This is a beautiful, lyrical essay about coming to terms with death. An enthralling read, from beginning to end, it is a reminder of the joy and pain of a life lived on the edge.
When the rescue helicopter lands, I rush to embrace Jean-François and kiss his cold face, until the emergency team forces me to let go. It’s the second time I’m kissing my dead partner. Eight years earlier, I had insisted that I should be taken, by ambulance, from my hospital bed to the cemetery to attend Erhard’s funeral.
Susana Ferreira reports on a digital nomad village that promised integration with the locals. Instead, she finds a somewhat awkward community with little meaningful interaction with the local Madeirans. Can such villages ever really work?
Established digital nomad hot spots, like Chiang Mai, Thailand, or Canggu, Bali, tend to be bubbles where wealthy and overwhelmingly white foreigners cluster at coffee shops, coworking spaces, and other businesses that cater to their wants and comforts in English. If he built a destination for digital nomads in small-town Madeira, Hall thought, things would be different. Itinerant remote workers could live just like locals, alongside locals: They could reside in the same neighborhoods, eat at the same restaurants, and mingle at gatherings coordinated by a “community manager.”
A great profile accomplishes the nearly impossible by making you feel like you truly know someone you’ve never met. It’s a feat of empathy and insight, the kind of alchemy that turns reporting into rapport. The five examples here span all manner of tone and subject, from victims of gun violence to digital charlatans, but they share one very important trait: They lodged in our editors’ minds long after the reading was done.
John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | October 24, 2022 | 8,582 words
“It had been 100 days since Caitlyne hid in a classroom, listening to a stranger slaughter 19 fourth-graders and two teachers across the hallway at Robb Elementary,” writes John Woodrow Cox. “Caitlyne knew them all.” I revisited Cox’s profile of 10-year-old Caitlyne Gonzales, one of the survivors of the school shooting in Uvalde, on a week when I was touring public elementary schools, since my 4-year-old will be entering kindergarten next fall. As I visited classrooms, I pictured my daughter sitting on a rug, listening to the teacher reading a book; I imagined her coloring at her desk. My eyes well up as I read details about Caitlyne and her classmates’ lives: the things they like, the things they do. Watching TikToks, doing cartwheels. The things that 10-year-olds are supposed to do. Cox does what he does best: He immerses us in Caitlyne’s day-to-day life and, with care and respect, tells an incredibly moving, human story of loss and resilience. So much of this story hurts to read, particularly lines that reveal the impossible reality and trauma our children face in a country that values guns over their lives. Caitlyne shouldn’t have to wear a lanyard with the photos of her dead friends. She shouldn’t know more about ballistic windows and bulletproof backpacks before knowing how to ride a bike without training wheels. She shouldn’t have to travel to the nation’s capital to beg this country’s leadership to do something to make our schools safer. (“I’m gonna go meet Joe Byron,” she says at one point, which is at first funny, but also deeply disturbing.) Caitlyne should be playing, learning — not fighting for action and accountability. It has now been 212 days since the Robb Elementary School shooting. This is just a reminder so we don’t forget. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
“The Remarkable Brain of a Carpet Cleaner Who Speaks 24 Languages” by Jessica Contrera for The Washington Post: My colleague Jessica Contrera’s story on a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages was such a delight. Many reporters would’ve seen it as an 800-word feature, but Jess went so much deeper, revealing the complex person behind the extraordinary talent. It never feels saccharine or belonging in the genre of manufactured, feel-good stories that make us cringe. The profile was often painful and poignant — moments made the joyous ones feel earned.
Christian Wallace | Texas Monthly | May 11, 2022 | 6,127 words
I am fascinated by vital elders. I want to be a vital elder. So when I see fascinating profiles of “old” folks kicking proverbial butt, I am there for it. Boots O’Neal was 89 at the time Christian Wallace wrote this fun, deeply reported profile of a cowboy who just loves to go to work every day, decades after many would have hung up their spurs to sit on the porch full-time and tell tall tales. Boots has a roundup of stories, that’s for sure. But by getting up before first light, riding a horse, and moving ornery bulls for a living at the end of his ninth decade, he is also the story. Wallace does a masterful job, not just in painting a portrait of Boots’ working life, but into capturing precisely what drives Boots to do the job he’s loved for the past seven decades: “’There’s not very many people in the world who love their job,’ Boots and Nelda’s daughter, Lauri Colbert, told me later. ‘I mean, people might like their job, they might tolerate it, but he loves it. When they give him the weekend off, he’s kind of mad about it.’” This devotion to his craft, coupled with the deep knowledge of ranching he’s accumulated over a stunningly long career — possibly longer than any cowpuncher alive — has propelled Boots to a level of fame practically unheard of for a working cowboy. —Krista Stevens
“‘She Made Us Happy’: The All-Star Dreams of Uvalde’s Biggest José Altuve Fan” by Roberto José Andrade Franco for ESPN: It’s been difficult to even read stories about Uvalde, so I can’t imagine how painful this piece was to write. Roberto’s profile of 10-year-old Tess Mata is an incredible tribute to a young life taken too soon. It’s also more than that. By exploring historical events that shaped this part of South Texas and the American West, Roberto helps us — not make sense — but contextualize the racism and violence that continue to shape and shatter our lives.
