The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

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Audience Award

What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?

Ghosts on the Glacier

John Branch | The New York Times | December 9, 2023 | 10,969 words

A fifty-year-old story is dusted off after a camera belonging to a deceased climber emerges from a receding glacier on Aconcagua, the Western Hemisphere’s highest mountain. What will the undeveloped photos tell us about an incident that may have been a climbing accident, but also may have been murder? John Branch conducted dozens of interviews and went on several reporting trips for this meticulous report. Combined with videos from Emily Rhyne, it is part adventure story, part murder mystery, and races along like a thriller. —CW

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The Venus Flytrap and the Golf Course

Reporting for Mother Jones, Jackie Flynn Mogensen goes to the Carolinas and spends time with Julie Moore, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, who is on the hunt for some of the last-remaining Venus flytraps growing in the wild. As Mogensen reports, the population of the tiny iconic plant is dwindling, but not enough to require federal action. Moore, who now runs a flytrap conservation nonprofit, is on a mission to save them.

After a stint at the North Carolina Heritage Program, the state’s primary biodiversity agency, she landed at the Fish and Wildlife Service in DC in 2004. There, she focused on convincing private landowners to voluntarily take up conservation measures for all types of threatened critters, including longleaf pine species like the red-cockaded woodpecker. When she retired in 2019, she left feeling like the agency failed to understand and serve people on a local level. So, after settling down in Raleigh, she founded Venus Flytrap Champions, knowing full well that public support of a key charismatic species can help save whole ecosystems. Now she treks up and down the coast, trying to convince people to safeguard flytraps and, in some cases, digging them up to relocate them. Think of her as Susan Orlean’s orchid thief but for rescuing, not stealing, plants.

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How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

For The New Yorker, Casey Cep profiles Christian Wiman, the former editor of Poetry magazine who has been battling lymphoma for nearly 20 years. Cep’s deep research and care for her subject are on bold display here, chronicling how Wiman became a poet and why he turns to verse while in “the cancer chair,” despite the fact that poetry is useless against physical pain.

It seems to have worked: it’s difficult to square Wiman’s history of aggression and dysfunction with the man he is today. Still, he retains some of the intensity of his youth, especially in his sky-blue eyes, which he sometimes closes to think. His childhood wasn’t all violence, he feels the need to say—there was beauty, too. The beauty of language; dialects he pocketed like coins, then spent in poems about home like “Five Houses Down,” with a neighborhood junk collector whose “barklike earthquake curses / were not curses, for he could goddam / a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch.” And the beauty of mesquite trees, tumbleweeds, and dust devils, the last of which he re-creates in a narrow wisp of a poem:

of flourishing
vanishing

wherein to live
is to move

cohesion
illusion

wild untouchable toy
called by a boy

God’s top

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Best of 2023: The Audience Awards

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Each week at Longreads we review our stats to find out which editor’s pick—chosen from longform stories published across the web—has been most read by our audience. The winner receives the coveted “Audience Award,” perhaps not the most lucrative prize for trophies or cash, but one that comes with something better: a spot in our weekly Top Five post and newsletter. Over the year, this award has awakened an increasingly competitive spirit amongst our editors, and we now wait with bated breath for the week’s announcement, hoping for the smug feeling that comes with a pick we chose winning.

For this post, we considered ruthlessly running the numbers to see which editor won the most awards of the year. But holiday spirit prevailed, and instead, we are simply giving you the top 10 most-read picks of 2023, which, it turns out, includes choices from all of our editors. Congratulations to the writers and publications for these stories that couldn’t help but grab attention.

If you want to follow our Audience Awards in 2024, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here. (And when you see which editor picked the winner each week, know that they will be gloating.)

—Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter, and Seyward

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1. How Rural America Steals Girls’ Future

Monica Potts | The Atlantic | April 6, 2023 | 3,436 words

This excerpt, from the forthcoming The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, captures how heartfelt Monica Pott’s exploration into small-town America is. By focusing on the women she grew up with, a story that is the same across many places becomes personal—and thus deeply resonates.

