If the racket known as “SEO optimization” has ever felt like an affront to coherence and language—and who are we kidding, of course it has—then Mia Sato’s reporting for The Verge will send you screaming for the longest novel you can find. Why? AI. Of course AI. At least the story is as hilarious as it is dread-inducing.
But for the online store, AI-generated text weaves in and out of shoppers’ perception. Recently, she demonstrated updating the page for a cannabis-themed apron and using the Shopify AI text generator for help. She added keywords like “pot lover,” “funny gift,” “men or women,” and “smoking marijuana gift” to the prompt. She then instructed the AI tool to use a “supportive” tone of voice and to add a few emoji into the description.
“Gift the pot lover in your life this funny cooking and BBQ apron,” the resulting text read. “The perfect gift for the chef who loves a good smoke sesh, this apron comes in sizes for both men and women and will make them laugh every time they grill or cook! 🤣🤪” Dziura tweaked an error inserted by the AI system — the apron is one size — and pushed it live to the site. It was good enough to do the trick.
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Katy Vine gives her first-person account of five weeks spent suffering a bout of vestibular neuritis: an inflammation of the inner ear’s vestibular nerve, thought to be caused by a virus. The condition came on spontaneously and not only incapacitated her, it brought on bizarre almost out-of-body spiritual experiences and left feelings of—surprisingly—bliss.
That’s when the pulses began, emanating from some quiet location, independent of the chaos surrounding me. These weren’t physical sensations. Some carried messages—distinct from thoughts, as they occurred repeatedly, without variation, and did not feel invited, encouraged, or scripted by me. One message was, “Everyone I love alive and dead lives inside of me.” Another was, “I am the result of millions of years of evolution.”
Other pulses brought perceptions that unseen others were with me. The presence of a hundred-year-old version of me lingered nearby. I didn’t visualize any figure, and she didn’t offer advice, but I had an unmistakable feeling of a guard keeping a protective watch over me. On other days, I experienced recurring visits from my grandmother, my namesake aunt, and a close friend—all of whom had died. Sometimes they came together, sometimes separately. Their vibe was encouraging and sympathetic and affectionate, like relatives entertaining a bored toddler in church.
What happened to me, exactly? Look up the symptoms of vertigo or vestibular neuritis and you’d be hard-pressed to find an explanation for all of what I experienced. Every so often, in the intervening years, a friend of a friend suffering a bout of vertigo has called, complaining of spinning, and asked me how I got over it. I’ve had to refrain from telling them that it was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had.
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What happens when the only way to ensure the survival of the people you love the most is to leave them behind?
That’s a choice no one should have to make, and yet it is the dilemma of overseas workers everywhere, no less so than in the Philippines, which exports about a fourth of the world’s 11.5 million migrant domestic workers, a predominantly female army of nannies, maids, and cooks. A significant percentage of these women are mothers separated from their own kids while caring for the children of others, sending home remittances and boxes of chocolate, Spam, and other treats, and wondering if their husbands are faithful and how many years will pass before they can see their families again.
“In the eyes of many employers, Filipinas were at the top of the ethnic hierarchy for domestic workers,” Rachel Aviv writes in one of the powerful stories below, “as if their nationality had become synonymous with family duty and deference.” Such sought-after traits have been a blessing and a curse, giving Filipinas access to the lives of elite families in cities like Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York City, but also subjecting them to highly exploitative and even dangerous situations.
Adding to their burdens, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have been called on to be “modern-day heroes” and uber-patriots. “Now, more than ever, we need you, the OFWs and your families, to take part in our nation-building efforts,” former President Rodrigo Duterte once said. “I thus call on you … to make our country proud.”
Laborers who remain in the Philippines, meanwhile, face their own dismal work prospects, such as foraging for discarded valuables in Payatas, a former dumpsite outside of Manila. Whether at home or abroad, Filipino laborers struggle valiantly to preserve their humanity amid hellish work demands.
You might not think that emotionally and physically arduous labor would be an inviting subject for longform writing, but it is. That’s because the writers featured in this collection portray the subjects of their stories not as victims but instead as three-dimensional people. As a journalism professor who has also reported on labor, occupational safety, and immigrant health issues, I turn to these compelling and well-researched narratives to illustrate how to report with empathy and care.
My Filipino American students in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, appear to connect to the stories in this collection at an almost cellular level.
