Sifting through the aftermath of a disastrous blaze. The romance that launched a thousand Supreme Court opinions. A poetic ode to a simple life, well lived. Tracing the arc of food writing. And examining the hidden costs of a particularly sensitive surgical procedure. Our favorites of the week, pulled from all of our editors’ picks.
Megan Greenwell | Wired | June 27, 2023 | 7,987 words
Megan Greenwell’s piece does what the best longform features do: It mesmerizes you with an opening so powerful and a story so compelling that you deliberately read it slowly, just to make it last. This piece—about a devastating fire at a branch of the National Archives and Records Administration that happened to contain records belonging to Greenwell’s grandfather—is nearly 8,000 words long, but the prose is so sharp and cinematic that you’ll wish it was longer. “The National Personnel Records Center fire burned out of control for two days before firefighters were able to begin putting it out,” she writes. “Photos show the roof ablaze, a nearly 5-acre field of flame. The steel beams that had once held up the glass walls jut at unnatural angles, like so many broken legs.” Even were it not set against a backdrop of the U.S. government, this would be a fascinating mystery: What or who started the fire and how do workers attempt to uncover precious facts from seriously damaged files? Did Greenwell’s grandfather’s records survive the blaze? Be sure to take it slow and let this story smolder. I’m certainly glad I did. —KS
Kerry Howley | New York | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words
My husband sent me this story while I was reporting in Idaho last week, with a message that said, “Isn’t this by that writer you like?” The answer, reader, is yes. Kerry Howley’s 2022 story about anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser was rightly named a finalist for a National Magazine Award—one of several nominations Howley’s work has received in the last several years—and I suspect this piece about Clarence and Ginni Thomas will be in the running for many, many honors. Whereas with Dannenfelser, Howley was shedding light on a powerful person who isn’t a household name, here she tackles two of the better-known political (yes, SCOTUS justices arepolitical) figures in America. She does it without access to them, instead surveying pre-existing material on the Thomases with remarkable facility, mustering everything she needs, and nothing she doesn’t, to tell the story of their marriage. Take the seemingly mundane detail of Ginni telling a bunch of right-wing youth that her favorite charm on a bracelet Clarence gave her is a pixie because, to her husband, she is “kind of a pixie…kind of a troublemaker,” which Howley convincingly positions as a metaphor for the havoc Ginni has wreaked on American democracy. Consider this brilliantly constructed sentence: “They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift.” And that’s just in the first section! This piece is one for the ages in both substance and style. I mean, damn. —SD
Jeremy B. Jones | The Bitter Southerner | June 6, 2023 | 1,580 words
I have never before picked an obituary for our Top 5, but Jeremy B. Jones’ ode to his grandfather deserves recognition. At just over 1500 words, it’s not a particularly long piece, but it’s a particularly poetic one, and is enough to get to know—and respect—Jones’ Papaw. Ray Harrell lived a simple life on a little bit of land in Fruitland, North Carolina. To many, it would not be enough; for Harrell, it was plenty. After all, as Jones writes, he had “a reliable tractor and a fiery woman.” It was a good life because he appreciated what he had, was contented with his lot. Jones notes that these quiet lives often slip past unnoticed, “yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.” A small essay about a simple life that I found hugely moving. —CW
In reviewing Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires, Marian Bull looks at how infusing recipes with introspection and experience begat the cooking memoir. What I loved about about this piece—besides spurring me to pick up Small Fires, which also appeared in our recent feature “Meals for One”—is that while Bull surveys chef memoirs, she hails Johnson’s book as one for the home cook, the self-trained enthusiast. “Johnson has inverted this form by writing a memoir of a recipe, rather than a ‘memoir’ with recipes,” she writes. Johnson looks at cooking as translation and recipes as a form of performance, which is comforting for someone like me who views a recipe as a guide: “The unpredictable ‘I that cooks,’ who resists the recipe again and again, generates new translations.” How inspiring and affirming to be invited to take a seat at this generous table where nothing is lost and everything is gained in translation. —KS
Ava Kofman | ProPublica and The New Yorker | June 26, 2023 | 8,601 words
It’s easy to think that “men trying to upgrade their dongs” is a journalism cheat code of sorts. Having written about them myself many years ago, I can assure you that it’s not. Pitfalls abound. Tone is everything. Jokes are easy; reserve is hard. (So is avoiding double entendres.) Yet, Ava Kofman manages to thread every needle in her stunning examination of the state of penile-enlargement procedures, which focuses primarily on issues surrounding the popular Penuma implant. She writes compassionately about the patients, not dismissing the complex psychological situations that led them to pursue surgery. She writes unblinkingly about the doctor who popularized the procedure, and whose practice seems at times to operate with all the care of a 30-minute oil change joint—and about the surgeon who “was doing such brisk business repairing Penuma complications that he’d relocated his practice from Philadelphia to an office down the street.” And speaking of unblinking, I dare you not to wince as she plays fly on the wall during an implantation; you may never hear the phrase “inside out” the same way again. This story may have drawn you in with its imagined salaciousness, but it delivers something far better: truth. —PR
Audience Award
What piece did our readers love most this week? One that makes clear that the kids are not all right.
