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In this week’s edition:
- An immigration story on the rise of Haitian refugee children traveling alone by boat
- A dive into the intricate world of romance fraud
- A profile on beloved former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe
- A hybrid of memoir, fiction, and essay on Wikipedia, knowledge, and truth
- A writer’s love letter to restaurants in the South that serve gas
1. When the Coast Guard Intercepts Unaccompanied Kids
Seth Freed Wessler | ProPublica | December 7, 2023 | 8,359 words
Since summer 2021, the US Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people at sea, including an alarming number of Haitian refugee children traveling alone. Immigration policy offshore is different than on land—asylum doesn’t apply at sea—and the system in place, reports Seth Freed Wessler, is opaque and dangerously inconsistent. Coast Guard immigration patrols are often closed off to journalists, but Wessler obtained internal documents about one boat detained in March that carried a group of Haitians, including three unaccompanied children: a 10-year-old boy and two sisters, 8 and 4. Wessler tracked down these kids, along with 18 others from the boat. He does an incredible job recounting the experience from the boy’s perspective: Tcherry started his journey at a smuggler’s house in the Bahamas and endured 12 hours inside the packed cabin of a shabby boat. The plan was to land in Florida, and then somehow make his way to Canada to join his mother. (There are many heartbreaking details in this story, but one I can’t get out of my head is that some kids on these boats are so young, they don’t even know their parents’ names or the country in which they were born.) After five days at sea, the Coast Guard has no choice but to send Tcherry and the two girls back to Haiti. As Wessler notes, detainments at sea aren’t just scarring for refugees: the work has taken a toll on Coast Guard members, too, such as the conflicted officer who encounters Tcherry and the girls on the boat—and later wonders what has become of them. A gut-wrenching look into the immigration crisis at Florida’s maritime border. —CLR
2. To Catch a Catfish
Stuart McGurk | The New Statesman | December 7, 2023 | 6,664 words
Online dating is a daunting world. There are many questions to consider about the person an app plucks from the ether and plops down onto your screen as a potential partner. Will we connect? Are you funny? Are those your actual teeth? But nowadays, one question has become paramount: are you real? As Stuart McGurk explains in this fascinating piece, romance deception is the fastest-growing category of fraud. It increased by almost a third last year, and now a staggering “two in five online daters have been asked for money, and half of those gave it.” (These types of stats seem destined only to grow with the rise of AI.) McGurk profiles Constable Rebecca Mason, a detective so dedicated to tracking down online fraudsters she puts in 20-plus-hour investigative shifts. I can see why she cares so much: when she meets the victims, it is heartbreaking. In the case of Alan Baldwin, the need to believe is so strong that when Mason breaks the news that the person he has loved—and sent money to—for 15 years does not exist, he won’t believe it. The targets of these scams are the emotionally vulnerable, longing for a connection, and desperate to help the person they care for. Particularly chilling is the pithy description of the scamming network’s WhatsApp group chat; like a gaggle of young girls discussing the best response to send a crush, the scammers talk about what replies will keep their targets on the hook. It’s a sickening thought. McGurk distills Mason’s meticulous work—and the reams of online messages—into a clear, sharp piece that, satisfyingly, goes all the way to a trial and conviction. (For further reading on dating fraud, I also highly recommend a feature from our sister publication, The Atavist: “The Romance Scammer on my Sofa.”) —CW
3. Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly.