“I didn’t realize we could be in these stories or write these stories,” a student told me after reading the work of Filipino American author Alex Tizon, whose essay is featured in this collection.
Representation matters.
Fortunately, the U.S. media has broadened its coverage of Filipino and Filipino American narratives in recent years, and we now read about Filipino American entertainers, food culture, and political leaders. But it’s important not to forget the cost—borne by so many Filipino laborers—of toiling at the hardest jobs imaginable to provide for the people they love.
The following five excellent pieces reveal the endless work ethic of Filipino workers— those who leave and those who stay.
With deft sentences and restrained prose, Alex Tizon recounts the story of Lola (Eudocia Tomas Polido), a servant who accompanied his family when they moved from the Philippines to the U.S. in 1964. Tizon exposes the horrors of modern-day servitude in a deeply personal and indelible way. Sadly, he died a few months before the piece was published as The Atlantic’s cover story, which went viral and generated both praise and criticism.
The story begins for Tizon at birth, when Lola served as a maid, cook, and nanny to his family while his parents worked to establish themselves in the U.S. By the age of 11, Tizon had come to understand that his beloved caretaker—who was “given” to his mother, then a child living in the Philippines—received no salary. Lola slept in random spaces of Tizon’s home, such as on the couch or in the laundry room. Lacking documentation, she could never leave the U.S. to return home; she also suffered physical abuse and cruelty at the hands of Tizon’s parents.
No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.
What strikes me each time I reread this piece is Tizon’s anguish over his family’s treatment of Lola. He also wrestles mightily with his own complicity, despite having provided Lola a pampered life when he became an adult. But as this story reminds us, good deeds don’t wipe away the sins of the past. Tizon’s final published piece is a testament to how difficult it is to forgive our family and how it’s even harder to forgive ourselves.
After Lola’s death at 86, Tizon hand-carried Lola’s ashes back to her remaining family in the Philippines, in a beautifully rendered scene of pure grief among the now-aged people who knew her as a youngster. En route to this encounter, Tizon draws on the islands’ fortitude—surprising, given their fragile formation—to suggest a metaphor for the spirit of Lola and the enduring work ethic of her beleaguered yet resilient people.
Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds … and the simple fact that it’s still there makes it beautiful.
Lola is only one face of the Philippines’ massive overseas workforce. In this New Yorker piece, Rachel Aviv portrays another laborer, Emma, who leaves her nine children behind and becomes a nanny to wealthy families in the U.S. In a heartbreaking moment before her departure, Emma faces doubts too enormous to ignore.
She said, “My conscience was telling me, ‘Don’t leave your kids. Don’t leave your kids. They are young and need you.’”
But like all working mothers, she chooses work over her children. Or, more accurately, she chooses work to provide for her children. I strongly connect to Aviv’s writing—which is as elegant as her research is exhaustive—and the piece’s theme of anguished working motherhood. I hated leaving my firstborn with strangers even though his babysitters provided loving care. My plight is of course trivial in comparison to mothers like Emma, who live apart from their children for years and even decades while they channel their maternal instincts toward the children of others. I wonder: Is this rerouted maternal love a form of consolation, or a source of bitter pain?
Either way, it’s clear that Emma’s children never stopped yearning for their mother’s return during her 16-plus-year absence, during which she mainly talked to her daughters through Facebook and brief telephone conversations (five minutes for each child). And while her girls gained opportunities from Emma’s sacrifice, these advantages didn’t seem to take them far enough. We learn at the end of Aviv’s story that their economic prospects in the Philippines have not improved much in their mother’s absence—one daughter has already emigrated to Abu Dhabi to work as a secretary—which is a stunning revelation given everything that Emma sacrificed to provide for a better future. And so the arduous toil of hardworking Filipina caregivers continues:
Emma’s daughters and their friends wished to go abroad, too, if not to America then to Japan or Hong Kong or New Zealand. “I think there’s no end to the cycle,” Emma told me. She found it hard to resist the idea of her daughters joining her in New York. She hasn’t seen them in sixteen years and still can’t discuss the separation without quietly crying. Over time, the tone of her children’s letters has evolved; there is less rivalry and more resignation. In the early years, the children kept guessing which holidays might be the occasion for Emma’s return. Gradually, they stopped asking about her plans. “I believe someday, if God permits, you can be with us once again,” her daughter Roxanne recently wrote.
