Carly Lewis’ report on the murder of Ashley Wadsworth is intense and devastating. But it also demonstrates the standard playbook of abusive men. Lewis is clear: Any history of abuse must be made public and early warning signs must be taken seriously. Wadsworth didn’t need to die.
For seven years, Wadsworth looked at Sepple’s face intently, through computer screens and smartphones, at the airport when they finally met, every day of their short cohabitation and in the last moments of her life. Under his right eye, for some of that time, was a tattoo: “hope” in cursive writing—the holy premise she clung to, staring back at her, as though a sign that perfect brightness would come.
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The next time I pass a gas station, I’ll wonder about what’s happening beneath it. The underground tanks that hold fuel can corrode and fail, allowing toxic chemicals to contaminate soil and water. Big oil has known about this problem for decades but has largely ignored it by attempting to pass the cleanup buck to independent owners. When that tactic started to fail and insurance companies refused to insure tanks against leaks and environmental damage, you might wonder who got stuck with the tab. If you guessed “the tax payer,” you’d be correct. Kate Yoder takes into the history of gas stations and the ever-present environmental costs, noting that while many leaking gas station sites have been cleaned up, there is much yet to do.
The number of stations overall has been in decline for decades thanks to mediocre profits, rising land values in cities, and more fuel-efficient cars. An analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that between 25 and 80 percent of gas stations nationwide could be unprofitable in 12 years — and that analysis was conducted in 2019, before a slate of new policies, including federal tax credits, were passed to promote electric vehicles. Under vehicle-emissions rules unveiled by the Biden administration in April, EVs would make up as much as two-thirds of all U.S. car sales by 2031. Last year, Washington state set a target of ending the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2030, just seven years away; it has also adopted California’s stricter deadline of 2035, along with five other states.
That shift could lead to a pileup of vacant gas stations that the existing cleanup programs won’t be able to handle. There are more than 145,000 fueling stations in the U.S., according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Even if the country manages to break off its century-long attachment to gasoline, the fuel’s legacy may live on in the soil and water. The question of who pays to clean up the contamination is a mess in itself: In theory, station owners are supposed to pick up the tab, but sometimes they’re unable to pay — or unable to be found — when the bill comes due. So then, who pays? Sometimes it’s an insurance company, sometimes it’s an oil company, and sometimes it’s the government. It’s up to lawyers and courts to hash it out.
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This profile of Luke Shephardson is full of joy, not just in his achievements—which include winning the most prestigious big wave competition in the world, the Eddie—but in the tender accounts of Luke’s family life. Gabriella Paiella does not shy away from reality: The family struggles to make ends meet on the expensive North Shore. But she also makes it clear just how happy Luke is with his lot. Sure, he’d like to own his own house, but he is not searching for the next big thing—he appreciates what he has. If only more of us could say that.
Luke has surfed waves in Tahiti and Fiji, chased swells in Japan and Chile. But he wants to stay on the North Shore forever. He wants his kids to be able to stay here, and maybe even their kids. “It’s better to struggle in paradise,” Luke tells me, “than to be unhappy and rich somewhere else.”
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Just in time for Father’s Day, A.W. Davis shares a beautiful tribute to her father, an artist who took every opportunity to encourage and nurture Davis in her own artistic and creative pursuits.
After having two boys, my mother says she prayed to God every night for a girl to be all hers, but she got me instead: a daughter, yes, but when I wasn’t climbing trees or sticking my nose in a book, I was with my father. We’d spend summer weekends hopping around the Smithsonian museums and artists’ studios in downtown D.C., and winter days building snow cities rather than snowmen. We made stop-motion movies with modeling clay, collaborated on murals using rolls of butcher paper spread the length of the garage floor, and sat on the covered porch during thunderstorms and drew the lightning bolts as they flashed. Dad taught high school during the day, and at night he’d hole up in his makeshift studio in the basement, sandwiched between the washing machine and sports equipment, painting to Miles or Coltrane. I’d be right there crouched on the floor, tinkering with pastels, pencils, paint—anything but coloring books, forbidden in our house, as they “stifled the imagination.” Every once in a while he’d ask me what color to use where, or for my interpretations of a theme he was exploring. It was the safest place in the whole world.
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
Thoughts on finding feminist inspiration in Tennessee. An analysis of a controversial therapy treatment. A report on the complicated role of the library. A reflection on the bond between a mother and daughter. And musings on the ever-evolving nature of language.
Jessica Wilkerson | Oxford American | June 6, 2023 | 3,644 words
I don’t just love that Jessica Wilkerson* takes on tough topics in her work, including racism, feminism, and outdated female gender roles; I love how she does it. In her writing, she gets comfortable with being uncomfortable, which allows her to go deep, probe difficult questions, and most importantly, come to some sort of (sometimes uneasy) understanding of what it means to live in a world that’s flawed. This is one of the great gifts of powerful writing. In “Lady Vols Country,” Wilkerson examines outdated southern gender roles through portraits of two women who were very important to her: her grandmother and Pat Summitt, the former head coach of the University of Tennessee’s Lady Volunteers basketball team. In remembering two strong women and the change they stood for, Wilkerson finds the permission she didn’t know she was looking for—to be true to the life she wants for herself. —KS
*If you’d like to read more by Wilkerson, I heartily recommend her Longreads feature, “Living with Dolly Parton,” in which she turns her keen eye and strong heart to the life, legacy, and social power of the country music legend.
