This story by Lynzy Billing is a stunning piece of journalism. Billing, a British journalist with Afghan and Pakistani roots, returned to Afghanistan as an adult to investigate what happened to her birth parents. Private investigators laughed at her or wanted nothing to do with it, so she decided to dig into her past herself. Over the next several years, Billing’s reporting shifted; what was initially a personal journey to learn about her origins became something else entirely: an investigation into night raids, or top-secret, CIA-backed operations meant to target insurgents.
With unprecedented on-the-ground access to survivors, eyewitnesses, and even fighters themselves, Billing tracked hundreds of night raids by one of the four “Zero Units,” or squads of U.S.-trained Afghan special forces soldiers. (These are also known as 02s.) With the help of Muhammad Rehman Shirzad, a forensic pathologist from Nangarhar province, over the course of her reporting Billing has identified 452 civilians killed in the 02’s raids over four years. But with “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy” being a common practice — and those in power ultimately not caring about civilian casualties — the full civilian death tally for this 02, plus the other Zero Units, is likely much higher. Billing’s conversations over three years with 02 soldiers like Baseer and Hadi are particularly riveting: “I’d come to see them as flawed soldiers who, in their way, were trying to pull some good out of their lot by sharing what they know,” she writes, “even if it meant exposing their role in killing innocents.” But really, the entire piece is extraordinary. I was gripped until the final line.
According to Baseer, Hadi is the joker of the two. He squeezed his friend’s shoulder reassuringly, grinning at him. “Don’t worry, she’s not American,” he said in Pashto. In an attempt to reassure them, I tell them I am English, not American, and of Afghan and Pakistani descent. Hadi smiled weakly, but it was clear he was unconvinced.
Both soldiers had obtained leave passes under false pretenses to meet me. The relationship between journalist and soldier seemed to offer them a space where they could discuss their actions — even boast about them when marveling at their superior training and autonomy — because I think they knew I wasn’t going to turn them in or use their stories as leverage.
Baseer’s family had left Afghanistan when he was 3, during the same fractious conflict that killed my own family. Eventually, his family settled in a refugee camp in Peshawar in Pakistan. Growing up, he considered both the Americans and the Soviets infidels, but he later came to realize that the Taliban have their own cruelties.
It requires mettle to be an investigative reporter, and the best in the business channel that fortitude into stories worthy of the subject matter — stories written with bravery, precision, and empathy. Our picks on this list, as well as a few suggested by the writers themselves, examine sexual violence, drug addiction, and government policy that destroys families, among other topics. It’s dark stuff, but in the hands of these writers, the stories sing. The tunes may be mournful, but they’re also gorgeous. You’ll want to listen until the final notes.
Janelle Nanos | The Boston Globe Magazine | July 28, 2022 | 11,329 words
“Even if many of us never find them again, they may never really be lost,” writes Janelle Nanos about our memories. For most of her life, Kate Price had felt, deep in her body, that she had been wronged when she was a child. When she met Nanos in 2012, Price had already spent decades interrogating her own memory and history, but together — as journalist and survivor — they embarked on a journey to make sense of Price’s childhood, and to find evidence that she was sexually abused by her father and maternal grandfather, and sold for sex to truckers who drove through Pennsylvania. It’s a challenging read about child abuse, long-lasting trauma, memory, and family, but also a remarkably told story 10 years in the making about a woman who risked everything to discover the truth, and who defied the odds and has managed to build a happy life. The piece plays eerie visual tricks on the reader’s eye, from Erin Clark’s double-exposure photos to subtly moving layouts that make you question what you’re seeing; this imagery, combined with audio clips, take you deep into this incredible story. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Janelle Nanos recommends two reads about family, loss, and memory:
This horrific story about a UK hospital’s failure to save the life of a young child — written by the child’s mother — was for me a reminder that it’s important to trust your own instincts when facing a medical crisis in order to ensure that your loved ones get the care they need.
This essay made me smile and weep, and brought on a cascade of other emotions as I thought about the prospect of what I’d do if facing a similar challenge with my own children. It was written by the mother of a child diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease who decided to celebrate her with a lifetime’s worth of birthdays.
