The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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In this week’s edition:

• Interracial persecution in 1960s Michigan
• The cruelty bred into the chickens we eat
• How Photo Shuffle helped one man through loss
• Navigating life not knowing you’re neurodivergent
• The deep craft in forging a handmade knife

1. In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.

Zack Stanton | Politico Magazine | December 22, 2023 | 17,959 words

The starting point for this mammoth feature by Zack Stanton is a little-known incident from the summer of 1967: a white mob tried with all their might to drive Carado and Ruby Bailey, an interracial couple, from the suburban Michigan neighborhood where they’d recently bought a new home. Drawing on interviews, public records, and press accounts, Stanton describes the horrors the Baileys and their daughter endured, including a cross burning, racist graffiti, and harassment by vigilante PTA moms who sound a whole lot like the women trying to ban books and marginalize transgender youth in schools today. But that’s not the whole story, or even half of it. In cinematic detail, Stanton shows how the battle over the Baileys’ home reached all the way to Washington, DC, where it might have shaped federal policy for the better if not for profound conservative backlash that instead helped usher in Republicanism as we know it today. I gobbled up this thick slice of forgotten history and was moved by the turn at the end when Stanton lets his sources directly address Ruby, now 95, a widow, and still living in the home she refused to leave. One source “admires your principle in the face of imminent danger,” Stanton writes. Another “wants people to understand that America isn’t simply a story of bad things that have happened; it’s the story of people trying to make things better.” Then there is the neighbor who watched from her window in ’67 and did nothing—today, she is ashamed. “When I asked what she would say to you if given the chance,” Stanton tells Ruby, “she broke down in sobs, a half-century’s worth of pain tumbling out.” —SD

2. The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

Boyce Upholt | Noema | December 19, 2023 | 3,954 words

Last week I roasted a chicken. I’ve eaten chicken probably three times since then. I’m careful about the chicken I buy and cook and eat, and as a one-time vegetarian I like to think that I do so mindfully, but even as I do I harbor a suspicion that something is irrevocably broken. That phrases like “free range” and “heritage breed” and “regenerative practices” add up to very little. Boyce Upholt’s Noema story did nothing to disabuse me of that suspicion, and I mean that as a compliment. The quest he refers to in the headline isn’t one that’s currently underway; it’s something that happened long ago. And while we certainly need “better” in the way we raise and slaughter animals for consumption—sorry, fellow meat-eaters, but there’s no use for euphemisms here—”better” here is meant in an industrial sense. It means bigger. Much bigger. So much bigger that decades of exhaustive and meticulous cross-breeding have led to a domesticated chicken that is virtually unable to live on its own. PETA videos exposing factory-farming practices are all well and good, but as Upholt writes, the true atrocity lies well upstream: “The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.” He’s not trying to guilt you about eating meat; he does so himself. (Besides, as he lays out ably, there’s not really a viable solution to the current situation.) Rather, by tracing the arc of the chicken from its initial domestication to its current fate, and by doing so with an engagingly nonjudgmental writing voice, he’s just making sure you know exactly what’s happened. Winner, winner, thought-provoking dinner. —PR

3. A Second Life for My Beloved Dog

Charlie Warzel | The Atlantic | January 5, 2024 | 1,500 words

I am the sort of person who, when watching a disaster film, will anxiously ask: “But, is their dog alright?” So—normally—I avoid any story where the dog might not, in fact, be OK. However, I conquered my fear to tackle Charlie Warzel’s essay about the death of his dog, Peggy (also the name of my dog, for extra potential trauma), and was rewarded with a beautiful, heartwarming piece. As any pet owner knows, the arrival of an animal means clogging your phone with endless photos: The pet sleeping. The pet playing. More sleeping. Charlie Warzel’s iPhone camera roll was no exception, and two-thirds of the way through 2015, it became “infused with a new vitality.” Peggy had arrived. When the time then comes for her to leave, Warzel descriptions of his grief are powerful. To remember Peggy, he tries Photo Shuffle on his phone, a feature that automatically changes the wallpaper to different photos from the camera roll. Setting a parameter to “Pets,” Peggy became his wallpaper star. Photo Shuffle is undiscerning—it may choose an Instagram-worthy shot but is just as likely to pull from the reams of outtakes, offering “chaotic, blurred streaks of fur and tongues.” The dynamic shots. The real ones. As Warzel explains, “Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle.” Every day he remembers a different trip with Peggy, or just an “ordinary Wednesday.” In this way, his phone, instead of a constant distraction, becomes a source of reflection and a teacher in grieving. Reading this lovely little essay, I realized that sometimes the dog dies—and that is OK. —CW

4. Flight Risk

Emily Stoddard | The Kenyon Review | January 8, 2024 | 5,463 words

As a child, Emily Stoddard was called gifted, the “most invisible curse you can a put on a child who already feels she does not belong.” For The Kenyon Review, Stoddard reflects on what it was like to navigate life before an ADHD diagnosis in her mid-30s, and how challenging it can be to have conversations, to work, to walk down the street in her shoes. In some of my favorite parts of this piece, her artful and intentional prose mimics the constant chatter of a feverish mind; she also uses third-person perspective to detach from her own self, stepping outside of her body in times when she’s felt it’s all been too much. This is a deeply personal piece about being (and not knowing) you’re neurodivergent—the need to always mask, the feeling that it’s all in your head, the “at-times maddening, at-times inspired” way your interior motor never stops. —CLR

5. A Knife Forged in Fire

Laurence Gonzales | Chicago Magazine | January 9, 2024 | 6,814 words

“What makes a good knife?” In trying to answer what appears to be a simple question, former chef Sam Goldbroch was “swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force” in becoming a bladesmith in Skokie, Illinois. In this gorgeous profile for Chicago Magazine, writer Laurence Gonzales commissions a knife from Goldbroch and invites us to shadow the master at work. Gonzales does what few writers can; he uses keen observation to recast an industrial space into a place of magical transformations. Read this piece and see the tangerine flame. Hear the forge roar, feel its heat, and revel in the alchemy of your tiny 6,000-word bladesmith apprenticeship. “A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes. ‘This is the moment of truth,’ Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. ‘This is when it becomes a knife.’” You’ll enjoy the science and history rendered in detailed scene work, but the most beautiful thing about this story is that it celebrates and exemplifies dedicated craft—in forging handmade knives and in revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. —KS