Jon Mooallem | The New York Times Magazine | December 3, 2023 | 7,960 words
To say that I was excited to read this profile is a ridiculous understatement. R.E.M. is my favorite band. (“Nightswimming” is my favorite song—a sentimental choice, but whatever, I own it.) And I wasn’t disappointed. There are delightful appearances by Taylor Swift, Stipe’s 87-year-old mother, and best of all Patti Smith, who is one of his closest friends. The story of how Smith and Stipe met is one for the ages: he got her number from a friend and called her from a bar in Spain on the first Valentine’s Day after Smith’s husband died, because he thought it might be nice. “I wouldn’t be calling except that I’m completely drunk on absinthe,” he told her. Little did he know that Smith had a crush on him, just from watching MTV. (Same, Patti.) But the best part of this profile is how author Jon Mooallem captures Stipe’s unique energy, which is at once radiant and humble. One of the greatest frontmen in the history of pop music is working on his first solo album, and that means harnessing an eternally restless mind, transcending self-doubt, and forcing himself to step away from a life populated by friends and family to whom he’s fiercely devoted. “He knew he’d have to isolate himself in one of the buildings on his property,” Mooallem writes, “walk in circles for six or eight or 10 hours at a time, effect a trancelike meditation and wrench out the rest of the lyrics, line by line.” For now, Stipe’s songs-in-progress live on his laptop in a folder called “Master file. Solo album.” That pop you just heard? It’s my heart exploding. —SD
4. The Hofmann Wobble
Ben Lerner | Harper’s Magazine | November 20, 2023 | 8,414 words
To be completely honest, I don’t know if this qualifies as nonfiction—the eyebrow “Experiment” sitting above the headline gives you some clue what you’re in for—but I do know it’s far and away the most daringly executed thing I read all week. On its face, it’s a memoir detailing how Lerner moved across the country in his mid-20s to work as a progressive think tank’s “new media fellow” and ended up creating a disinformation campaign via Wikipedia. There’s just one issue: he destabilizes our experience at every possible turn. His memory is faulty, he tells us. He’s lying. The details are wrong. Lerner is best known for his literary fiction (autofiction, really) and poetry, both of which beat at the heart of this piece. It’s a dizzying, disorienting read, but it’s also so smartly constructed and beautifully written that you can’t help but press on. It all still holds true, even if he’s making up or misremembering the details. At least, it seems to, and that’s the point. We’ve constructed a system in which establishing fact is simply a function of building the right illusion. Unreliable narrators come and go, bringing with them the intermittent uproar of a philosophical debate. What debt do writers owe the truth? But at this moment of transition, with the black box of artificial intelligence beginning to reshape the textual web, it’s far more troubling to realize that it’s not just the narrators who are unreliable—it’s the architects, too. —PR
5. My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas
Kiese Laymon | The Bitter Southerner | December 6, 2023 | 1,914 words
The Bitter Southerner just published Kate Medley’s Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South, a “photographic road trip” documenting service stations, convenience stores, and pit stops across the South. This essay by Kiese Laymon is the book’s foreword. At one point I seriously considered writing a recommendation for this piece that simply read: “Kiese Laymon. That’s all you need to know.” But that would have robbed me of the opportunity to reread and savor the bounty of this essay. If you do not know Laymon’s work, do yourself a favor and read this piece. Here, he takes us back to his childhood in 1984 and the Friday nights spent with his grandmama and her boyfriend Ofa D at Jr. Food Mart: a diner, convenience store, and gas station in Forest, Mississippi. “I loved everything about where we were going,” he writes. “I loved the smell of friedness. I loved the way the red popped in the sign. I loved how the yellow flirted with the red. I loved that the name of the restaurant started with Jr. instead of ending in Jr. Like, Food Mart Jr.” It’s a captivating read about anticipation, finding joy in a place you might not expect, and the long hours worked at minimum wage that made that joy possible. At Jr. Food Mart, Laymon, his grandmama, and Ofa D got oh so much more than fried fish and ‘tato logs for a yummy Friday night supper; they got a hefty helping of love and care and history served up to go. —KS
Audience Award
Congratulations to the most-read editor’s pick this week:
‘How Do You Reduce a National Dish to a Powder?’: The Weird, Secretive World of Crisp Flavors
Amelia Tait | The Guardian | December 2, 2023 | 4,045 words
What’s the weirdest chip flavor you’ve ever tried? For me, it was one that supposedly tasted like a spicy German sausage, and it seems to have been available only for a limited time, and only in Southeast Asia. How does that make sense? How does anything about the global distribution of chip flavors make sense? Amelia Tait talks to the world’s foremost powdered-seasoning gurus in search of answers. —SD
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