Immersing himself in the fast-paced world of restaurants, Angel Dean Lopez meets a Japanese restaurateur, quickly teaming up they attempt to bring karaoke to America — but competition is nipping at their heels. A fascinating snapshot into a surreal period in someone’s life.
“Because when I saw you sing, I suddenly understood how karaoke can work in America. In Japan, everybody studies music in school. When they sing the song, they feel it’s important to do it correctly. But you just jumped in and had fun. You didn’t care if you sucked. That’s the way it has to be in America!”
In our last Top Five of the year, we are bringing you some fantastic stories from a broad range of publications. We begin with a powerful piece on gun violence, written by a reporter who embeds herself for a year in a high school. We then go back in time to the heady days of Silicon Valley in the 90s, before taking a look at the increasingly disturbing abilities of AI. A delve into the world of audiophiles follows before we finish on a seasonal note, with a lovely essay on the Christmas tree trade. Enjoy reading and happy holidays!
Noelle Crombie | The Oregonian | December 11, 2022 | 3,274 words
If you need a reminder of why we need strong local newsrooms, look no further than this powerful project. Reporter Noelle Crombie spent a year at Rosemary Anderson, an alternative high school in Rockwood, a neighborhood in Gresham, Oregon, buffeted by racism, poverty, and COVID-19. Her goal: to document the impact of skyrocketing gun violence on the students, teachers, and support staff. The result is a four-part series, of which this article, about the death of student Dante McFallo, is the first entry. “Five students, including Dante, have died in shootings in the past 2½ years,” Crombie writes. “Another student died in a stabbing and two died in car wrecks. All were young men of color, just 18 or 19. Gunfire wounded at least two other Rosemary Anderson students; both survived.” Make sure to spend time with the photos and videos that accompany the story. —SD
Natalie So | The Believer | December 9, 2022 | 12,558 words
Computer chips were “the dope of the ’90s.” And during those years, Silicon Valley, changing dramatically from the personal computing boom, was the Wild West. In this splendid piece for The Believer, Natalie So takes us back to a dark, frenzied time in the Bay Area’s history: when computer-related crime was on the rise, and a new generation of organized crime, run by Asian gangs as part of a large-scale heroin operation, targeted businesses for hardware, especially microchips. But what makes this story special is So’s exploration of her family’s — and particularly her mother’s — place within ’90s Silicon Valley. She traces her parents’ trajectories as immigrants working in technology in the Bay Area before the dot-com boom. As she unearths the past, she is in awe of her mother: street-smart, fearless, and an anomaly in a culture that portrayed Asian American women as docile and passive. In a story that has it all — from true crime to history to memoir — So uncovers a chapter of the computer industry’s past that’s been largely forgotten. “Who writes the Silicon Valley story?” asks So. “And who is excluded from it?” This brings to life a seminal period in the Bay Area’s tech industry, but even more, it’s an epic piece of family history. —CLR
Keith Holyoak | MIT Press Reader | December 2, 2022 | 3,335 words
Artificial intelligence has fascinated me ever since 2017, when someone told me (in all seriousness!) that I’d be replaced by it within the decade, my editorial experience and skill first duplicated then surpassed by a machine that eats knowledge for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 24/7, 365. Happily, this hasn’t happened — yet — but as Keith Holyoak says in this piece adapted from his book The Spider’s Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry, computers have long surpassed our ability to do math calculations. Could artificial intelligence eventually eclipse our creative abilities when it comes to language? Holyoak suggests perhaps not: “Though I remain officially agnostic, for the purpose of the specific question that presently concerns us — can AI write authentic poetry? — the preponderance of evidence leads me to answer “no.” AI has no apparent path to inner experience, which I (and many others) take to be the ultimate source of authentic poetry. A major corollary of this conclusion deserves to be stated: Inner experience can’t be defined as a computational process.” —KS
Sasha Frere-Jones | Harper’s | November 9, 2022 | 5,206 words
Perfection is a lie, but try telling that to someone with a newfound hobby. The apparatus of want — single-topic Instagram accounts, subreddits, fan forums — can turn a passing interest into an all-consuming obsession with the “endgame,” a nirvana in which all dreams are realized. For some, it’s mechanical keyboards. For others, it’s quilting. For the community that Sasha Frere-Jones explores in this fascinating piece, it’s audiophiles. (Or the “triode horn mafia,” as a subset of them is known.) But while there’s plenty of subculture gawking to be done here, what with the six-figure speaker prices and jargon-laden schisms, Frere-Jones threads the piece with an emotional honesty that turns it into something special. He entered this world because he loves music, and he wanted to hear the music he loves as truly as he could. Those moments where he manages to do just that, and to render the experience with the clarity that’s given him a long career as a music critic, are the ones that turn this piece into something else entirely. Discount the audiophiles all you want. But if this piece doesn’t make you want to throw your favorite piece of vinyl on a turntable and throw your smartphone into the sea, then I don’t know what to tell you. —PR
Owen Long | Curbed in partnership with Epic Magazine | December 7, 2022 | 6,374 words
Who knew the business of Christmas trees could be completely wild? Just read Owen Long’s entertaining story about the Christmas tree industry in New York City. Here, there are no quaint family tree farms or small neighborhood pop-ups — this ruthless industry is run by a few eccentric businessmen, called “tree men,” who spend most of the year preparing for the holiday season. There’s George Nash, an old hippie who sells trees to much of Harlem; Kevin Hammer, known as the “Keyser Söze of Christmas” and the man responsible for shaping NYC’s industry into what it is today; and Greg Walsh, who is Long’s boss (and looks exactly like Santa Claus). I don’t want to say too much — just sit down with a hot drink and dive into this festive and fascinating piece. There are some pretty hilarious lines, so be careful not to spit out your eggnog. —CLR
This story by Lynzy Billing is a stunning piece of journalism. Billing, a British journalist with Afghan and Pakistani roots, returned to Afghanistan as an adult to investigate what happened to her birth parents. Private investigators laughed at her or wanted nothing to do with it, so she decided to dig into her past herself. Over the next several years, Billing’s reporting shifted; what was initially a personal journey to learn about her origins became something else entirely: an investigation into night raids, or top-secret, CIA-backed operations meant to target insurgents.