Audience Award

Here’s the piece our readers dug the most this week:

‘Badass Detective’: How One California Officer Solved Eight Cold Cases—in His Spare Time

Scott Ostler | San Francisco Chronicle | December 27, 2023 | 3,611 words

Given its subject matter on unsolved murders, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call this a “feel-good” story. But Scott Ostler’s profile on Matt Hutchinson, a curious and determined Bay Area detective with a knack for solving decades-long cold cases in his free time, is a great read. In the seven years Hutchinson has been part of the robbery-homicide unit at the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety, he has solved eight cold cases—six homicides and two sexual assaults. Thinking out of the box, and also using today’s DNA testing and crime-solving tools, “[h]e has solved more cold cases in three years than any single detective in the last 15,” and in the process has helped to bring peace and closure to some of the victims’ surviving family members. Not bad for someone off the clock.  —CLR

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The Unending Quest To Build A Better Chicken

You might think the headline promises science and agriculture coming together to help reform the way we raise and process chickens. It doesn’t. Instead, Boyce Upholt tells of the 20th-century quest that changed our food system irrevocably—and how the consequences of that “progress” continue to ripple across the world. An accomplished blend of history and present-day reporting.

Is it possible to build a system of animal agriculture that deepens rather than distances our relationship with animals? One potential ideal might be a future where anyone who chooses to eat meat keeps a handful of chickens clucking through their backyards. When I raised this possibility with one epidemiologist, though, she cautioned that an expansion of such “small-holder” poultry farms could be its own pandemic risk: Now that influenza is endemic in wild birds, a more dispersed poultry production system means more potential sites for spillover.

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Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2024

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Before longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj works on his writing projects, he seeks inspiration by reading and sharing short stories that are freely available on the web. In 2023, he posted 256 stories to X, tagged with #Longreads, from “The Big Quit“by David Means at Harper’s Magazine to “Bitch Baby” by Helle Hill at Oxford American. Of that 256, here are the 10 he loved most.

“Make it Black” by Andre Dubus III (Narrative Magazine)

Andre Dubus III’s immersive novella is about a couple that lives separately in the densely forested acreage they co-own.

Through the screened windows of her bedroom she can hear them, hundreds, maybe thousands of them munching on the leaves of her oaks and maples and other trees she cannot name, even though she has lived in these woods for over twenty years. It’s after midnight, and beside her in the darkness Michael sleeps, his big hairless chest rising and falling. When they made love earlier, his smooth back had felt like rubber to her and she imagined that he was not real, that this man she’s been seeing for over a year now is just some device she bought to ease her loneliness, to ground her away from the nagging sense that she’s hanging as still in the air as a nightgown on a branch.

Some nights she asks him to go sleep at his own place, and she wished she’d asked him that tonight too. If only so can be alone as she listens to the gypsy caterpillars decimate her trees. Their tiny waste rains down through the branches, and she does not know why she wants to listen to this, but she does.

It is late May and the air coming through the screens is cool. She can smell her magnolias and cherry blossoms but also the broken green of leaves that had only just begun their season, and now a hot anger opens up in her at these tiny fuckers that her husband Kai had warned her were coming again. It had been almost nine years since the last generation of them, and Kai had missed the signs then but not this time.

“I Won’t Let You Go” by Hiromi Kawakami (Granta)(Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell)

Hiromi Kawakami has won several Japanese literary prizes and is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary authors. This story’s plot reveals her fascinating imagination.

I came by something strange while I was travelling. This was what Enomoto had said to me about two months ago.

Enomoto is a painter-slash-high school teacher who lives in the apartment directly above mine. We met when we both served on the local residents’ association, and have been friendly ever since. He would call me on the phone every so often and say, I’m brewing some nice coffee. I would traipse up the stairs to Enomoto’s apartment to enjoy his delicious coffee. We would make small talk and then I would trudge back down the stairs and return to my own apartment. That was the extent of our relationship.

Enomoto’s apartment is exactly the same layout as mine, but it has quite a different feel. It’s tidy, for a bachelor’s flat, but what with his painting supplies and his hobby cameras and his magazines on those subjects, there were things all over the place. Interestingly, though, his apartment gave the overall impression of being much more clearly delineated than mine.

Enomoto only ever referred to the coffee that he brewed as ‘nice’. He would grind the beans on a hand-operated coffee mill, and use a cloth filter. Then he would gently pour it into warmed coffee mugs. The aroma and the taste were both extremely sophisticated. Which is why, whenever Enomoto called me for coffee, I would abandon whatever I was doing and traipse up the stairs to his place.

Lately, though, there haven’t been any invitations from Enomoto for ‘nice coffee’. Ever since the call, two months ago, when he mentioned that he had come by something strange, he hasn’t invited me over.

“That Particular Sunday” by Jamel Brinkley (Guernica)

A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s first short story collection, was a finalist for a National Book Award. His 2023 collection, Witness—in which this story appears—has received strong reviews.

There are times when a family has an aura of completion. Remembering such a time feels like gazing at a masterpiece in an art gallery. You might find yourself taking one or two steps backward to absorb the harmonious perfection of the entire image. Or you may be lured by it, drawn to it, inching closer to study every fine detail of composition, the faultless poise with which each element confirms the necessary presence of the others. Take the figure of the son, who hurtles into the foreground of the picture, claiming his position in a web of femaleness, affixing himself to the very center of its adhesive heart, because he belongs there, or so he believes with the wild unblemished certainty of a boy’s imagination. Like everything else in the image, he never changes. Yes, that is my mother, his presence announces. And those are my aunts, he seems to say. And this—of the girl closest to him, her expression as breathless as his own—this is my cousin. My companion. My closest friend. Her soul is the identical twin of mine. The absence of the father doesn’t matter one bit. The absence of the siblings doesn’t matter much either, even though the son will love them hopelessly. Recklessly. They belong to a different elsewhere, a time yet to come, with another father to come, and the circumstances of their lives will frenzy the family, purpling it, cloying it until it is spoiled. Then it will be no different from any ordinary clan. Unpleasant to regard. An eyesore.

