It’s that time of year again! Our annual year-end series has evolved over the past decade, but our aim remains the same: to share and celebrate the best in longform nonfiction storytelling across the internet, and to honor writers and journalists publishing exceptional work. We’re thrilled to kick off our Best of 2022 collection with today’s list of our 10 most-read essays and reported stories.
The digital publishing landscape is uncertain, and continues to change. In 2023 we’ll continue to curate our favorite reads on the web, and publish original essays and reading lists from both established and emerging writers. Thanks for reading and supporting us!
Lisa Whittington-Hill | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)
Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects. Thirty years later, it’s time to reassess their legacy.
Krista Diamond | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,342 words)
There is risk in the wilderness — even in mild adventures — and yet we still seek to reason with it, to assign order to it, to control it, and to tempt it.
Colin Dickey | March 2022 | 24 minutes (4,226 words)
Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Other times, the solution requires retooling your perspective.
Devin Kelly | January 2022 | 27 minutes (7,394 words)
Another beauty of endurance is that it is happening at all times. It is everywhere we look. To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance.
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These days, animals can receive excellent veterinary care, ranging from blood tests and X-rays to ultrasounds and surgeries. It’s become easier to save or prolong an animal’s life, though it also depends on how much money you have — and are willing to spend. In this piece, Sarah Zhang speaks with human guardians of cats who’ve received costly care — including a kidney transplant, which is considered controversial — and asks important questions around pet ownership and the bond between humans and animals.
For decades, Americans’ collective spending on veterinary care has been rising—it exceeded $34 billion in 2021—a sign of a broader shift in how we think about pets. Our grandparents might have found it indulgent to allow pets on the living-room couch, let alone the bed. But as birth rates have fallen, pets have become more intimate companions. (In my own household, our cat Pete is really quite insistent on taking up the full third of the bed that he believes is rightfully his.) Cats and dogs now have day cares; health insurance; funerals; even trusts, should an owner die an untimely death—a proliferation of services that implies new obligations to pet ownership, turning it into something more like parenthood.
Joey Ayoub offers a hopeful look at Solarpunk, a genre that emerged in response to Cyberpunk, and a movement focused on positive futurism and community-building that’s utopian yet pragmatic. “Solarpunk is a recognition that the modern world is oversaturated with despair and helplessness,” writes Ayoub, “and in that context hope can be a radical act.” Doomscrolling and denying the planet’s big problems are easy to do, but Ayoub’s inspiring essay shows people that there can be other paths for us — and the Earth — if we can tackle them together.
After successfully entering the building and kicking the guard out, they let in 200-odd homeless people to find shelter from the cold. When the police inevitably arrive, the activists trap them between two of the gates and use the building’s heating control to increase the temperature to 115 F (46 C). This forces the cops to remove their armor or risk heatstroke. At that moment, ten activists who were waiting in a different, cooler room, allow the cops to enter in small numbers at a time, disarm them, destroy and throw their weapons away, then let them go out in nothing but T-shirts and underwear. The irony of the situation is hard to miss: In the Boston winter cold, the cops cannot survive without going back to their homes, a right denied to the homeless. Only through direct confrontation was that made apparent.
The Solarpunk element of the story is the idea that climate-related challenges are going to increase, yet by thinking and organizing together we are able to arrive at concrete solutions to specific problems. Unlike the more common climate-related apocalyptic stories we’re all familiar with, agency is given back to humans who, when sufficiently organized, are able to change their living conditions.
On March 14, the ski resort owner Vail Resorts made an announcement: the company would pay a new minimum wage of $20 per hour across all of its North American properties. This is the story of how the ski patrollers at Park City fought for this change. Focussing on one patroller and his family, Gloria Liu cuts through the bureaucracy to show how what is sold as a dream life is in fact a daily, dangerous, struggle.
During a lift ride back to the shack, we saw two of Andersen’s teammates on the slope below, tending to a young male skier in a red jacket who was sitting on the snow with his skis lying beside him. One of the patrollers was wrapping the skier’s right knee in an orange splint. Andersen’s radio crackled. Dispatch wanted to know if they could get pickup for three medical calls at once; on the other side of the mountain, patrollers were coordinating an emergency helicopter flight.
When Matt Blake buys a house he finds something unexpected, leading him to explore the house’s history. He uncovers a troubling story that will make you wonder what secrets your home may be hiding.
The more we pulled, the more we saw it – an amorphous black patch, about the size of a double bed, in the centre of the room. Some of the boards appeared chewed up and peppered by flecks of white and grey where there had obviously been some kind of fire. My homebuyer’s survey had mentioned nothing of this.