Those looking for dirty deeds to be done seem to be going no further than the Comm, a series of Discord communities in which people order violence, including commissioning robberies for bitcoin, and organizing swats against vulnerable people for perceived slights and insults. For Vice, Joseph Cox infiltrated this vile, testosterone-fueled world of crime. —KS
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This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
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In this gorgeous essay for Vittles, the poet Seán Hewitt recalls weekend nature walks in England and his grandfather’s lessons on the wonders of foraged food. Inspired by the abundant hawthorns in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Hewitt writes about making his own hawthorn gin.
When the hawthorns were all done and the gin was in the jar, I put it into the cupboard, then checked on it every week, turning it, watching the colours darken. Now I’ve learned to leave it in peace, and I don’t turn it that often anymore. I just bide my time until December when, on some foggy, cold evening – when it feels like winter has begun – I take it out of the cupboard.
The main difference between sloe and hawthorn gin is that, where sloe gin is fruity and sweet and mixes well with tonic or soda, hawthorn gin is like a dark sherry, perfect for winter. It has a velvety texture, a rich smoothness. I also like that, unlike sloe gin, you can’t buy it anywhere, so hawthorn gin becomes a secret, shared thing between friends, a preservation of summer pulled into winter.
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Long before the 1947 Roswell incident brought “little green men” into the public consciousness and prompted an explosion in UFO sightings, writers and scientists have speculated about the existence of life beyond our planet. H. G. Wells laid the groundwork for modern science fiction with novels like The War of the Worlds (1898), one of the first books to imagine an extraterrestrial invasion. Before Wells, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) sparked the imagination by discovering “canals” on Mars. But for the first recorded instance of humanity pondering the possibility of alien life, we have to go all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the first century B.C., Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beast.” Not exactly a controversial supposition; still, whether or not such tribes have come to our planet remains impossible to prove, and those who claim to have encountered alien beings have long been dismissed.
That said, in recent years, the concept of otherworldly visitors has begun to shift toward the mainstream. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the latest governmental entity devoted to investigating unexplained sightings. Even the term of choice, “UFO,” has given way to “UAP”—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. And just this June, former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch claimed that the U.S. government had retrieved remains of several aircraft of “non-human” origin. The fallout from Grusch’s claims is yet to be determined—as is their veracity—but it seems likely that, in the end, the world will settle back into the binary of believers and skeptics, with no concrete evidence to settle the debate. Regardless of which camp you fall into, some of us will always look skyward with hope; we may never be able to scour the entirety of the universe, but it’s hard not to thrill to Lucretius’ logic. In the meantime, the longform articles collected here offer a fascinating glimpse into the UFO community and the stories that have shaped our modern understanding of the topic.
For me, what makes alleged alien encounter testimony so compelling is that—regardless of whether I believe the person’s interpretation of events—the incident had an undeniable and profound effect on their lives. This may not be true in every case, but even if you write off many accounts as delusion or whimsy or simply fiction, you’re still left with a legion of people who have been dramatically changed by their perceived experiences. It’s comforting to know, then, that for those such as Jason Guillemette, a character in this piece about amateur ufologists, communities exist where one can share their experiences without judgment.
In Guillemette’s case, that community is the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a non-profit, volunteer-run organization active in more than 40 countries—and one whose members are as rigidly skeptical as Guillemette. For most MUFON alumni, this is a quest for truth, not validation; members work rigorously to find earthly explanations for reported sightings. And as Badelt widens his scope to other folks in other organizations, you can’t help but be moved by people’s stories. After all, if you were to have a life-changing close encounter, with whom would you share that knowledge?
Most of the time, he’s able to find an explanation, he says. He often sends videos to other volunteers at MUFON who specialize in analyzing computer images. He refers to websites that track the flight patterns of satellites and planes and the International Space Station—the usual suspects when it comes to UFO sightings, he says. Guillemette described a recent case in which a couple reported seeing strange lights hovering above a nearby lake. The lights circled above the lake and then dropped down into the water, only to rise up a moment later and zip away. It turned out to be a plane, he says—filling up with water to fight a nearby forest fire. “Not everybody likes what we come up with,” he says, “but sometimes it’s really evident.”
Crowded Skies (Vaughan Yarwood, New Zealand Geographic, April 1997)
The history of UFO sightings in New Zealand dates back to the early 20th century. It seems such a tranquil and unassuming country—cinematic hobbit history notwithstanding—which perhaps makes the events recounted here even more unsettling. These are all-too-human tales of altered lives. Some cases, such as that of Iris Catt, a self-proclaimed alien abductee whose nightmarish encounters go back to her childhood, are heartbreakingly tragic. Others follow more positive narratives, believing that aliens are beaming down rays of positivity and openness, gradually bringing humanity to a point where it is ready for formal communication.
When I was at university in the 1990s, “regression therapy” became big news, with countless stories of trauma-blocked memories and past-life remembrances unearthed through hypnosis. Just as suddenly, regression therapy drowned in a flood of peer-reviewed criticism, relegated to yet another pseudoscience. The concept never went away entirely and it pops up again in Vaughan Yarwood’s story, cautiously approved by academic institutions for its utility in specific circumstances. It’s complex territory, but Yarwood navigates it with clarity and sensitivity.