The first time Vanessa had sex, she asked her boyfriend to stop, and he didn’t. Later, with other boys, Vanessa sometimes felt like she couldn’t say no to their advances, because she’d already lost her virginity. Only many years later did Vanessa recognize some of these incidents as sexual assaults, she told me when I visited her in 2017. She didn’t blame the boys, necessarily; they were just doing what everyone expected them to do, she felt. But her reputation suffered.

2. The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

Kit Chellel | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 6, 2023 | 6,516 words

In a tale that races along like a James Bond novel, Kit Chellel introduces us to Niko Tosa, the man who had casinos scrambling to change roulette. Was his winning streak down to luck, skill, or a supercomputer? We never find out, but trying to figure it out is still a really fun ride.

That night, March 15, 2004, the thin Croatian seemed to be looking for something. After a few minutes, he settled at a roulette table in the Carmen Room, set apart from the main playing area. He was flanked on either side by his companions: a Serbian businessman with deep bags under his eyes and a bottle-blond Hungarian woman. At the end of the table, the wheel spun silently, spotlighted by a golden chandelier. The trio bought chips and began to play.

3. A Star Reporter’s Break With Reality

Elaina Plott Calabro | The Atlantic | June 12, 2023 | 6,904 words

Lara Logan rose to broadcast stardom as a hungry reporter who capitalized on both her fearlessness and her telegeneity. That was before she drifted into a nest of conspiracy theories that would get her ousted from numerous TV gigs; now, she travels a far-right lecture circuit, fearmongering for profit. But Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile doesn’t relish in the gory spectacle—it’s a dispassionate, empathic look at how someone so talented can lose their way so completely.

Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.

Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.

4. What Happens When Dave Chappelle Buys Up Your Town

Tyler J. Kelley | Bloomberg Businessweek | April 28, 2023 | 4,851 words

Dave Chappelle has lived full-time in the tiny, idyllic Ohio town of Yellow Springs for more than 15 years; at this point, it’s as much a part of his personal brand as the everpresent cigarette. But as Tyler J. Kelley reports, Chappelle’s impact on Yellow Springs—including his many real estate purchases and a number of questionably zoned live shows—has become a point of contention among townspeople who fear the end of affordability and find themselves torn between pride and preservation.

Dozens spoke in favor of granting the variance, mostly touting the economic benefit of the shows. Despite her doubts, Parsons voted yes. The measure passed unanimously. “When push came to shove, we caved,” she says. “I felt so dirty afterwards.” She took the weekend to think it over, then quit the board. “If I haven’t got enough guts to stand up for what I believe, I’m not serving the people,” she says. The village has always been “weirdly dysfunctional,” she went on, but “now it’s not a fun dysfunction, and there’s people who are afraid.”

With the variance granted, the shows carried on until the end of the summer. In the village, the T-shirt shop sold more T-shirts, the restaurants sold more dinners, and the record store sold more comedy records. The celebrities arrived, the fans were happy, the jokes were funny. Meanwhile, the tensions of past years continued to bubble beneath the surface like sulfurous spring water

5. The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children

Margaret Talbot | The New Yorker | September 25, 2023 | 14,695 words

In postwar Austria, a psychologist named Maria Nowak-Vogl ran a mysterious psychiatric facility where “difficult” children were sent. With help from a friend and journalist, Margaret Talbot, Evy Mages mines memories of her time at this child-observation station in the mid-seventies, remembering all the abuse that happened there. Nowak-Vogl was a well-respected academic; she was also trained by Nazis and believed in repressive practices and cruel punishments to make children compliant and “socially desirable,” including administering epiphysan, a shot meant to suppress sexual urges. Talbot accompanies Mages to Austria to learn more about Nowak-Vogl and the villa—which operated from the mid-fifties until the late-eighties—as well as her own family history. This story is as horrific and dark as it sounds. Amazingly, though, Mages has come out the other side, now helping other victims connect with each other and making it easier for them to report the abuse they experienced as children.