With unprecedented on-the-ground access to survivors, eyewitnesses, and even fighters themselves, Billing tracked hundreds of night raids by one of the four “Zero Units,” or squads of U.S.-trained Afghan special forces soldiers. (These are also known as 02s.) With the help of Muhammad Rehman Shirzad, a forensic pathologist from Nangarhar province, over the course of her reporting Billing has identified 452 civilians killed in the 02’s raids over four years. But with “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy” being a common practice — and those in power ultimately not caring about civilian casualties — the full civilian death tally for this 02, plus the other Zero Units, is likely much higher. Billing’s conversations over three years with 02 soldiers like Baseer and Hadi are particularly riveting: “I’d come to see them as flawed soldiers who, in their way, were trying to pull some good out of their lot by sharing what they know,” she writes, “even if it meant exposing their role in killing innocents.” But really, the entire piece is extraordinary. I was gripped until the final line.
According to Baseer, Hadi is the joker of the two. He squeezed his friend’s shoulder reassuringly, grinning at him. “Don’t worry, she’s not American,” he said in Pashto. In an attempt to reassure them, I tell them I am English, not American, and of Afghan and Pakistani descent. Hadi smiled weakly, but it was clear he was unconvinced.
Both soldiers had obtained leave passes under false pretenses to meet me. The relationship between journalist and soldier seemed to offer them a space where they could discuss their actions — even boast about them when marveling at their superior training and autonomy — because I think they knew I wasn’t going to turn them in or use their stories as leverage.
Baseer’s family had left Afghanistan when he was 3, during the same fractious conflict that killed my own family. Eventually, his family settled in a refugee camp in Peshawar in Pakistan. Growing up, he considered both the Americans and the Soviets infidels, but he later came to realize that the Taliban have their own cruelties.
It requires mettle to be an investigative reporter, and the best in the business channel that fortitude into stories worthy of the subject matter — stories written with bravery, precision, and empathy. Our picks on this list, as well as a few suggested by the writers themselves, examine sexual violence, drug addiction, and government policy that destroys families, among other topics. It’s dark stuff, but in the hands of these writers, the stories sing. The tunes may be mournful, but they’re also gorgeous. You’ll want to listen until the final notes.
Janelle Nanos | The Boston Globe Magazine | July 28, 2022 | 11,329 words
“Even if many of us never find them again, they may never really be lost,” writes Janelle Nanos about our memories. For most of her life, Kate Price had felt, deep in her body, that she had been wronged when she was a child. When she met Nanos in 2012, Price had already spent decades interrogating her own memory and history, but together — as journalist and survivor — they embarked on a journey to make sense of Price’s childhood, and to find evidence that she was sexually abused by her father and maternal grandfather, and sold for sex to truckers who drove through Pennsylvania. It’s a challenging read about child abuse, long-lasting trauma, memory, and family, but also a remarkably told story 10 years in the making about a woman who risked everything to discover the truth, and who defied the odds and has managed to build a happy life. The piece plays eerie visual tricks on the reader’s eye, from Erin Clark’s double-exposure photos to subtly moving layouts that make you question what you’re seeing; this imagery, combined with audio clips, take you deep into this incredible story. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Janelle Nanos recommends two reads about family, loss, and memory:
This horrific story about a UK hospital’s failure to save the life of a young child — written by the child’s mother — was for me a reminder that it’s important to trust your own instincts when facing a medical crisis in order to ensure that your loved ones get the care they need.
This essay made me smile and weep, and brought on a cascade of other emotions as I thought about the prospect of what I’d do if facing a similar challenge with my own children. It was written by the mother of a child diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease who decided to celebrate her with a lifetime’s worth of birthdays.
Caitlin Dickerson | The Atlantic | August 8th, 2022 | 28,600 words
In my original blurb for this story, when it was featured in Longreads’ Top 5 newsletter, I wrote that Caitlin Dickerson’s “examination of the Trump administration’s family separation policy is a reporting tour de force and an American horror story that should be read and studied as long as the republic stands.” I remain steadfast in this belief. Assign it in journalism classes, government seminars, law courses, social work degree programs. Every American should know this story and grapple with its devastating contents. And, lest we act like we’re past the cruelty that Dickerson so masterfully unveils, family separation is still happening. Read this story, then use it to fuel demands that policymakers and law enforcement cease family separation once and for all. —Seyward Darby
Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud | New Lines Magazine | April 27, 2022 | 7,881 words
This piece instantly came to mind when I thought about investigative reporting. It’s haunted me. A harrowing read, it begins with a description of the videos that inspired Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud to start the investigation: two men, in broad daylight, executing 41 civilians and dumping the bodies in a pre-dug pit prepared with car tires for incineration. Detailed vividly, I warn it contains upsetting descriptions of violence. The callousness of these videos stood out for Üngör and Shahhoud, even though, as researchers of mass violence and genocide in Syria and elsewhere, they have watched thousands of hours of distressing footage. For previous research, they had created a Facebook profile of a young, pro-regime woman from an Alawite middle-class family — “Anna” — and used her to interview dozens of Assad’s perpetrators. After narrowing their scope with on-the-ground research, they scoured Facebook with this profile, finally recognizing the main shooter from the videos in a photo. Friending him on Facebook messenger, “Anna” leads him on a catfish dance for months before finally approaching the topic of the massacre and convincing him to confess that he “killed a lot of people.” Tracking down a killer and getting him to admit the soul-destroying acts he has committed is an impressive feat. But it took a toll, and to learn more about what Üngör and Shahhoud went through during the investigation, listen to The Guardian‘s podcast series “Searching for the Shadow Man” — they could not keep “Anna” alive for much longer. —Carolyn Wells
Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod | ESPN | April 11, 2022 | 31,519 words
There are few sports scandals more horrifying than Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky being indicted in 2011 for the sexual abuse of dozens of young boys. It killed the program’s reputation; it led to the ouster of legendary head coach Joe Paterno, a man revered in the town of State College and beyond. But decades before, the Penn State football system met another monster in its midst. Todd Hodne, a young and aggressive defenseman, was arrested for rape in 1978. Paterno ousted him from the locker room, but the end of Hodne’s football career didn’t mean the end of his atrocities. With patience and empathy, Lavigne and Junod piece together the saga in an investigation that’s something more than a magazine story. For the women who crossed Hodne’s ruinous path, it’s an exorcism, a defiant testimonial that desecration doesn’t have to mean destruction. For the reader, it’s a crucial reminder that the sports world has a way of coddling even its outcasts. And for the journalists who searched and listened and wrote this outstanding work, it’s yet another laurel in their already legendary careers. Between the ongoing true-crime podcast wave and Netflix phenomena like Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, it’s clear that our society has developed a lurid fixation with serially violent men. “Untold” will help you remember that every voyeuristic frisson comes at the price of another person’s life. —Peter Rubin
Tom Junod on his favorite investigation of the year:
Full disclosure: The people who wrote this are my friends and colleagues at ESPN. But my admiration for this story about NFL owner Daniel Snyder goes well beyond the personal. Simply put: The question that the writers started with was provocative enough — with all of Snyder’s baggage, why doesn’t the NFL just get rid of him? But the answer was, literally, jaw-dropping: Snyder remains an NFL owner because he’s let it be known that he’s investigated all the other owners. I mean, when I read that, I’ll admit that I was like, “Holy cow — these guys better have the goods.” That they had the goods is proven by all the disclosures that keep following in the original story’s wake, and the fact that Snyder is putting the Washington Commanders up for sale. But even more telling is the experience of reading the story. Sure, it has all the investigative revelations promised by its rather ungainly digital title. But it’s also an expert exercise in melding investigative and narrative journalism, one that, by its end, convinces readers that they know very little about how rich and powerful people live — about what they value and what they might be willing to destroy.