Departures (Tan Tuck Ming, TheKenyon Review, October 2022)
Working for an employment recruitment agency in international domestic work, Tan Tuck Ming brings a unique vantage point to this essay about Filipina housekeepers in Hong Kong. But for him the issue is also personal: He was cared for by a beloved Filipina housekeeper as a child, and it’s clear that her kindness left an imprint on his soul. Ming’s piece mines some of the same material as Aviv’s, but the essay form allows for more rumination and ties together personal narrative with historical and theoretical frameworks. Here, for example, he discusses migrant caregiving as the fuel powering the economic engine of international commerce:
[T]he way I understand an economy is as vertical motion, people either moving up or down but never staying still. This is how cities like Hong Kong or Singapore—these dense, vertiginous centers for global capital and its circulation … are made possible by tracing the fissures of nation, empire, and debt; by the subdivision of labor charted as unskilled within the topographies of capitalism to a secondary class of migrant workers. “We need to protect domestic workers with all our might,” a member of the legislative council says, at an antitrafficking fundraising event. “After all, without them, Hong Kong cannot unleash its economic power. We must be grateful to them for releasing our workforce.”
This politician’s statement is of course vexing. I wonder if a low-earning Filipina maid in Hong Kong actually aspires to unleash the power of the wealth-gathering class. And yet the comment suggests a key truth, which is that the center of Hong Kong’s economic juggernaut is not a technology or financial infrastructure so much as a beating heart—that of the industrious, loving Filipina caretaker.
Of course, Filipino labor doesn’t only occur overseas. In fact, the Philippines is one of America’s leading outsourcing destinations for customer service, technical support, and other industries.
Adrian Chen explores the highly stressful labor of content moderators, whose job is to evaluate questionable uploads to social media and to remove offensive, harmful, and inappropriate material. And this profession takes a toll, as Chen documents in interviews with workers in the Philippines who spend all day looking at the beheadings, sexual assaults, animal abuse, and other horrendous content that users attempt to post on Facebook and other platforms. Chen shows us an invisible workforce taking on the worst of humanity to make our reading and viewing online more benign. But as always, it’s the laborer—and in this case, the Filipino/a worker—who makes a massive sacrifice to enable our scrolling pleasure.
In a shopping mall, I meet a young woman who I’ll call Maria. She’s on her lunch break from an outsourcing firm, where she works on a team that moderates photos and videos for the cloud storage service of a major US technology company….“I get really affected by bestiality with children,” she says. “I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.” She laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of a horrific sex crime and an overpriced latte.
Constant exposure to videos like this has turned some of Maria’s coworkers intensely paranoid. Every day they see proof of the infinite variety of human depravity. They begin to suspect the worst of people they meet in real life, wondering what secrets their hard drives might hold. Two of Maria’s female coworkers have become so suspicious that they no longer leave their children with babysitters. They sometimes miss work because they can’t find someone they trust to take care of their kids.
In this final selection, the late great adventure writer Matthew Power explores one of the world’s notorious trash dumps at the time in Payatas, a barangay outside of Manila.
In this literally toxic workplace, enterprising foragers dig for buried trash items they can sell: copper wires, old cell phones, even a frozen swordfish thrown out by a restaurant. It’s grubby and exhausting work, and some of the foragers live on the site (at least at the time of Power’s visit). The descriptions are as precise as the site filthy:
The ground underneath our boots is spongy, and as we climb, black rivulets of leachate flow down the access road. A black puddle releases methane, bubbles like a primordial swamp, and the ground itself shakes when a loaded truck rumbles by.
Yes, the description is memorably graphic, but the story goes well beyond capturing the gross-out factor. Power instead brings the workers on this trash mountain to life, not only showing Filipino foragers in action but also in rare moments of leisure: singing karaoke, enjoying the cockfights, even planting gardens. The piece is ultimately a paean to work ethic and labor even in supposedly menial jobs that appear simple and straightforward. The work, like the people who perform it, is complex and worthy of our admiration:
A kalahig slits open a bag as if it were a fish, garbage entrails spilling out, and with a series of rapid, economical movements, anything useful is speared and flicked into a sack to be sorted later. The ability to discern value at a glimpse, to sift the useful out of the rejected with as little expenditure of energy as possible, is the great talent of the scavenger.