When the Kohistani family was evacuated out of Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, they did not assume they could duplicate their comfortable existence in Kabul. Lemar Kohistani risked his life time and again to ensure the U.S. forces had fuel for their war. What did the U.S. offer to Kohistani and his family? A home in rural Missouri seven miles away from the nearest grocery store, a place where they only mosque burned down after it had been shot up a decade ago. Due to an ill-equipped refugee system overwhelmed by the influx, the family was placed far from an aunt in St. Louis who could have helped the Kohistanis to navigate life in the U.S., potentially avoiding a tragic outcome for the family’s 14-year-old son, Rezwan.
How did the Kohistanis wind up so cut off from other Afghans? And how did Rezwan end up at a school that didn’t know what to do with him? The answer lies in a cascading series of failures that stretched from a tiny Missouri nonprofit to the White House, which was ill-prepared to handle the human fallout of America’s longest war.
Rezwan was buried on May 6 after a service in the mosque outside Joplin. Dr. Tabassum Saba, a leader of the area’s small Muslim community, started a fundraiser for the family. “Not everyone here is a hatemonger. Not everybody is KKK. But putting families in rural areas is going to be traumatic,” said Saba, who is a psychiatrist. “They would have been better off in many other places.”
The few students who’d befriended Rezwan grieved. A former classmate ran out of her classroom in tears when she saw his seat empty the next morning. “I think this whole thing could have been avoided if there were other Afghan kids and he had a group to be in instead of being alone,” his friend Beard recalled.
Others were callous. One student expressed surprise that Rezwan hadn’t died trying to “blow up the school,” multiple classmates recalled. The boys who had sat at Rezwan’s lunch table before he disappeared were asked about him by investigators. None recognized him. One said, “What’s a Rezwan?”
Midway through 1991’s The Addams Family, young Wednesday Addams attempts to supplement her family’s lost fortunes by selling poison lemonade for a nickel. Not everyone’s a willing customer. “I only like all-natural foods and beverages, organically grown with no preservatives,” a perky Girl Scout tells her, rolling her eyes in an unwitting rendition of today’s Goop-flogging wellfluencers. “I’ll buy a cup if you buy a box of my delicious Girl Scout cookies.”
“Are they made from real Girl Scouts?” Wednesday counters.
In that exchange, a hero was born.
Wednesday Addams is not like other girls. She thinks of homicide when she should be thinking of boys; she guillotines her dolls and sleeps with their discombobulated parts. At summer camp, conscripted into a drowning-rescue exercise, she gladly lets her nemesis sink beneath the water. Pale and large-eyed, fond of funereal garb, she always manages to seem both amused and joyless. But the beauty of Wednesday — or at least the version portrayed by Christina Ricci in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values — is that she wasn’t a maladapted goth waif yearning to find someone who truly understands her. Instead, she brought to the screen a morbid self-acceptance that set her apart, and became a crucial blueprint for a generation of girls developing their own gallows humor.
When she first arrived on screen in 1991, Wednesday Addams was actually like quite a lot of other cinematic girls that came to define the era: goth-lite, hex-loving, homicidal. (Think the high-school coven from The Craft.) But their darkness was almost always meant to be a metaphor for supposed teen girl self-loathing and loneliness. Not Wednesday’s. She loves dark chaos for dark chaos’s sake. Her life’s ambition is to be sentenced to a fiery death by an angry mob for dancing naked in the town square — though, as her parents insist, college comes first. She’s a rebel without a cause who isn’t torn apart by that lack of cause.
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Freeing adolescent girls from the yoke of self-hatred was one of the most subversive parts of the already subversive 1990s Addams family films, which anticipated coming decades of the conservative movement’s culture-war obsession with the (straight, white, Christian) nuclear family. According to screenwriter Paul Rudnick, the title of sequel Addams Family Values was a direct jab at those ideals. “In Republican terms, ‘family values’ is always code for censorship and exclusion, and Republicans still refuse to respect or even acknowledge, for example, LGBTQ families,” Rudnick told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2018 oral history. He called a pivotal scene from the film, in which Wednesday enacts a gory retelling of the first Thanksgiving at predominately blonde, upper-class Camp Chippewa, the “ultimate revenge, on Republicans, blondes, mean girls, and bullies.”
