In this nuanced essay for Seattle Met, Allecia Vermillion writes about what it’s like to raise a family when your partner lives with hearing loss.
After a few minutes she told us he had passed his hearing screen. That’s when I heard the sound of crying. Not the infant kind. Across the dark room, Seth’s breathing was ragged. A few sobs escaped before he could dry his eyes and compose himself back into stoicism.
Sure, we were all tired and running on raw emotion. But his tears were my first, my only, clue that Seth had worried our child might inherit the hearing loss that had demarcated so much of his life.
Every other year, Seth visits his doctor for routine hearing tests. They measure the difference between his hearing and that of a typical ear. They also record whether that hearing has diminished since his last visit. So far both right and left are holding steady at the same levels as when we met. Still, I lie awake sometimes, imagining how we would conduct our lives if Seth’s hearing went away entirely. Would we set up some sort of marital Slack channel? Could witty text messages sustain our closeness? They already get us through the workday. When we hug, if I get too close to his ear, it squeals with feedback, like someone adjusting a microphone as their band comes onstage for its set. The sound used to make me retreat. But after all these years I know to tilt my head the other way, and just keep on holding tight.
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What does it mean when someone says a dessert is “not too sweet”? For older generations of the Asian diaspora, it might be a comment of the highest praise. For younger Asians and Asian Americans, perhaps it’s a mark of maturity (and a sign that they’re becoming their parents). For Eater, Jaya Saxena unpacks this common phrase, which is a lot more complicated than it seems.
Like any in-joke among a marginalized group, “not too sweet” is a defiant shorthand, and one that in its construction necessitates a binary: “too sweet” compared to what? Often, in the Asian American usage, it’s a contrast to Western desserts filled with milk chocolate, sticky caramel, and corn syrup. To say “not too sweet” is to say actually, I don’t want your frosted red velvet cupcakes or your sticky toffee pudding; I long for the subtlety of red bean, the freshness of mango over sticky rice. It’s to say that Asian dessert traditions and flavors — matcha, black sesame, jellies laced with lychee — are superior to flavors associated with whiteness. It’s to proclaim that my culture has given me different tastes, better ones, and no amount of soft power can take that away.
This is what got my hackles up every time I saw a blanket “Asian” or “Asian American’’ descriptor around this supposed preference. Estimates put Asia as encompassing about 50 countries, and 4.7 billion people. Do you hear how silly it sounds to describe a cuisine, a behavior, literally anything as “Asian”? How dare you speak for everyone! I called my Bengali grandmother and asked her about desserts, just for extra proof, and she waxed about the roshogulla in her hometown outside Kolkata, the kalakand she ate at college in Lucknow, her mother’s kheer. “I love sweets,” she told me, even though at 93 she now limits her intake. Still, this was proof that the preference for “not too sweet” is not universal among Asians, and that “Asian” and “Asian American” cease to be useful frameworks when we start talking about the nuances of culture.
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Indigenous communities have long relied on the far north’s caribou herds for sustenance. But the herds are disappearing, and there’s not a clear cause of the decline, nor is there a remedy:
To anyone who lives south of the Arctic Circle the problem can seem abstract—another distant note of sadness in an era heavy with extinctions. But this is not how it appears in the far north.
In small communities scattered along the tree line or set in the open tundra, towns such as Anaktuvuk Pass that are often isolated, often Indigenous, where imported food and gas can be astronomically expensive and hunting caribou is often the cheapest and fastest and certainly the most satisfying way to provide for a family, the decline brings a peculiar dread. An Inupiat elder in a coastal town told me it was like feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on. The cold arrives, and it lingers. You don’t get over it. Then it worsens, until you become gaunt and haunted, until you’re afraid it isn’t a cold at all but something deeper. Something that’s shot through your whole system.
This is how the caribou problem feels to many Native people in the north, including the Nunamiut. Their name means “people of the land,” but anyone will tell you that they are, most of all, a caribou people. They are also sometimes called America’s last nomads, because only in about 1950 did the Nunamiut give up a mobile life, a life spent hunting and following caribou. They chose to settle in Anaktuvuk Pass exactly because the herd poured through it like a river. The name Anaktuvuk means “the place of many caribou droppings.”
One night after I’d gone out hunting with Clyde Morry, his father, Mark, made a quiet comment about the choice his people had made. Mark Morry was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thick gray hair, thick old glasses. He sat in a recliner by a window in the house he had built, watching his family eat caribou that Clyde had brought home.
“It was a big gamble for them to settle down like that,” Mark said of his own father and mother and uncles and aunts, the generation who gave up nomadism. “They figured the caribou would always be here.”
*This story is only accessible to National Geographic subscribers.
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This week we’re featuring stories about restorative justice, donated bodies allegedly sold at Harvard, an ER doctor who recognized her own catastrophic symptoms, a fascinating career pivot, and chimpanzees on the lam.