I appreciate that Power goes beyond “studying” his subjects through the lens of first-world superiority and instead gives us reason to respect their immense work ethic and love of family. Sadly, like Tizon, Power died long before his time, in 2014.
Amy DePaul is a college journalism instructor at the University of California, Irvine. She reports on public health, immigrant communities, and labor. You can find her boogie-boarding at Crystal Cove.
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Lara Logan rose to broadcast stardom as a hungry reporter who capitalized on both her fearlessness and her telegenic appearance. That was before she drifted into a nest of conspiracy theories that would get her ousted from numerous TV gigs; now, she travels a far-right lecture circuit, fearmongering for profit. But Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile doesn’t relish in the gory spectacle—it’s a dispassionate, empathic look at how someone so talented can lose their way so completely.
Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.
Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.
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This essay defies easy description. It is about love. It is about perseverance. It is also about many cruelties—the cruelty of poverty, of terminal illness, of grief, of generational trauma:
What you know of your mother’s childhood can be summarized in a single story that is about not her childhood but her father’s:
There once lived a little boy, the son of impoverished tenant farmers. One day, he was invited to the village fair by the child of his richer neighbor. The neighbor gave the boy a few coins to spend at the fair. Ecstatic, he bought himself the first toy of his life, a wooden pencil, which he hung proudly around his neck the whole day. When he returned home, his parents beat him within an inch of his life. Those coins could have bought rice and grains! Enough to feed the family for a week!
This was the only story your grandfather told your mother of his childhood, and the first time she told it to you, you recognized the echo of every hero tale you were taught as a child. A Communist cadre till the end, your grandfather had run away at age sixteen to join the Party, which had given him the first full belly he had known. Just as important, the Party had taught him how to read, inspired the avidity with which he had marked up Mao’s Little Red Book: his cramped, inky annotations marching up and down the page like so many ants trooping through mountains.
The second time your mother told you the story, you were ten or eleven and she didn’t have to tell it at all. The two of you were at Staples, shopping for school supplies. “back-to-school sale,” the posters all over the store screamed. Four notebooks, four mechanical pencils, your mother had stipulated, but you wanted more. You always wanted more. When you persisted, she had only to look at you and utter the words “You have more than anyone” for you to know exactly whom she was referring to.
The story was growing inside you, just as it had grown in your mother: a cactus whose spines pierced their way through your thoughts.
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The Rim Fire in Tuolumne County, Florida, ate over 250,000 acres and cost nearly $130 million to put out. One man confessed to starting it—accidentally—but the case against him fell through. What really happened back in 2013? For Rolling Stone, Joseph Bien-Kahn attempts to find the truth.
It’s admirable for Skalski to be so unbothered by the criticism. Still, I press on. She, more than anyone, embodies the feds to the locals of Tuolumne County. Why, in her view, had the area been so ready to forgive the man rescued from the scene of the crime? “I think what people were surprised at was that it was a local person. Not even so much that it was a hunter, but that it was a local person,” she says. “We all knew how dry it was out there, so they’re like, ‘Why would you do that?’ I don’t know — that could’ve been a disappointment to find out it was somebody local as opposed to somebody coming from a city out there.”
Of all the explanations, Skalski’s rings most true. We say we tell stories to understand the world, but the ones we choose to believe often fit into our existing understanding of it. A local kid should’ve known better than to start a fire on the hot, dry afternoon of Aug. 17, 2013. A terrible accident with untold costs was too simple an explanation. And so, many other stories began to be told.
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With today’s news of Cormac McCarthy’s death at age 89, American literature has lost another giant. As with so many giants, McCarthy inspired a journalistic cottage industry of sorts; his stylistic and creative influence touched countless other writers, many of whom felt moved to acknowledge that influence in their own writing. What follows is a quintet of such pieces that Longreads editors have read and enjoyed over the years.