“Splashdown” by Jonathan Escoffery (Oprah Daily)

Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You—short-listed for the Booker Prize and long-listed for a National Book Award—is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami.

The summer he turned thirteen, Cukie Panton set out for the Florida Keys to meet his father for the first time. By then, Ox meant little more to Cukie than a syllable spat from his mother’s lips. What he knew of Ox was that he was American— the catalyst for Cukie having been born in Baptist Hospital, right on Kendall Drive—and that Ox had stuck out the first two months of fatherhood, then bounced, leaving to Cukie the dried ink on his birth record that spelled out Lennox Martin.

More than a dozen years after this abrupt departure, Cukie’s mom answered the phone to hear a remorseful Ox, saying he should know his boy. By this time Cukie felt ambivalent. It didn’t help that Daphne Panton figured that the drink or else some brush with death must have resuscitated Ox’s conscience to bring him calling. Perhaps Andrew had inspired Ox’s reemergence, the hurricane having wiped away so much that would have to be rebuilt, not even a year ago. Whatever the affliction, Cukie’s mother assumed it was ephemeral. The calls continued, though, and when plans grew specific, she told Cukie to pack his duffel and they departed Kendall for Smuggler’s Key.

“The Ugliest Girl at Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion” by Kelly Luce (Colorado Review)

A new short story by the author of the novel Pull Me Under and the collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail.

After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. I wanted to learn something I never would have learned in Jacksonville while married to Carl. To feel like the person I’d once been, a person I’d liked being. The first trade that came up was in Happy, Texas, a town of 603 souls outside of Amarillo. The carrier there was eager to move to Florida to be near his twin grandsons. My new route consisted mostly of cluster boxes I could drive right up to.

Happy’s motto was “the town without a frown.” I set up a bank account at Happy Bank, got my Texas driver’s license at Happy City Hall, and waited for a line of pickup trucks to follow a hearse into Happy Cemetery. I found an apartment on Happy’s main street, Main Street, above an event hall called Marcy’s Wedding Pavilion. The apartment had two bedrooms—plenty of space for my equipment. The stove didn’t work and there were no closets, but the ceilings were high and there was a filthy skylight in the kitchen that Randall, the property manager, told me was put in after a meteorite came through the roof in 1999. The meteorite sold me on the place.

“The Pink House at the End of the Street on the Other Side of the Town” by Manuel Muñoz (Virginia Quarterly Review)

Manuel Muñoz is the author of the story collections Zigzagger, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, The Consequences, as well as the novel What You See in the Dark. He received a 2023 MacArthur fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American community of California’s central valley.”   

Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo, had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when the fields ran muddy and no one else would brave the kind of cold that would lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves. By spring, he’d return to a pueblito called Pozos, which made everyone ask why he’d go back to a hole in the ground. A frog crawling under the mud to wait out the heat. That was El Sapo, leaving sometime in early April before the heat came. And then the others would arrive. Fidelio and his twin brother, Modesto, who for some reason was several inches shorter than him. Jerónimo, quiet and stark, who claimed to know Silvio, but nobody knew for sure. Baldomero El Mero Mero, who boasted that he was the one who had shown the others how to start with a bus in Celaya, take it to the outskirts of Tijuana, and, right over there, at a llantería owned by his old friend Raimundo, you could sneak through the dust yard of Raimundo’s old tires and cross to the other side, get to the highway on foot, and, if you were smart enough to hide your money, catch a Greyhound to a place called Goshen, where you’d go to the phone booth outside of the station, look out at the cotton fields as you dialed a number and told a man named Poldo that you’d made it across. A cousin by way of another cousin. A friend of the family. From Celaya. From Ojo de Agua. From La Cuevita. From Charco Blanco. Yes, yes, of course. A third yes if you promised you had the money to pay a little rent for a month. That’s how Eliseo showed up. And poor Casimiro, who wore thick glasses and peered into the fruit trees with his whole face to see what he was picking. But you’d have to know Spanish to know why all the other men laughed at his name.

“Love Machine” by Nic Anstett (Passages North)

In a doomed world in which robots are taking over, a lonely man explores his sexuality.

The robots have taken Seattle and I am on the apps again. I can no longer sleep in my half empty queen bed without another body. More than India, I miss her dog, Binky, who diagonally draped himself across the mattress every night. Whether it was a soggy July evening or one of Baltimore’s cruelly dry winter nights, I could count on a furry dog blanket. Now, my nighttime hands grab only limp fabric and empty air. I miss the warmth and I miss having something living to pull towards me, which in the last several months had always been Binky. Even before she left, I could tell India was pulling away. So, now I’m spending my nights during the machine uprising swiping through the singles of the greater Chesapeake Bay area.

I’m not alone in this at least. It turns out that the oncoming annihilation of organic life makes loneliness even more lonely.

“You picked the right time to start messing around,” Krista told me over bloody marys two weeks back. “Even the straightest of straight guys are sleeping with transsexuals now. There’s no room for pickiness.”

“Is it Too Late?” By Pegah Ouji (Isele Magazine)

An Iranian immigrant remembers a retirement community resident she cared for during her early years in in the United States.

The first time I met you, I thought you looked like a dried peach, sweet but aged. Please forgive my crude description. I’d just turned seventeen and oddly enough, a young girl’s imagination sometimes defies delicacy. I close my eyes and imagine you now after all these years. It has become an old game. How much of you can I still remember? Your hands, wrinkled, slender fingers with soft tips which had typed up many articles on your old typewriter and hardly ever had held anything heavier than a ball-point pen. Your honey-colored eyes, marble-like, in the folds of your wrinkled eyelids. By the time I met you, you had barely any hair left, the remaining survivors white and fuzzy. You see now why the peach was an apt metaphor?