Mari Cohen | Jewish Currents | September 28, 2023 | 7,745 words
In 2015, I was on an Amtrak train that derailed, killing eight people, including the young man sitting next to me. I was lucky to escape with relatively minor physical injuries. In the years since, I have thought often about the conductor of the train, who was acquitted in a jury trial of a series of charges related to the crash. He had no intention to cause harm, and he certainly wasn’t responsible for the systemic issues that, had Amtrak addressed them proactively, might have mitigated the scale of the tragedy. I don’t think he should be made to suffer—I have no doubt that living with the knowledge of what happened while he was driving the train is a terrible enough burden. But this doesn’t mean that I’m not upset about the crash, a feeling that wasn’t really assuaged by the compensation that Amtrak provided victims. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to talk to the conductor, because in the exchange of words there might be some measure of healing for both sides. A similar notion is at the heart of Mari Cohen’s beautiful essay about being the victim of a hit-and-run. In the aftermath, Cohen began reporting on restorative justice approaches to traffic crashes, which advocates believe can “better serve the needs of all involved, creating a confidential space where drivers could express remorse without legal consequences, and where victims could receive the apologies they were looking for.” Through readings, interviews, and her own experience, Cohen considers whether restorative justice is a viable alternative to criminal justice. She suggests that it might be if we can shift our perceptions about closure. “I am trying to let go of the idea that a solution has to do everything,” she writes, “in order to do something.” —SD
Brenna Ehrlich | Rolling Stone | December 4, 2023 | 4,937 words
This grim tale explains the bizarre crossover between morgues and the oddities world. Bodies donated to Harvard (via the Anatomical Gift Program) may have inadvertently ended up as collectibles, after Cedric Lodge, the head of the Harvard morgue, allegedly allowed people to come in and pick out human remains to buy and take home. Yep, someone who gave their body for science may now have a body part on a collector’s shelf. Brenna Ehrlich unpicks this disturbing story for Rolling Stone and finds other morgue owners accused of the same crime. It’s hard to fathom that people in such positions of trust could be selling their charges or that anyone would actually want to buy them—a macabre segment of the world to discover. But it’s by talking to the families that Ehrlich shows us the true horror of this case: grieving family members are now unsure if they have the correct ashes or if their relative has ended up as an unusual knickknack. A touching detail was the number of people keen to discuss the secret recipes of their loved ones (William R. Buchanan had a famous carrot cake, Doreen Gordon some excellent macaroons, and Adele Mazzone was good at pork fried rice). I appreciated the care taken by Ehrlich to humanize those who donated their bodies in the first place. —CW
Grace Glassman | Slate | November 26, 2023 | 5,038 words
In an ongoing medical emergency, lay patients and their families often have no idea exactly how dangerous a situation has become as specialists and professionals speak in rapid-fire numbers and acronyms only they understand. (Strangely, if you don’t know precisely how dire things are, you also don’t understand how bad things could get, and this incomprehension can sometimes be a kindness.) As an emergency room doctor, Grace Glassman had no such luxury: when she went into hemorrhagic shock after delivering her third child via C-section, she knew she would die without heroic medical intervention and she asked for as much on the way to the operating room for life-saving surgery. “My doctor was running next to my gurney,” she writes. “I found her hand and said, ‘Dr. P., please, do everything. For my kids.’ I was shocked to see her wipe away a tear.” This piece is a master class in the personal essay: it unfolds with perfect pacing, placing you in the hospital room as trauma unfolds, delivering critical context you need to understand Glassman’s peril without overwhelming you with medical detail. It can be said that birth stories are all individual and universal, yet Glassman begets a piece that belies the genre. —KS
Tad Friend | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 8,925 words
Part of being an aging rap fan means periodically being confronted with bizarre “what happened to X” moments. To wit: learning that Jesse Jaymes, the man behind the ill-conceived 1991 oddity “Shake It Like a White Girl,” is now Jesse Itzler, a billionaire (by marriage) and triathlete (by hobby) who is also bent on becoming a top-tier motivational coach. I still don’t know how to react to this development, but at the very least I can say that it gave Tad Friend his latest A+ profile. This is a window into a world that feels like the end state of every “optimization” podcast you’ve ever heard: “The conference-goers, mostly in their thirties and forties, have the air of commuters who missed the first train to the city and are determined to crowd onto the next one. They seek trade secrets and, better still, the mind-set to deploy them.” Personal development, as it’s currently known, is a massive industry, awarding (mostly) men six figures for a single speech at a popular conference. That’s where Itzler is aiming, though under the guise of helping people connect with gratitude and overcome self-doubt. But while there’s no shortage of great scenework—the green room before addressing people who sell dialysis machines, a spontaneous swim race against Olympic athletes—the real draw here is the keen deconstruction of the mythologies we establish. Last year, Friend’s feature about the world of door-to-door salesmen captivated me in similar fashion; he’s able to chronicle a certain kind of masculinity like few others can, teasing out its tensions and deceptions until what starts as a profile of one person becomes an X-ray of an archetype. You may not have heard this tune before, but you won’t be able to shake it. —PR
Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | December 5, 2023 | 7,400 words
You know right from the start that this one’s going to break your heart. But you carry on and brace yourself, because you can also tell, from the opening line, that Imogen West-Knights will deliver a riveting piece of reporting. Last December, the beloved chimpanzees in Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo escaped their enclosure. It took the zoo staff and keepers 72 hours to contain them to their ape house, and West-Knights reconstructs the ordeal with deft pacing and great detail. As the hours pass, the zoo must weigh the safety of the zookeepers and public at large against that of the chimps, and the situation grows more distressing. The photography in the piece—snowy landscapes of the zoo’s grounds that look more sinister than serene—add to the unsettling nature of the story, as you can’t help but imagine these great apes loose in the cold, some in their final moments. (You also wonder: why are we subjecting these animals to a place that’s too cold for them six months out of the year?) This is a sad read, but it sparks an important conversation around zoo safety protocols, climate-specific zoos, and whether zoos should even exist at all. —CLR
Audience Award
Do you hear timpani? This is the piece our readers loved most this week:
Clint Rainey | Fast Company | November 30, 2023 | 4,722 words
Chik-fil-A has been a political lightning rod nearly as long as it’s been a phenomenon—and in recent years, has achieved the dubious distinction of getting blowback from both ends of the ideological spectrum. But as Clint Rainey details, the company is in the midst of a tightrope walk: listening and learning, while still preserving the customer-first approach that has set it apart from the fast-food fray. An image-rehab piece? No question. But here’s what matters: it’s smartly structured, well reported, and strong enough to make you question your own stance toward the company. —PR
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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:
For more than 75 years, Leicester has been the place where British potatoes become crisps. Its Walkers factory produces 5m packets a day, steam billowing from behind big blue security gates. Just down the road sits its HQ, where 300 marketers, scientists and chefs decide which crisps the world needs next.
Emma Wood controls most of the world outside the US—at least when it comes to the taste of crisps. In 2017—12 years after she started working for Walkers’ parent company, PepsiCo —she was promoted to director of global flavour and seasonings, meaning it’s her job to develop flavours for Europe, Africa and Asia. It’s not a responsibility she takes lightly. “I know it’s not an expensive purchase,” she says over a conference table, multipacks of Wotsits lying between us, “but it’s really disappointing when you buy something for your lunch and it’s not what you wanted it to be.”
Actually, not everyone eats crisps at lunchtime—in France and southern Europe, they’re more of a pre-dinner snack with aperitifs. This is why Lay’s in the region are so light and simple; why there is a Mediterranean flavour that is essentially just oil and salt (so it doesn’t overpower any accompanying cocktails). And this is why innovating in Spain is often about offering new thicknesses, not new flavours.
Wood’s favourite flavour is salt and vinegar, but I think her personality is more prawn cocktail—sweet but punchy with her blond bob, floaty floral skirt and silver-studded trainers. In the past two decades, her work has taken her everywhere. Before Doritos launched in India five years ago, she took a “culinary trek” across the northern city of Lucknow, trying different pilaus, meats and breads from street food stalls. She relies on knowledge from local PepsiCo teams, so that if she says, “I think I can taste cardamom,” they can clarify: “It’s roasted green cardamom, actually.”
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Jason Diamond’s younger years were culinarily magical: a neighborhood full of first- and second-generation immigrants meant that going to his friends’ houses exposed him to food from all over the globe. One food in particular, a Bukharan dish whose actual name he didn’t even know, turned him into a garlic lover. Years later, living in New York he went on a quest to find it—and ended finding out more about garlic than you thought possible.