Seth Harp | Rolling Stone | September 4, 2022 | 5,922words
They’re young, healthy members of the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Bragg. So why are far too many of them dying by accidental fentanyl overdose? That’s the question that Seth Harp set out to answer in this deeply reported piece for Rolling Stone, but he ended up discovering much more about the needless reasons Fort Bragg soldiers are dying while stateside, despite a lack of transparency from top brass at the military installation. Is it the nature of the work at a place that houses mostly “male soldiers in combat-arms units”? Could the personality traits that make for elite soldiers make them more likely to dismiss the risks of drug use? Could the horrors of serving in Afghanistan and the recent U.S. withdrawal have spawned trauma that causes soldiers to self-medicate? In this unflinching piece, Harp does the work to try to find out and call the U.S. Army to account. Aside from the accidental overdose crisis killing soldiers at Fort Bragg, perhaps Harp’s most alarming discovery is about the most common way that soldiers stationed there die: “Forty-one Fort Bragg soldiers took their own lives in 2020 and 2021, making suicide the leading cause of death. A spokesman for the Army, Matthew Leonard, confirmed that no other base has ever recorded a higher two-year suicide toll.” —Krista Stevens
Ten years ago, Jen Hensel lost her daughter, Avielle Richman, in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty first graders and six adults were murdered. That shooting should have been a singular event: a transformative moment that should have led to stricter gun control laws and a national coming together to make schools safer. While some legislation has passed since then, it’s certainly not enough. For NPR, Tovia Smith tells Hensel’s story in the years after Avielle’s death: how she and her husband, Jeremy Richman, set up a foundation focused on neuroscience research and violence prevention; how she has coped with the death of Richman, who died by suicide in 2019; and how — despite it all — she has found some happiness with her two kids, Owen and Imogen. Smith’s portrait of Hensel is devastating and emotional; the piece forces you to imagine her family’s pain. “You have to imagine it,” Richman once said. To face the horror of gun violence — not turn away from it.
But embedded in every such joy is perpetual pain. It’s no longer the raw, relentless kind that made it hard to stand up 10 years ago, Hensel says. But it’s still sharp enough to blindside you and bring you to your knees.
Hensel’s dear friend Francine Wheeler, who also lost her 6-year-old, Ben, at Sandy Hook, agrees. They share an aversion to the word “closure” and bristle at the very idea of a “10th anniversary” — and the implied expectations around where they should be in the arc of their grief.
Sasha Frere-Jones is best known as a critic, but he’s a music lover at heart, as is clear in this reported essay about the maddening, seductive world of audiophilia. On one side, the many of us who are satisfied with cheap earbuds; on the other, the seeming fetishism of what he calls the “triode horn mafia.” Triangulating between those extremes isn’t a given, but he does so with aplomb.
I am heartbroken that the masters of John Coltrane’s Impulse! recordings were lost in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios. But I still think the existing analog and digital copies of those recordings are good enough to spread the message. An obsession with the quality of recordings is, on some level, antithetical to the spirit of mindful listening. The constant, beautiful, churning production of music in the present moment reminds us that fetishizing the past, rather than simply learning from it, is a non-musical obsession. You can love the texture and living power of recordings—I absolutely do—without losing your goddamn mind. In their back-and-forth manner, all technologies have been improving, even if the peristalsis of history is hard to follow. The necessary gear will be there, somewhere, and even bad gear is good enough for great music.
This eye-opening, entertaining story by Owen Long exposes the wild and ruthless business of selling Christmas trees in New York City. The industry is run by a few eccentric businessmen, called “tree men,” who spend most of the year preparing for the holiday season. There’s George Nash, an old hippie who sells trees to much of Harlem; Kevin Hammer, known as the “Keyser Söze of Christmas” and the man responsible for shaping NYC’s industry into what it is today; and Greg Walsh, who is Long’s boss (and looks exactly like Santa Claus). It’s a fascinating (and at times, very funny) read.
I’ve met several people who’ve sold Christmas trees for Hammer. Almost all of them asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. They said that to work for Hammer, there is no interview and there is no application. The only way to enter his network is to be referred by an insider. You and a partner — Hammer’s sellers always work in pairs — call a number around October, and a voice instructs you both to show up at a certain location (typically a sidewalk outside a bodega) around Thanksgiving. When you arrive, the two of you wait, possibly hours, potentially days, for another phone call from a different number. A new voice instructs you to construct a small shack out of pallets, plywood, even garbage, then continue waiting for the arrival of hundreds of Christmas trees, which will soon appear overnight along with clippers, chain saws, and plastic netting. You are instructed to sell each tree at the highest possible price.