Iris Catt, a mild-mannered, unprepossessing woman in her 40s, then introduces herself. She is an abductee. It appears certain aliens have had their eye on her from an early age. She recounts her night horrors calmly, the way people do who have learned to accept their scars, to make their hurt and anguish a part of themselves.
“It is happening every day, and it is happening in New Zealand,” says Iris. “It is not going to go away. I truly believe that more and more people are beginning to remember what is happening to them because the time is getting closer when we are going to have to recognise that we are not the only intelligent form of life in the universe.”
Her audience understands. She is among friends.
Alien Nation (Ralph Blumenthal, Vanity Fair, May 2013)
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Edward Mack spent many years engaging with people who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, in the process becoming a pioneer in his field. Not surprisingly, he attracted resistance from the scientific community—less because of his work than because, over time, he came to the startling and highly controversial conclusion that a number of alleged abductees were telling the truth. Mack’s research may be little remembered by his profession at large, but his warmth, humanity, and faith continue to inspire hope in a small community that gathers annually in Rhode Island. They prefer the term “experiencer” to “abductee,” and in this Vanity Fair feature Ralph Blumenthal interweaves their stories with Mack’s.
For more about one of the characters in Blumenthal’s story, a 1994 feature in Omni details Linda’s alleged experience.
Once again, for me, the fascination of this piece lies in the stories of these everyday folks. To some degree, it doesn’t matter what they actually experienced. What counts, as Mack understood, is they have experienced something, and that something left a profound mark on their lives. In seeking to apply rigor and structure to the stories he was collecting, Mack plowed a hard path with poise and compassion. As this piece eloquently shows, his work was not in vain.
“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”
I have long been fascinated with the so-called Wow signal, received in 1977 by Ohio University’s Big Ear radio telescope, which was then being used to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tale of the signal makes for a great story in itself, but Keith Cooper’s piece sees that as merely a starting point. His narrative finds a central character in a man named Robert Gray: While the scientific community, including SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), gradually lowered the Wow signal to the status of “interesting curio,” Gray remained convinced that there was more to uncover.
Gray’s tenacity and belief in the face of mounting opposition is remarkable. Struggling for funding, unsuccessfully attempting to enlist help, and bartering for much-needed time on a limited number of radio telescopes, the frustrations he must have experienced make the twists in his story all the more poignant. Just when his enthusiasm began to wane, his work seemingly at a dead end, an exoplanet scientist reached out to Gray with a fresh idea, breathing new life into the man’s relentless quest. There is no neat, satisfying definitive end to this tale, but perhaps therein lies the true glory of Gray’s work. In the face of uncertainty, he carried on until the very end.
Nobody knows what the Wow signal was. We do know that it was not a regular astrophysical object, such as a galaxy or a pulsar. Curious the frequency that it was detected at, 1,420 MHz, is the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in space, but it is also the frequency that scientists hunting for alien life listen to. Their reasoning is that aliens will supposedly know that astronomers will already be listening to that frequency in their studies of galactic hydrogen and so should easily detect their signal – or so the theory goes. Yet there was no message attached to the signal. It was just a burst of raw radio energy.
If SETI had a mythology, then the Wow signal would be its number one myth. And while it has never been forgotten by the public, the academic side of SETI has, by and large, dismissed it, quite possibly because it hasn’t been seen to repeat, and therefore cannot be verified—the golden rule of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) detection.
Celebrities who have copped to believing in UFOs are numerous enough to populate a listicle. Politicians? Not so much. Yet, the U.S. Congress’ House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing regarding UAP reports, and if you trace the conversation back a few years, you’ll find that this shift is at least partly thanks to the protagonists in this story: former U.S. senator Harry Reid and Tom DeLonge, a founding member of pop-punk band Blink 182.
There’s a lot to digest here. It’s a wonderful example of hidden history: a small group of like-minded individuals working behind the scenes to advance their cause, with potentially wide-ranging repercussions. That history would be far less engaging, however, were it not for Tom DeLonge’s gregarious personality and indefatigable belief in alien visitors. His company, To The Stars, devotes considerable time and money to researching UAPs and extraterrestrial matters in general; Bryan Bender’s feature tells the story of how the singer managed to recruit experts and politicians to his cause.
Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
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Fans of American football remember well the rise and fall of Adam “Pacman” Jones, but not many expected to see him bounce back. Zak Keefer delivers my favorite kind of redemption feature in this profile of Jones, who’s now mentoring the sons of his late friend and teammate Chris Henry. The story starts with Jones’ tears; it might end with yours.
“Y’all need to uproot and move up here with us,” he urged Loleini Tonga, the boys’ mother. “We’ll help you out.”
So that’s what they did. Pacman Jones, once the NFL’s cautionary tale for reckless behavior, made Chris Henry’s family part of his own. They moved in with him in Cincinnati, where he drives the boys to school and picks them up after practice, where he trains them in the offseason, where he pushes Slim’s two sons the same way he once pushed their father, passing on the lessons learned from the opportunity they both almost threw away.
“I’ll tell you this,” Jones says, getting a bit heated. “I’ll be damned if these kids make the same mistakes I did.”