Kerry Howley | New York Magazine | May 9, 2022 | 7,800 words
I knew as soon as I read this piece in May that I would pick it for Longreads’ Best of 2022. Not because the subject, Marjorie Dannenfelser, is from my hometown, went to the same university I did, and got married in the Catholic church attached to my middle school. All that made me feel eerily close to the piece, sure, but what makes Kerry Howley’s work worthy of inclusion here is that she uses a magazine profile as a vehicle for challenging the tropes and omissions, the lies and distortions of America’s anti-abortion movement. “If we are by now accustomed to discussing ulterior motives and the well-documented history of legislators using abortion rhetoric to consolidate the right,” Howley notes, “we speak less of how the rhetoric works: by triggering in its subjects a stomach-churning horror.” And: “Almost all social movements work to erase context contrary to the cause. In this case, the context is a woman.” Howley shows how Dannenfelser, a powerful, single-minded activist, orchestrated a generation’s worth of horror and erasure, leading directly to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. —Seyward Darby
Sean Williams | Outside | September 20, 2022 | 6,616 words
There is something primal about skipping stones. See some rocks near a body of water and I’ll bet you chuck one across it, as millions have done before you, all the way back to competitions in Ancient Greece. The subject of this profile, Kurt Steiner, has tapped into this deeply embedded part of our psyche. Stone skipping, he says, has an “undeveloped natural purity, a refuge against the consumerist, plutocratic, kleptocratic, f*cking destroy-and-build-up-everything mentality.” In this beautiful piece, Sean Williams attempts to find out more about Steiner and this ancient sport. It was not an easy quest: Kurt lives in a cabin with no central heating or shower, craps in a bucket, and goes weeks without cell or internet coverage. It took Williams a year to reach Steiner via email, two years to set a time to meet him, and an intense few minutes to persuade U.S. border guards he was entering the country to interview a stone skipper. It was worth it. Williams immerses himself in Steiner’s world, spending days with him, skipping stones until his elbow throbs, talking for 12 hours at a time. He discovers a fascinating character for whom stone skipping is a respite from mental illnesses, love, and loss. The time invested in getting to know Steiner is apparent in every word. A respectful, thoughtful look at someone who has found a way to step out of society as we know it — and produced some record-breaking throws to boot. —Carolyn Wells
This was going to be a story about trekking in the western reaches of Guyana, about beautiful waterfalls and indigenous people living in an area where the border with Venezuela is a mushy and unimportant thing. Then I found myself travelling with a pair of influencers, so instead it was going to be about what it’s like to witness, up close, the rise of their industry and the death of mine. It was going to be about content and clicks and why any of that matters in a place with no electricity, let alone WiFi.
But then something weird happened, and we all almost died together, so now it’s really a story about that.
Madeleine Aggeler | GQ | May 5, 2022 | 3,054 words
What was the year of the scammer? Was it 2016, when a scammer became president of the United States? 2018, when the Anna Delvey saga became known? 2019, when twin documentaries about the Fyre Fest fiasco landed on competing streaming platforms? Or has it truly been 2022, when a man named Brian Johnson amassed a following of millions on TikTok and Instagram by selling supplements and espousing an “ancestral lifestyle” that includes eating a pound of raw beef liver a day — only to be brought low in December after his staggering (and obvious) steroid habit was revealed? It’s a trick question: Thanks to the attention economy, every year is the year of the scammer! But at least 2022 brought us Madeleine Aggeler’s treat of a profile of Johnson, a man who hasn’t seen a shirt or a parenting manual in years. (I’m not saying that boxing lessons in the living room is bad parenting; I’m saying that calling them “Savage Liver Boys” and filming them eating organ meats is maybe worth a think.) Be clear: This is not a history-bending profile. It is, however, a wildly entertaining one. And more importantly, it’s a valuable reminder that social media isn’t a dumpster fire just because Elon Musk bought Twitter; it’s a dumpster fire because the only thing it rewards is extremity. We’ll see if that’s changed by the end of 2023, the year of the scammer. —Peter Rubin
Moriah Wilson was a champion in gravel bike racing. Her shocking murder left the community devasted. Rowan Moore Gerety takes a look back at her impressive life, before its untimely end.
