Sasha Frere-Jones is best known as a critic, but he’s a music lover at heart, as is clear in this reported essay about the maddening, seductive world of audiophilia. On one side, the many of us who are satisfied with cheap earbuds; on the other, the seeming fetishism of what he calls the “triode horn mafia.” Triangulating between those extremes isn’t a given, but he does so with aplomb.
I am heartbroken that the masters of John Coltrane’s Impulse! recordings were lost in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios. But I still think the existing analog and digital copies of those recordings are good enough to spread the message. An obsession with the quality of recordings is, on some level, antithetical to the spirit of mindful listening. The constant, beautiful, churning production of music in the present moment reminds us that fetishizing the past, rather than simply learning from it, is a non-musical obsession. You can love the texture and living power of recordings—I absolutely do—without losing your goddamn mind. In their back-and-forth manner, all technologies have been improving, even if the peristalsis of history is hard to follow. The necessary gear will be there, somewhere, and even bad gear is good enough for great music.
This eye-opening, entertaining story by Owen Long exposes the wild and ruthless business of selling Christmas trees in New York City. The industry is run by a few eccentric businessmen, called “tree men,” who spend most of the year preparing for the holiday season. There’s George Nash, an old hippie who sells trees to much of Harlem; Kevin Hammer, known as the “Keyser Söze of Christmas” and the man responsible for shaping NYC’s industry into what it is today; and Greg Walsh, who is Long’s boss (and looks exactly like Santa Claus). It’s a fascinating (and at times, very funny) read.
I’ve met several people who’ve sold Christmas trees for Hammer. Almost all of them asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. They said that to work for Hammer, there is no interview and there is no application. The only way to enter his network is to be referred by an insider. You and a partner — Hammer’s sellers always work in pairs — call a number around October, and a voice instructs you both to show up at a certain location (typically a sidewalk outside a bodega) around Thanksgiving. When you arrive, the two of you wait, possibly hours, potentially days, for another phone call from a different number. A new voice instructs you to construct a small shack out of pallets, plywood, even garbage, then continue waiting for the arrival of hundreds of Christmas trees, which will soon appear overnight along with clippers, chain saws, and plastic netting. You are instructed to sell each tree at the highest possible price.
In this essay, Preston manages to make a mundane job sound fascinating. An astonishing feat. As a human helping out a chatbot, she observes the world of an AI bot named Brenda and the lives of the often desperate humans she is supposed to help.
“Hey Brenda,” wrote a prospect. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you. You were so awesome and so willing to help me and I’m sorry for being a jerk and leaving you hanging. I haven’t been very productive as far as moving goes cuz I guess it just kinda sucks to move alone and no one to be excited with, ya know?”
“We have 1BR and 2BR starting at $1645,” Brenda wrote. “Would you like to come in for an appointment?”
Italy is home to a food tradition as rich as varied as the terrain itself; not one cuisine, but many. Yet, as John Last sets out in this Noema feature, it’s also home to a culinary purism that can verge on xenophobia — and considering the many-headed hydra of difficulties the nation is facing, it’s going to need to adapt or perish.
All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine.
Who is to blame when a self-driving car strikes and kills someone? That question animates Lauren Smiley’s feature about the first instance of such a tragedy. Smiley focuses on the aftermath, detailing the toll that the incident took on the Uber driver — or, rather, “operator” — behind the wheel of the car, and how powerful interests shaped her fate:
For years, researchers and self-driving advocates had anxiously prognosticated about how the public and the legal system would react to the first pedestrian death caused by a self-driving car.
The crash in Tempe ripped those musings into reality — forcing police, prosecutors, Uber, and Vasquez into roles both unwanted and unprecedented in a matter of seconds. At the scene that night, Vasquez stood at the center of a tragedy and a conundrum. She couldn’t yet fathom the part she was about to play in sorting out where the duties of companies and states and engineers end, and the mandate of the person inside the car begins.
“I’m sick over what happened,” Vasquez confided to the police as her mind spun in the hours after the crash. She said she felt awful for the victim’s family. She also grieved the event in a different way — as a loyal foot soldier of the self-driving revolution. “Oh God, this is going to be a setback for the whole industry,” Vasquez told Loehr. “Which is not what I want.”