The fact that the film fails to punish or reward Wednesday for taking that revenge is also disruptive in its own way. For hundreds of years, morality tales have either punished girls who stepped out of line or exposed them as being misunderstood and lonely. Wednesday Addams is neither. She is exactly as she appears — what Rudnick calls “something rare: a child with power.” At the end of Values, Wednesday’s would-be boyfriend delivers the kind of soliloquy that teen rom-com characters would have swooned for: “What if you met just the right man, who worshiped and adored you, who’d do anything you say, who’d be your devoted slave? Then what would you do?” Wednesday’s response? “I’d pity him.” She might want a comrade on her crusade to take down self-righteous strivers, but she doesn’t seem to need one.
Sandwiched between overwrought ’80s delicate-flower tropes and the girl-power boom of the mid-’90s, that display of blithe self-reliance became a touchstone for a generation. Nearly 30 years later, Wednesday Addams remains a perfect time capsule of Gen X’s distrust of phoniness — and proof for millennials that the very idea of “a bright side” is an illusion.
Wednesday wasn’t always this way. In Charles Addams’ original New Yorker cartoons that spawned the family, the then-unnamed child was usually silent — an oval-faced, miniature version of her vibrantly morbid mother. It was the 1960s television version of The Addams Family that began to bring Wednesday to life: morose beyond her years, yet still adorable enough for wholesome prime time. But while Wednesday remained mostly seen rather than heard, society at large was busy clutching its pearls over the fates of teenagers. Movies like Rebel Without a Cause introduced overblown fears about middle-class, suburban kids, raising the dreaded specter of “juvenile delinquency.” The ensuing moral panic characterized wayward teens as eschewing tea parties and chastity for alcohol and sex, and even a fascination with death and murder.
That midcentury paranoia spawned a cottage industry of exploitation movies about sullen, out-of-control teenage girls — the Ed Wood-penned The Violent Years chief among them — which in turn became fodder for late 1980s and early 1990s social parody. Heathers, The Craft, and Beetlejuice all featured young female protagonists who were anything but innocent, preferring to resolve their “teenage angst bullshit” with a “body count,” as Heathers’ Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) so eloquently puts it.
Like all films in which Ed Wood had a hand, The Violent Years is terrible. Overblown, sensationalist, and hilarious, the film was released just one year after Rebel Without a Cause. This time, the delinquents were well-heeled teenage girls. Discontent with pretty dresses and suburban respectability, the girls use the freedom of their gifted automobiles to drink, carouse, and murder to tragic consequences. In 1989, Heathers took up this theme to intentionally comedic effect. Dark-haired, large-eyed protagonist Veronica Sawyer would use her own upper-middle-class privilege for revenge against the social injustices of high school — after falling under the spell of her juvenile delinquent boyfriend (Christian Slater), of course.
It wasn’t Ryder’s first such performance. The year previous, Ed Wood devotee Tim Burton had cast her in Beetlejuice as Lydia Deetz, a goth, death-obsessed teenager who writes suicide notes for fun in her wealthy parents’ newly renovated farmhouse. “I am alone,” Lydia writes in one, before revising it for maximum angst: “I am utterly alone.”
But just as the punishment for failing to appreciate suburban values in The Violent Years had been death, the cure for what ailed both Sawyer and Deetz was normalcy. Sawyer eventually vanquished the bad boyfriend and used her killing spree to champion harmony in her suburban high school; Deetz got a nuclear 1950s sitcom family in the form of the ghost parents who haunt her farmhouse. It wasn’t until 1991’s The Addams Family, co-written by Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson (who had worked with Tim Burton on Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, respectively), that the murderous goth girl’s macabre worldview was treated as a feature rather than a bug.
Ricci’s Wednesday was devious, quietly furious, and most importantly, content to be so. “She’s fiendishly smart and never worries about other people liking her,” Rudnick said about his vision for the character. That may sound similar to other late ’80s and early ’90s alternative heroines, but the character’s inner confidence proved a fundamental difference.
In the masterful sequel, Wednesday seemingly exists expressly to discomfit rich white people. The script recognizes Ricci’s acting chops and deadpan delivery by giving Wednesday and her brother Pugsley their own plotline: cut off from their family at mostly-white Camp Chippewa, Wednesday unleashes vengeance upon her oppressively sunny counselors and campmates for no reason other than that she doesn’t want to smile.
When writing stories about teenage girls, there seems to be a shared temptation among screenwriters to tie any rebellious character trait to hormones. Addams Family Values resists this temptation at every turn. Values never ascribes Wednesday’s outlook to cop-outs like loneliness (as with Lydia Deetz) or lust (Veronica Sawyer); her appetite for chaos needs no excuse. “She’s at that age when a girl has one thing on her mind,” Morticia Addams tells the mother of Amanda Buckman (the Girl Scout from the previous movie, still played perfectly by Mercedes McNab).