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No, it’s not the first time a national magazine has sent a writer thousands of miles to write a cover-the-waterfront story about the largest state in the U.S. But with California more of a symbol than a state, Joe Hagan manages to coax a few sharp edges out of the well-worn trope, combining marquee politicians with some surprising characters (comic Shang Yeng, Abbot Elementary writer Brittani Nichols, a firearm instructor to the stars) to help compensate for the most eye-roll-inducing dinner party ever committed to print. A commendable piece of macro reporting that’s sure to infuriate everyone.
Octavia E. Butler was asked, seven years after the publication of her uncannily predictive 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, whether her visions of an environmentally ravaged Los Angeles, circa 2024, where the elite barricade themselves in walled fortresses surrounded by poverty-stricken encampments of drug addicts and illiterate poor, was something she really believed would happen.
“I didn’t make up the problems,” replied the writer, who grew up in Pasadena. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
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Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:
RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.
The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.
The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”
UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.
But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.
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In a decrepit house in São Paulo lives a woman who many people call a bruxa (the witch). As a blockbuster Brazilian podcast recently revealed, Margarida Maria Vicente de Azevedo Bonetti is wanted by U.S. authorities for her treatment of a maid named Hilda Rosa dos Santos, whom Margarida and her husband more or less enslaved in the Washington, D.C. area:
In early 1998—19 years after moving to the United States—dos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor she’d befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.
When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998—shortly after dos Santos had moved—she was stunned. She’d handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renê Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)
Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat she’d scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.
“I couldn’t believe that would take place in the United States,” Kerr said.
During Kerr’s investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings she’d received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.
She’d also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.
She’d had “no voice” her whole life, Kerr concluded, “no rights.” Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was “extremely passive” and “fearful,” Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie.
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For n+1, Marian Bull highlights Rebecca May Johnson’s book Small Fires and hails the author for considering recipes as translation and cooking as performance. This is a satisfying read that will set any self-trained home cook free in the kitchen.
IN THE EARLY 1980S, cookbook author Marcella Hazan published the recipe for a simple tomato sauce (no, not that one) made from just olive oil, tomatoes, basil, and five cloves of garlic, finely chopped. According to Hazan’s headnote in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, in which she reprinted the recipe, it is a version of a traditional Roman sauce named for the city’s carrettieri. These long-ago cart drivers brought wine and produce to the city from the surrounding hills; their pasta sauces were cheap and improvised from the “least expensive, most abundant, ingredients available to them.” Hazan’s version of the recipe instructs the cook to combine the oil, garlic, and tomatoes (fresh or tinned) in a pot and simmer them gently, “until the oil floats free from the tomato,” before seasoning with salt and adding a large bunch of fresh basil whose leaves have been torn by hand.
Such was the recipe when Rebecca May Johnson, a London-based writer and academic, found it. In the ten-plus years since, she has cooked it over a thousand times, a process she calls, in her new book Small Fires, a “hot red epic.” She has cooked it faithfully to Rogers, faithfully to Hazan, and unfaithfully every which way: eyeballing measurements, skipping the basil when she can’t afford it, cracking in eggs, adding capers, adding rosemary, adding sausage, adding coriander, adding a soundtrack of Giorgio Moroder, whose exclusion from the original was not explicit, but whose inclusion still colors the reality of the dish. Hazan’s sauce alights Johnson’s investigation into the recipe as a literary text, as a mode of cultural transmission, as nothing less than a way of understanding the world.
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Megan Greenwell’s grandfather served in the US military after becoming a naturalized citizen in 1943. Were his personnel records among the nearly 18 million files destroyed by fire in 1973 at a branch of the National Personnel Records Center? In this superlative story for Wired, Greenwell attempts to find out.
So she and her colleagues climbed one more flight of stairs, to a door that opened into the sixth and top floor. She remembered that this was where the older military records were kept, the ones from World War I, World War II, and Korea, but she hadn’t been up here since orientation. Now, as she pulled open the door, she saw the cardboard boxes neatly stacked on metal shelves as far as the eye could see.
They were on fire.
Had the group gone up a staircase on the periphery of the building and not the central one, Trieschmann likely would have seen only a thick cloud of smoke. Instead, she witnessed the earliest stage of a blaze that would occupy hundreds of firefighters for days.
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Maddy Frank | Longreads | June 27, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,981 words)
The caves of Missouri are bleeding. I had forgotten that—the way the rocks under the earth constantly drip, the water coming from places I cannot see. There is no singular source. It filters through the limestone like blood through lungs.
I write it down in my notes app so I remember: the caves of Missouri are bleeding. I don’t usually like metaphors like that. They feel scientifically false, a romanticization of something that is already astounding and beautiful enough without poetry. But I can’t help it. I feel inside.
I am inside—inside Meramec Caverns—a privately owned system of caves in the backwoods of Stanton, Missouri. It toes the line between natural wonder and tourist trap: At 400 million years old, this place has earned its awe, but there is also an extensive gift shop selling artificially dyed stones and nameplate necklaces. Lester Dill bought the cave in 1933 to turn it into a “show cave,” a place for tours and spectacles and entertainment. His picture is up on the Meramec Caverns website—he stands in a leopard print jacket, pointing up to something out of frame, smiling wide at the camera. A quintessentially American opportunist, he reportedly invented an early version of the bumper sticker to promote the caves, and this land has been in his descendants’ possession ever since.