At the time, Vasquez was an Uber defender. She had come a long way to this job. Over the previous few years, she’d acquired a dizzying track record of doing hidden work for highly visible companies — moderating grisly posts on Facebook, she says; tweeting about Dancing With the Stars from ABC’s Twitter; policing social media for Wingstop and Walmart. But her position with Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group had offered new stability, and after years of turmoil as a transgender woman navigating a hostile society, she was careful not to jeopardize it. Vasquez had even removed the box braids of colorful yarn that had defined her look since she was young. At a new job, she had come to think, “the less attention I bring to myself, the better.” During her nine months of work as an operator, the viselike grip of everything she’d endured as a child and teen and adult had slackened just a bit. As she trudged into her forties, Vasquez had felt her life, finally, relaxing into a kind of equilibrium.
Now, as she and Loehr sat in a victim services van near the Tempe bridge after midnight, grappling with Herzberg’s death, the vise was tightening again. She found herself asking, “Do I need a lawyer?”
Reporter Noelle Crombie spent a year at an alternative high school in Gresham, Oregon, documenting the impact of skyrocketing gun violence on the students, teachers, and support staff. The result is a four-part series, of which this article, about the shooting death of Dante McFallo — one of eight male students of color who have died in the last two and a half years — is the first entry:
So many deaths in such a short time infused teachers and staff with a sense of desperation to protect the young people who come through the door each day. As the Portland area records another year of unprecedented gun deaths, the race to keep students in school and away from harm took on new urgency even as violence approached the school itself.
The campus serves students from communities east of Interstate 205, an area with among the highest concentrations of poverty in Oregon and where in some neighborhoods, residents on average die five to 10 years sooner than the rest of Multnomah County.
Powerful forces buffet many of the school’s families. Decades of racist planning scattered Portland’s small Black population. Rising housing costs put home ownership out of reach for many. Limited economic opportunities make it difficult to ascend to the middle class.
Pandemic-induced declines in enrollment also exacted a heavy toll, plunging the student body from a high of 150 before the COVID-19 outbreak to about 90 this year. Some days, only a few dozen show up.
For students, Rosemary Anderson High School represents stability and safety, a respite from dangerous streets and chaotic home lives, its teachers and staff often doubling as surrogate parents.
This was especially true for Dante.
In the end, the school and its teachers could not keep him safe.
The reported essays that grabbed our editors’ attention this year demonstrate the craft of the form: immersing yourself in a new world and finding other people’s voices and expert knowledge to help tell a story. We have drawn from all our picks of the year, and also asked some of these talented writers for their own insights. Enjoy reading this eclectic range of pieces that report from around the world.
Melanie Challenger | Emergence Magazine | January 20, 2022 | 3,605 words
In this poignant and incisive essay at Emergence Magazine, Melanie Challenger grapples with grief and loss in her life and the irony of a general human ambivalence to death in the plant and animal kingdoms that has allowed us to harm the planet over time. Speaking of grief, my own life has changed exponentially since I first read and shared Challenger’s piece back in January. I met death face-to-face when it came calling in August, and like Challenger, “I didn’t leave that room the same person.” She’s right when she suggests that we hurt so much when someone dies because we are so very privileged to love: “Among the many lessons Hannah taught me that day, and in the days to come, was the significance and seriousness of grief in human lives — which is another way of saying the significance of love in our lives, because it is the fever of our attachment to one another that charges grief with its intolerable brilliancy.” Now, if only we could love the planet the way we love and grieve for one another: “When we are closer to the animals and plants that accompany us in this life, we share in their demise and in their aim to flourish, which raises the force of their deaths and softens the force of our own.” —Krista Stevens
“The Turbulent Brain” “by Morten Kringelbach and Gustavo Deco for Aeon: I was very struck by this article in Aeon which presented new theories and findings on non-equilibrium states, and how we respond to the external world. It made me think hard, which, for me, is the best thing a piece of work can do.
“Two Weeks in Tehran” by Azedah Moaveni for The London Review of Books: I’m an ideas-based writer rather than a reporter but I have huge admiration for quality reportage, and this is a piece that matters. And, as we now see, this article was prescient.