In this essay, Preston manages to make a mundane job sound fascinating. An astonishing feat. As a human helping out a chatbot, she observes the world of an AI bot named Brenda and the lives of the often desperate humans she is supposed to help.
“Hey Brenda,” wrote a prospect. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you. You were so awesome and so willing to help me and I’m sorry for being a jerk and leaving you hanging. I haven’t been very productive as far as moving goes cuz I guess it just kinda sucks to move alone and no one to be excited with, ya know?”
“We have 1BR and 2BR starting at $1645,” Brenda wrote. “Would you like to come in for an appointment?”
Italy is home to a food tradition as rich as varied as the terrain itself; not one cuisine, but many. Yet, as John Last sets out in this Noema feature, it’s also home to a culinary purism that can verge on xenophobia — and considering the many-headed hydra of difficulties the nation is facing, it’s going to need to adapt or perish.
All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine.
Who is to blame when a self-driving car strikes and kills someone? That question animates Lauren Smiley’s feature about the first instance of such a tragedy. Smiley focuses on the aftermath, detailing the toll that the incident took on the Uber driver — or, rather, “operator” — behind the wheel of the car, and how powerful interests shaped her fate:
For years, researchers and self-driving advocates had anxiously prognosticated about how the public and the legal system would react to the first pedestrian death caused by a self-driving car.
The crash in Tempe ripped those musings into reality — forcing police, prosecutors, Uber, and Vasquez into roles both unwanted and unprecedented in a matter of seconds. At the scene that night, Vasquez stood at the center of a tragedy and a conundrum. She couldn’t yet fathom the part she was about to play in sorting out where the duties of companies and states and engineers end, and the mandate of the person inside the car begins.
“I’m sick over what happened,” Vasquez confided to the police as her mind spun in the hours after the crash. She said she felt awful for the victim’s family. She also grieved the event in a different way — as a loyal foot soldier of the self-driving revolution. “Oh God, this is going to be a setback for the whole industry,” Vasquez told Loehr. “Which is not what I want.”
At the time, Vasquez was an Uber defender. She had come a long way to this job. Over the previous few years, she’d acquired a dizzying track record of doing hidden work for highly visible companies — moderating grisly posts on Facebook, she says; tweeting about Dancing With the Stars from ABC’s Twitter; policing social media for Wingstop and Walmart. But her position with Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group had offered new stability, and after years of turmoil as a transgender woman navigating a hostile society, she was careful not to jeopardize it. Vasquez had even removed the box braids of colorful yarn that had defined her look since she was young. At a new job, she had come to think, “the less attention I bring to myself, the better.” During her nine months of work as an operator, the viselike grip of everything she’d endured as a child and teen and adult had slackened just a bit. As she trudged into her forties, Vasquez had felt her life, finally, relaxing into a kind of equilibrium.
Now, as she and Loehr sat in a victim services van near the Tempe bridge after midnight, grappling with Herzberg’s death, the vise was tightening again. She found herself asking, “Do I need a lawyer?”
Reporter Noelle Crombie spent a year at an alternative high school in Gresham, Oregon, documenting the impact of skyrocketing gun violence on the students, teachers, and support staff. The result is a four-part series, of which this article, about the shooting death of Dante McFallo — one of eight male students of color who have died in the last two and a half years — is the first entry:
So many deaths in such a short time infused teachers and staff with a sense of desperation to protect the young people who come through the door each day. As the Portland area records another year of unprecedented gun deaths, the race to keep students in school and away from harm took on new urgency even as violence approached the school itself.
The campus serves students from communities east of Interstate 205, an area with among the highest concentrations of poverty in Oregon and where in some neighborhoods, residents on average die five to 10 years sooner than the rest of Multnomah County.
Powerful forces buffet many of the school’s families. Decades of racist planning scattered Portland’s small Black population. Rising housing costs put home ownership out of reach for many. Limited economic opportunities make it difficult to ascend to the middle class.
Pandemic-induced declines in enrollment also exacted a heavy toll, plunging the student body from a high of 150 before the COVID-19 outbreak to about 90 this year. Some days, only a few dozen show up.
For students, Rosemary Anderson High School represents stability and safety, a respite from dangerous streets and chaotic home lives, its teachers and staff often doubling as surrogate parents.
This was especially true for Dante.
In the end, the school and its teachers could not keep him safe.
The reported essays that grabbed our editors’ attention this year demonstrate the craft of the form: immersing yourself in a new world and finding other people’s voices and expert knowledge to help tell a story. We have drawn from all our picks of the year, and also asked some of these talented writers for their own insights. Enjoy reading this eclectic range of pieces that report from around the world.
Melanie Challenger | Emergence Magazine | January 20, 2022 | 3,605 words
In this poignant and incisive essay at Emergence Magazine, Melanie Challenger grapples with grief and loss in her life and the irony of a general human ambivalence to death in the plant and animal kingdoms that has allowed us to harm the planet over time. Speaking of grief, my own life has changed exponentially since I first read and shared Challenger’s piece back in January. I met death face-to-face when it came calling in August, and like Challenger, “I didn’t leave that room the same person.” She’s right when she suggests that we hurt so much when someone dies because we are so very privileged to love: “Among the many lessons Hannah taught me that day, and in the days to come, was the significance and seriousness of grief in human lives — which is another way of saying the significance of love in our lives, because it is the fever of our attachment to one another that charges grief with its intolerable brilliancy.” Now, if only we could love the planet the way we love and grieve for one another: “When we are closer to the animals and plants that accompany us in this life, we share in their demise and in their aim to flourish, which raises the force of their deaths and softens the force of our own.” —Krista Stevens
“The Turbulent Brain” “by Morten Kringelbach and Gustavo Deco for Aeon: I was very struck by this article in Aeon which presented new theories and findings on non-equilibrium states, and how we respond to the external world. It made me think hard, which, for me, is the best thing a piece of work can do.
“Two Weeks in Tehran” by Azedah Moaveni for The London Review of Books: I’m an ideas-based writer rather than a reporter but I have huge admiration for quality reportage, and this is a piece that matters. And, as we now see, this article was prescient.