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Robert Draper | Texas Monthly | July 1992 | 2,116 words
Cormac McCarthy showed up in El Paso around January 1976, his move from Knoxville unannounced and his arrival completely unnoticed. He was a 43-year-old writer of three out-of-print novels, a man twice divorced, living exclusively off of literary fellowships. He began to be seen in pool halls and bowling alleys on the south side of town, as well as in various Mexican restaurants, always with some esoteric book under his arm. The friends he slowly accumulated had no idea who Cormac McCarthy was in literary terms. They knew him as a short, handsome man who wore simple clothes, who seemed to live comfortably with little income, and who enjoyed talking about almost any imaginable topic—except, as it happens, contemporary literature. He did allow as to how El Paso was a proper setting to research his latest project: the spectacular Blood Meridian, perhaps the most unyieldingly savage vision of the Old West ever committed to print, in which cowboys and Indians scalp each other and their own kind without a moment’s hesitation or remorse. But something else about El Paso appealed to McCarthy. It was, as he told a friend, “one of the last real cities left in America,” with its own unvanquished eccentricities and the added feature of geographical remoteness. A man could move freely in El Paso. He could get lost there.
David Kushner | Rolling Stone | December 1, 2007 | 4,196 words
But among this rarefied gathering of leading intellects, none is more respected than the spry old cowboy dipping his tortillas in beans at the lunch table. Dressed in a crisp blue shirt and jeans, he sits comfortably with his weathered boots crossed and listens intently as a theoretical biologist who has flown in from Berlin discusses something called evolutionary economics – the relationship between animal behavior and marketlike forces. This is quintessential Santa Fe stuff, examining one phenomenon (biology) in the light and lexicon of another (economics).
The discussion soon turns to the topic of suicide. As a slide of a West African tribe flickers on the biologist’s computer screen, the researchers dig into the idea that suicide attempts can be evaluated as a kind of expression of market forces – a threat to remove oneself as a source of benefits to others. The neuroscientist in the corner raises her hand and poses a question to the group: “Does anyone know another animal besides humans who commit suicide?”
Brains churn. Air conditioning whirs. For once, though, the scientists are stumped.
Then the cowboy chimes in, as he often does, with the answer.
Tom Chiarella | Esquire | June 28, 2009 | 5,900 words
Cormac McCarthy fathered a son as an old man, and this story is an ode to a ticking clock, to the diminishment of time, to last chances. Last chance to parent. Last chance to warn, to train, to prepare. The father fights to teach. And the father teaches the boy to fight. In the movie’s first teaching moment, the father shows his son where to shoot himself in the head should it come to that. With the gun loaded. It is perhaps the movie’s only lurid turn, a moment that, like almost every moment in the movie, appears in the book as well. By the time it occurs, it is understood to be a gesture of necessity. There they are, citizens of a kind of now, bad teeth and all, pallid, filthy, damp to the bone, at their end, and whether you’ve read the book or not, the sight of it makes you seize.
Jim White | Radio Silence | June 12, 2012 | 4,987 words
In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take on the mechanics of serendipity) it’s sheer coincidence that it ended up in my suitcase as I packed for this tour. Likewise I’m no great bibliophile, certainly not one of those types who might find it exhilarating to locate and use, say, the exact toilet that Jack Kerouac took a shit in while writing On the Road. That said, I’m happy it ended up with me here in Knoxville, as the city itself is practically a character in the novel. Gay and Central Streets, where Walter’s barbershop is, are mentioned frequently, so it’s interesting to be in the physical locale where the action takes place. I’m about halfway through Suttree this time around. I’ve read it front to back many times, usually when events in my life have gone spiraling out of control and that black cloud of depression that’s dogged me off and on for much of my adult years descends.
Noah Gallagher Shannon | Oxford American | September 5, 2017 | 6,836 words
If it’s not so uncommon for a writer to traverse literary landscapes, McCarthy does seem unique in being claimed by the native intelligentsia of two separate regions. In the late sixties, Guy Davenport wrote that in McCarthy, Appalachia “has found a new storyteller to depict the darkness of its heart and its futile defiance of its luck.” So too in the West, where he is considered the reviver of an aesthetic long cheapened. A poll taken a few years back by High Country News named the Border Trilogy, which comprises All the Pretty Horses and its sequels, asamong readers’ favorite books about their home, alongside canonical texts by Lewis and Clark and Wallace Stegner.
All this critical sorting and swerving tells us a few things about McCarthy: that no one quite fathoms him enough to name his place in the culture; and that his absence has shifted the responsibility of this naming over to his obsessives, many of whom have become fixated on figuring out the best method to secure his legacy, a task which, the closer you get to it, feels less and less like scholarship and more like a Rorschach test. To many, he has become a ghost, a figment of study—which is strange since, of course, he’s alive, and writing. His existence today, at eighty-four years old, feels already posthumous.
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