Back in Mo’s childhood room, beyond the door with the macaroni nameplate, Karen picks out cherished flannel shirts to give to Moriah’s cousins, bike outfits and cute jeans with holes in them for Cash. Karen and Moriah wore the same size, and Moriah’s scent is threaded through Karen’s dresser drawers now too. Each day, she chooses something to pick up and breathe in. “Sometimes it makes me cry, and sometimes it makes me smile,” she said, seeming, as we spoke on the phone in October, to do a bit of both. “I do wonder,” she said, “what’s it gonna be like when the scent is gone?”
Eighty years ago, Walter Springs, a 24-year-old Black man from Colorado, died on a barroom floor in a small Texas town in the segregated South, shot by a military police officer named Martin Walker. Springs had been a star boxer and popular student at Regis College (now University), but left Denver in 1941 to join the Army. He never made it to battle.
For decades, his family was in the dark about his death. “What the Springs family wanted, more than anything, was to know why? Why did Walter Springs die the way he did that day in 1942?” 5280 journalist Robert Sanchez digs into what happened that night; his investigation eventually leads him to answers in court-martial transcripts in a folder tucked away in a military archive.
It was vindicating to know her family’s stories had been correct. Their assumptions about the night in Texas, Walter’s father’s intuition, were right all along.
There was a fragility here, too, Springs-Levert thought. What if she didn’t have the family album with her uncle’s photographs and papers? What if Campbell hadn’t been asked to research Springs’ life in 2020? What if the fire at the National Personnel Records Center had destroyed the transcripts of Martin Walker’s court-martial proceedings?
At Oxford American, David Ramsey writes a braided ode to the forever unknowable Hank Williams, a country music legend and violent drunk, who died of alcoholism in 1953, before he turned 30 years old.
But he did not live. And so he is ageless, of another time. Hank with his guitar in black-and-white photos. He was signed up to be a movie star by MGM but he no-showed and was canned. He remains pure, for the purists. He remains unknowable. Storytellers and historians hunt through old articles and radio promotional materials. They double check state records and rifle through legal proceedings and re-read the transcripts of interviews from decades past with anyone who might have crossed his path. They gather the whisper of facts and conjectures from the archives. But this was before we knew everything about everyone. This was before we’d figured out how to preserve and catalog every bit of data about every little thing. A legend forms when much is lost.
I am not here to knock down any statues, just here to tell you the truth, as best as I can make it out from an imperfect record: When the man who sang these songs lived, and started drinking to cool whatever deep harm was within him, he could be a monster.
As part of Best of Longreads, our annual labor of love, we pored over all the stories we’ve picked in 2022 to create these year-end lists. The following features all embody the strong voice and excellent writing that made us fall in love with narrative journalism. Sweeping, hard-hitting, and emotional, each immerses us in a time and a place, introducing us to a fascinating set of characters that make for unforgettable stories.
Similar to last year, we asked our featured authors to share their favorite stories across categories. You’ll see their recommendations alongside ours in this list and others to come this month. Enjoy!
Annie Hylton | The Walrus | February 28, 2022 | 8,160 words
Ayoob Mohammed, an Uyghur man, left his family in Xinjiang to find a better life. While waiting for a U.S. visa in Pakistan in September 2001, he traveled into Afghanistan — and found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sold to the U.S. for bounty as an alleged terrorist, he was held in Guantánamo Bay for four years, and then exonerated. He and a few other Uyghur detainees resettled in Albania, the only country that offered to take them. But 16 years later, he is still trying to prove he’s innocent, and is unable to reunite with his wife and children in Montreal as Canada continues to reject his application for permanent residency. Annie Hylton weaves an intimate story detailing Mohammed’s journey into a larger piece about the complex global politics among nations and the “invisible forces” that move people like pawns. For most of us, family separation and love across borders are abstract ideas, but Hylton’s narrative of one man’s life, told with precision and empathy, makes for an emotional and devastating read. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Jeff Weiss | Los Angeles Magazine | Jan 13, 2022 | 6,842 words