Today garlic is everywhere, and the stinky little bulbs make about $21 billion annually across the planet. China grows the bulk of it—nearly three-quarters of the world’s supply comes from there. It’s been growing there for thousands of years, but since it’s such big business, anything you buy from your supermarket sourced from there probably wasn’t harvested wild. If you happen to get a head or two from one of China’s neighbors to the west, it’s likely that grew wild, and the flavor difference is astonishing. Whereas most grocery store garlic in the United States tends to have a bitter, spicy taste to it, Kazakh garlic, for instance, has a nutty, earthy flavor without the sharpness of the stuff shipped over from China. If you’re able to try garlic from Central Asia, that, to me, is the real stuff. It’s organic, pulled from the ground, and has a richness to it that you can’t create in a lab. It makes you realize just how much we’re missing when it comes to flavor in America—not just with garlic but with almost any food item.
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Reported essays reflect the great craft involved in blending fact, anecdote, and personal observation to tell a compelling story. These are the pieces we can’t stop thinking about, the ones we will forever recommend to friends, the ones that surprised and delighted us—all drawn from our vast and deep pool of editors’ picks. Enjoy!
Summer Praetorius | Nautilus | December 19, 2022 | 3,975 words
This piece by paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius, which is part memoir and part science writing, was published in mid-December last year in that overlooked period that made it too late to include in our Best of 2022 collection, yet technically ineligible for this one. But I’m making an exception. (As Praetorius notes about the Great Unconformity—the gap of a billion years of Earth’s unrecorded history between 1,600 and 600 million years ago—there’s much to be discovered about seemingly forgotten periods of time.) I’ve read many poignant climate stories on the melting of glaciers and the razing of ancient forests, but I keep returning to this one because of Praetorius’ vast understanding of the Earth’s history across hundreds of millions of years; she simplifies complex concepts about geological amnesia, resilience, and system collapse so they’re more accessible to a general reader. I love the beautiful way she describes the Earth’s memory, recorded in layers of sediment and held within its disappearing ice sheets, which she refers to as “the great brains of our planet.” But she also weaves a deeply personal account of her late brother Jebsen’s mental deterioration after a snowboarding accident, another example of a complex system pushed too far out of equilibrium to recover effectively. This parallel story helps to make the piece relatable on a more intimate scale. Recalling the ride home from the woods when she notices the first signs of Jebsen’s memory loss as he sat in the back seat, she realizes now that he was forever changed from that moment and never recovered. “I fixate on our immobility; on the lack of actions we took to assess the larger damages that may have been hiding beneath that hole in his memory,” she writes. It wasn’t that she and her mother didn’t care about his well-being, but perhaps they didn’t initially believe it was anything serious. As Praetorius shifts between her family’s story and scientific research, you can’t help but ask: How resilient is Earth? Are we seeing and acting on the warning signs? —CLR
Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words
So many families, mine and likely yours, have things they just don’t talk about, experiences and events rooted in regret and shame, where everyone concerned wants to forget or remain silent. But does silence bring solace or does it ensure irreparable harm, perhaps greater than the pain of confronting the past? This is just one of the weighty themes Jennifer Senior considers in “The Ones We Sent Away,” a brilliant essay I have not stopped thinking about since reading it in August. At the heart of the piece is Senior’s aunt Adele, who was institutionalized in 1953 at 21 months old. Adele was diagnosed with microcephaly and removed from those who loved her the most in this world on the advice of medical doctors who meant well. This story is chiefly about loss and trauma, primarily the trauma Adele endured while institutionalized and the incalculable loss of not receiving enlightened care. Adele’s family suffered too, deprived of Adele’s lively spirit in their lives. With deep care and nuance, Senior examines the systemic and societal failures that deemed it best to separate Adele from her family. In writing this essay, she looks closely at the decision makers of the past and turns the microscope on herself: as a journalist writing about an aunt unable to give consent, Senior realized she faced an ethical dilemma not unlike the doctors who suggested Adele be institutionalized in 1952. She, like they, meant well. By sharing Adele’s story, Senior wants not just to avoid harm, but to do good, possibly for other families facing similar decisions today, possibly for anyone who sits in silence, afraid to face an unpleasant and painful past. Through Adele’s incredible story, Senior suggests that to do better as humans, we first need to be brave enough to talk about it. —KS
Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words
Here’s an endorsement: I am prone to ranting about Teslas not (only) because of the waste of space that is Elon Musk and the shoddy construction of his EVs, but also because of this essay. In March, writer Nick Bowlin attended an annual conference in Toronto, Ontario, where the “institutions that constitute the global metal-mining industry commiserate in the bad times and celebrate the good.” In a perverse twist, Bowlin found that 2023 is a decidedly good time for mining not in spite of climate change, but because of it. A world hungry for electric batteries, solar panels, and other essentials of a decarbonized economy means there is escalating demand for metals, and mining interests are seizing the moment to make over their image—and to make bank. “To stop global warming,” one conference speaker says, “you need us.” But boosting the profits of some of the world’s most notoriously exploitative concerns comes at a terrible cost: to the earth, to mine workers, to the inhabitants of metal-rich land. Bowlin doesn’t suggest that mining can’t be part of green solutions. Rather, his essay brilliantly illuminates the perils of trying to save the world by relying on the blunt tools and maximalist mindset of late-stage capitalism. —SD
Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words
Reported essays cover a broad spectrum, with historical reporting being oft-overlooked. It’s a difficult skill: conjuring events from hundreds—or even thousands—of years ago is no mean feat. But when it works, a history piece is engaging and fascinating reportage. In this essay on ancient Pompeii for Aeon, Guy D. Middleton grabs attention with a piece of graffiti scrawled on the vestibule wall of a well-to-do house owned by two freedmen, the Vettii: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” Explaining how “graffiti . . . comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society, ” Middleton leads us into the bowels of Pompeii to try and discover who Eutychis was. Expect back-stabbing brothels, brutal slavery, and sexual abuse. The meaning of every word of the crude advertisement is examined, along with writings, paintings, and artifacts that add further insight into this grim world. (Particularly revealing is a lead collar inscribed: “This is a cheating whore! Seize her because she escaped from Bulla Regia.”) Through clever tools, rather than dumbing down, Middleton makes history accessible—and Eutychis can call out to us from nearly 2,000 years ago. —CW
Tom Vanderbilt | Harper’s Magazine | March 20, 2023 | 5,339 words
Despite the fact that I’m one of those clean-but-messy people, I also love the idea of precision. Exactitude. The idea of a constant. That spills over into a fascination with measurement in general. It’s not a hobby—I don’t collect rulers or, like, assemble Ikea shelves with a torque wrench—just an abiding curiosity. And it’s one that Tom Vanderbilt seems to share, judging from his quest in Harper’s to find the ground truth of the second. Like so much of his writing, he sets about answering a question (in this case, what drives clock time?) as genially as possible. Characters don’t just talk, they do so “with weary resignation” or “[nodding] excitedly”; they call statistical noise “jiggly wigglies.” That seasoning, Vanderbilt knows, becomes all the more crucial when the rest of the recipe comprises chewy concepts like dematerialization or the ephemeris second. Who wouldn’t get the tiniest thrill knowing that researchers had to travel to France to compare their kilograms to the platinum-iridium cylinder once deemed the “official” kilogram? Who’s not just a little bit awed by the idea that the official second doesn’t actally exist, but is essentially spit out by a nine-billion-step Rube Goldberg machine made of cesium atoms? It’s science writing that reads like a travelog: Look to your left and see the world’s smallest ruler! If you’re going to guide readers through the world of the abstract, you’ve gotta make the concrete part fun. —PR
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Jesse Itzler has had some pretty remarkable fortune in his life. He got signed as a rapper in the early ’90s. He started two businesses that sold for large sums of money. His wife sold her business for a much, much larger sum of money. Yet, Jesse Itzler’s biggest goal is as yet unrealized: he wants to be a hundred-million-dollar motivational coach. For The New Yorker, Tad Friend hits yet another state-of-the-American-man profile out of the park.
