction rods into the ground. When they pull the rods up, the tips are caked with soil. The women sniff the lingering dirt, hoping for a rotting odor—a tell-tale sign of human decomposition.
María Cleofas Lugo, whom everyone in the group calls Manqui, has searched for her son Juan Francisco since June 19, 2015. A photo of his face dangles in a silver frame from a chain around her neck. Manqui is the oldest woman in the group, and she is famed for her sense of smell. With the help of a rod, Manqui can discern what the earth beneath her holds. A clean musk means nothing is there. Sometimes a heavy funk of spoiled meat and sewage coats her nostrils and throat. When Manqui detects this, the smell of death, Las Rastreadoras dig.
Over the years, Manqui has learned the difference between the scent of a body and that of an animal carcass. “The smell of a human being is more penetrating,” she said. Many women can’t handle the odor. Manqui reminds them, “Yes, it smells bad, but it could be our children.”
When they uncover treasure, whether it’s a tooth or a torso, Las Rastreadoras pause over the site. They say a prayer, an Our Father or a Hail Mary. Then they alert the local government forensics team, which can test the DNA of the remains. The women hope for a match—that the treasure they’ve found belongs to someone on their list. Currently, Las Rastreadoras are looking for more than 1,500 missing persons; many are relatives or friends of the group’s members, but others are strangers whose names were supplied by people living in El Fuerte.
On her first dig, Blanca wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t know how to use the tools or watch out for snakes or steel herself against the odor of death. “I went in eagerly but weak,” she said. “I was not a person who went out a lot.” At home, Blanca wore dresses and kept her long hair loose. She was proud of her delicate, shapely feet, which Camilo had always admired. On the search with Las Rastreadoras, the other women teased her because she showed up wearing gloves and carrying an umbrella, hoping to avoid the scorching Sinaloa sun. When Mirna handed her a shovel, Blanca stabbed it into the dirt with so much force that it rebounded into her chest, bringing tears to her eyes.
Blanca’s first search was a negative, which is how the women describe digs that don’t turn up remains. Her second was a positive. The group uncovered a body lying in the fetal position, still mostly intact. “The impression was something horrible,” Blanca said. When she saw the corpse, the air left her lungs and she fell backward. Other women, more seasoned trackers, were there to catch her. One gave Blanca an inhaler. They stayed by her side until she could stand again.
Week in and week out, Blanca continued to search with Las Rastreadoras. “Little by little, I kept on learning,” she said. But she was honing more than her skills with a shovel. Like the other trackers, she was also learning how, in lieu of a body and the closure it provides, to live with loss.
Read the full story at The Atavist
Leer en espanol.
Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Lifts Off! via NASA https://t.co/M1hPyvis7k https://t.co/hyqxlczP8M
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 7, 2021
Hunger strikers supported by the American Communist Party march toward the Capitol on December 6, 1932. (the Capitol is out of view behind us). The large Acacia Life Insurance Co building (now the Federal Home Loan Bank Board) at 320 1st St NW is in the distance on the left. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 7, 2021
Take a trip out of this world with this US Air Force lunar reference model. It was compiled in 1962, seven years before humans set foot on the moon. Explore the craters here: https://t.co/NXRYnLhsro https://t.co/VHQTtd85rZ Take a trip out of this world with this US Air Force l…
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During WWII, the Washington Senators traded in their usual spring training facility in sunny Jacksonville, Florida for the University of Maryland. https://t.co/mNTJMA7oBz #DCHistory #MDHistory During WWII, the Washington Senators traded in their usual spring training facilit…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 7, 2021
Today in History - December 7 https://t.co/l4K62iiGSU On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, killing more than 2,300 Americans. Continue reading. Click here to search Today in History for other historic …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 7, 2021
Since we started the #longreads hashtag in 2009 to share great reads on Twitter, curation has been the beating heart of Longreads. All year long, we highlight our favorite stories in the weekly Longreads Top 5. At the end of the year, we love to reflect on and share the pieces that stayed with us, a tradition we’ve kept for 10 years! Today, we’re kicking off our annual curation celebration with five moving personal essays we loved in 2021. Watch for lists over the next couple of weeks that highlight reported essays, investigative reporting, features, and profiles.