Missouri, specifically the Ozark region spanning the southern half of the state, is prime real estate for caves. That’s why Missouri is called “The Cave State.” It has what is known as karst topography—soluble limestone and dolomite landscapes riddled with caverns and sinkholes. Swiss cheese, right under our feet. Acidic water moves through the ground, slowly dissolving the rocks, a process called dissolution. There was something, and then, unbearably slowly, there is nothing. A cave is an absence.
There was something, and then, unbearably slowly, there is nothing. A cave is an absence.
There are only three of us on today’s tour of Meramec Caverns. That leads me to believe the extensive advertising isn’t working, bumper stickers or otherwise. I drove past dozens of billboards during my hour-long drive down Route 44 from St. Louis. Some of the billboards, posted between anti-abortion and adult video store signs, just read, Cave. Others say, Cave Ice Cream and Cave 60˚ All Year. One reads, Meramec Caverns Salutes Veterans. as if these rocks are a human entity. My favorite asserts, Kids Love It. At 26 years old, I am the youngest person in this hole in the ground by a few decades, though I don’t have much competition. The middle-aged couple from Oklahoma on the tour with me are the only non-employees I’ve seen since I arrived at the almost empty parking lot.
Our guide is a man in his late seventies named Arthur. He’s dressed in a state park ranger sort of uniform. His hair is mostly gone, the perfect set-up for a joke: “Be careful, if the water from the cave drips on your head, it’ll burn your hair off.” He points to his own scalp. There’s even a fresh wound on his forehead, still red and the length of a thumb. The woman next to me looks concerned. He clarifies, “I’m just joking. It’s a very weak acid. It’s like, you guessed it, carbonated soda.” Despite telling us he’s from California, he talks in a thick Missouri accent, all the words running together uninhibited by consonants.
Despite telling us he’s from California, he talks in a thick Missouri accent, all the words running together uninhibited by consonants.
I can’t hear him very well over the sound of the running water anyway. I’m relying on my own observations to take notes: cave pearls and yellow icicles and smells like ROCK. If I don’t write this stuff down, I don’t know how long it will last in my brain. I have a terrible memory. I have lost large swathes of time—family vacations and childhood birthdays, months in high school and college when my mental health was especially bad, classes I took and presents I received. Even the recent past eludes me. I can remember crying last week, for example, but not what the crying was about. I can remember around a memory, but rarely the memory itself. Nothing is medically wrong with me, at least not as far as I can tell. It has always been this way. My brain is constantly leaking acidic water, and these facts are just being dissolved away, leaving a karst life behind. It doesn’t matter if the thing was traumatic or not. It is simply gone. So, I’m trying to take note of everything.
Everything is wet. The limestone looks rounded and glossy. The rock formations are drips and dollops, pillars of melted cream-colored candle wax and inorganic limbs. We weave and duck between these rooms of calcium carbonate and even with the path, I am aware of how one could get lost in here. Arthur keeps turning out the lights behind us so we exist only in the current space. It makes it hard to have any situational awareness. I can’t figure out which point of darkness we walked out of or which one we’re walking into next. He shines the flashlight on the floor where he wants us to go and the three of us follow it like moths.
Part of my disorientation is due to lack of information. I tried to research Meramec Caverns before I came here today, but because this place has been privately owned for so long, the largest source on these caverns is the cave’s own website. Buried among pages about panning for fake gold and purchasing tour tickets is a simplistic history page, nary a citation in sight. Fifty percent of the timeline is dedicated to Lester Dill’s feats of promotion.
Meramec Caverns seems to be operating almost entirely on lore. There’s science too, but they sell this experience through tales. The infamous outlaw Jesse James is plastered all over this place—his name, his likeness—but there is little evidence to confirm that he ever used this cave as a hideout like they claim. They call it a local legend, but it feels more like a rumor, a guess, a padding of the timeline.
There wasn’t much left behind here by Jesse James or the people who came before him, though it’s said that the Osage people did sometimes use these caverns, and others like it, for protection during bad weather. That name, “Osage,” is French, an example of the way certain stories in America are purposefully forgotten and rewritten. The Osage call themselves 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 (Ni-U-Ko¢n-Ska, “Children of the Middle Waters”). Frenchman Philippe François Renault is credited with the discovery of Meramec Caverns in 1720, but the Osage natives are the ones who showed it to him. From Osage stories, Renault thought there might be gold in the cave, but instead he found saltpeter (potassium nitrate), a valuable oxidizing agent used in gunpowder. Over 300 years later, in 2021, the Osage Nation sought to purchase a different Missouri cavern, Picture Cave, but it was sold to the highest private bidder. That $2 million transaction took place despite the cave being a sacred indigenous site, one covered in prehistoric glyphs. We don’t just want to hear stories, we want to own them, profit from them, even if they’re not ours to begin with. Lester Dill was one of many.