Categorizing a piece like this can feel like an impossible compromise. Jeff Weiss’ gut punch of a story about the killing of Los Angeles rapper Drakeo spills across nearly every journalistic genre imaginable. It’s deeply reported and essayistic, a nearly inescapable combination when the reporter in question is also an eyewitness. It’s a dispassionate profile written from within the clinch of a genuine years-long friendship. But ultimately, only the word “feature” can accommodate the many ways it plumbs facts and grief with equal acuity. When Drakeo rose to prominence in the city that put gangsta rap on the map, it was because he was the herald of something unapologetically new. But when 113 people ambushed him backstage at an outdoor music festival last December, it was because of something much, much larger. “To begin to understand why it happened,” Weiss writes, “is to grapple with the most corrosive aspects of humanity: the need for revenge and hatred of the other; our capacity for rage, ego, and jealousy. It is the boomerang of racism, police corruption, and the worship of violence. Yet it is also a condition of the spiritual and material poverty that infects most aspects of modern American life. Only here, under a deranged spell of nihilism, greed, and lust for fame, can all the codes and compasses that once governed us become meaningless.” This story won’t make you feel good. It certainly won’t restore your faith in human nature. It might, though, help you understand why an artist like Drakeo moved the way he did. Why he refused to stop fighting, even while marked for death by both the state and the street. Why he stepped out of the car that cold December night, knowing what awaited him — if not immediately, then still far too soon. —Peter Rubin
Mitch Moxley | Esquire | June 2, 2022 | 5,756 words
Humboldt is a farm town of about 5,900 in central Saskatchewan, Canada. In Humboldt, hockey is a religion. In Humboldt, everyone is proud of The Broncos, the junior hockey team. It was on April 6, 2018, that a lorry crashed into the Broncos’ team bus, killing 14, and leaving the close-knit town devasted. In this essay, Mitch Moxley, while still telling the story of the day of the crash, focuses on what happened in the years afterward: A community left in shock, families grieving, and a high-profile court case where the driver of the lorry, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, is charged with 29 counts of dangerous driving. It’s a heartwrenching read, but Moxley is careful and compassionate in his portrayal of the different paths grief can take you down. One father who lost a son advocates for Sidhu to be deported to his home country of India after his prison sentence. Another father forgives him, writing letters to support his stay in Canada. Moxley’s description of Sidhu meeting the man who forgave him — down on one knee, sobbing — will make your emotions somersault. There is no clear right or wrong here, whether to forgive or not. Grief has no clear answers. A powerful essay that looks beneath the surface of a tragedy, examining the complicated tangle of issues beneath: forgiveness, family, community, immigration, unfair work practices, and tremendous loss. —Carolyn Wells
Paul Fischer | Hidden Compass | January 11, 2022 | 4,985 words
It’s the rich, cinematic detail in Paul Fischer’s “Gazawood Dreams” that draws you in and holds you captivated. It’s the story of two Palestinian brothers who, despite ongoing violence around their home in the Gaza Strip, just want to make films. Fischer introduces us to Tarzan and Arab within the ruins of Gaza City’s al-Nasr movie theatre, the site where the brothers’ cinematic dreams were born. It’s been shut down since 1987. “They called their studio Gazawood. Its walls plastered in collages of images, Gazawood was like a psychological and emotional bunker, sheltering them from the fighter jets roaring overhead, the whipcrack of rockets firing in the distance, the sectarian arguments in the febrile streets.” Fischer paints more than just a portrait of two brothers trying to make films in a war zone, taking us from hardship to hope and from Gaza to Cannes as Tarzan and Arab persevere, despite violence and overwhelming government oppression. —Krista Stevens
Paul Fischer recommends three pieces that moved him in 2022:
Jonathan Tjarks was dying when he wrote this. We were more or less the same age. He had a young child, I have a young child. I loved reading him, and I loved listening to him — on podcasts and elsewhere. This is a final story about the author’s own death, his fatherhood, his faith.
Peanuts is foundational to me and many, many other. This excavates and illuminates the strip’s depth and beauty, in such an intelligent, insightful, precise way.
Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker | March 28, 2022 | 10,600 words
When I think about what connects Rachel Aviv’s diverse body of writing, one word comes to mind: complexity. She isn’t afraid of it. She confronts the knotty, the nuanced, and the murky through reporting and language. To my mind, this is what it means to do a story justice. Aviv was true to form with this feature about a teenager who escapes an abusive parent, gets a full ride to an Ivy League school, and eventually wins a Rhodes Scholarship — only to have her success and resilience challenged by the very entities that had celebrated her. The story shines a glaring light on the ways that powerful institutions define, use, and abuse individual suffering. Calling it thought-provoking is putting it too mildly: This story is infuriating. —Seyward Darby
Rachel Aviv recommends a piece that made her think:
“How To Recover from a Happy Childhood” by Rivka Galchen for The New Yorker is an extraordinary essay about childhood, grief, nostalgia, and replicating the ways of our parents. In a mysterious and delicate way, the essay made me feel (without making any claims to be providing advice) that I had a better grasp on what it means to be a good parent.”