For this category, I’m recommending a moving, lyrical personal essay from Kim Green and Chantha Nguon. Nguon is a co-founder of a women’s social enterprise in rural northeastern Cambodia. For 10 years, these two friends have been collaborating on Nguon’s life story, through interviews and cooking sessions, which will eventually culminate into Slow Noodles, a memoir on food, loss, and recovered family recipes. This excerpt from the memoir-in-progress is an evocative piece on surviving the Cambodian genocide, and remembering the flavors, the memories, and the past that the Khmer Rouge regime tried to erase. It’s also sprinkled with “recipes,” made up of ingredients that reveal details of Nguon’s life, particularly of her childhood in Battambang: “Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy French-Catholic-school education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Separate her from home, country, and a reliable source of food.” I’ve read this gorgeous essay a number of times, and each time I pay attention to new details — aromas, tastes — which make me appreciate it even more. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Authors Chantha Nguon and Kim Green on the story they wish they’d written this year:
We both loved “Cambodian Americans Are Ready to Share Their Cuisine, On Their Terms” by Maryam Jillani in Condé Nast Traveler. It’s a great primer on Cambodian cuisine that acknowledges the diaspora’s collective trauma without dwelling on it. And we love how she highlights the artistry of chefs we follow and admire. We wish we had written it but are also thrilled that Jillani did it so well.
In her exquisite piece about the human condition in the age of COVID, climate change, and other calamities, Briohny Doyle challenges readers — and herself — to give up the ghost of renewal. “What is an ideal community, a good life,” Doyle asks, “if nothing is renewed, if we are working in and through catastrophe with only what we have now and in the face of what will be?” This question is more than essay fodder. It’s a mantra, an incantation — for us all. —Seyward Darby
Author Briohny Doyle‘s personal essay recommendation:
I’m a long-time admirer of Vanessa Berry’s writing, which is always marked by assiduous curiosity and intimate detail. Gentle and Fierce — the title of her new collection — describes her writing as much as her animal subjects. This essay, “Perec’s Cat” is a wonderful example of her enviably light touch at work.
Even as artificial intelligence creeps across science and technology, bulldozing computational problems, we comfort ourselves in the face of such power by thinking there are some things a program simply can’t do. A program can’t be funny, can’t be fraught, can’t be human. And maybe it can’t. But in Vauhini Vara’s gutpunch of an essay, we begin to see the glimmer of otherwise. Unable to write about her sister’s death of a rare cancer years earlier, Vara began feeding the linguistic engine GPT-3 prompts about her sister — and over the course of nine increasingly stirring attempts, their two voices meld in a way that wipes away any preconceptions you might have brought to the piece. This isn’t a warning klaxon about robot overlords; it’s a bracing exploration of what can happen when we finally hold the mirror at the perfect angle. —Peter Rubin
Author Vanessa Angelica Villarreal on “Ghosts”:
“My own writing is largely a practice of communion with the dead—recording forgotten lives, lost records, documenting collective memory. I personally use tarot to tap into my own unconscious and excavate the buried material there, and have noted the recent trend of astrology apps and tarot on TikTok and the uncanny specificity of its algorithms to ensure the right message finds you. It is brilliant to use AI as a divination tool, and to explore what mathematical fabric algorithms might be connected to beyond our understanding.”
Alison Criscitiello’s essay about her climbing partner Anna Smith has stayed with me for a long time. It starts off as a rollicking adventure story: Two best friends embarking on a climbing expedition to the Indian Himalayas. The affection and admiration the women share spills out of her words, “opposites in almost every way imaginable, end members constantly bringing one another closer to an elusive center.” It is not just an exquisitely told quest: It is also about true friendship — and the joy found in sharing beautiful experiences.