A news article about the commission’s findings described the villa as a combination of “home, prison, and testing clinic.” The commission had reviewed medical records and reported something shocking: children had been injected with epiphysan, an extract derived from the pineal glands of cattle which veterinarians used to suppress estrus in mares and cows. Nowak-Vogl, a conservative Catholic, had wanted to see if epiphysan would suppress sexual feelings in children, as well as discourage masturbation, thus rendering her charges more “manageable.” Masturbation—among both adolescents and young children, who use it to self-soothe—was a preoccupation of Nowak-Vogl’s. So was bed-wetting. Her staff was instructed to keep charts documenting urination and bowel movements, and to check children’s underwear “with the eyes or the nose.” Schreiber described her as being “on a crusade against masturbation and sexual excitedness.”

6. The Ones We Sent Away

Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words

In her gut-wrenching piece—a masterpiece of thoughtful longform journalism—Jennifer Senior profiles her aunt Adele, a woman eventually diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12 after being institutionalized for decades. Senior attempts to understand the trauma Adele and her family suffered after being deprived of one another based on medical advice considered best at the time.

My grandmother told my mother that she instantly knew something was different when Adele was born. Her cry wasn’t like other babies’. She was inconsolable, had to be carried everywhere. Her family doctor said nonsense, Adele was fine. For an entire year, he maintained that she was fine, even though, at the age of 1, she couldn’t hold a bottle and didn’t respond to the stimuli that other toddlers do. I can’t imagine what this casual brush-off must have done to my grandmother, who knew, in some back cavern of her heart, that her daughter was not the same as other children. But it was 1952, the summer that Adele turned 1. What male doctor took a working-class woman without a college education seriously in 1952?

Only when my mother and her family went to the Catskills that same summer did a doctor finally offer a very different diagnosis. My grandmother had gone to see this local fellow not because Adele was sick, but because she was; Adele had merely come along. But whatever ailed my grandmother didn’t capture this man’s attention. Her daughter did. He took one look at her and demanded to know whether my aunt was getting the care she required.

7. A Catatonic Woman Awakened After 20 Years. Her Story May Change Psychiatry.

Richard Sima | The Washington Post | June 1, 2023 | 4,122 words

Could autoimmune diseases be at the root of some mental illnesses? Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, thinks so. “By all accounts, she was thriving, in overall good health and showing no signs of mental distress beyond the normal teenage growing pains,” they said of April Burrell. This was before she suffered a traumatic experience, became incoherent, and was hospitalized. Twenty years after she became catatonic, Markx discovered that April’s bloodwork showed antibodies were attacking her brain. Miraculously, after several courses of steroids and immunosuppressive drugs, April improved to the point where in 2020, she was deemed mentally competent enough to check herself out of treatment, but not before a joyful reunion with her family.

The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus. Every month for six months, April would receive short, but powerful “pulses” of intravenous steroids for five days, plus a single dose of cyclophosphamide, a heavy-duty immunosuppressive drug typically used in chemotherapy and borrowed from the field of oncology. She was also treated with rituximab, a drug initially developed for lymphoma.

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately.

8. Death On The Savage Mountain: What Really Happened On K2, And Why 100 Climbers Stepped Over A Dying Man On Their Way To The Summit

Matthew Loh | Insider | August 21, 2023 | 6,472 words

What price would you pay to summit K2, a mountain far more technical and challenging than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain? Could you literally walk past a dying man in order to get there? This past July 27th, 100 people bypassed Pakistani porter Mohammed Hassan on their way to the summit as he lay dying after a fall. For Insider, Matthew Loh tries to understand.

By the end of the summit window, at least 102 people had conquered K2. All paying climbers would descend the mountain safely, and regroup at base camp.

Mohammad did not.

His death would shake the mountaineering industry in the weeks to come, and eventually make headlines worldwide. The climbers who summited K2 that day were swept into the heart of a bitter debate. Speculation churned as people argued whether a man more than 8,000 meters above sea level could have been saved from the Mountain of Mountains — or whether greed for glory had blinded more than 100 climbers and left Mohammad stranded on the ice.

9. “America Does Not Deserve Me.” Why Black People Are Leaving the United States

Kate Linthicum | Los Angeles Times | October 10, 2023 | 2,576 words

The pandemic prompted a lot of people to move to a lot of different places. But as Kate Linthicum reports for LAT, the scale of “Blaxit”—Black Americans’ emigration around the world—could make it one of the largest such patterns since the 1920s. But while Europe has long been a home for Black American artists, the current moment stretches from Mexico to Ghana, and encompasses all walks of life. This is what following one’s bliss looks like.