We met during my first week at Hillside Retirement Community, a place you had already been calling home at that point for more than five years. Being so young and naive and having immigrated from Iran with my mother and grandmother only a year before that, I felt alive to have a job of my own. Life in America was finally beginning to pay off, I’d thought. Despite my shaky grasp of the English language, Mrs. Hazelwood had hired me for four hours every day after school as a dining room server. The trick to getting hired had been to appear like I understood more than I actually did, achieved chiefly this through vigorous head nods and readily dispensed yes replies.

“Different” by Sindya Bhanoo (The Masters Review)

Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. “Different” appears in this collection.

For three decades, Chand gave his Indian graduate students his house keys when he and Raji left town. He told them to relax and use his spacious home as a place to rest and study, to use the hot tub in the back, and the grill, as long as they did not put beef on it. “Sleep in the guest bedroom,” he said. “Escape your dreary apartments.” It gave him pleasure to offer comforts that graduate student stipends could not afford. In his home, students could watch satellite channels like Zee TV and TV Asia and catch up on episodes of Koffee with Karan and Kaun Banega Crorepati. Before Skype and WhatsApp and FaceTime, some students made long distance phone calls from his landline. Chand never charged them for it. He treated them like family, because their own families were so far away.

He had been a graduate student once, in a small town in Montana, tens of thousands of miles away from Vellore, his hometown in South India. Things were different then. When he moved to America, he called his parents once every three months, and was careful to think through what to say before dialing. Back then, calls cost three dollars for the first minute and one dollar for every minute thereafter. He remembered the loneliness, the immense sorrow that came from going months without uttering a word of Tamil. There was no way for him to express certain thoughts, certain feelings, in the English language. He remembered the warmth he felt when the one Indian professor on campus, a Punjabi chemical engineer named Dr. Gupta, occasionally invited him to his home for dinner.

“Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li (The New Yorker)

For Pravesh, this story was love at first read.

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for . . . Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled.

All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been cancelled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.

She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would cancelled trains only lead to more cancelled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

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Check out all of Pravesh’s previous story recommendations:  2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

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Pravesh Bhardwaj wrote and directed “Baby Doll,” an Audible Original podcast in Hindi (featuring Richa Chadha and Jaideep Ahlawat).

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A Second Life for My Beloved Dog

A short, but beautiful essay on how an iPhone feature helped Charlie Warzel to grieve for his dog, Peggy. An insightful reflection on grief and a heartwarming affirmation of the power of happy memories.

On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.

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A Knife Forged in Fire

Deep care and craft are on display in this keenly observed profile of bladesmith Sam Goldbroch for Chicago Magazine. Dive into blade science and history along with the sensory experiences of Golbroch’s forge, as he creates a knife commissioned by the author, Laurence Gonzales.

Sam brought out what looked like a deck of tarot cards with nothing on them. No Hermit. No Hanged Man. No Fool. They were gray, thicker than ordinary cards, and clearly heavy in his hands. Inside of them a message waited. He had a long ritual to perform to release it.

As he shuffled the cards, they clattered together, revealing the first hint of their message: They were made of steel. He stacked them and squared up the edges so that all of the cards were nice and straight, nothing sticking out or crooked. Everything neat. The alchemical precision favored by Newton in his dim laboratories.

He clamped them in an industrial vise. Now the cards made a block about the size of a thick paperback book. They would never be individual cards again, these 12 pounds of two different kinds of steel, arranged in alternating layers.

And I knew that Sam would make his own Damascus steel for this knife. The blade and handle would mate to make a work of art that was an exceptional tool.

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Flight Risk

Related read: In a 2022 essay at Harper’s Bazaar, Carla Ciccone describes what it’s like to be diagnosed with ADHD at nearly 40.

What is it like to navigate each day with ADHD? In this personal essay for The Kenyon Review, Emily Stoddard—a writer who was diagnosed in her 30s—describes life with a restless mind and an interior motor that never quits. Stoddard artfully writes about being neurodivergent, and what it has meant to mask all of her life.

In the wake of diagnosis, I’m forced to admit the creature I named Restlessness both is and is not who I thought she was. The alphabet soup begins to expand and stratify with the language of neurodivergence — a map that only now, in retrospect, can I see and draw meaning from. Some regions of the language make me flinch at their candor and their implied judgment: thoughtless mistakes, oppositional defiance, rejection sensitive dysphoria. And other regions, especially the phenomenon of masking, shimmer with their potential for nuance. Here is a place where I can build a home for complexity. Masking rearranges every interaction I’ve ever had into an open question.

Useful is another mask. It’s the one I have worn the longest. It’s the mask many try on after gifted, after emotional, after too much. If I can’t make you understand me, maybe I can make you need me. If I don’t want to play dead forever, perhaps I can live to be of service — it’s easier to pretend to be noble than to go on being misunderstood. If I can’t belong with you, maybe I can do something for you instead.

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The Neighbors Who Destroyed Their Lives

On Christmas Eve, 1991, a woman named Dana Ireland was raped and murdered on the Big Island of Hawaii. Two brothers were wrongfully convicted of the crime and exonerated 25 years later. Now they live among people who once maligned them, and some who actively participated in the injustice perpetrated against them:

Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

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The Perfect Webpage

For The Verge, Mia Sato writes about Google’s power over the internet—and how Google Search has shaped the way we do so many things, including finding information, writing and creating, building businesses, and making websites. The feature, sleekly animated by Richard Parry, also takes us through the process of creating a hypothetical website about pet lizards; the result is a visual journey showing just how much “the internet has been remade in Google’s image,” writes Sato. “And it’s humans—not machines—who have to deal with the consequences.” While this may not be anything new to industry experts and people who know the SEO game, it’s an accessible read about Google’s homogenizing force on the web for a more general audience.

Google’s outsized influence on how we find things has been 25 years in the making, and the people running businesses online have tried countless methods of getting Google to surface their content. Some business owners use generative AI to make Google-optimized blog posts so they can turn around and sell tchotchkes; brick-and-mortar businesses are picking funny names like “Thai Food Near Me” to try to game Google’s local search algorithm. An entire SEO industry has sprung up, dedicated to trying to understand (or outsmart) Google Search.