To many rudderless men who feel at sea, toxic masculinity seems like a safe harbor. Ed Mylett, a prominent speaker, told me, “The easiest lane to get big right now is right-wing politics and hypermasculinity. Show ’em your Lambo, show ’em your mansion, show ’em your muscles, and scream at ’em.” Though seventy-five per cent of the life coaches in North America are female, women are vastly underrepresented among the best-paid motivators. Of the seven speakers on the poster for the Forward Event, six were men. “I am so often the token female at these dude events,” Jen Gottlieb, a podcaster and speaker, told me.
Itzler’s masculinity is relatively evolved, but he does dwell on grievances. When a lone detractor called him “pampered” in a reply to Itzler’s Instagram post about an Ultraman (perhaps because he’d brought a team of six to film, hydrate, and Theragun him), Itzler groused about it for weeks: “I will never forget that!” But he generally uses grudges as fuel for the next race, then discards them like an empty bottle of Muscle Milk. “Something must have happened in my childhood where I thought I had something to prove,” he told me. “I’d have to spend a lot of time on the couch to figure it out.” Any plans to? “Nope!”
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When the body of a loved one is donated to the Harvard Anatomical Gift Program, there should be no doubt that the generous gift is being used for science. There is doubt. Breanna Ehrlich eloquently explains the disturbing story.
Were those ashes — the ones they’d received in a plain black box in the mail from Harvard, the ones they’d so carefully divided up among their family members to scatter at sea, the last remaining physical presence of their mother — possibly not even their mother at all?
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Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | December 6, 2023 | 17 minutes (4,850 words)
I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. I was 21 years old and, in a way, quite homeless. Home is one of the enduring themes of Christmas, the joy of being in its midst and the thundering melancholy of longing for it, wondering if you can ever really get that feeling of belonging back—if you ever had it in the first place.
At the time, I was a college student in Jackson, Mississippi, and rarely went home. I would only fight with Pop about why I stopped going to church or entertain questions from Mom about my sudden hair loss and what this did or did not mean about radon poisoning. I did love my family, or at least the idea of them, and took great pride in our being rednecks who lived far off in the Piney Woods, a lawless land where nobody would deliver a pizza. So many of my college friends came from civilized places with public parks and museums. When somebody asked where I was from, I would pull out the atlas to poke my finger at the unmarked point on a map of Mississippi, between Brandon and a subatomic little village called Puckett. “Traveling circuses wintered there,” I’d say, a detail I learned from the Rankin County News as a boy.
It was a nonplace, really. The boonies. The sort of place you only went if you were searching for an escaped convict or a coonskin cap. It did not feel like home. Nowhere did. Mom was from the Delta, Pop from the Hill Country up near Coldwater. “Mama and thems,” he called it, in a county where all the cemeteries had tombstones full of Scotts and Keys, which are two of my names. It felt nice to be in a place where so many of my family members had been embalmed.
As a young man, my father declined an offer to take over the family farm and split for Memphis to seek his fortune like a character in an old country song, though he never found it there. Memphis is where I was born. Was that my home? When I was nine, Pop’s work brought us down to the Piney Woods near Puckett, some three hours south, where we had no kin. In a place like Mississippi, where kin matters, we might as well have moved to Tierre del Fuego. But I had my first kiss here, and hit my first homerun. Maybe this was home.
It was, I suppose, until a week before Thanksgiving in my senior year of college. I’d come back to do a little laundry when Pop strode into the kitchen and gravely informed me that they were selling the house and moving again, due to a land dispute with a choleric farmer up the road who hated everyone but his cows.
“Where are you moving?” I asked.
“Up to town,” Pop said.
He meant the Ross Barnett Reservoir, an artificial lake with weedy marinas surrounded by forgettable subdivisions, which would allow my father to carry on his illicit affair with the largemouth bass. It was hardly 30 minutes away, but the people up there were all new.
“You coming up to mama and thems to hunt?” Pop asked as I folded laundry.
I didn’t want to spend Christmas with my family at a farm that never would feel like home, staring backward into a past that only made you sad. I wanted to stare forward. I wanted something new. I needed money, for one. My parents sure didn’t have any. “You have to come,” Mom said. “It’s Christmas.”
“Maybe,” I said, walking out of my last childhood home for the last time. I would never come back to this place. We had no people here. Why would I come back? Where would I stay?
I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood. The elusiveness of home is one of the Bible’s great themes. God himself was mostly homeless. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” he says, “but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says, a little passive-aggressively.
God doesn’t seem to care too much about where you’re from, and when you’re from a place, he likes making you go somewhere else, usually worse. The whole book is a fever dream of exile and real estate development, beginning in a garden and ending 1,200 chapters later in something even better than New York in autumn, a hermit’s grand hallucination of a city almost impossible in its beauty and cleanliness and tax revenue.
I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood.
I remembered my Bible, and all those hymns, too, so many songs about looking for a home you can’t quite put your hands on. In “We’re Marching to Zion,” we sang about the “beautiful city” that awaited us, reached via “The Gloryland Way,” a spiritual highway leading into a metaphorical Canaan’s Land where there exists a habitation on a hilltop for peoples of every nation with no war or passport requirements. Until then, we slouched through arid and inhospitable lands, filled with stumps and snakes. The message was clear: you could find a home—you just have to die first.
I drove through woods and up into town toward Jackson, wondering if God had a home for me out there, somewhere. He’d led the Israelites to theirs with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, but driving back to campus in the dark, I saw no burning signs pointing the way. All I saw was a great big billboard off the interstate, bathed in spotlight. In a blaze of fluorescent fire, the sign shouted with holy ghost power: fireworks!