[Nuriddin] acknowledges that she is lucky to have a job that allows her to work remotely, and that a lot of people, including many of those from her parents’ generation, don’t. She’s trying to convince her cousins to find work that will allow them to live outside of the country.

Like many Black expats here, she’s still learning Spanish. She communicates easily with the English-speaking descendants of Jamaicans, but talking to other Costa Ricans is hard. Still, she says she feels a mutual recognition when she locks eyes with Black locals. “There’s almost a little glimmer in the eye when you look at each other,” she said. “There’s like a little nod.”

10. My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon

Amy Silverstein | The New York Times | April 18, 2023 | 1,587 words

Author Amy Silverstein has had a heart transplant—twice. Now she’s dying of cancer. Those facts are related, as she explains in this essay. The procedure that saved her is now killing her.

I gave my all to sustaining my donor hearts despite daunting odds, and the hearts rewarded me with extraordinary years. I have been so lucky.

But now I lower my chin and whisper the words malignant … metastatic … lungs … terminal. It is the end of the road for my heart and me — not because we didn’t achieve and maintain sparkling cardiac health. But because the sorry state of transplant medicine took us down.

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors. And I understand the irony of an incredibly successful and fortunate two-time heart transplant recipient making this case, but my longevity also provides me with a unique vantage point. Standing on the edge of death now, I feel compelled to use my experience in the transplant trenches to illuminate and challenge the status quo.

Explore our Best of 2023 lists

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A Work of Love

Homophobes have spent centuries insisting that same-sex relationships are unnatural. Simply put, that’s a lie. For proof, look no further than this delightful Q&A with the illustrator of the seminal book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, published more than 20 years ago. John Megahan, interviewed here by Radiolab host Lulu Miller, took descriptions from field studies, scientific journals, and interviews to illustrate the book, written by biologist Bruce Bagemihl, with images of mammals and birds engaging in queer behavior:

LM: In the mid-1990s, when you were starting to work on this, was there a lot of doubt that homosexuality takes place in the natural world? Was there a sense that this was something people were aware of, or did it feel new even to be bringing it out?

JM: It felt new. It was something that I was not aware of and had not really considered before, so I was personally fascinated by the subject.

All these things that are compiled in here were the notes and observations of scientists. For years they’ve been seeing this stuff, but usually just in side notes. And they published very little about these subjects. This is the one publication that pulled everything together into a single document.

LM: That’s interesting. It’s taking the side notes and the things that were listed as deviant or abnormal and saying, Wait, when you actually put them all together, maybe they’re not.

Do you remember any drawings, or the journeys to a drawing, that were funny or hard or complicated?

JM: Well, a fun one for me was the hand signals by chimpanzees. We spent quite a bit of time working on this illustration. We actually studied the symbols that they use in sign language publications.

LM: There’s a sideways wave and there’s one that almost looks like you’re dribbling a basketball, which is apparently an invitation for sexual interaction. There are ones that seem to be telling the partner what to do: turn around, position yourself, spread your legs. Were you watching videos? How did you get so precise with these? It’s so cool. It’s like a language—like sex talk.

JM: Bruce basically gave me rough sketches of what he wanted on these. And so I had a rough idea of how to go about this. And then I think I asked my wife, Anne, to move her hand about in various ways, and then I turned her hand into a chimpanzee hand.

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The South Korean Woman Who Adopted Her Best Friend

In South Korea, only people related by blood, heterosexual marriage, or adoption are considered family under the law. But a growing number of “no-marriage” women, who are defiantly single, want to change the face of family in the country. Among them is Eun Seo-Ran, a 43-year-old writer who a few years ago adopted her best friend, a woman just five years her junior. It all started when they became roommates, but soon realized they wanted to be more than that to one another:

Their different personalities—Seo-Ran is sensitive but outspoken while Eo-Rie is more easy-going and nonchalant—complement each other well, Seo-Ran says.

“Eo-Rie accepted my hyper-sensitiveness with ease, and even joked once, ‘I feel like I have a high-end home cleaner’,” she says, laughing.