The small, behind-the-scenes changes site operators deployed over the years have made browsing the web — especially on mobile — more frictionless and enjoyable. But Google’s preferences and systems don’t just guide how sites run: Search has also influenced how information looks and how audiences experience the internet. The project of optimizing your digital existence for Google doesn’t stop at page design. The content has to conform, too.

But no matter what happens with Search, there’s already a splintering: a web full of cheap, low-effort content and a whole world of human-first art, entertainment, and information that lives behind paywalls, in private chat rooms, and on websites that are working toward a more sustainable model. As with young people using TikTok for search, or the practice of adding “reddit” to search queries, users are signaling they want a different way to find things and feel no particular loyalty to Google.

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In 1967, a Black Man and a White Woman Bought a Home. American Politics Would Never Be the Same.

The summer of ’67 was a chaotic time in America. But you’ve probably never read about this chapter of it: a battle over a home in a suburban Michigan neighborhood, purchased by an interracial couple named the Baileys. And you’ve almost certainly never heard about the political controversy that ensued, one that went all the way to the most hallowed halls of Washington, D.C. In this fascinating feature unearthing a vital piece of domestic history, Zack Stanton explains the whole ordeal:

The battle that was taking place on Buster Drive in Warren was but a small sideshow to the images playing on the nightly news and would soon be eclipsed by the devastating violence that would erupt a few miles away in Detroit in July. But what would transpire over the coming days and months and years on Buster Drive would actually have profound consequences for race relations in America and shape the national political landscape in ways that are still being felt today.

A telegenic housing secretary with presidential ambitions would use the Baileys’ plight to launch a bold plan to desgregate all of America’s suburbs.

Local officials in Warren, stoked by the rage of their white constituents, would stymie his efforts, even though it meant forfeiting millions of dollars of federal aid.

A Republican president facing reelection would torpedo his secretary’s plan, empowering the white middle-class voters he considered crucial to his victory.

Those voters, in turn, would make this corner of suburban Detroit the unofficial capital of America’s white middle class, and shape the strategy of presidential hopefuls of both parties for decades to come.

Ultimately, the whites-only fortress of Warren and surrounding Macomb County would crumble, overwhelmed by the consequences of self-defeating choices made decades before. Like suburbs across the country, it would become more diverse—and increasingly Democratic. But it would retain the scars of unhealed racial fault lines first laid down in 1967—a de facto segregation that would make Macomb County a prime target for populist conservatives bent on appealing to white working-class voters. Few suburbs would suffer the same headline-making unrest or the targeted federal scrutiny as Warren. But its prominent role in the massive demographic and political shifts of the last half century would ensure it remained an important bellwether heading into the 2024 presidential election when, once again, Macomb County would find itself a political battleground for the nation’s all-important suburban vote. 

But before any of that could happen, the Baileys had to outlast the mob.

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Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

Novelist Johannes Lichtman doesn’t write about the CIA, or CIA-adjacent topics. So he found it a bit of a mystery when he was invited to speak to a writing group inside Langley. In this dispatch for The Paris Review, Lichtman recounts the strangeness of the experience, which starts in the parking lot. (Apparently parking at CIA headquarters is a headache, not just for visitors, but for the people who work there.) I do wish this essay went deeper, but given its subject matter, perhaps it can’t. Still, it’s enjoyable: Lichtman includes odd and funny details from the day (did you know, for instance, that Langley has a gift shop?), and captures the odd mundanity of this place on the surface. (It also scratches an itch I have, as I’m in the midst of bingeing shows like Person of Interest and The Diplomat.) Overall, the piece creates more questions than answers, which, after all, seems absolutely appropriate.

At first, we couldn’t find the conference room. Like me, Vivian wasn’t allowed to bring her phone into the main building, but even if she had, I don’t know who she would’ve called for directions. CIA officers generally don’t know their coworkers’ last names. (The Starbucks at Langley is the only Starbucks where baristas aren’t allowed to ask for your name.) So I am without photos or notes, but walking through the main building at Langley, is, in my memory, like walking through an airport terminal in a major metropolis, crossed with a hospital, crossed with an American mall, crossed with an Eastern European university. It’s big and gleaming and cold and brutal, all at once. There was a hall of presidential portraits with notes from commanders in chief to the Secret Service, all of them written in elegant fountain pen, except for Donald Trump’s, which was written in Sharpie and said “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”

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The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative

Tom Wolfe is a literary icon for many reasons, not least his white suits and liberal use of onomatopoeia. In this smart assessment of Wolf’s legacy, Osita Nwavenu reads the late author’s works closely in search of an ideology:

Though he’ll be remembered as an inventive journalist who managed a moderately successful turn to popular fiction, Tom Wolfe was also a social theorist in natty but thin disguise—his work both espoused a mostly coherent worldview and made a case for a particular way of viewing the world. All told, the bulk of Wolfe’s writing is animated by a conviction that revolutions of style are also revolutions of substance—look closely enough at an aesthetic trend or fashionable consumer fad, he insists excitedly, time and time again, and you’ll find the elements of a social or cultural turn, and perhaps one that’s escaped the attentions of most cultural observers.

His Esquire feature on hot rods, for instance, the piece that brought him to prominence, is more than just the first major showcase for his pyrotechnic prose or an informative and engaging look at youth car culture. It’s an exhortation, one that he’d repeat often, to locate meaning in the putatively superficial—to examine the values underpinning artifice. “I don’t have to dwell on the point that cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe’s great formal century, say, 1750 to 1850,” he wrote. “They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color—everything is right there. Things have been going on in the development of the kids’ formal attitude toward cars since 1945, things of great sophistication that adults have not been even remotely aware of, mainly because the kids are so inarticulate about it, especially the ones most hipped on the subject.”

Being articulate about the inarticulable, for Wolfe, demanded the adoption of a now standard critical posture—taking popular culture seriously and viewing its products and developments as worthy of close study, if not respect. Through this lens and in his hands, a figure like Phil Spector, for instance, the twentysomething tycoon savant of early ’60s pop, might additionally be understood as a cultural figure of almost world-historical importance. “Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorious expression of its style of life,” he wrote in a 1965 profile. “In latter-day Rome, the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in late Augustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen.”