Meramec Caverns contains no such drawings, though there is an unsettling statue of Jesse James and his brother crouching over their loot in one of the limestone rooms. They look surprised to see us. Jesse has his hand on his gun.
Someone once told me that geology is like storytelling: piecing together rocks of eras past to create a narrative, the earth’s narrative, our narrative. But that makes the missing facts, the missing chapters, even more noticeable. Geologists call these missing bits of time “unconformities”—layers of rock from vastly different time periods butting up against each other, the years connecting the two completely gone. In parts of the Great Unconformity (which is clearly visible in the Grand Canyon), for example, there are over a billion years missing. We don’t know where they went, at least not for sure. Our best guess is a large-scale deglaciation event. Receding ice, miles thick, can eat just about everything, it seems. Water has a knack for stealing time. The dissolution that created these caves is evidence of that.
My undergraduate degree is in geology. As time goes on, and as I’ve completed my master’s in creative writing, this science degree has become less an aspect of myself and more of a fun fact. It’s a way to say, hey, I wasn’t always a struggling creative. But I can no longer remember how to read a phase diagram, nor can I recall the optical properties of different minerals, and this hurts me. The me who knew those things seems like a different person. I can’t even place the absence of my geology knowledge in my brain. Most of the time, it’s like it was never there.
The things I do remember feel random. I remember that Herkimer diamonds are double terminated quartz (that means pointy at both ends). I remember that a species of eurypterid are the state fossil of New York. I remember that the mineral kyanite glows rainbow under cross-polarized light. I’m not sure what to do with this information besides hold it, wedge it between the two hemispheres of my brain in hopes it won’t slip out. It’s not useful to me anymore, maybe, but it must’ve been useful to me once. I am worried about losing these facts because I’m worried about losing the person I was when I needed them. She was smart. She knew how to read a rock’s deformational history.
I can’t even read my own.
Forgetting is a part of living. This issue of mine is more of an inconvenience and less of a cause for alarm. But an inconvenience it is, and I worry about the future, when my mom is gone, maybe my dad too, and there’s no one to fill in the blanks for me, no more geologists trying to complete the story. I won’t remember how many times I went to summer camp or when I started horseback riding or how to catch fireflies in mason jars in the hot Alabama evenings.
As we walk down a narrow hallway, Arthur talks about the formation of stalagmites and stalactites. The water seeps through the limestone, and over thousands of years, millions of years, the calcium carbonate precipitates out, forming the rocks—stalactites on the ceiling, stalagmites on the floor. That’s another fact I’ve always remembered. They reach toward each other like The Creation of Adam until they create a column. The rock is dissolved away and then spat back out. It’s the same composition, but it doesn’t fill up the space like before. It’s a retelling of an old story, a dissolution of the original.
Meramec Caverns is filled with little spotlights. They point at everything in all directions, and yet this place still feels dark. Every time I think my eyes have reached the back of the cave, they fall on a hold of pitch black, and I know there must be something else back there, more rooms and stories and geological hideouts, but I can’t seem to picture the ambiguous darkness. It’s a cave, but I can’t conjure up an image, despite having multiple references for what it might look like. There are too many unknown factors.
I’ve toured caves two other times in my life: once on a field trip to Howe Caverns in New York in college, and once when I was young, on a family excursion to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. On the way to Meramec this morning, I called my mom and asked about the latter. I told her I couldn’t picture much from the trip except for the gift shop. My mom said I was 8 years old. She said I was slightly timid, and then she said, “My recollection is that you found it fascinating…but there is something scary about going below the Earth.” Yes, I can still conjure up the feeling of descending the metal stairs into Mammoth, watching my feet the whole way down so I don’t slip. I know I was a careful child because I am a careful adult. Even now, I’m ducking when Arthur tells me to duck, holding the railings and staying away from the edges, watching my feet so I don’t slip into the depths.
We enter a room called Mirror Lake. Arthur tells us this area is sometimes called the karaoke room. He launches into “Heigh-Ho” from Snow White to demonstrate the lovely acoustics and the notes bounce off the rock columns that stand in the middle of the lake. It sounds beautiful in a way that makes me wonder about his past. He hasn’t turned the lights all the way on yet, and there’s no way to tell how far back the sound is going. The pool of water just beyond the guardrail looks dark, impossibly deep. When he finally flips the main switch, the couple and I say, “Oh, wow” in unison. The water is, in fact, not deep at all. The stillness of the surface just reflects everything—images of the limestone columns are doubled—six feet of stone reflected in 18 inches of water.
In a moment between looking up from the water to the stalactites, the lights go out and it’s as if the world has been deleted. There is no perception of any kind. There is only cave, only absence. It makes me want to hold my breath. My body tells me that even the air is gone. By the time we’ve all figured out what’s happening, the spotlights are shining again. “The power must’ve switched from the generator back to main,” Arthur says. That explains the noise I heard above ground. I had thought it was an excavator. There’s a terrible storm making its way across the entire region today. Arthur says the power has gone off a few times. Flooding prevents us from seeing the lower levels of the cave (we were refunded seven dollars of the tour price because of it). “I’m glad you got to experience absolute darkness,” he says. That’s the one part of a cave tour that I have always remembered. Absolute darkness is difficult to recreate in any other circumstance.