“Boys?” Mrs. Buckman asks with a condescending smile.
“Homicide,” Wednesday answers.
For an audience of geriatric millennial girls, that exchange — along with Wednesday’s steadfast refusal to seek the belonging, boyfriends, or social status even Beetlejuice and Heathers told us we should want — was a revelation. Later in the film, Wednesday answers her camp counselor’s racist retelling of the first Thanksgiving with arrows, fire, and violence. Wednesday is not looking for acceptance. She is simply amusing herself by confronting a horde of smiling, blonde Disney enthusiasts with a taste of what it would be like to actually be held accountable for the misery upon which their comfortable lives are based.
In current internet culture, the Wednesday Addams aesthetic is stronger than ever before — a response to years of pandemic, recession, crippling student loan debt, Supreme Court decisions over the contents of our uteruses, and the radicalization of a growing number of racist extremists. My former Jezebel colleague Hazel Cills distilled the sentiment two years ago in an essay called “There Are Only 3 Moods: Lobotomy Please, Asteroid Take Me Now, I Hope I Get Abducted By Aliens”:
But truthfully, I can no longer remember a time when I wasn’t casually talking to people about how much we all wanted an asteroid to take us, now. “I want a lobotomy,” a friend will joke, and I’ll casually agree with a grin on my face, as we both settle in to read about a QAnon conspiracy theory seemingly every child on TikTok aged 13 to 19 is gobbling up like popcorn. “When are the aliens taking me?” I’ll say to nobody, scrolling through my horrible Internet feed that nobody is forcing me to looking at.
It’s a Wednesday Addams worldview: looking on the dark side for the sole reason that looking on the bright side seems like a pretty dim thing to do.
In a way, smooth-brain culture is part of a move toward earnestness in response to quite a lot of dark bullshit. (“The Great Irony-Level Collapse,” as Hanson O’Haver called it at Gawker.) When Wednesday Addams roasts her camp counselors over a spit for writing a play in which Indigenous Americans not having shampoo is a punchline, she’s funny, but she’s not joking. She’s also not lonely, not asking for social currency, and she doesn’t need to be punished for not buying into the idea that organic lemonade is the cure for what ails us. Her morbidity doesn’t stem from being a teenage girl — it stems from the fact that stuff sucks, knives are cool, and pretending that the first Thanksgiving was anything but one terrible chapter in an overall horrible story is the actual weird thing to do. Fantasizing about a lobotomy is a normal response to the last three years; believing that a $40 scented candle counts as self-care is not. That’s the lesson Wednesday Addams reinforced in a certain kind of geriatric millennial girl, and it wasn’t one we often heard.
Even though we have supposedly moved into a more enlightened age of feminist media, characters like Wednesday Addams remain outliers. A recent remake of Rebecca removed Daphne Du Maurier’s iconic villain, Mrs. Danvers, from the plot, flattening her into being simply misunderstood. A much-anticipated but largely forgotten reboot of The Craft got too tangled up in questions of witchcraft and consent to depict any memorable teenage girl characters, good or bad. A 2018 animated version of The Addams Family featured Wednesday Addams in a pink dress to make a point about either conformity or rebellion. (The point was unclear.) Save for rare exceptions like Showtime’s Yellowjackets, featuring a grown-up and still magnificent Christina Ricci, stories about death-obsessed teenage girls and women have been effectively pinkwashed, offering their characters no more nuance than the Ed Wood paranoia of old. Only now the message is that the creepy girls should be as loved and accepted as the blonde organic lemon-eaters — rather than the idea that one can simply be A Person Who Does Not Give a Shit.
A new iteration of the Addams family, Wednesday, premieres November 23 on Netflix. The series follows a “sleuthing, supernaturally infused, mystery charting Wednesday,” played by Jenna Ortega, an actor who proved in the macabre You that she could ably embody ’90s Wednesday energy if given a chance. Hopefully, the writers (as well as Tim Burton, who executive-produced the series) will remember the girls who first encountered Wednesday Addams in theaters, the girls who became goth-lite rebels without a cause. Wednesday doesn’t need the dark academic girl-power treatment so common in series like The Umbrella Academy and The Magicians. Let her remain a hero for those who aren’t lonely or self-loathing — those who simply like guillotines and funeral chic. After all, as Wednesday explains in Addams Family Values, we’re only alive because we haven’t waited long enough.
Emily Alford is a writer living in Los Angeles. A former staff writer for Jezebel, her work has also appeared at Gawker, Vox, and Buzzfeed.
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