And I got to thinking.
There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses. The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and air of a place.
There are places and there are also nonplaces, forgotten or ignored or transformed by human progress into blind spots of experience where nobody wants to be, like the landscaping in front of a Burger King. The expansive lot with the fireworks billboard off the interstate was a nonplace, which is perhaps why I felt so irresistibly drawn to it.
The billboard stood high on a pole, just off I-55, alongside US Highway 80. Once known as the Dixie Overland Highway, it stretched from the briny waters of the Atlantic near Savannah, Georgia, to the raging tempests of the Pacific near San Diego, California, and through a now-forgettable piece of Jackson over the brown sad water of the Pearl River. As I drove by this nonplace, I beheld a magnificent wasteland below the billboard, once a truckstop, now a field of gravel featuring the sort of tattered sheet metal structures where they chain hostages to the floor.
The fireworks sign stayed up all year, because every June and December, a capacious candy-striped circus tent filled with all manner of fiery delights materialized in this post-industrial apocalypse as if by some strange wood-elf magic. It seemed like the perfect place for a boy from nowhere to spend the upcoming holiday. I don’t know what prompted me to call the telephone company and find the phone number of the company that operated this fireworks tent, but that’s exactly what I did.
“Absolutely not,” Mom said, when I explained over the phone that I’d found holiday employment with Boom City, LLC, a subsidiary of The Hunan Group, Inc., managing Central Mississippi’s largest fireworks tent on a dark patch of highway just over the river from the Murder Capital of the New South. Death was rampant in the area: stabbings, execution-style shootings at the river or the strip clubs just over the hill.
“You’ll be robbed,” Mom said. “What kind of company hires a child to sell explosives?”
Something possessed me, a hunger to escape, to hurry up and exile myself and get it over with. Missing Christmas would be a hard stop, a clean death for the past.
A few days later, during finals week, my father made a rare appearance on campus. Most of the students were gone already.
“I brought you some things,” Pop said, opening the trunk of the car to reveal gun cases, ammo, and a machete wrapped in an army blanket.
“Your momma’s worried, son. The machete will make her feel better. I sharpened it,” he said, thumbing the blade.
Pop had brought along my old 12-gauge pump, my .30-.06 rifle, and three preloaded clips with 220-grain shot, in case the fireworks tent was attacked by a team of bison.
“And some pistols,” he said, handing me a bag of pistols.
“Thanks, Pop,” I said, transferring the arsenal to my trunk, a few parking spaces over.
Sometimes, when I think about my life, I think about the quiet moments that may have shaped me more than I could’ve known, like the time my father handed me a sack of guns in a dormitory parking lot because he didn’t want me to die.
I reported for duty on Wednesday, December 18, 1996. I brought long johns, a hunting coat, bedroll, cookstove, radio, books, and the weapons; along with sufficient foodstuffs for the long dark winter: boxes of ramen, several gallons of Dinty Moore Beef Stew—enough survival gear to stage a delicious, hearty coup.
The lot was hemmed in on two sides by interstate overpasses and a vast junkyard to the rear. In between the tent and the interstate sat a midcentury motor lodge for travelers using this highway, back when travelers used this highway. The place was still open, rot be damned. A sign announced: telephone in every room. Presumably, so you could call and say goodbye to your loved ones as you bled out on the floor.
The enormous circus tent had gone up overnight. A tractor-trailer the color of dry mustard backed up to one corner, but otherwise, the site was empty—a moonscape. Here I was to meet a man called Donny, who’d show me where the execution-style murders would take place.
Donny was maybe 30 years old with a .44 Magnum on his hip and ran all the Boom City tents in this part of the state. Orientation began in the tent proper, big enough for a church revival, strings of naked bulbs draped across the expanse of it. He opened the trailer, the merchandise stacked to the ceiling.
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“It’s a hundred grand worth of fireworks,” he said. “I hope you got a gun.”
“I have enough guns to start a new government,” I said.
Behind the trailer, tucked away in the back, were my sleeping quarters, a tiny trailer the color and shape of a Grade B egg.
“There’s a hot plate in there,” he said. “But don’t use it.”
“Got it.”
“You get caught leaving, you’ll be fired,” he said.
“Got it.”
He looked around the empty tent and went to a dark place inside himself.
“People will want to steal everything,” he said. “But don’t go calling the cops just because. Don’t be jumpy like the last dude.”
“What happened to the last dude?” I said.
“He got jumpy.”
“What if I need to shower?”
“Use the motel,” he said, of the sex workers’ encampment across the lot. “They’ll give you a shower for five dollars.”
“Have you ever been inside it?” I asked.
“Hell no,” he said.
Donny had me sign papers that relieved Boom City of any liability in the event of my dismemberment and said he’d see me in a week to empty the cash box and bury my remains.
Alone now on the surface of this godless asteroid, I tossed my bag and bedding into the egg. I’d brought a single sheet and a pair of heavy, careworn quilts made by my great-grandmother, Mama Bessie—my mother’s mother’s mother—tough as old boot leather and the size of an emaciated gnome. Mama Bessie raised six children alone and came from a time when men were men and women were also men, due to all the men dying. She made her home near Possumneck, another nonplace, east of West and west of Ethel. I could not shake the strangeness of life—how one day, you’re a boy, hoping Santa Claus answers your letters, and the next, you’re living inside a fiberglass egg with a loaded rifle and a pair of heirloom quilts from a village that Santa will never again visit, for it no longer exists.
I worked myself ragged that first day, through the early sunset and into the blue-black chill of night. My overnight security would be arriving sometime before midnight. Donny had let me hire my own night watchman, and I’d selected my big brother, Bird, the only human I knew— besides my father—who seemed capable of manslaughter. He was in town for a few days and sleeping at the new house over at the reservoir, the one I hadn’t even been to yet.
When Bird finally showed up, my body was already covered in a fine layer of gunpowder.
“What’s the new house like?” I said.
“It’s a house,” he said.
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
“What do you want me to do all night?” he said, surveying the ridiculous tent.
“Keep us both alive.” I handed him one of the pistols.
“I brought my own.”
“If something bad happens, wake me up,” I said.
“Just come out if you hear shooting,” Bird said.
That first morning, my big brother woke me with a vigorous rap on the door of the egg. I unfolded myself, thanked him, and he drove away, to return 16 hours later, as he would every night that holiday. Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time. For 18 hours, I unboxed and priced Roman candles, M-60s, Black Cats, Saturn missiles, my body covered in combustible dirt. At sunset, I walked the lot with a price gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. I warmed a bowl of Dinty Moore on the forbidden hot plate and watched holiday programming on a small TV on the counter.
Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time.