I don’t like picturing the flooding down below—guardrails and stairs drowned in water. Maybe there’s still a spotlight on down there, but probably not. I bet it’s like the deep ocean, past the twilight zone, the kind of place humans aren’t meant to go.
Despite this knowledge of danger, and my resistance to the image, I still want to see those places, look at what’s inside. Like cliff edges, I’m drawn there, as if whatever is visible beyond my current field of view will tell me something I need to know.
Over the last 200 or 2,000 or 200 million years, large earthquakes have opened new drainage pathways in the rocks at Meramec Caverns, emptying the water and revealing new rooms and entrances. In some places, like “The Wine Room,” you can see a dark line on the wall of the cave, a mark of where the water level used to be. Arthur is telling us about a formation that looks like a three-headed camel, a six-foot-tall structure named “The Wine Table” composed of grape-shaped aragonite clusters, but I’m busy looking up at that line. I am underwater.
I am reminded of grounding, a technique in which a person walks barefoot on the Earth’s surface to realign their natural energy. People claim it can help with all kinds of physical and mental ailments, but I don’t buy it. The Earth may have energy, but it uses that energy to destroy itself: tectonic plates slipping under and above one another, mountains breaking open, rocks dissolving and washing away. Even if that energy could be transferred, I’m not sure that I would want it. I am already missing enough of myself. The Earth creates too, of course, but it’s at the cost of itself.
My missing bits, my faulty memory, have become a more noticeable problem in recent years because I’ve been writing more. Memoirists are supposed to remember the things that happen to them; that’s kind of the whole point. My mom often jokes that I write fiction, not nonfiction, because my reconstruction of events is so unrecognizable to her. I have always been an unreliable narrator of my own story.
There’s a phrase that gets thrown around creative writing workshops: “present absence.” It refers to something that a reader can feel in an essay, but is not actually there—that is, written down. What is left is the shape of that thing. It might be the narrator’s motivations, or something more specific, like the narrator’s relationship with her family. The consensus is almost always that this present absence should not be absent. I received this comment several times in response to my vague references to my mental health and my sexuality and my thoughts on my older brother, among other things. I was told that all the substance was in the ether of my essays, floating around in the empty space between lines of dialogue and paragraph breaks.
I was told that all the substance was in the ether of my essays, floating around in the empty space between lines of dialogue and paragraph breaks.
I worry sometimes that my brain only functions in this ether. I worry that I am mostly ether, in fact. That so much is missing that my only hope is to write it down and trust that the reader can fill in the unconformities for me.
I’ve heard people describe limestone caves as “cathedrals” because the stalactites and stalagmites look like a massive organ or carved arches. I can almost picture the altar in Howe Caverns, an artificial glowing heart placed into the limestone floor. There’s something about caves that feel intimate to the point of being holy. Arthur points out a human-shaped stalagmite tucked away in a corner. “That’s the Virgin Mary,” he says. She’s lit up with a spotlight, turned away from us, head hanging low. Humans love to create meaning like that, place it somewhere quiet and damp and safe. We see the perfect version of us in a lump of stone. We trace our hands on cave walls. We want to remember what it felt like to be here.
I try to take a picture of her, but my phone just captures the rock. That’s nice too; it’s the truth of the thing.
I’d like to think that the truth exists outside of our memories and narratives, beyond photographic evidence, as if it’s written into the fabric of the fourth dimension, but sometimes that’s hard to believe. Memory is inherently fallible and endlessly moldable. We influence the witnesses. We are the witnesses. It’s a messy and unfair system controlled by those in power, the ones who write the stories. Consequently, peoples and landscapes and histories are crossed out and rewritten and retold, separate from the truth, especially in the depths of America, even down here in the belly of Missouri.
But sometimes the person writing is you, and the story is yours.
I’d like to think that the truth exists outside of our memories and narratives, beyond photographic evidence, as if it’s written into the fabric of the fourth dimension, but sometimes that’s hard to believe.
So what do we lose when we lose our own memories? Do we lose the story? The real one? Am I no longer the person who measured glacial striations in a geology lab in northern New York because I can’t remember what it felt like to trace the grooves with my index finger? Those lost days must still influence us; the shape of them must be present. A cave is an absence, yes, but you can still occupy it, wander around, see where the stalactites and stalagmites are almost touching. What I’m trying to say is, I am still the person who went to camp in the Adirondack Mountains three summers in a row; it’s in what the water spat back out, my tendency for homesickness and my dislike of cold morning swims. I am, in part, my karst topography.
I do not know what I will retain of this trip. It will still be with me tomorrow, I’m sure, but I cannot predict the days after that. I do not know where the water will seep.
The tour ends with a light show, which is less of a show and more of a slide presentation, with stock photos of soldiers and happy couples walking on the beach and bald eagles projected on a curtain of limestone 70 feet high. The three of us sit in the first row of some metal bleachers. If nothing else, this place does feel like a theater. “God Bless America” plays in the background over surround sound speakers. When Mount Rushmore appears, the faces of those long dead men distorted from the uneven surface of the cave wall, it takes everything in my power not to laugh. I think I am supposed to be feeling patriotic, as if these rocks, which have existed here for millions of years, hold that history in their forms. It takes 100 years to precipitate one cubic inch of limestone. We are nothing but inches here.