Sunaura Taylor and Astra Taylor | Lux | January 6, 2022 | 6,846 words
From a young age, we’re shown and sold the bucolic version of a farm, but in reality, a modern factory farm is a horrific place of reproductive violence on a massive scale. What would it mean to truly respect and honor animals? What will it take to radically shift the way we think about animal consumption, and to break up and abolish Big Meat and Big Milk? In this thought-provoking essay, Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor call for cross-species solidarity and make a socialist-feminist case for veganism. “We are all caught in the same racist, sexist, colonial, and ecologically catastrophic capitalist system,” they write. Vegans get a bad rap, but the authors urge people, especially those on the left, to join alongside them — and to expand their visions of democracy, reproductive choice, and egalitarianism to include pigs, cows, and other animals that we exploit for profit. This is an eye-opening piece making clear that the liberation of humans and the liberation of non-human animals are interconnected. I’ve returned to it numerous times this year during and after tough conversations with loved ones, and often think about it as I reconsider my own habits. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Lachlan Summers | Noema | July 14, 2022 | 3,699 words
Mexico City is built on soap. After the Lago de Texoco was drained (the coda to a centuries-long process of colonialism and development), what was left behind was a 70-meter deep layer of soil known as jaboncillo, “like moisture soap.” Jaboncillo is squishy, effectively hollow, and is no small reason why earthquakes in 1985 and 2017 so devastated the city. It also ensures that seismic damage continues to pervade the city’s landscape. As Lachlan Summers writes, CDMX “reflects the strangeness of the earth on which it sits. Footpaths undulate. Potholes suddenly appear in the street and begin consuming the road. A fissure slyly burrows under a building to do unseen work to its foundations.” Such instability also lives on in the psyches of residents, and Summers’ fascinating essay unpacks the staggering effect it has on Mexico City’s tocado, or “touched.” The tocado are beset by vertigo, loss of appetite, and a fear that one day the building they walk past every day will finally buckle and fall. Conventional medicine has no easy answer for them, dismissing such symptoms as a “cultural concept of distress,” but with insight and empathy Summers maps it as the inevitable result of human experience colliding with geologic time. Scales so disparate are never meant to overlap, of course — but as we’ve seen so many times, human intervention has a way of hastening end-time scenarios. —Peter Rubin
Lachlan Summers recommends two polar opposite reported essays from this year:
“Dead Man Living” by Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic: Bruenig’s account of the Alabama state’s repeated efforts to kill Alan Eugene Miller is a bleak story of incompetence, indifference, and the unending horror of state-sanctioned murder.
“Banana Nation” by Jasper Craven in The Baffler: A hysterical story about the insane worlds being built and destroyed by crypto-bros as they fight to convince everyone (including themselves) that crypto is the future.
Adam Fales | Dilettante Army | February 15th, 2022 | 5,200 words
Calling all English majors who love the horror genre and whose nation’s many ghosts keep them up at night — and anyone else with a yen for a great literary read. Adam Fales’s brilliant essay about the motif of the haunted house in American fiction and film comprises seven sections, which he calls “gables” in a nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fales casts a wide net for source material, incorporating Ari Aster’s movie Hereditary, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and many more works of art. Fales argues that the haunted house tale, a staple of U.S. culture for hundreds of years, “lets Americans concentrate the past’s wrongness,” from genocide to slavery to capitalist exploitation. Problem is, these stories have often “failed, if not outright refused, to heal the wounds they simultaneously abhor and celebrate.” What does a better haunted house tale look like? In the answer to that question might be kernels of a wider revolution in how we talk about and, indeed, stop reconstructing our collective sins. —Seyward Darby
Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | January 27, 2022 | 6,380 words
A delightful piece by the ever-witty Sophie Elmhirst, plucked from the murky depths of time — January 2022. Before the war in Ukraine. Before sky-rocketing bills. Early 2022 was a whole different landscape. Rereading this essay, I wondered how things had changed for Gary Hersham’s British real estate company, Beauchamp Estates: Russian Oligarchs, fond of buying up London properties, are now sanctioned, and interest rates in the U.K. (and around the world) have reached giddy heights. Despite this essay feeling like a time capsule, I still loved revisiting the indomitable Hersham. He has operated through ups and downs for decades; I bet he is doing just fine. Elmhirst tags along as he blusters his way through viewings, sales, interactions with his “fantastic” secretary, and many, many phone calls. It’s a riveting insight into a world where who you know absolutely matters, and Britain is sold as a brand. As Elmhirst eloquently puts it, “[a] slice of fictional England, a portal to aristocracy, yours for £10,000 a square foot.” While we glimpse Indian billionaires and Chinese industrialists, it is Hersham who remains the most fascinating character. He is another snapshot in time, confidently telling Elmhirst: “‘I always call it WhatsUp.’ As if the app had got it wrong.” —Carolyn Wells
Computer chips were “the dope of the ’90s.” And during those years, Silicon Valley was the Wild West. In this splendid piece for The Believer, Natalie So takes us back to a dark, frenzied time in the Bay Area: when computer-related crime was on the rise and Asian gangs targeted businesses for computer chips. So uncovers a largely forgotten chapter of Silicon Valley’s past — one that includes the many immigrants working in technology, before the dot-com boom, that helped build the industry. But it’s also an incredible record of family history.
Not until twenty years later would I learn just how frequently these robberies were taking place. Even though millions of dollars’ worth of computer chips were stolen, this era of Silicon Valley would largely be forgotten. Computer hardware would eventually give way to the dot-com bubble, after which social media, the cloud, big data, and later, Bitcoin, NFTs, and other increasingly intangible technologies would come to the fore. But for a time, the boom of personal computing transformed Silicon Valley into the Wild West, a new frontier that drew every kind of speculator, immigrant, entrepreneur, and bandit, all lured by the possibilities of riches, success, and the promise of a new life. The Silicon Valley of the ’90s was in many ways an expression of the quintessential American story, but an unexpected one: one that involved organized crime, narcotics trafficking, confidential informants, and Asian gangs. It is also part of my family history. Grace, as it turns out, is my aunt. And the company being robbed? It was my mother’s.