Imagine for a moment a horrific trauma exists in your past, and it continues to wreak havoc on your life. In a cruel twist, talking about the issue remains so painful and triggering that multiple types of psychotherapy have brought you no relief. But then you hear about a process that doesn’t require deep excavation, yet promises near-magical results. That’s exactly what drew people to EMDR, a modality that allegedly processes traumatic memories and alleviates PTSD using rapid eye movements. Now, 30 years after EMDR first emerged, Meg Bernhard tackles its divisive and confounding legacy. Many claim it cured them, and hail its creator as a savior; others dismiss it as snake oil, pointing to its dearth of clinical validity. This is a fascinating story, one that contends with both sides of the conversation while also being informed by Bernhard’s own inconclusive experience with EMDR. “The business of healing is messy,” she writes. “People start and stop therapy, are triggered years after their traumatic event. They get better, and worse, and better. Or they don’t. Why should an eye-movement therapy work? Why should it not? Perhaps EMDR, with its loops and repetitions, its movements, its quiet, echoes this illogic. Perhaps, in doing so, it reminds us that healing doesn’t fit a single script.” Centuries of scientific progress have uncovered much, yet the human body remains unimaginably complex, especially where mind and muscle overlap. As we all stumble toward wellness, it’s helpful to remember how knotty that path can be. —PR
Nicholas Hune-Brown | The Walrus | June 12, 2023 | 5,333 words
The library in the town where I grew up was in an ugly, box-like, red brick building, starkly contrasting with the cobbled high street and medieval buildings surrounding it. But this location was key. Bang in the middle of town, it’s where my Mum would often drop me off while she did her shopping, leaving her free to peruse seventeen different types of bedsheets without a whinging child, and me to go ride dragons—in a fantasy book, tucked in a cozy nook of the children’s section. It was free babysitting. Libraries have always been about more than just the books. However, Nicholas Hune-Brown discovers in this thought-provoking essay that they are now being called upon to perform services far beyond their old remit. Spending months going from library to library across Canada, Hune-Brown finds that as “the last public space,” libraries have become a social services hub for their communities. A place to learn, apply for jobs, get warm, or use a washroom. Everyone is welcome through the doors, and librarians—who, as Hune-Brown writes, “probably chose the profession because of their passion for Victorian literature”—can now find themselves dealing with anything from a mental health crisis to opioid poisoning. The last safety net. I had not previously given much consideration to the current role of the library. Now I have. —CW
Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 12, 2023 | 6,260 words
Early in the pandemic, I started going for runs through the empty streets of Brooklyn. These outings kept me sane, even as they took me past grim reminders of the crisis, including a refrigerated truck that our neighborhood hospital was using as a makeshift morgue. One day I listened to an episode of This American Life in which writer Jiayang Fan described the terror and grief she felt navigating COVID because her mother, who had advanced ALS, was in a medical facility that Jiayang couldn’t visit. Jiayang imagined what it would be like to lose her mother, her only family, at a time when the closest she could get to her physically was by standing in a park, looking up at the window of her room. The devastating segment literally stopped me in my tracks, and though I can’t say for sure, that may have been the day that I regularly started walking the last chunk of my running route so that I could call my own parents. Jiayang’s mom passed away last year, and now she’s written an essay that defies easy description. It’s about their bond, and it’s told through the lens of stories: stories Jiayang’s mother told her, stories she told her mother, stories she tells herself. I promise that it will stop you in your tracks. —SD
Alexander Wells | European Review of Books | April 19, 2023 | 3,551 words
Shared language is about communication, for sure, but as Alexander Wells notes in the European Review of Books, it’s also about identity and belonging. Sometimes, even understanding the latest slang makes you feel in-the-know, right!?!? (Not at all fond of how “right” has become the latest way to enthusiastically agree, but I digress.) As an editor of an English-language monthly published in Berlin, Wells is fascinated by ever-evolving common language usage in Germany, rife with combined English and German words cut like butter into flour to form something new and sometimes amusing, but always full of meaning. “German social media loves to mock awful Denglisch marketing attempts,” he writes. “But when the bilingual puns are good, they’re good—and enhanced by the thrill of belonging. I love this one billboard ad for classic indie radio that reads Everybody hörts (« everyone listens to it »), and I love it not only because I like the pun, but because I feel a surge of pride that I’m in on the joke, that maybe I do really speak German.” I came for the appreciation of evolving language and stayed for the pun of it. —KS
Audience Award
Congratulations to this week’s top choice from our readers!
Amelia Tate | The Guardian | June 10, 2023 | 3,645 words
Amelia Tate finds looking back at her teenage diaries an awkward experience. Who wouldn’t? But Tate finds more than cringe in these books—she finds an understanding of who she was as a teenager. It’s not someone she is proud of. —CW
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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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