Caitlin Dickerson | The Atlantic | August 8th, 2022 | 28,600 words
In my original blurb for this story, when it was featured in Longreads’ Top 5 newsletter, I wrote that Caitlin Dickerson’s “examination of the Trump administration’s family separation policy is a reporting tour de force and an American horror story that should be read and studied as long as the republic stands.” I remain steadfast in this belief. Assign it in journalism classes, government seminars, law courses, social work degree programs. Every American should know this story and grapple with its devastating contents. And, lest we act like we’re past the cruelty that Dickerson so masterfully unveils, family separation is still happening. Read this story, then use it to fuel demands that policymakers and law enforcement cease family separation once and for all. —Seyward Darby
Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud | New Lines Magazine | April 27, 2022 | 7,881 words
This piece instantly came to mind when I thought about investigative reporting. It’s haunted me. A harrowing read, it begins with a description of the videos that inspired Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud to start the investigation: two men, in broad daylight, executing 41 civilians and dumping the bodies in a pre-dug pit prepared with car tires for incineration. Detailed vividly, I warn it contains upsetting descriptions of violence. The callousness of these videos stood out for Üngör and Shahhoud, even though, as researchers of mass violence and genocide in Syria and elsewhere, they have watched thousands of hours of distressing footage. For previous research, they had created a Facebook profile of a young, pro-regime woman from an Alawite middle-class family — “Anna” — and used her to interview dozens of Assad’s perpetrators. After narrowing their scope with on-the-ground research, they scoured Facebook with this profile, finally recognizing the main shooter from the videos in a photo. Friending him on Facebook messenger, “Anna” leads him on a catfish dance for months before finally approaching the topic of the massacre and convincing him to confess that he “killed a lot of people.” Tracking down a killer and getting him to admit the soul-destroying acts he has committed is an impressive feat. But it took a toll, and to learn more about what Üngör and Shahhoud went through during the investigation, listen to The Guardian‘s podcast series “Searching for the Shadow Man” — they could not keep “Anna” alive for much longer. —Carolyn Wells
Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod | ESPN | April 11, 2022 | 31,519 words
There are few sports scandals more horrifying than Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky being indicted in 2011 for the sexual abuse of dozens of young boys. It killed the program’s reputation; it led to the ouster of legendary head coach Joe Paterno, a man revered in the town of State College and beyond. But decades before, the Penn State football system met another monster in its midst. Todd Hodne, a young and aggressive defenseman, was arrested for rape in 1978. Paterno ousted him from the locker room, but the end of Hodne’s football career didn’t mean the end of his atrocities. With patience and empathy, Lavigne and Junod piece together the saga in an investigation that’s something more than a magazine story. For the women who crossed Hodne’s ruinous path, it’s an exorcism, a defiant testimonial that desecration doesn’t have to mean destruction. For the reader, it’s a crucial reminder that the sports world has a way of coddling even its outcasts. And for the journalists who searched and listened and wrote this outstanding work, it’s yet another laurel in their already legendary careers. Between the ongoing true-crime podcast wave and Netflix phenomena like Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, it’s clear that our society has developed a lurid fixation with serially violent men. “Untold” will help you remember that every voyeuristic frisson comes at the price of another person’s life. —Peter Rubin
Tom Junod on his favorite investigation of the year:
Full disclosure: The people who wrote this are my friends and colleagues at ESPN. But my admiration for this story about NFL owner Daniel Snyder goes well beyond the personal. Simply put: The question that the writers started with was provocative enough — with all of Snyder’s baggage, why doesn’t the NFL just get rid of him? But the answer was, literally, jaw-dropping: Snyder remains an NFL owner because he’s let it be known that he’s investigated all the other owners. I mean, when I read that, I’ll admit that I was like, “Holy cow — these guys better have the goods.” That they had the goods is proven by all the disclosures that keep following in the original story’s wake, and the fact that Snyder is putting the Washington Commanders up for sale. But even more telling is the experience of reading the story. Sure, it has all the investigative revelations promised by its rather ungainly digital title. But it’s also an expert exercise in melding investigative and narrative journalism, one that, by its end, convinces readers that they know very little about how rich and powerful people live — about what they value and what they might be willing to destroy.
Seth Harp | Rolling Stone | September 4, 2022 | 5,922words
They’re young, healthy members of the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Bragg. So why are far too many of them dying by accidental fentanyl overdose? That’s the question that Seth Harp set out to answer in this deeply reported piece for Rolling Stone, but he ended up discovering much more about the needless reasons Fort Bragg soldiers are dying while stateside, despite a lack of transparency from top brass at the military installation. Is it the nature of the work at a place that houses mostly “male soldiers in combat-arms units”? Could the personality traits that make for elite soldiers make them more likely to dismiss the risks of drug use? Could the horrors of serving in Afghanistan and the recent U.S. withdrawal have spawned trauma that causes soldiers to self-medicate? In this unflinching piece, Harp does the work to try to find out and call the U.S. Army to account. Aside from the accidental overdose crisis killing soldiers at Fort Bragg, perhaps Harp’s most alarming discovery is about the most common way that soldiers stationed there die: “Forty-one Fort Bragg soldiers took their own lives in 2020 and 2021, making suicide the leading cause of death. A spokesman for the Army, Matthew Leonard, confirmed that no other base has ever recorded a higher two-year suicide toll.” —Krista Stevens
Ten years ago, Jen Hensel lost her daughter, Avielle Richman, in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty first graders and six adults were murdered. That shooting should have been a singular event: a transformative moment that should have led to stricter gun control laws and a national coming together to make schools safer. While some legislation has passed since then, it’s certainly not enough. For NPR, Tovia Smith tells Hensel’s story in the years after Avielle’s death: how she and her husband, Jeremy Richman, set up a foundation focused on neuroscience research and violence prevention; how she has coped with the death of Richman, who died by suicide in 2019; and how — despite it all — she has found some happiness with her two kids, Owen and Imogen. Smith’s portrait of Hensel is devastating and emotional; the piece forces you to imagine her family’s pain. “You have to imagine it,” Richman once said. To face the horror of gun violence — not turn away from it.
But embedded in every such joy is perpetual pain. It’s no longer the raw, relentless kind that made it hard to stand up 10 years ago, Hensel says. But it’s still sharp enough to blindside you and bring you to your knees.
Hensel’s dear friend Francine Wheeler, who also lost her 6-year-old, Ben, at Sandy Hook, agrees. They share an aversion to the word “closure” and bristle at the very idea of a “10th anniversary” — and the implied expectations around where they should be in the arc of their grief.
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.