Sarah Souli | November 2022 | 13 minutes (3,781 words)
This is an excerpt from The Atavist’s issue no. 133, “A Matter of Honor.”The story was completed with generous support from the Incubator for Media Education and Development, a nonprofit journalistic organization founded in 2018 with an exclusive donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
“Just by being there, the border is an invitation.
Come on, it whispers, step across this line. If you dare.” —Kapka Kassabova
Life in a diaspora can have the dull ache of a phantom limb. In the Istanbul neighborhood of Zeytinburnu, in August 2021, the pain was acute. More than 2,000 miles away, the Taliban was starting to take back control of Afghanistan; within days the country would fall to an old regime made new. The events had plunged Zeytinburnu, an enclave of tens of thousands of Afghans displaced from their home country by war, poverty, and other ills, into a state of collective fear and mourning.
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The context seemed to render my investigation, now dragging into its third year, futile. What did three dead women matter when a whole nation was having its heart ripped out?
The heat of late summer shimmered off the pavement as I spent long, liquid days moving from one person to another, displaying my phone screen and asking the same question: Do you know these women? I approached customers in call centers that promised good rates back home, patrons in restaurants where the smell of mutton biryani filled the air, elderly men sipping tea on wooden benches, and mothers watching children at a construction site that had been turned into a makeshift playground. I lost count of how many people I asked. Everyone gave the same answer: No.
On what was supposed to be my last afternoon in Zeytinburnu, I stood outside a café window watching a young Afghan man inside churn cardamom shiryakh (ice cream) in a large copper pot. The customers behind him drank fruit juices and devoured frozen treats amid kitsch decor: blue plastic flowers, a glossy relief of the Swiss Alps. The scene felt at odds with the urgent historical moment; in Kabul, as the American military withdrew, the Taliban was shooting people dead in the streets. Still, perhaps my professional defeat, my failure to find answers, would go down easier with sugar.
* Names have been changed for individuals’ safety.
The door to the café jingled as I walked inside with Tabsheer,* an Afghan journalist and translator who was helping me report. We sat at a plastic table, where a waiter placed a dish of ice cream swirled to a perfect point and dusted with pistachio. After we ate, Tabsheer suggested, “Let’s just ask one more person. We’re here. We might as well.”
We settled on a middle-aged man who, in a pressed shirt and slacks, would have looked the consummate professional if not for the comically large banana smoothie he was drinking. We walked over and introduced ourselves using the same tired script. I took out my phone and pulled up a photo of a woman, her glossy red lips pursed in a coquettish expression that over the course of my reporting had come to signify disappointment—at men, at law enforcement, at me, the journalist trying to unearth her story.
The man looked at the image and put down his smoothie. He furrowed his brow and leaned in slightly. His lips parted and he hesitated a moment, which prepared me for familiar disappointment. Then he spoke.
“Yes,” he said. He cocked his head to the side. “Yes, I know this woman.”
“Are you sure?”I asked, incredulous at the turn the day had taken.
I pulled up another photo—a teenager with dark eyes, her straight hair tucked behind one ear. “What about this girl, do you recognize her?” I asked, holding my breath.
The man narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he repeated.
I brought up another photo, this time of a young man looking over his shoulder, his mouth firmly set. “I often saw them together around here, but this was many years ago,” the man said. He looked at me quizzically. “What do you want with these people?”
I chose my next words carefully. Few things spook people like the mention of murder. “I’m looking for them,” I replied. “Something bad happened to them in Greece.”
The man held my gaze for a moment and took a sip of his smoothie. Whatever he was weighing, when he set his glass down he seemed to have made up his mind. “I know all these people, and I know their story,” he said. “I will tell you everything.”
THREE YEARS EARLIER
On the morningof October 10, 2018, a Greek farmer named Nikos Papachatzidis left his house to tend his fields. His land abutting the Evros River had long been a source of pride. This slice of the world, on the very eastern edge of Europe, is fertile, a place where sugarcane, cotton, wheat, and sunflowers grow in abundance.
With his snow-white hair blowing in the breeze, Papachatzidis, then in his early seventies, hopped onto his tractor and began tilling the soil. As he drove, he noticed something on the ground: a human hand, bound with a length of rope. He stopped the tractor and climbed down to find a dead woman, her face more or less intact, with a wide wound on her neck. Papachatzidis called the police.
Papachatzidis is not a man easily ruffled. When the police arrived, they cordoned off the area around the body, and Papachatzidis went back to work on another part of his land. He stayed out until sundown, at which point he returned home, exchanged his muddy boots for house slippers, and told his wife about the dead woman. At first she was angry—why had he waited all day to tell her? Then she grew so scared that a killer might be on the loose that she spent a sleepless night praying.
The next day, the couple received a phone call from the police. The bodies of two other women had been found on Papachatzidis’s land. It was likely that all three were migrants or asylum seekers. They had been murdered.
Bodies turn up along the Evros River with morbid regularity. The thin, shallow waterway divides Greece and Turkey for some 120 miles—the countries’ only shared land border—before dumping into the Aegean Sea. The area around Papachatzidis’s farm is a popular gateway for people desperate to enter Europe in search of freedom, safety, and dignity. But while traversing the river is less treacherous than a boat passage across the Mediterranean, it is by no means safe. Between 2018 and 2022, more than 200 migrants and refugees died trying to cross the Evros. Hypothermia and drowning are the most common causes of death. The strong current is challenging even for capable swimmers, and natural debris such as tree branches can snag on clothing and drag people—often children—to the river’s muddy bed. Across the Evros, other dangers await. Smugglers load people into vans bound for Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, with drivers who are often scared and inexperienced, resulting in horrific car crashes along the highway.
Murder, though, is a different matter. It is all but unheard of in Evros, the Greek region that takes its name from the river. For locals, the crime on Papachatzidis’s land was the most brutal act in recent memory.