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Hope Is the Thing with Feathers

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Amory Rowe Salem | Longreads | January 9, 2024 | 2,909 words (10 minutes)

Chances are Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sick long before the rest of us discovered her illness. When we did, the news hit us like a boxer’s mitt to the heart. Not just because her tiny frame seemed so completely incapable of carrying the weight of a serious diagnosis, but also because of the unfairness of it all. The injustice.

Ruth was small but feisty, often taking on adversaries of twice her heft. She was our David in an arena of Goliaths. Though she wasn’t spoiling for fights, she was skilled at ending them, rarely failing to punctuate her victories with a small show of rhetorical force. Ruth was unrelenting, vigilant, and inquisitive. We loved her for all of those traits. And because she laid blue eggs.

Only two of our chickens—Ruth and her flockmate Michelle Obama—laid blue eggs. The rest of our feathered badass lady gang—Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, Scarlett Johansson, Kamala Harris, and Aliphine Tuliamuk—all laid brown eggs, which were lovely and appreciated. But finding a blue egg in the nesting box surfaced memories of unearthing that rare piece of blue sea glass on the windswept winter beaches of my childhood. It felt like a treasure.

So when the tide of blue eggs ebbed, a sure sign of chicken illness, my children and I loaded Ruth and Michelle into the family van and drove them 45 minutes out of the city to the Tufts Hospital for Small Animals in Grafton, Massachusetts, the only place within 50 miles that will provide care to a chicken.

We were not veteran chicken keepers. We’d stumbled upon the delight of raising chickens entirely by accident when we traded a 50 lb. bag of flour and a jar of sourdough starter for a bucket of day-old chicks. It was the sort of barter people were making in the early days of the pandemic, when the unthinkable and the absurd upstaged the logical and the predictable.

We had no prior experience with poultry; we didn’t have a coop or a brooder lamp or the faintest idea of how to raise a palmful of down into an egg-laying hen. We needed to learn. Not just for the sake of the birds, but for our own sakes: we craved a learning curve. The world was going two-dimensional on us—all screens and games and apps—but those tiny feathered bodies, each one housing a beating heart the size of an infant’s thumbnail, demanded our attention. We became dedicated keepers of those hearts; and the flock, in turn, shocked our family’s flatlining system, giving us back the gift of emotional amplitude that had been compressed by our escalating attention to the glossy artifice of the staged and surface-level.

The coop was its own classroom. Our early chicken lessons were learned on the fly as we tried to stay a half-step ahead of our growing flock, keeping them fed, clean, warm, and safe. In that way, my children were initiated in parenting: balancing birthday parties and playdates with regular feedings and weekly “house cleanings,” summoning an uncommon vigilance over their brood.

While I wasn’t a trained educator capable of making cetaceans and early American history and square roots come alive for them, I was still a person equipped to teach my children about the living and, when necessary, the dying.

Over time, we extracted bespoke wisdom from our gallinaceous charges. My son, whose outsized capacity for empathy was at odds with his narrow 10 years of experience, divined that a chicken was a fair barometer for human character. “If you can’t figure out how to hold a chicken right, you’re not a very kind person,” he’d concluded. He wasn’t wrong. You hold a chicken much the same way you hold an infant, with your forearm tucked under the length of its body so it feels supported. If you’re in the business of vetting people, there are worse metrics. At least one would-be boyfriend of his oldest half-sister has been summarily dismissed based on failing the chicken-cradling exam.

My daughter, an introvert with a preternatural instinct for hibernation, admired the chickens’ unerring sense of home. For weeks after we moved their coop from the muddy corner of the yard to slightly higher ground, the birds would return to the site of their original coop at sundown, standing with their prehistoric feet sunk in the muck as if their house was just about to materialize around them. What adolescent girl hasn’t stood, Dorothy-like in the Oz of the schoolyard, silently intoning: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”?

For my part, I watched with recognition as our rasorial creatures bent their heads to the ground and brought the full force of their attention to a single square inch of grass. They were excellent excavators of the granular, masters of the microscopic, capable of quarrying the tiniest insects and grubs. But they paid a price for their ground-level monomania, sometimes missing a juicy worm just a few feet away—or a predator overhead—because they simply weren’t seeing the bigger picture. As a mother, a teacher, a citizen, I also knew the opportunity cost of becoming mired in the details. It behooves all of us, every now and then, to turn our faces to the sun lest we lose sight of the magnitude of the stage on which we are playing.

Our first year of chicken-keeping had been full of tiny wonders and short on heartache. But as we rounded the bend into year two, with a flock of a dozen, the poultry actuarial tables were turning and the parade of covetable “firsts”—first flight feathers, first dust bath, first eggs—changed tenor. We had our first sick chicken.

In Grafton, the fourth-year veterinary student gave us a diagnosis for Ruth within 15 minutes of our arrival.

“It’s the first thing we check in backyard chickens,” she told me over the phone from deep inside the hospital, while the kids and I waited in the parking lot. 

Ruth was suffering from lead poisoning. Michelle, too—and likely the entire flock. But Ruth was presenting as the most ill because she was our smallest chicken and our best forager. I learned then that what is true for so many of us is also true for chickens: we are often drawn to what is not good for us. Even to what can kill us. The vet explained that lead tastes good to chickens: it tastes sweet. So if a hen finds an industrial-era cache buried just below the surface of our urban backyard, she’ll return to it again and again, sampling until the lead has permeated every muscle, organ, bone, and feather.

“Ruth’s lead levels were too high to read,” the vet explained. “She’s probably been sick for a long time. Chickens are very good at hiding their illness.”

My daughter, sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat of our idling van, cocked an ear in my direction. As a middle school-age girl she, too, knew something about hiding weaknesses for fear of having them exploited. Recently I had found her crumpled deep in the covers of her bed. Despite the fact that it was spring in New England, the sun still shockingly high in the sky for the late afternoon hour, she had burrowed into the darkest corner of her room the way a hen seeks the dim, still seclusion of the nesting box to endure her daily egg-laying effort.