When the weather turned cold and unexpected flurries began, I donned a woolen poncho and took my smoke breaks mere steps from the explosives, using the tractor-trailer as a windbreak. I must have looked a sight to the customers and dealers who came and went with some frequency from the Sex Lodge. Sometimes I read Shakespeare. I had a Complete Works the shape and size of a Bible, tiny print on cigarette paper. I had given some thought to becoming an actor, traveling the countryside with a troupe. Who needs a home when you’ve got a stage?
A hundred yards behind the tent, out in the scrubby desert of disemboweled cars, sat a cinderblock shed where a man with a wispy white mullet lived, sexton of the junkyard. I saw him only once a day when he tootled around the lot on a small dune buggy. One day after lunch, I walked across the gravel to introduce myself. Nobody answered and I walked away. Then a voice rang out.
“Ho, there!”
I turned and there he was, in overalls and T-shirt, waving me back.
“I’m Otto,” he said.
“I’m working the tent,” I said.
“I do like a sparkler from time to time,” he said, his mind wandering to a happier youth.
“I’ve seen you out here on your dune buggy,” I said.
“That ain’t me,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, though it was obviously him.
“That’s the other Otto.”
I wanted to ask him what it was like to live with dissociative identity disorder and which Otto would be slitting my throat later. But this Otto seemed pleasant.
Customers were scarce—a few truck drivers, attorneys who drove over the bridge from downtown. One afternoon, a local TV reporter stopped by and asked to interview me for a segment on fireworks safety and I made up some important facts about fireworks safety. I must have looked like something dragged out of a bog, the scruffy character in the holiday movie who teaches life lessons.
I called Mom from the landline that ran into the tent from a nearby pole, to give her the number and offer proof of life.
“Could you come to the farm Christmas day, at least?” she said.
“I can’t,” I said.
“I left you a turkey breast, if you get a chance to go to the house,” she said.
“I can’t, I’m not allowed to leave.”
“I just hate this,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”
Isolation works a number on you. I almost wanted criminals to stop by. In the long stretch of dark between sundown and the arrival of my brother, I took to dragging a chair out in the middle of the lot, beyond the glow of the tent, under the great black ceiling of stars, staring up into the cold. I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave home and go find another one and that his family would grow as many as the stars above. I felt like Jacob, his grandson, who sleeps on the ground at night and demands a blessing and God puts him in a scissor hold and gives him a hip injury that lasts all his days. It always seemed odd to me that God would appear to Jacob and all Jacob wanted to do was wrestle. But after a week out on the moonscape, I understood. If God had shown up, I’d have wanted to wrestle, too.
The night of Christmas Eve, I sat out in front of the tent looking at the stars, the faint wash of interstate traffic a distant waterfall. Where were all the people going? Back home or madly away? My school friends were spread across the country. Other friends were over beyond the gelid swamp rot at Martin’s, a seedy downtown lounge always lively in the homecoming days before Christmas, filled with a neon haze of cigarette smoke and the beautiful stench of whisky and ash. The thought of all that happiness made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad but you can’t help what you think about. All those people, at least the ones I knew, had homes to go back to, right there in town, warm childhood beds in leafy neighborhoods where they’d grown up and could probably keep coming back to for the rest of their lives, if they wanted.
The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination. Pop had a place like that, at the Coldwater farm. He was there now, asleep next to Mom in a bed in his parents’ house, on the land he called home and always would. I had an egg on wheels.
When Bird showed up that night to let me sleep, I’d made up my mind.
“I’m going to the new house,” I said.
“Thought you wasn’t supposed to leave,” he said.
“If Donny shows up, tell him I’m over at the motel.”
The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination.
I careened through better parts of town, everything closed for Christmas Eve but shop windows gleaming yet with light. I wanted a shower. It would be a gift to myself, a small luxury, a humanizing act, a blessing to wrest from the grip of God. I pulled into the neighborhood, tucked away on a forgettable street among a series of forgettable subdivisions, each with its own forgettable boat ramp. The design of the homes was derivative at best, another subdivision without history, all those Frankenstein facades, a Victorian gable here, a Tudor chimney there, shallow porches, hollow columns. The new house was dark, just another brick ranch with shutters that wouldn’t close.
As soon as I saw it, I laughed aloud: I’d once gone out with a girl who lived here, two or three years before. Uncanny. The girl, Libby, was so pretty, so kind, so tall, so blond—like a captain for the Finnish national volleyball team—and I remember feeling envy that she lived here, in a house, in a place where you could get pizza delivered right to your door. Life is weird.
Pop’s boat was backed into the open carport. Through the window, I caught the unmistakable glow of our lighted Christmas tree, though the house was empty. I found the key Pop had handed me a month before and tried the side door, but it didn’t work, and neither did any other key, and neither would the windows budge nor the locks be jimmied with a credit card. I kicked the shrubberies. I cursed the name of God. I whispered fuck very loudly.
I climbed up into the bass boat, into the only good seat available, and smoked.
Libby! Where had her family gone? The brass knocker on the front door still had her family’s surname on it. She’d lived here all her life, she said. Why’d they leave? Divorce? Promotion? A sudden turn of ill fortune? Where did she sleep now and was she sad about that?
I guess it was in that moment that I must have first begun to see, through a glass, darkly, that all of us lose home eventually. Otto hadn’t been born in that cinderblock shed. Mom had no family farm. She had nothing but us, her children. No wonder she called the fireworks tent every night. When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too.
I threw my head back and exhaled a cloud of breath and smoke and overhead saw a perfect square cut into the carport ceiling. Maybe Christmas didn’t have to be annulled. Maybe I could climb through the ceiling and sit by the tree and just enjoy it, for an hour or two.
I found a ladder in the garage and climbed into the attic, crawling on hands and knees across ceiling joists with a lighter to show me the way. I would take a shower and make a delicious turkey sandwich. It would make Mom so happy to know she’d fed me. Maybe I would make a fire, sit by the tree, and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, remembering happier Christmases. Maybe even pray for a few more, down the road. I would make Bird a sandwich, too.
When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too.
Up in the rafters now, above what I reasoned was the kitchen, I kicked at every hole in the ceiling that looked like it might be an attic door, but nothing would give. I kicked and cursed like a failed St. Nick, with no gifts and no magic and no way into a house that would never be a home. No room in this inn. Not tonight.
I climbed out and drove back to the emptiness on US 80, where I half-expected to find Bird dead, all the money and fireworks gone, but he sat there, perfectly unharmed, a rifle across his lap, watching a snowy feed on the television.
Later, Bird and I sat there together in the dark beyond the light of the tent and smoked. From the interstate, the warm red light of the striped canvas must have looked inviting in the blackness. The Bible says Jesus is just like that, a tent you can crawl inside. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God,” writes John in the Book of Revelation.
“Merry Fucking Christmas, little brother,” Bird said.