Word spread fast, fueling rumors. This was the work of Islamic State operatives, some people said. No, the Turks did it. No, only a Greek soldier could be responsible. Greece, after all, had militarized the border in recent years, in an effort to keep migrants out of the European Union. With support from Brussels, the Evros River was now lined with fences and patrolled by men with guns. Some police officers who intercepted Afghans, Syrians, Somalis, and other migrants after they crossed the river allegedly violated international human rights law by sending them right back to Turkey, a practice known as pushback. (Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Greece denies that it engages in pushback.) Over the coming years, several people would be shot dead trying to enter Evros. In March 2020, as border police and the military fired upon migrants, reportedly killing two, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen thanked Greece for being “a European shield.”
A glaring indignity, among many others, is that Europe is not always aware of who dies on its doorstep. Identifying bodies found in Evros is the job of one man: Pavlos Pavlidis, a doctor and forensic scientist. When a migrant dies, the body is taken to Pavlidis’s morgue at University General Hospital in the seaside city of Alexandroupoli.
Pavlidis is tall and gaunt, with the stooped demeanor of a man used to doling out bad news. His job often feels Sisyphean: endless and hopeless. Unlike the sea, the Evros River has no salt to preserve bodies, and faces quickly disintegrate beyond recognition. Most identifying documents are lost or heavily damaged during crossings. Pavlidis takes DNA from the bodies and notes potentially identifying clues—tattoos and circumcisions, for instance—as well as material possessions. He sometimes works with the International Red Cross and various embassies to try and contact the families of the deceased. In most cases, the bodies he inspects are never identified.
When Pavlidis arrived at Papachatzidis’s farm, a grisly scene awaited him. Two of the women were found on their knees, facedown in the soil. Roughly 330 feet away, the third woman, who looked older than the others, lay sprawled on the ground, as though she had tried to run away and been knocked off her feet. All three had their hands bound, and their throats were cut. Their shoes were laced and their pants were buttoned.
Pavlidis is not an emotional man. In the more than two decades he has spent toiling in a hospital basement, he has learned not to think about what the dead were like when they were alive, or what they experienced in their final moments. A morgue is no place to contemplate the immense cruelty of the world if one wants to stay sane. “You get feelings,” Pavlidis said with a firm shake of his head. “I don’t want that.”
Pavlidis oversaw the transfer of the women’s bodies to Alexandroupoli, where they were placed on metal gurneys. The sharp chemical smell of the hospital masked the musk of decay. Decomposition had already set in; it appeared that several days passed before Papachatzidis discovered the bodies. Pavlidis noted that the women were dressed like “Europeans,” in tight denim and without headscarves. They had no identifying documents. Pavlidis found no internal bruising or other signs of trauma. No drugs or alcohol were in the women’s systems, and there was no evidence of sexual assault. The younger women were still, at least medically speaking, virgins; the older woman was not.
Pavlidis took DNA samples from skin, clothes, and hair. He scraped underneath the women’s fingernails, which were manicured and painted pearly pink. Genetic testing soon illuminated one piece of the story: The women were related. The younger two were sisters, and they had been killed a short distance from their mother.
The cause of death in each case was hemorrhagic shock brought on by severe blood loss. The women’s jugular veins had been cut, likely by someone right-handed. In Pavlidis’s experience, wounds of this nature were often sloppy and jagged; slicing someone’s throat is difficult, especially if they’re screaming or moving around. But the wounds on the women were precise. “It was like a butcher cut,” Pavlidis told me, sitting in his office. A cigarette smoldered in a glass ashtray on his desk, and an old PC hummed behind it. “I’ve said from the beginning, this guy is a professional.”
Two knives were found at the crime scene: one nine and a half inches long, with a serrated edge, and another, slightly shorter, with a black plastic handle. Both had been wiped clean. Police found a few other items near the bodies, including a water bottle, a bag of almonds, a tube of lipstick, and a soda can.
The most important piece of evidence was also one of the luckiest finds: a Samsung mobile phone tucked in the mother’s breast pocket. The local police didn’t have the technology to extract metadata from it, nor the experience to handle what was likely to become an international criminal investigation. The women had been killed in Greece after leaving Turkey, and it was all but certain they’d begun life in a third country. To find out who the women were and who had killed them, someone with resources and connections would have to run the investigation.
In the photos on the phone, the women were suddenly alive. In some images they had their arms thrown around each other. Filters—floating pink hearts, rabbit ears—embellished others.
Zacharoula Tsirigoti is short and compact, with small fingers that seem constantly to be rolling cigarettes with the assistance of a little machine she keeps in her purse and reddish hair that, when we met, was cropped close to her scalp. But while outward appearances indicate a woman built for efficiency, during our first interview Tsirigoti called herself “a romantic.” I watched her tear up twice while talking about her work.
From the age of 13, Tsirigoti wanted to be a police officer. “Not like the riot police that just beat people up,” she clarified, wagging a finger in the air. She wanted to give back to her community; she was attracted to the ethos of service and protection. After graduating from university, Tsirigoti started off as a constable, then spent 22 years working on relations between the Hellenic police and foreign law enforcement. She eventually became head of the Aliens and Border Protection Branch, and in 2016 was promoted to lieutenant general in the Hellenic police in Athens, making her the highest-ranking female officer in Greece.
None of this was without challenges. Greece is the lowest-ranked EU country in terms of gender equality; the Hellenic police is not a bastion of feminism. “The society in Greece is not ready to accept women doing jobs that men used to do,” Tsirigoti said. She sprinkled tobacco onto a rolling paper and looked up at me with a sly smile. “They gave me this branch because they thought I couldn’t manage the situation, but they were wrong,” she said. “A woman is more diplomatic than a man.”
Diplomacy was one characteristic needed to helm the investigation into the triple murder in Evros. Another was patience. Tsirigoti knew it might take months, if not years, to make progress in the case. The required paperwork and bureaucratic maneuvering, already Kafkaesque in Greece, would become even more dizzyingly complex when other nations entered the mix. With her commitment to her work and her Rolodex of international contacts, plus her deep understanding of migration patterns between Greece and Turkey from her time in border protection, Tsirigoti was ideally suited to the job.
One factor working against the investigation was general disinterest in the victims. In November 2018, a month after the murders, Eleni Topaloudi, a 21-year-old Greek woman, was attacked, gang-raped, and killed on the island of Rhodes. The case mobilized the nation, and police quickly arrested the perpetrators. The following year, when Suzanne Eaton, a sixty-year-old American woman, was murdered on Crete, the crime made headlines around the world, and her killer was brought to justice in two weeks. By contrast, the three migrant women killed in Evros barely made the news.