Her story had come out in messy exhaled fragments hyphenated by tears. A classmate rebuked by a teacher for an outfit deemed inappropriate for school. The predictable adolescent backlash. A girl-led campaign to wear crop tops and short shorts to school in rebellion. My daughter’s discomfort and refusal. Her choice not to sign the offender’s dress code petition. A parade of protesting peers observed from a careful and conservatively clothed distance. The fallout. She had been exiled from the flock, hen-pecked in hallways and corridors of the internet—her pandemic cohort, recently reunited, now fumbling with the fizzy power of sudden togetherness.

Lead lodged deep in a body is easier to extract than loneliness. Many times over the next two weeks, as my daughter and I corralled our flock twice daily to inject each chicken with a chelating agent, I wished for as straightforward a solution as a hypodermic needle sunk into soft muscle to cure my adolescent girl’s unhappiness. A pinch of pain every 12 hours seemed a small price to pay to restore balance.

Every parent of double-digit-age children craves a return to the obvious fixes of infancy and toddlerhood when tears could be quelled with a diaper change, a snack, or a nap. But the grand bargain of parenting holds that as our children grow wondrously more complicated, so do their problems. Those simple early solutions get shelved with the board books and Duplos, as obsolete as last year’s ice skates. So I was surprised—as the late spring days lengthened and we extracted the last of the medication from its glass vials and injected it into Ruth and her flockmates—to see that both the birds and my daughter were improving.

Maybe it was just time. Maybe some other tween-age scandal moved onto the front page of her classmates’ attention. But I like to think that the caretaking of other hearts was its own slow-working salve for her adolescent injuries. My daughter needed something—affection, attention, patience—so she gave those things away. And in return, she got better.

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A month after our first visit to Tufts, we boomeranged back to Grafton to have the flock’s lead levels rechecked. Ruth’s numbers were much improved—as were the rest of the birds’—but the vet palpated a mass in Aliphine’s coelom and suggested she take a closer look. Aliphine, a tall Lavender Orpington with a gentle manner and eyes more elephantine than reptilian, was named after distance-running phenom Aliphine Tuliamuk, winner of the 2020 US Olympic Marathon Trials. Befitting her namesake, our Aliphine went on to endure an odyssey of diagnostics in the subsequent weeks: blood draws, X-rays, ultrasounds, and a fine-needle biopsy. The news was neither encouraging nor conclusive.

By the time the last of the tests was done, Aliphine was spending most of her days perched quietly in a corner of the run, an introvert in a flock of socialites. Unlike her fellow chickens, who were always busy scratching in the dirt, squabbling over the prime nesting box, and preening in the afternoon sun, she kept to herself. Short of invasive surgery, which the vet wasn’t sure she’d survive, our best option was to keep her comfortable and to try to catch the falling knife of divining precisely when she stopped behaving like a happy chicken and started behaving like an animal in pain.

That day came in late summer, when Aliphine failed to defend herself from a flurry of unwarranted pecks delivered by a cranky flockmate. Her will—and maybe her capacity for self-preservation—had waned. I called the vet.

It was an awful errand. Every prior trip to Grafton had been undertaken with the hope of a diagnosis or at least some new measure of understanding. But there was no avoiding the fact that this was a different journey altogether. My children, then 10 and 12, were not unaccustomed to loss. In roughly a decade they had lost two grandparents and 18 months of their childhoods, ideas made abstract by distance and time. Aliphine was theirs, though: a feathered beating heart for which they felt deeply responsible.

We’d all done so much looking away: from grown men being choked to death on city streets, from riots and mass shootings, from atrocities at home and across oceans. The way forward had to be with open eyes and with hearts exposed to injury. We’d seen the price we paid when we failed to bear witness.

No parent wishes pain upon their child; but every parent wants the next generation to be able to bear up under its inevitable burden. I wanted so much for my children to avoid being among those who spent their lives carving routes around difficult emotional obstacles. While I wasn’t a trained educator capable of making cetaceans and early American history and square roots come alive for them, I was still a person equipped to teach my children about the living and, when necessary, the dying.

Before we left the house I sat the children down and laid out the path: we would take Aliphine to Grafton; the veterinary staff would bring us into a private room; we’d have a chance to say goodbye; and then the doctor would put her to sleep. There were several exits off the road ahead, I explained to the kids. They didn’t have to go to Grafton at all. Or they could keep Aliphine company on the drive to Grafton and not go into the hospital. Or they could say their goodbyes in the room itself. It was important to me that they made and owned their choices in this process, that they looked at this moment directly and felt it for what it was: a loss.

“We want to go,” my daughter said.

“But we’ll decide when we get there if we go into the hospital,” my son added.

While my daughter walked out to the coop to retrieve Aliphine, my son packed an ear of corn, a wedge of watermelon, and a fistful of blueberries—all of the chicken’s favorite foods—and carried them to the van. Aliphine sat quietly in my daughter’s lap for the drive, each one seemingly happy to feel the warmth of the other. As we made our way west, my daughter’s eyes welled with tears, emptied, filled again. Every few minutes Aliphine vocalized a chicken syllable or two, a sweet low sound that made each of us turn our gaze to her, and then to one another. It was hard not to hear those notes as questions.

When we exited the Mass Pike and began to slalom through the small town rotaries and farmland adjacent to Grafton, I felt that familiar tug, a nearly irrepressible urge to yank the wheel and change the direction of our distressed quartet. It felt so heavy, the weight of what we were carrying. The temptation to cast it off, even if only for a day or a week, to distract ourselves with the fleeting giddiness that comes from shirking responsibility, was overwhelming. But there was no outrunning this particular outcome and the inevitable impact it was going to have on each of us. We’d all done so much looking away: from grown men being choked to death on city streets, from riots and mass shootings, from atrocities at home and across oceans. The way forward had to be with open eyes and with hearts exposed to injury. We’d seen the price we paid when we failed to bear witness.