“So merry,” I said, fingering the safety of my rifle.
We looked at the stars and told stories. I did not want to leave him alone and I think he did not want me to go to sleep. Whatever sadness I felt was as much my fault as anybody’s. I’d made my choices. Home was out there, somewhere. All the hymns said so. Maybe it would be a city or maybe it would be a church or a wife and children or a house on a beautiful street, or maybe it would just be peace in the invisible tabernacle that was Jesus. Who could know.
A few days later, the world descended upon the house of explosives and bought almost everything. Nobody died, I saw no drug deals gone wrong, nobody shot anybody, and Otto didn’t show himself again and neither did the other Otto. I hired a few friends to help out on New Year’s Eve, and it was nice to have company.
After midnight, when the crowd finally thinned and the traffic slowed, out beyond the glow of the tent, my friends fired off bottle rockets and multi-shot aerials, which burst in bright bouquets of color and light over the junkyard and far across the darkness of the river, and it was fun to see them having fun, but my mind was already down the road, toward some new future where I might never have to be alone again at the most wonderful time of the year. A family. A wife. A place to sleep without wheels. My last night on the lot, in the trailer shaped like an egg, I felt ready to hatch and fly toward some new home.
These days, I don’t know what to tell people when they ask where I’m from. I have lived in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wyoming, and I’ve lived in Savannah, Georgia, now for 17 years—longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. My mother lives here and my father is buried here, under soft green grass five minutes from my house. I have a wife, too, who moved as a child even more than I did. We have three girls. One will be off to college next fall and the other two after that. I like the idea of staying here so that our children can be from somewhere, even when they leave. It’s nice to know where you’re from.
When people ask where I’m from, I still say “Mississippi.”
And people say, “Whereabouts?”
Sometimes I say, “The Piney Woods.”
Sometimes, “Brandon,” where I had my first kiss.
Or “Star,” where I went to high school.
Or “Puckett,” where I hit that homerun.
Mostly I just say “You haven’t heard of it. I haven’t even heard of it.”
I still think about that big circus tent. Strangely enough, I now live mere blocks from the very origins of the old Dixie Overland Highway, US 80. They call it Victory Drive here in Savannah, Georgia, but it’s the very same road that runs right by the tent where I worked that December, some 600 miles to the east. I ride my bike across this road to go to work. Crossing that road is like fording a river of time that runs back through the weird history of my little life and all the places I’ve lived and left. Sometimes I think the only home any of us have is in the tabernacle of memory, though I do own a pretty brick house on a leafy street, which feels as close to paradise as I’ll ever get, at least on this side of the Gloryland Way.
The year after I worked the tent, I heard that my successor had been robbed of all his money in the middle of the night and stripped naked, gagged, and bound to a pole. Discovered hours later he was believed to be dead but was only asleep. They say he was fine. I still drive over that piece of interstate every few years when I come back to Mississippi, and I always look off toward the moonscape with fondness; that desolation where I spent the loneliest Christmas of my life. The motel is still there, and so is Otto’s cottage. I don’t know if the tent goes up anymore. In place of the large fireworks sign is a great big banner promising romantic adventures. I have often considered stopping, to have a closer look and stand there amid the wasteland and feel the sweet pang of lost youth, but having no weapon, I drive on.
Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.
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Patricia Lockwood spends 72 hours in Rome after being invited to meet the pope, ostensibly to repair the friendship between artists and the church. Hilarity and hyperbole ensue.
At the English-language bookshop Otherwise, we make friends with the man behind the till, Donato, who poses for a picture while exclaiming: ‘I’m ugly as fuck though!’ He has excellent taste in literature. He gives us a free tote bag. On the back of it is printed: ‘Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ I have the chance to do the funniest thing possible and carry this into the Sistine Chapel.
A bit of weather crosses the pope’s face. He’s mad at me, maybe, for not giving him a drawing called The Quantum Eternity of Love. No, he’s mad at me for not giving his hand back. He retrieves it, with surprising strength, and then raises two fingers and blesses my stomach. He is finally smiling – no longer trapped with the artists, but back with the bambini. Oh my God, I realise, as I walk back to my seat, he 100 per cent thinks I am pregnant.
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In December 2022, the chimpanzees of Furuvik Zoo escaped when a staff member tending them accidentally left one of their enclosure’s doors open. In this riveting but heartbreaking Guardian read, Imogen West-Knights recounts the chaotic 72 hours it took for the zookeepers and park staff to contain the chimps in their ape house. Be warned, though, that this is far from a happy tale. In fact, it’s distressing. But West-Knights reconstructs the incident from minute to minute in a brilliantly reported piece.
It’s not uncommon for animals to escape from zoos, and all zoos have protocol to deal with this eventuality. The precise response, however, depends on which animal has escaped. In 2022, a king cobra escaped from its enclosure in the reptile house at Skansen Aquarium, a zoo in Stockholm. The week-long hunt for the snake involved calling in X-ray operators from Stockholm’s main airport, who used equipment typically used to scan suitcases for narcotics to X-ray the reptile house for the shape of a snake hiding in pipes or air vents. (The cobra, now renamed Houdini, returned to its enclosure on its own, in the end.)
Seven chimpanzees on the loose require a very different approach. Chimpanzees are big and smart, they are adept climbers and can move at up to 25mph. For the humans catching the chimps, the experience can be emotionally challenging, even existentially confusing, in a way that returning an escaped cobra to its cage is not. Great apes, the name given to large primates like chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, are so like us. They hold hands, embrace and kiss one another, and the meanings of these gestures seem to be the same as when we do it. They express fear, delight, surprise, affection. And yet they are not us. The Dutch zoologist Frans de Waal, who has more than 50 years of experience with chimpanzees, suggests in his seminal book Chimpanzee Politics that we cannot help but feel a sense of unease around the animal. How should we relate to them, these creatures we know to be wild, but who look like we do? Last month, I stood with a zookeeper at a zoo in the south of England, watching a group of chimpanzees sun themselves in their enclosure. “I find them terrifying,” she admitted. “They’re so human. Who is looking at who?”
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A provocative review of Beyoncé’s new film. Whether you agree or disagree with Angelica Jade Bastién’s take, and whether you like Beyoncé or not, this essay is worth a read:
Like the album and tour with which it shares a name, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé seeks to be a celebration of Black queer joy. From the start, Beyoncé preaches her desire to create a “safe space.” “Renaissance means a new beginning,” she says; it’s a balm “after all we’ve been through in the world.” But what exactly is she referring to? The onslaught of death and illness brought on by the continuing pandemic? The lawsaimed at criminalizingtrans children and adults? The rising misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Blackness that leads to grave violence? The various, ongoing genocides? Beyoncé gives us no context for what she’s referring to or how it touches the shores of a life dominated and driven by the kind of wealth that insulates her from harm. Her words reflect broadly liberal pablum meant to give the appearance of care and mean just enough that her fans can project radicalness upon her but not so much that she would ruffle anyone enough for her to lose money or be forced to stand for something.