At the beginning of the tour, Arthur told us not to touch the rocks. “If it’s a rock, don’t touch it,” he said. “The oils from hands can be damaging.” I’m all for the preservation of natural landscapes, but what is the owner of Meramec Caverns doing if not leaving his mark? This place is not being refilled with precipitated limestone, but with polished, artificial narratives. Plastic stones.
After the music fades, we are asked to clap for the people who have fought for our freedom, particularly the ones who lost their lives. There is no mention of the stories of Pre-Columbian Native Americans who used these caves as shelter, or the enslaved peoples who used it as a stop on the Underground Railroad. We don’t talk about how Philippe François Renault, the man falsely credited with the discovery of these caves, was also the man who first brought enslaved Africans to this part of the continent. This American story is full of holes. Our reluctant claps hit the contours of the cave and then disappear.
We exit the caverns the same way we came in, though a large open space they call “The Ballroom.” Groups of people used to drive their cars in here for parties before they realized that the trapped fumes were dangerous. There’s a disco ball hanging from the bumpy dolomite ceiling. Arthur shines his flashlight on it and the light starts to bounce but with just the four of us standing here, it doesn’t feel much like a party. People gathered here because it stays a consistent 60 degrees, the perfect dancing temperature. I think the billboard should’ve specified that.
I move at a glacial pace toward the exit. I like feeling blanketed by these rocks, removed from my own head, occupying some other gaps instead. I finally make it to the gift shop. I browse through the T-shirts and baseball hats. I stop at the nameplate necklaces and look for my own name etched in imitation gold. I can’t find it and I take that as a sign to leave.
Arthur holds the door for me as I walk back outside. It’s still pouring rain. The water is spilling over the gutterless roof.
“I was hoping it would’ve stopped by now,” I say. I squint at the Meramec River raging in the background. I’m stalling. I don’t want to get wet.
“Not until 2 p.m.,” he responds, filling in the unconformity for me. That’s still an hour and a half off. I can’t wait it out. The water will continue to fall.
I thank him for the tour and make a run for it. By the time I reach my car, I’m soaked.
Maddy Frank is a memoir and science writer living in St. Louis, Missouri. She is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis’ MFA program. Her work has appeared in Brevity and Driftwood Press.
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In a time when Botox and breast augmentation have given way to Brazilian butt lifts and Ozempic injections, it should come as little surprise that the physical-insecurity complex has come for men. In partnership with The New Yorker, Ava Kofman investigates the promises and (unbelievably graphic) perils of below-the-belt enhancement. If you can make it through without wincing, I applaud you.
Soon afterward, the pandemic began fueling a boom in the male augmentation market — a development its pioneers attribute to an uptick in porn consumption, work-from-home policies that let patients recover in private and important refinements of technique. The fringe penoplasty fads of the ’90s — primitive fat injections, cadaver-skin grafts — had now been surpassed not just by implants but by injectable fillers. In Las Vegas, Ed Zimmerman, who trained as a family practitioner, is now known for his proprietary HapPenis injections; he saw a 69% jump in enhancement clients after rebranding himself in 2021 as TikTok’s “Dick Doc.” In Manhattan, the plastic surgeon David Shafer estimates that his signature SWAG shot — short for “Shafer Width and Girth” — accounts for half of his practice. The treatment starts at $10,000, doesn’t require general anesthesia and can be reversed with the injection of an enzyme. In Atlanta, Prometheus by Dr. Malik, a fillers clinic, has been fielding requests from private equity investors.
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Those looking for dirty deeds to be done seem to be going no further than the Comm, a series of Discord communities in which people order violence, including commissioning robberies for bitcoin, and organizing swats against vulnerable people for perceived slights and insults. For Vice, Joseph Cox infiltrated this vile, testosterone-fuelled world of crime.
In the Comm there are the people who order the violence for whatever reason, and then the people willing to provide it as a service. I found various Telegram channels run by groups offering their IRL violence services. One called Bricksquad offers to throw bricks at a target building. It also advertised services in which they would shoot a house or car; commit an armed robbery; stab someone; “jumping (multiple people)”; and “beating (singular person).”
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Although there is no official count, it is believed that there are over 300,000 children orphaned in America after losing one or both primary caregivers to COVID-19. Black children have been disproportionately affected. For Andscape, Dwayne Bray profiles the Green family of Detroit, Michigan, whose lives were permanently changed after their mother and father—both frontline workers—died hours apart after contracting COVID, orphaning four adult and three minor children.
Fewer than 1,700 children have died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some advocates, researchers and doctors told Andscape that there is a misconception that children have been spared the worst of COVID-19 because relatively few of them have died from the disease. But the deaths of their caregivers have caused hundreds of thousands of children to lose their main source of financial, emotional and developmental support.
These three children are part of a large Detroit family whose mother and father died only hours apart after contracting COVID-19 nearly two years ago. Their maternal grandmother had died of COVID-19 a few months earlier and their 25-year-old first cousin was killed in a car crash weeks later.
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