Then it becomes something else. When Criscitiello describes Anna’s death, it is raw; I felt her pain. The essay turns into a survival story: Surviving not only the physical challenge of getting Anna off the mountain, but the grief, shock, and loneliness overwhelming Criscitiello now that she “no longer had Anna tethered to me.” For three days, she stays with Anna before a team arrives to help take her body down. Even then, Criscitiello remains, “guarding her” until Anna is finally cremated “along the shores of the Beas River in the heart of Manali” and her ashes taken home. It is time spent remembering Anna, whose “strength emanated from her core” and whose spark “set my aspirations afire.” —Carolyn Wells
Brimhall’s essay explores the influence that art, process, and ritual have on dealing with grief and loss as she mourns her mother’s death and the end of her marriage. So many essays deal with grief, but few consider the shape of it through so many disparate lenses. As Brimhall makes art out of the unexpected, she weaves a strand of persistent, insistent hope for the reader. “I love that nothing is wasted,” she writes. “Everything is ripe for transformation.” This essay reminds me that despite the fact that humans struggle with loss and change, maybe we can learn something about ourselves if we choose to lean on process and routine. Maybe too, we can get better at being more human as we deal with things that end, be it a life, a friendship, a marriage, or even just a time in our lives. —Krista Stevens
Quote of the Day: "The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others." - Robert Baden-Powell
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 7, 2021
It cost only three cents for a copy of the Washington Post's very first issue in 1877. https://t.co/6i6Po5pQHu #DCHistory It cost only three cents for a copy of the Washington Post's very first issue in 1877. https://t.co/6i6Po5pQHu #DCHistory — Boundary Stones (@BoundaryS…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
In case you missed it last week, read about these interesting New York City tenement house committee maps from 1894 in our latest blog post! Read the post here: https://t.co/Re0YGausE8 https://t.co/AlbHAWQXRo In case you missed it last week, read about these interesting New Y…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
In the mid 1980s, the creation of the Friendship Archway in D.C.'s Chinatown was controversial among neighborhood residents because of its association with China's Communist government. https://t.co/zZQBfiTSPz #DCHistory In the mid 1980s, the creation of the Friendship Archw…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
Looking for a gift for the reader in your life? Here are eight books we featured on Longreads this year: the memoir of a teen environmentalist, an essay collection on dance and illness, a refugee family’s story, and more.
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In this debut memoir, autistic climate activist Dara McAnulty writes about his immersive, intense connection to nature and wildlife with lyrical, evocative prose. The book’s entries, centered around McAnulty’s encounters around his home in Northern Ireland through the seasons, show a teenager’s deep appreciation for the natural world, science, and conservation.
Unfortunately, for me, I’m different. Different from everyone in my class. Different from most people in my school. But at breaktime today I watched the pied wagtails fly in and out of the nest. How could I feel lonely when there are such things? Wildlife is my refuge. When I’m sitting and watching, grown-ups usually ask if I’m okay. Like it’s not okay just to sit and process the world, to figure things out and watch other species go about their day.
Read an excerpt: ‘The Fledglings Are Out!’
When Jennifer Berney and her wife Kelly embarked on the journey to start a family, they found that the options available did not accommodate lesbian couples like them. Part-memoir, part-history of fertility and the LGBTQ+ community, Berney’s book explores feminism, outdated notions of heredity and paternity, and queer family-building.
As I was coming of age as a lesbian and considering my future, it had never once occurred to me that the medical industry could legally withhold services from me or anyone else, that they could say yes to straight couples and no to queers, but in fact they did just that. Most sperm banks and fertility clinics turned away any woman who wasn’t conventionally married. Sperm banks weren’t made for lesbians.
Read an excerpt: Binders Full of Men
Asad Hussein grew up in Dadaab refugee camp complex in Kenya, which was established in the early 1990s as families from Somalia fled the country’s civil war. When he was 9, his older sister Maryan was able to resettle in Arizona, but he and the rest of his family had to wait for years before they could come to America. Their story, told beautifully by Ty McCormick, is ultimately a hopeful one, while also revealing the absolute brokenness of the U.S. refugee resettlement program.
Many new arrivals in Tucson who had come from Dadaab, including Yussuf, had never lived outside of a small rural village. Some of the children had never seen the outside of a refugee camp. Maryan was unique in that she had lived alone in Nairobi. She also spoke decent English, and was used to a level of independence that was unusual in conservative Somali communities. This was a source of constant friction in her marriage, but it was also a font of opportunity in America.