Beyoncé has been a remote star for years, someone far more content with having her dedicated Hive project upon her than speaking for herself. This makes the behind-the-scenes moments of her latest concert documentary, which are so primed toward engendering intimacy, rather curious. Every time you think you’ve seen behind the curtain, you realize there’s another curtain upon another stage. This isn’t new for her. Consider previous projects like the labored 2013 film Life Is But a Dream and the more successfully realized Homecoming in 2019. From this vantage point, fake intimacy is a currency she utilizes to give the appearance of revelation even if she actually remains as closed as a fist. Beyoncé positions herself not as a goddess bestowing a peek of humanity to her loyal subjects but as a relatable figure we can and should connect with. But if you have cameras on you all the time, even when you’re supposed to be “off,” when do you take down the performative mask? It isn’t even when she has knee surgery, a moment carefully documented on camera. For Beyoncé, a woman known to film her every move and house it in a temperature-controlled archive, everything is performance and each performance is merely a means of brand extension.
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Personal essays are as much about the readers as the writers. While all the essays in this list demonstrate exceptional writing—each piece struck a distinct chord with the editor who chose it. For Seyward, it was an essay on grief. For Krista, a piece on community experience. Peter was drawn to video game writing (Red Dead Redemption 2!), Cheri to the immigrant experience and caring for loved ones, and Carolyn to the fear of missed opportunities as we age (and a vicious jungle tick).
We hope you find a piece to resonate with you as you read these beautiful personal stories.
Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words
Grief is unpredictable. Sometimes it stabs you, sometimes it suffocates you; when it isn’t making you weep or scream, it’s leaving you numb. Grief is also unfathomable: we cannot see, much less reach, the edges of the permanent absence of someone we love. “Grief may be the knowledge … that the future won’t be like the past,” Kamran Javadizadeh writes in this exquisite essay about the death of his sister, Bita. “Like water to the page, it spreads in all directions, it thins the surface, it touches what you cannot touch.” Javadizadeh reflects on his grief through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience of losing Bita: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from college; a Hafez verse that Bita texted to him one day. The best poetry is not unlike grief: it is vast, complex, elusive. And in reading verse, Javadizadeh shows, we can find lessons for mourning. I’ve thought about this essay countless times since I read it last summer, and I suspect I will reread it many times in the years to come. —SD
Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words
Consider what it means to truly feel full—with a full stomach and a full heart—when your physical and spiritual hungers are satiated for a time. Diné poet Jake Skeets mulls these layers of resonance in his beautiful essay “The Butchering,” in which he prepares to kill a sheep for “the Kinaałda. . . .loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony.” For Skeets and members of his Indigenous community, story is wonderfully entangled with preparing the food that will nourish his family both physically and spiritually. Community members teach and learn interchangeably, switching roles naturally in a space of safety, free from shame. Skeets meditates on the open mindset needed to fully participate; sometimes he is a child, earning knowledge passed on from family and sometimes he is an uncle, offering an example for others. There’s a slowness to savor in Skeets’ writing, a gentle quickening you observe in the essay as he educates you on what it takes to sustain his community and their Indigenous way of life. “The next time I butcher I’ll have my own story to tell, my own memory to share, knowledge to offer. One more voice to add to the chorus on those nights when you’re out in the desert under the night sky, no sound for miles, just the moon and the ground beneath you, reminding you it’s all real. That and your full stomach. Generations heard through wind, the air, the stirring gleaming stars. All that knowledge, all that story, all that beauty,” he writes. Be sure to make time for this piece; it will ignite your sense of wonder and spark your curiosity, feeding you in a way that’s truly satisfying. —KS
Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words
Not long after I started at Longreads, I put together a reading list detailing some of my favorite pieces of video game writing over the previous decade. If people could enjoy reviews of movies they haven’t seen, I reasoned, then they could do the same with gaming criticism and journalism—even if they’d never held a controller. That conviction hasn’t wavered in the years since; however, this year brought a piece powerful enough to vault back through time and land on that list. Hanif Abdurraqib’s Paris Review essay (which also appears in the newly published collection Critical Hits) is nominally about the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ critically acclaimed title set in the American West in 1899. The word “nominally” carries more weight than usual, though. In Abdurraqib’s able hands, the game instead becomes a portal to grief and salvation, futility and loss. Some characters can’t be redeemed by virtue of their programming. Others can. The trajectory of the character of you is another story altogether. “If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say,” Abdurraqib writes. “I don’t think about it, until I do.” As with the very best of arts writing, this meditation teases apart its medium’s limitations to find the universal truths and questions embedded within. No virtual revolver necessary. —PR
Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 5, 2023 | 6,197 words
Jiayang Fan was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with ALS. She writes: “The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones.” This was the first personal piece Fan wrote after her mother’s death; it’s a devastating tale of the immigrant experience in America, of illness, of the intimate and complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. Fan’s descriptions of her bedridden mother range from exquisite to grim to satisfyingly peculiar. She is “shipwrecked in her own body,” with skin like “rice paper” that will inevitably tear. Even a line detailing how literal shit excretes out of her mother’s body—a “rivulet” down the “limp marble of her thigh”—manages to read beautifully. Fan writes with vulnerability about caring for an elderly loved one, love and sacrifice, the intertwining of two lives, and the story about them that’s ultimately written. I had to pause and collect myself a number of times as I thought about my own aging mother, and the decisions made over the course of our lives that have made us who we are. “One creature, disassembled into two bodies,” Fan writes of their shared life. This is extraordinary writing that hit me in a spot deep within. —CLR
Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words
A key sentence in this essay goes as follows, “Behold my nightmare: a tick has bitten my vagina.” The incident—relayed with “the gravitas of Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the destruction of planet Alderaan”—occurs in 2017, while Melissa Johnson is enduring a five-day trek in northern Guatemala to attend the wedding of two ex-military women. (She reflects on how during the days of Trump America, the middle of the jungle felt a safer spot for such nuptials.) Johnson embarks on this quest fresh from harvesting her eggs. Single at the age of 39, she is not only wrestling ticks from her “holy garden” but with her fear of missing out on love and motherhood. Trudging along the soggy trails, Johnson dwells on her cloudy future with trepidation. But, by the time she is released from the jungle’s insect-infested innards, she has come to terms with the fact that she is an adventurer—someone comfortable with the unknown. This piece has many layers: an adventure story, a character study of people with names such as “Tent Dawg,” and a thoughtful take on aging and motherhood. It’s also just plain funny. I loved going through the jungle with Johnson, and I also loved the last sentence of her bio: She had a baby girl in March. —CW
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