Once at the hospital, I pulled the van into a parking spot near the entrance. Aliphine perked up and preened a feather or two, seemingly animated, as infants are, by the transition from automotive movement to stillness. Without explicitly asking my children what their choice was—to enter the hospital or not—I simply opened the sliding door, an invitation. Each of my children stepped out onto the curb, my daughter still holding Aliphine and my son carrying her bag of treats.

As we began our slow procession up the walkway, my son reached for my hand. Thinking he was seeking a small physical reassurance, I turned my open palm toward him, but instead of slipping his hand into mine, he dropped into my palm a tiny ivory-colored tooth, still wet and rimmed with blood. Before I could ask the question, he bared his teeth at me: less smile, more grimace. There, in the front, on the bottom, I could see the newly vacated gap. I noted the loss, slipped the tooth into the pocket of my overalls, and walked on with my boy, my girl, and our chicken.

My daughter needed something—affection, attention, patience—so she gave those things away. And in return, she got better.

I said many things to my children in the low light of the room where Aliphine was euthanized. And my children said many things to her as they fed her corn and blueberries and watermelon for the last time. The vet spoke to all of us, told us we were making the right choice, that it was time. She spoke to Aliphine, too, as she pushed the Pentobarbital into the catheter she’d inserted into her leg bone. I watched closely, a hand on her feathered breast, as Aliphine’s body bucked once, twice, and then went limp. Of all of the words exhaled in that room, though, the ones that stick with me form what I think of now as our family’s most intimate catechism.

“We were lucky to love her,” I said to my children.

“And she was lucky to be loved,” my daughter replied.

“That’s not nothing,” my son added.

All true. Maybe the most important truths we can know.

The hospital was good at grief. There was no price or paperwork for the dead. Within minutes of Aliphine’s death we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road that would take us back to the city. As the emptiness of the van settled around us, the still and chirpless space yawning wide, I watched out of the corner of my eye as my son’s face twitched and then contorted. At first I thought he might be fighting back tears. But then I realized he was poking his tongue into the space where his tooth used to be, gently exploring the vacancy where something familiar had been and was no longer.

I saw him wince. I imagine it hurt. I imagine, too, that in that tiny moment he learned he could bear the pain. Then the pain ebbed. And he learned the shape of pain, its tidal behavior. And that understanding made him someone wiser and more durable. And I knew, over time, and his countless recoveries from those small waves of hurt, he would feel something new break the surface.

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Amory Rowe Salem reads, writes, coaches, parents, and tends to her flock in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can read her work at amoryrowesalem.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

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Can a Big Village Full of Tiny Homes Ease Homelessness in Austin?

Cute, eclectic tiny homes. Chicken coops and a vegetable garden. An outdoor movie amphitheater. A golf cart to shuttle you around. A street sign labeled “Goodness Way.” These are the types of things you’ll see at Community First, a 51-acre village outside of Austin, Texas, for chronically unhoused people—and the largest project of its kind in the US. The mastermind behind it—a nonprofit founder, church volunteer, and former real estate developer named Alan Graham—views the village as a place for people to get back on their feet, earn income, and find support and a community. So far, the project has met ambitious fundraising goals and received support from philanthropists, companies, and architectural firms, and Graham hopes to expand to nearly 2,000 homes across multiple locations. But is it the right solution in Austin, where the homelessness crisis is getting worse?

But Community First is pushing the tiny home model to a much larger scale. While most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens, its leaders see that as a necessary trade-off to be able to creatively and affordably house the growing number of people living on Austin’s streets. And unlike most other villages, many of which provide temporary emergency shelter in structures that can resemble tool sheds, Community First has been thoughtfully designed with homey spaces where people with some of the highest needs can stay for good. No other tiny home village has attempted to permanently house as many people.

Like Mr. Johnston, many residents have jobs in the village, created to offer residents flexible opportunities to earn some income. Last year, they earned a combined $1.5 million working as gardeners, landscapers, custodians, artists, jewelry makers and more, paid out by Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

Steven Hebbard, who lived and worked at the village since its inception, left in 2019 when he said it shifted from a “tiny-town dynamic” where he knew everyone’s name to something that felt more like a city, straining the supportive culture that helped people succeed.

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A Maui Love Story

This is the story of one couple on the day their hometown burnt—a day that plays out like a horror film, the town descending into chaos as officials struggle with what to do. A powerful piece that whips between romance and disaster, a combination that makes the fear so very vivid.

A short plane ride away from the FEMA event, the girls bobbed in the water beneath their towels. Three hours passed. Still no rescuers. Isabella knew there was a vast military force in Hawaii. Why had no one showed up yet? Had the fire wiped out the entire island? she worried. Had all of the firefighters perished too? Where were they?

From her vantage point, Isabella could peek from beneath the towel and see Lahaina’s historic banyan tree on fire. The harbor was engulfed. Boats burned. A giant piece of sheet metal from a nearby restaurant’s roof hurtled into the water, scratching Isabella. Every car that caught fire or exploded brought more black, suffocating smoke.

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In the South, Developers Enter a Complicated Relationship with Endangered Bats

A fungus is wiping out entire colonies of bats in a region of the US South near the South Carolina coast. The Northern long-eared bat landed on the federal endangered species list not long ago, with more bat species expected to reach this status soon. This has paused the development of thousands of new homes in the area, pitting the endangered winged mammal against developers and politicians. As Clare Fieseler reports in this informative piece, the battle isn’t really about saving an animal, but about land.

Every Republican senator voted for the resolution, including South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, as did a few Democrats, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The bill’s sponsor said the bat’s “endangered” status would put an undue burden on the East Coast’s timber industry.

The rule found support in the U.S. House and among developers. Rock Hill-based Republican Ralph Norman, a successful developer himself, has benefited from forest clear-cutting to build large commercial warehouses. Norman suggested that the Endangered Species Act shouldn’t apply to all animals. And certainly not these bats.

“I see the bald eagle. That makes sense. I see the bears. That makes sense. But long-eared bats? I hope the white-nose syndrome wipes all of them out. We won’t have it to worry about,” Norman said at a committee hearing before a critical vote.

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