Tsirigoti didn’t just keep law enforcement’s attention on the case—she was the attention. “For me as a woman, it was very sad to see a mother with her two daughters killed like this,” she said. “To cross the border to another country there is a cause. They are human beings, not a number. I wanted to prove to the world, to the EU, that the Greek police investigate and care about everything. It was a matter of honor.”
The first step in the investigation was to contact Interpol, the international organization that facilitates cooperation among law enforcement in 195 countries. Greek police sent a “black notice” to the agency, an official request for information pertaining to unidentified bodies. They shared fingerprints taken from the three bodies—if the women had been registered as asylum seekers in, say, Turkey, there was a chance Interpol would be able to identify them. “We expected to get an answer from them,” Tsirigoti said. But that route turned out to be a dead end.
Tsirigoti hoped that the phone found on the mother would hold clues, so in December 2018 she turned to the Hellenic police’s anti-terrorism unit—not because she suspected that the women had been killed in an act of terrorism, but because the unit is the most technologically advanced in Greek law enforcement. Forensic analysts extracted data from the phone, including 511 contacts, 282 text messages, the dates, times, and numbers associated with 194 calls, and hundreds of photos and videos. Additional messages were found on social media platforms, along with data indicating when and where Wi-Fi was activated.
Sifting through the information, Tsirigoti was able to begin piecing together the women’s identities. They were from Afghanistan, and their first names were Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana. Fahima, the mother, was in her mid-to-late thirties. Rabiya was 17, and Farzana couldn’t have been older than 14. In the photos on the phone, they were suddenly alive. In some images they had their arms thrown around each other. Filters—floating pink hearts, rabbit ears—embellished others.
Now that Tsirigoti knew the women’s nationality, her next move was to reach out to the Afghan ambassador in Greece, Mirwais Samadi. In March 2019, she shared the black notice and other details about the case with him. A much needed stroke of luck: Samadi was close with the chief of police in Kabul. He called in a favor to accelerate the process of formally identifying the women.
Two months later, in May, Tsirigoti received a document from the Interpol office in Kabul. It stated that Fahima was married with five children: Rabiya, Farzana, and three younger ones, two boys and a girl. The whole family had left their home in Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north of Afghanistan, in early 2018. They had passed through Iran before settling in Istanbul for a few months, where they sought passage to Europe. When the Mazar-i-Sharif branch of Interpol received photos of the deceased women, one of Fahima’s sisters and an uncle identified them; law enforcement was able to corroborate their identities with a brother-in-law of Fahima’s living in Europe.
Tsirigoti then turned her attention to Turkey, visiting the country five times as part of the investigation. She worked with the Turkish authorities, trying to track down men who may have come in contact with Fahima and her daughters. Since the women were migrants, they almost certainly had paid smugglers to get them across the Evros River. Those men could be murder suspects or the last people to see the women alive.
But that summer, Tsirigoti’s investigation came to a sudden halt. Political allegiances run deep in Greece, and Tsirigoti had been appointed to her post under the leftist Syriza government, which in the July 2019 elections lost power to the center-right New Democracy party. The new government made sweeping changes to police leadership, and on July 23 Tsirigoti, only 54 at the time, was forced to retire. “I didn’t finish the investigation,” she said, “and I feel very sad about it. But the police is a man’s world.” She shrugged.
Before vacating her office, Tsirigoti spoke with the officer who would take over the case. She made him swear to God he’d solve it. He promised he would, then handed it off to a small team of young male officers. It soon stagnated as police cooperation along the Greek-Turkish border all but ceased under the new government.
Conflict between Greece and Turkey stretches back centuries. After nearly 400 years of occupation by the Ottomans, Greece declared independence in 1821. Four wars followed. In 1923, a forced population exchange of 1.2 million Orthodox Greeks living in Turkey for 400,000 Muslim Turks living in Greece drastically altered the demographic makeup of each country. Refugees came to constitute one-fifth of Greece’s population—among them was Tsirigoti’s grandmother.
Another influx of refugees, this time in the 21st century, became a new source of acrimony between Greece and Turkey; both countries are keen to stir the pot of nationalist ideology and point fingers at each other when it suits them. Greece insists that Turkey isn’t doing enough to stop displaced people from crossing into European territory, while Turkey, host to the world’s largest refugee population, accuses Greece of pushback measures. Caught in the middle are migrants and refugees, human beings treated as pawns.
With her professional experience and fervent commitment to justice, Tsirigoti had managed to bulldoze through political hostilities to investigate the murders of Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana. Without her there was a risk that the crime might never be solved. When we first met, in January 2020, Tsirigoti was still keeping an eye on the case, albeit from afar. She also had a theory about what had happened to the women. She leaned in close to tell me. Behind her, cars zipped down a busy Athens street. “It is my belief that this was an honor killing,” Tsirigoti said.
It seemed reductionist to assume that foreign women had been killed for foreign reasons, as opposed to a smuggling gone wrong, a mangled burglary, or something else related to the perilous journey they’d made to Europe. A form of gendered violence seen primarily in extremely conservative communities, honor killings usually occur when a woman or girl is believed to have tarnished a man’s reputation. These are not crimes of opportunity—they necessarily involve a perpetrator motivated by a desire to protect what he perceives as his dignity. Who might have had that motive, and why? Tsirigoti didn’t have an answer, but she thought she knew who might.
Found on the phone in Fahima’s pocket were photos of a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties, with deep-set eyes and black hair that swooped across his broad forehead. There were images of him with Fahima’s daughters in a park, and one of him sitting on a sofa. In some of these, he had his arms around Fahima; in one, she kissed his cheek. What was his relationship to the women? Could it have been a reason for violence, committed by him or by someone else?
Data from the phone indicated that the young man may have been the last person to see Fahima and her daughters alive. Law enforcement had no idea where he was. I told Tsirigoti that I’d try to find him. Then, in a rush of bravado, I went further: I said that I would find out what happened to the three women.