Their home life became “joyful, peaceful, and comforting”.

“I came to believe that a real family is those who share their lives while respecting and being loyal to each other, whether or not they are related by blood or marriage,” says Seo-Ran.

A few years later, with the arrangement working so well, they decided to buy their apartment together. But then, after Seo-Ran, who suffers from other health problems like chronic headaches, was rushed to the ER several times, they started talking about how if they were family they could sign medical consent forms for one another. South Korean hospitals, fearing legal action should something go wrong, customarily refuse to offer urgent care—including surgery—unless a patient’s legal family gives consent.

“We have helped and protected one another for years. But we were nothing but strangers when we needed each other most,” Seo-Ran explains.

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Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

For decades, American-style crossword clues held the rest of the world at arm’s length. But as the story of Indian puzzle constructor Mangesh Ghogre makes clear, crosswords function as a linguistic bridge like few other things can; why shouldn’t that bridge be constantly updated to reflect global culture? Natan Last—a constructor and child of immigrant parents himself—melds a profile of Ghogre with a smart, nuanced examination of the grid-based landscape.

In 2021, the psychologist and puzzle-maker Erica Hsiung Wojcik published the Expanded Crossword Name Database, a “list of names, places and things that represent groups, identities and people often excluded from crossword grids.” Because of English’s consonant-heavy phonotactics, crossword constructors make use of vowel-heavy French loanwords to fill out the grid—ete, oui, epee. That’s also, perhaps, why we know Jean auel, eero Saarinen, all the canonical iras. If vowelly nouns are so useful, why not arm constructors with an updated canon: Why not put eula Biss, Michaela coel, or yaa Gyasi in a crossword? One solver’s trivia is another’s lived lexicon; what’s “fair” to W. H. Auden might keep newbie solvers on the other side of the fence.

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Best of 2023: Profiles

Profiles dig deep, assembling original details to convey the essence of a person or place—and sometimes both—as you’ll see. These are the stories that gave us keen insight into the lives of others, drawn from hundreds of editors’ picks selected in 2023.

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Amor Eterno

Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | May 8, 2023 | 7,531 words

Before May 24, 2022, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, a part-time local reporter and mother of six children living in Uvalde, Texas, was shy and quiet. After that horrific day at Robb Elementary School, when two teachers and 19 children were murdered—including her daughter, Lexi—Mata-Rubio was forever changed. She was overwhelmed with grief, but also felt compelled to speak, to do anything she could to fight for justice for Lexi. Shortly after the shooting, she testified in a hearing about gun violence. She then started to speak at rallies, at home and in Washington DC. She became a fierce advocate for gun control, even meeting with Ted Cruz to push him to support an assault weapons ban. (Not a spoiler: he didn’t.) In those months that followed, she realized that she had a voice. (Recently, in fact, she ran for mayor of Uvalde, though she lost the bid last month in a special election.) I’ve sat down several times to write why I picked this story by Skip Hollandsworth, but have scrapped numerous attempts. They all read hollow and repetitive, because I’ve written versions of them before. My Best of 2022 pick in this category was also a Uvalde profile, about student Caitlyne Gonzales, so it seems that I can’t help but return to this town, to this tragedy. Perhaps immersing ourselves in the narrative of tragedy is a form of emotional retreat, a way of numbing the constant onslaught of violence in the world. Hollandsworth’s piece reminds us that these stories do not end when the spotlight of our attention moves on, but continue to transform communities, families, and individuals. This is an emotional, difficult, but necessary portrait of a grieving mother finding meaningful ways to honor her daughter’s life, and perhaps help birth a better world for all of us. —CLR

Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story

Kerry Howley | New York Magazine | June 21, 2023 | 7,555 words

For the second year in a row, my favorite profile was written by the inimitable Kerry Howley, one of the great chroniclers of America’s right-wing resurgence. Last year, I adored—and seethed over—her profile of anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser; this year, Howley turned her attention to Clarence and Ginni Thomas. The former, of course, is the conservative Supreme Court justice confirmed to the bench despite being credibly accused of sexual harassment—laying the groundwork for the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco a quarter-century later—who more recently was exposed for accepting expensive gifts from various billionaires. Ginni, Thomas’s wife, started a political consulting firm with money provided by one of those billionaires, and used her influential perch inside the Beltway to support the January 6 insurrection. In this profile, Howley illuminates how the Thomases’ almost alchemical bond as a couple makes them such a potent, ruinous force in the American project. The insight here is as sharp as the prose. “There was something in Ginni and Clarence that reinforced and refined a shared extremism, something beyond their shared intolerance for ambiguity,” Howley writes. “There was an interlocking set of beliefs, a fatalism born of the lived experience of racism and the entire heavily manned edifice of white ignorance.” When I got to the end of this piece, I whispered under my breath, to no one in particular, damn. —SD

Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana

Wyatt Williams | The Bitter Southerner | September 4, 2023 | 6,303 words

The stories I love best are slow and savor-y, served with a love that can transcend pain. Wyatt Williams’s ode to his mother, the state of of Louisiana, and the songwriter Lucinda Williams is a piece I reread often. I return to remember how great writing disappears in serving a story, or when I’m struggling with how to get my point across just so. I’m rewarded with new resonance every time. Williams’s mother and Lucinda were born in 1953 in Louisiana, a place known most often for the destruction wrought by hurricanes; both families endured the stormy weather of violence, alcoholism, and generational trauma. When Williams writes, “She had been through crisis before. She had her ways of getting through it,” he’s talking abut his mother but alluding to Lucinda and the state of Louisiana, all three of which, on deeper inspection, reveal a special kind of resilience. Writers grapple with how to convey inchoate and entangled ideas and feelings but Williams creates beauty out of the chaos by sheer repetition, just like listening to a song on repeat and discovering something new with each spin. “It seems almost impossible that someone could spend 14 years writing 34 lines of poetry,” he writes. “But one of the things to understand about the work is that it isn’t as much about putting down words as it is about learning to see, reteaching yourself to look at the world, your own life, and find the shapes and patterns.” This story is about working hard to make something out of nothing, about naming things you don’t yet understand, about doing the work and paying deep attention in an attempt to find meaning and perhaps even earn a kind of peace. These are universal truths so bold, you know you can’t let go. —KS

Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul

Nate Rogers | The Ringer | April 12, 2023 | 5,170 words

When you ask people to name the profiles that have stuck with them, they nearly always point to pieces that hinge on proximity. That’s for good reason. Spending hours or days in deep conversation with a subject (or simply fishing) generally works to break down the walls of image maintenance, creating enough unvarnished moments for a good writer to plumb. But there are many other ways to write a meaningful profile, as Nate Rogers’ piece about Paul Dochney proves. Dochney is known by a large swath of the internet simply as Dril, a Twitter persona who for 15 years has polished satirical shitposting to a high sheen and in the process helped architect online culture’s dominant comic voice. It was a nearly uninterrupted piece of performance art, which makes the profile’s quotidian backdrop—an anonymous old-school L.A. greasy spoon—all the more delightful. Like any profile, Rogers gives you the broad beats of Dochney’s upbringing and CV, dutifully threading in secondary interviews for texture and context, but the profile’s real value lies in how he contends with the idea of art in the age of social media. Dochney/Dril isn’t a provocateur; he’s a guy who likes making stuff. It’s just that in a twist of fate, Twitter became the place where that stuff first connected with people. And with that platform teetering ever closer to obsolescence, Dochney’s next steps become even less certain. Amid a sea of stories that seek to examine the role of the “creator,” Rogers’ profile instead sets out to examine the creative urge—and is stronger for it. —PR