Read an excerpt: When Refugee Families are Separated, Women Carry the Burden
Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living in rural Pennsylvania, in the greater Williamsport area, among communities caught in the middle of a fracking controversy. His book is a deep dive into the wider fracking debate, U.S. property rights, and the conflict between America’s notions of liberty and personal choice and the public good.
Thanks to land leasing, George had finally broken free of a lifetime of relative deprivation. Though he was hardly alone in turning to the fracking lottery in an effort to escape hardship, George certainly made out better than most. Of course, those who didn’t own any mineral estate couldn’t participate in the fracking lottery.
Read an excerpt: The Fracking Lottery
What does life look like for a ballet dancer with rheumatoid arthritis? This essay collection from Renée K. Nicholson explores the world of professional dance, the discovery of one’s body, and living with chronic disease.
The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me. Like anyone who is hopelessly in love, I will always be the keeper of a flame.
Read an excerpt: Happy is a Relative State
Plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso presents a whimsical discussion of the lives of plants, and the many lessons they can teach us about living and thriving on this planet — together. A manifesto of sorts, it’s playful, informative, and inspiring, reminding us of the interconnectedness of all things and urging us to take action in a time of climate change.
Playing with something whose working mechanisms are not well known is clearly dangerous. The consequences can be completely unpredictable. The strength of ecological communities is one of the engines of life on Earth. At every level, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, it is these communities, understood as relationships among the living, that allow life to persist.
Read an excerpt: Why Bumblebees Love Cats and Other Beautiful Relationships
In her memoir, Miranda Ward reflects on pregnancy loss, infertility, and the unique place of almost-motherhood: an uncertain landscape characterized by waiting, wanting, hoping, and not-knowing. A writer and geographer, she asks questions of geography on the most intimate scale and discovers the wilderness of her own body.
The idea of the miscarriage in progress perplexes the part of me that imagined that this is a thing that can only happen privately, violently, suddenly, because it is a thing that is happening without much noise at all, and meanwhile here I am transcribing an interview, here I am meeting with a freelance client, wearing a new skirt I bought yesterday from the charity shop, here I am buying groceries and planning dinner, with nothing but a question mark inside me.
Read an excerpt: The Geography Closest In
Natasha Pulley’s genre-bending and time-twisting novel is an original and entertaining adventure, blending history, speculative fiction, a love story, and a wartime tale into one.
Most people have trouble recalling their first memory, because they have to stretch for it, like trying to touch their toes; but Joe didn’t. This was because it was a memory formed a week after his forty-third birthday.
He stepped down off the train. That was it, the very first thing he remembered, but the second was something less straightforward. It was the slow, eerie feeling that everything was doing just what it should be, minding its own business, but that at the same time, it was all wrong.
Read an excerpt: Even the Steam Had a Shadow
Eclipse Over Antarctica via NASA https://t.co/xWTX2aJ5FG https://t.co/074g7xJWSh
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
This manuscript map of the Great Lakes region, created around 1755, shows four “phantom islands” in Lake Superior – islands which don’t exist! These islands commonly appeared on maps for almost 80 years. See if you can spot them here: https://t.co/qLcY1FssTc …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
In September 1814, Congress convened at Blodgett's Hotel after the British army burned down part of the Capitol, along with other government buildings in #WashingtonDC. In September 1814, Congress convened at Blodgett's Hotel after the British army burned down part of the Cap…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
Today in History - December 6 https://t.co/sT7toeyUta On December 6, 1884, workers placed the 3,300-pound marble capstone on the Washington Monument. Continue reading. Abraham Lincoln nominated Salmon P. Chase chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on December 6, 1864. C…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
1906 postcard of the Loudoun Apartments, now known as the John Jay Apartments, located at 314 East Capitol Street NE. The building was designed by B. Stanley Simmons and constructed in 1901. https://t.co/H7EomqYqED 1906 postcard of the Loudoun Apartments, now known as the John…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Dec 6, 2021
