In this devastating personal essay, Iranian Canadian activist and author Hamed Esmaeilion remembers his wife Parisa and daughter Reera, who died in Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 in January 2020. The plane, which took off from Tehran and was meant to stop over in Kyiv, was shot down minutes later by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Esmaeilion tells the beautiful story of how he and Parisa met — at dentistry school in Iran’s University of Tabriz in the mid-1990s — and how they came of age and fell in love while living under an oppressive fundamentalist regime. After having Reera, they moved to Toronto in 2010 to live a new life. This is a powerful and moving piece about love, loss, and looking for justice.
I fell into the arms of our mothers and Parisa’s sister. Already, DNA from Parisa’s grandparents had been used to identify her body; my parents’ DNA was used to identify Reera’s. That night, in my mother-in-law’s home, I imagined my wife and daughter packing their suitcases, adjusting items to make room for Reera’s new books and dolls. Sometime between their departure from this room and my arrival, their lives had ended and, in effect, so had mine.
How do you make sense of what’s senseless? At Orion Magazine, Zarina Zabrisky reflects on what she saw and experienced while reporting on the war in Ukraine in 2022.
After nine months of traveling around Ukraine, I have come to understand that war feels inconceivable in its entirety. Too epic to contemplate as whole. So I have instead begun to seek the truth about existence during wartime by examining familiar objects snatched by explosions from their habitual context. As reality shatters into a million senseless shards, the meaning of one’s life is rearranged and reassessed midflight, constantly changing.
You don’t forget your first bombing. The stench of things burning. For a moment, all your senses are overwhelmed. Then, it’s scarily mundane.
Every week, we highlight our favorite stories in our weekly Longreads Top 5, and at year’s end we spend much of December reflecting on the pieces that most stuck with us.But our readers have long been a source of inspiration as well, sharing their favorite stories on social media with the #longreads hashtag and even emailing or DMing us recommendations.So last year we made the Longreads community part of our annual Best Of package, reaching out to them to see what stories they most enjoyed. We’re delighted to keep our newest tradition going, and to showcase eight gems from the year that our readers loved — along with their own words why.
Sheena Dare Romero | Delacorte Review | October 11, 2022 | 7,882 words
A moving study of the mutability of the idea of home; how the word itself can ring so differently from place to place. This piece has such an interesting take on race in America, both from afar — when the author spent time in Germany — and from deep within, at the snowbound confines of a university campus in the middle of Vermont. Romero deals with it in such a tactile, subtle way that I felt like I was coming to the subject completely fresh, feeling her confusion, hope, and frustration almost viscerally. —Rohan Kamicheril
Jamie Loftus | Gawker | May 24, 2022 | 2,550 words
Loftus’ essay is ostensibly about a sporting event, but ultimately, it’s a grotesque glimpse into the psyche of America at a particular point in time. Loftus’ roots are in comedy, so it’s also a darkly funny piece of writing, but it never loses its focus on the violence and excess of the event. When the essay came out, Loftus shared it on social media and joked, “please say no one has done this before,” obviously referencing Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” This may draw the ire of MFA lit bros, but I’ll just say it; I like her essay better than Thompson’s. The description of the winning horse is chilling, beautiful, and unforgettable: “After he won, Rich Strike bit a pony over and over, taking what any underdog believes should be their reward, the flesh of their competitors and oppressors served raw. Instead, he got a slap to the face and a rumbling on Twitter, one almost immediately buried by Mother’s Day photos, which got buried by essays about How We Discuss Abuse, which got buried by news of three mass shootings.” —Krista Diamond
Jonathan Haidt | The Atlantic | October 11, 2022 | 8,362 words
I’ve watched with growing horror how divided the U.S. has become, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. As someone who grew up in an age before the internet, it’s hard to understand how this happened. When I read this article, it seemed like everything fell into place. The Atlantic probably does the best job in all of the media in terms of covering the ramifications of social media on our society, and this was their best story of the year. —David Hirning
Rozina Ali | New York Times Magazine | November 12, 2022 | 11,674 words
A harrowing, intimate story with incredible details. Most importantly, it connected one baby’s tragic journey with the biggest stakes of the U.S. in Afghanistan, a year after the withdrawal. — Jonathan Guyer
Elaine Hsieh Chou | The Cut | March 24, 2022 | 2,625 words