Casual Luke Rides the Big Wave

Gabriella Paiella | GQ Sports | June 13, 2023 | 5,175 words

Everyone loves a good underdog story, and this one is particularly delightful. The Eddie Aikay Big Wave Invitational is a surf contest that relies on the whims of nature—the waves in Waimea Bay must reach a butt-clenching height of a minimum of 40 feet for it to go ahead. When conditions are right, competitors race across the world to get there. For North Shore local Luke Shepardson, the commute was less of an ordeal (although he still got caught in traffic, leaving his wife in the car and running down the road). It also happened to be his commute to work. That’s right: Luke worked as a lifeguard at the event, taking his turn to ride the waves between patching up other competitors. He won the competition after riding a wave the size of a four-story building, beating the world’s greatest surfers without even being a professional on the circuit. After the win, Luke finished his shift and headed home to watch The Lion King with his kids. As Gabriella Paiella explains in her enchanting profile, this was all very Luke, who “is known as ‘Casual Luke.’ In Hawaii. Which is like being called ‘Neurotic Matt’ on the island of Manhattan.” Luke’s down-to-earth nature pervades this piece, with Paiella clearly coming to respect an attitude so different from other sports stars. Luke got some money from the Eddie, but not enough for his life to be easy. Living with his wife and two kids in a one-bedroom apartment—in an ever more expensive area—he dreams of “descending back into obscurity” and buying his own home in this little slice of paradise. Nothing more. You can see why, with Paiella painting a lovely picture of family life in this beautiful surf town. Sure, it’s expensive, but the height of elegance is a flip-flop, and everyone knows everyone. (“As Luke’s mom put it after the Eddie: I changed first- and second-place’s diapers.”) This profile oozes sun, sand, salt, and joy. Everyone loves an underdog story, and everyone loves Casual Luke—after all, he has all the big stuff figured out.  —CW

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An English couple, a Ukrainian Surrogate and a Baby: the Extraordinary Story of How War United Two Unlikely Families

A powerful story of how the war in Ukraine forced a surrogate mother into living with her baby’s biological parents. Williams documents the history of the two mothers, highlighting the different worlds they came from, and does not shy away from showing the difficulties of two families unexpectedly ending up under the same roof. What is incredible is that post-birth, they are all still there.

Between the surrogate and the intended parent there is a peculiar bond. “They’re doing this life-changing thing for you and receiving a life-changing amount of money in return,” Dorothy often says. The position suggests equality, but it is a fine balance, dependant in part on distance. Now the war was about to uncouple them from the organisational rules that kept them apart.

Dorothy found Anastasia on Facebook. The agency had told couples not to contact their surrogate on social media, and vice versa, for mutual protection against, say, surrogates asking for more money, and intended parents suggesting diet and exercise regimes. But some couples still snooped on their surrogates, scouring Facebook and Instagram for evidence of smoking or drinking. On the afternoon of 24 February, Dorothy sent Anastasia a supportive message: “I hope you don’t mind me contacting you. I just want you to know we’re thinking of you and hope you and your son are OK. If there is anything we can do, please let us know.”

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What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Can you imagine a world in which the dodo, the mammoth, and other long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Sabrina Imbler’s Defector essay is an absolutely fascinating look at the de-extinction movement, and the main VC-funded company behind it.

If we reach a point where native ecosystems have been restored, conservation is abundantly and globally funded, governments have taken meaningful and equitable action against climate change, no species are endangered by our presence on the planet, and people no longer live in poverty that makes poaching a rhino horn or mammoth tusk a necessary trade-off for survival, then sure: Let the dodos* and mammoths* frolic. But in the world we live in, spending lots of money to inflict unknown degrees of suffering on living and dying animals in pursuit of creating hybrids that will require immense and expensive assistance to survive on their own amid vanishing wilds does not just seem misguided. It seems funereal.

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What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm takes a trip to the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), where some fascinating studies on farm animals are taking place. It’s an often overlooked field, but researchers are beginning to realize that these animals are smarter than we ever thought. This piece may make you think differently about the 78 billion farm animals on Earth—and also picture a pig choosing to run on a treadmill for the endorphins.

The goal is to train the pigs for an experiment that will test whether they’ll exercise just because it makes them feel good, a window into their emotions. “The idea comes from human sports physiology,” Puppe says. “That exercise can improve mood.”

A couple of decades ago, work like this would have been laughed out of the barn. There are an estimated 78 billion farm animals on Earth—a number that dwarfs monkeys, rodents, and humans combined—and we have lived with them longer than any other creature save dogs. Yet in an era where researchers are modeling rat brains on computers and showing that our canine pals may be able to intuit our thoughts, livestock remain a black box.

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