Sunaura Taylor and Astra Taylor | Lux | January 6, 2022 | 6,846 words
From a young age, we’re shown and sold the bucolic version of a farm, but in reality, a modern factory farm is a horrific place of reproductive violence on a massive scale. What would it mean to truly respect and honor animals? What will it take to radically shift the way we think about animal consumption, and to break up and abolish Big Meat and Big Milk? In this thought-provoking essay, Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor call for cross-species solidarity and make a socialist-feminist case for veganism. “We are all caught in the same racist, sexist, colonial, and ecologically catastrophic capitalist system,” they write. Vegans get a bad rap, but the authors urge people, especially those on the left, to join alongside them — and to expand their visions of democracy, reproductive choice, and egalitarianism to include pigs, cows, and other animals that we exploit for profit. This is an eye-opening piece making clear that the liberation of humans and the liberation of non-human animals are interconnected. I’ve returned to it numerous times this year during and after tough conversations with loved ones, and often think about it as I reconsider my own habits. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Lachlan Summers | Noema | July 14, 2022 | 3,699 words
Mexico City is built on soap. After the Lago de Texoco was drained (the coda to a centuries-long process of colonialism and development), what was left behind was a 70-meter deep layer of soil known as jaboncillo, “like moisture soap.” Jaboncillo is squishy, effectively hollow, and is no small reason why earthquakes in 1985 and 2017 so devastated the city. It also ensures that seismic damage continues to pervade the city’s landscape. As Lachlan Summers writes, CDMX “reflects the strangeness of the earth on which it sits. Footpaths undulate. Potholes suddenly appear in the street and begin consuming the road. A fissure slyly burrows under a building to do unseen work to its foundations.” Such instability also lives on in the psyches of residents, and Summers’ fascinating essay unpacks the staggering effect it has on Mexico City’s tocado, or “touched.” The tocado are beset by vertigo, loss of appetite, and a fear that one day the building they walk past every day will finally buckle and fall. Conventional medicine has no easy answer for them, dismissing such symptoms as a “cultural concept of distress,” but with insight and empathy Summers maps it as the inevitable result of human experience colliding with geologic time. Scales so disparate are never meant to overlap, of course — but as we’ve seen so many times, human intervention has a way of hastening end-time scenarios. —Peter Rubin
Lachlan Summers recommends two polar opposite reported essays from this year:
“Dead Man Living” by Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic: Bruenig’s account of the Alabama state’s repeated efforts to kill Alan Eugene Miller is a bleak story of incompetence, indifference, and the unending horror of state-sanctioned murder.
“Banana Nation” by Jasper Craven in The Baffler: A hysterical story about the insane worlds being built and destroyed by crypto-bros as they fight to convince everyone (including themselves) that crypto is the future.
Adam Fales | Dilettante Army | February 15th, 2022 | 5,200 words
Calling all English majors who love the horror genre and whose nation’s many ghosts keep them up at night — and anyone else with a yen for a great literary read. Adam Fales’s brilliant essay about the motif of the haunted house in American fiction and film comprises seven sections, which he calls “gables” in a nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fales casts a wide net for source material, incorporating Ari Aster’s movie Hereditary, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and many more works of art. Fales argues that the haunted house tale, a staple of U.S. culture for hundreds of years, “lets Americans concentrate the past’s wrongness,” from genocide to slavery to capitalist exploitation. Problem is, these stories have often “failed, if not outright refused, to heal the wounds they simultaneously abhor and celebrate.” What does a better haunted house tale look like? In the answer to that question might be kernels of a wider revolution in how we talk about and, indeed, stop reconstructing our collective sins. —Seyward Darby
Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | January 27, 2022 | 6,380 words
A delightful piece by the ever-witty Sophie Elmhirst, plucked from the murky depths of time — January 2022. Before the war in Ukraine. Before sky-rocketing bills. Early 2022 was a whole different landscape. Rereading this essay, I wondered how things had changed for Gary Hersham’s British real estate company, Beauchamp Estates: Russian Oligarchs, fond of buying up London properties, are now sanctioned, and interest rates in the U.K. (and around the world) have reached giddy heights. Despite this essay feeling like a time capsule, I still loved revisiting the indomitable Hersham. He has operated through ups and downs for decades; I bet he is doing just fine. Elmhirst tags along as he blusters his way through viewings, sales, interactions with his “fantastic” secretary, and many, many phone calls. It’s a riveting insight into a world where who you know absolutely matters, and Britain is sold as a brand. As Elmhirst eloquently puts it, “[a] slice of fictional England, a portal to aristocracy, yours for £10,000 a square foot.” While we glimpse Indian billionaires and Chinese industrialists, it is Hersham who remains the most fascinating character. He is another snapshot in time, confidently telling Elmhirst: “‘I always call it WhatsUp.’ As if the app had got it wrong.” —Carolyn Wells