I loved Elaine Hsieh Chou’s essay — it’s an unflinching, powerful examination of the writer’s experiences with racism and misogyny, and it speaks to the fear and rage felt by so many Asian American women, myself included. It confronts the cultural forces that continue to feed anti-Asian hate and reminds me of the power and ferocity of our collective voice. —Yuxi Lin
Marissa Evans | Los Angeles Times | March 25, 2022 | 2,603 words
Marissa Evans’ essay, written in the thick of her grief after her father passed suddenly at the beginning of this year, is a time capsule of her father’s dreams, which included his children’s prosperity, a refreshed hairline, and something increasingly rare: living a long, healthy life as a Black man. As the life expectancy for Black men shrinks, we continue to witness even the monied and privileged among them leaving this earth too soon. Evans writes: “My father’s death, particularly as an older Black man, is considered an inevitability we must live with. I can accept my father’s death, but I refuse to accept that the number of Black men we are losing is normal.” —Ko Bragg
Jem Bartholomew | The Economist | July 28th, 2022 | 4,795 words
This investigation into Britain’s big cat hunters is thoughtful, surprising, and, at turns, oddly touching. Jem Bartholomew’s adroit exposition of his subject, Frank Turnbridge, left a lasting effect on me. When reading this article, I felt like I was traipsing through woodlands and winding country roads with Frank and Jem, nervously anticipating the impossible. This is not an investigation into big cat hunters. It is an investigation into those obsessed with the ever-encroaching beast of urbanization. —Christian Hill
Help us fund our next story
We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.
I still think about Jason Fagone and Vauhini Vara‘s excellent pieces about AI and death from last year, which explore the possibilities of interacting with deceased loved ones in written form via GPT-3 technology. This story by Charlotte Jee, about speaking to or video-chatting with our beloved dead, takes this even further. Experimenting with software created by HereAfter AI, Jee talks with digital simulations of her parents, who are very much alive. “Grief tech” like HereAfter AI uses a lot of data — hours of conversations with subjects about their lives and memories — to create virtual versions of people. Jee finds it all “undeniably weird” and ethically complex. But ultimately, she knows she’s only human: “If technology might help me hang onto them, is it so wrong to try?”
And what if that person is not, in fact, dead? There’s little to stop people from using grief tech to create virtual versions of living people without their consent—for example, an ex. Companies that sell services powered by past messages are aware of this possibility and say they will delete a person’s data if that individual requests it. But companies are not obliged to do any checks to make sure their technology is being limited to people who have consented or died. There’s no law to stop anyone from creating avatars of other people, and good luck explaining it to your local police department. Imagine how you’d feel if you learned there was a virtual version of you out there, somewhere, under somebody else’s control.
Courtney Shea takes a look into the industry of Christmas movies by interviewing a master of the genre. A light, but oh-so-seasonal, Q&A.
Falling for Christmas was the most-watched movie on Netflix for more than a week after it came out. Are you a guy who pays close attention to the ratings?
Every morning I would come onto set of the project I was working on and ask, “Does anyone here have the number one Netflix movie in the world? Anyone? Raise your hand? Oh, that’s right—I do.” I did that for nine days straight and drove everyone crazy, but it really is absurd.
“What happens when the child of a slave writes over text that has been digitally archived?” In this powerful essay that’s part of Scalawag‘s grief & other loves series, Victoria Newton Ford reflects on and pushes back against the media record that continues to dehumanize her mother, Tamara Mitchell-Ford, years after her death.
I’d believed for years the presence haunting our lives was a specter dwelling in the yard. But this isn’t a ghost story. The abjection my mother endured was organized and funded by the city—from the police officers, to the judges, to the reporters who circled our house, hungry to add to their narratives. Tamara’s humiliation and punishment were profitable and entertaining. It was made possible by structures and a paradigm of surveillance fortified by antiblackness, which claimed her life—as an ex-wife, an addict, a prisoner, a main character, my mother. None of these were even stable identities for her to claim.
A gentle love note to Texas, Elizabeth Bruenig’s essay takes time to reflect on her family leaving the state, after more than 200 years of history. A thoughtful look at heritage, community, and belonging.
I wanted to call and tell them to turn around and go back, but it wouldn’t have been any use. They wanted to be closer to me and my children on the East Coast. People can be heliotropic, their faces turning toward the future the way flowers lean to the sun. They were always going to follow their grandchildren, and I was the one who’d spirited them north in the first place. I had been the one to end our family’s history in Texas; they had only been late to accept it.
