Somewhere off the coast of Alaska lies the island of Chirikof, which is home to zero full-time humans but somewhere north of 2,000 feral cattle. The herd has been there for a century, its habitat enshrined as a federally protected wildlife preserve. However, as Jude Isabella makes clear in this beautifully rendered travel/nature feature (with photography to match), such a status might not be best for the rest of the area’s wildlife—or even for the cows themselves.
On the floor, a cow’s head resembles a Halloween mask, horns up, eye sockets facing the door, snout resting close to what looks like a rusted engine. Half the head is bone, half is covered with hide and keratin. Femurs and ribs and backbone scatter the floor, amid bits and bobs of machinery. One day, for reasons unknown, this cow wedged herself into an old shed and died.
Cattle loom large in death, their bodies lingering. Their suffering—whether or not by human hands—is tangible. Through size, domestication, and ubiquity, they take up a disproportionate amount of space physically, and through anthropomorphism, they grab a disproportionate amount of human imagination and emotion. When Frank Murkowski said Alaska should leave one island to the cattle, he probably pictured a happy herd rambling a vast, unfenced pasture—not an island full of bones or heifer-buckling bulls.
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A hundred years ago, David Owen tells us, about two percent of purchased goods were returned to the store. Now, the rate is over 20%, and clothing is double even that. However, while online retails accept returns, virtually none of the stuff returned gets sold as new—and Owen’s examination of “reverse logistics” explores the many solutions, from liquidation lots to straight-up incineration.
You can register as a buyer on Liquidity Services’ Web site right now, as I did recently, and place bids in any of hundreds of auctions. I didn’t do that, but I did spend a pleasant morning studying items that other people were bidding on, among them a two-pallet lot containing six hundred and fifty-four pounds of sports-related Amazon returns. The lot included seven pellet guns, six clear-plastic umbrellas, an assortment of punching bags and punching balls, a double-bladed lightsabre toy, a shatter-resistant over-the-door mini basketball hoop, eight yoga mats, a minnow trap, an indoor exercise trampoline, a pair of hiking poles, a kickboxing shield, a car refrigerator, two hoverboards (one with Bluetooth and one without), a jump-rope rack, a quiver’s worth of crossbow bolts, a fourteen-gallon red plastic gas can with a siphon pump, a set of four badminton racquets, and a mountain-bike handlebar. There were a hundred and fourteen items in all, and Liquidity Services had estimated their combined original retail value as six thousand five hundred and seventy-six dollars. The lot ended up attracting fifty bids. The winner paid nine hundred and twenty-five dollars, shipping not included. None of the fifty bidders were willing to offer more than fifteen cents on the dollar, and even at that price they were taking a chance, since there was no guarantee that any particular item would still function. Returned items are often damaged, dented, scratched, or inoperable, and even ones that don’t look too bad can be missing parts or accessories.
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Slavery isn’t a thing of the past. The descendants of people who profited from it are still profiting, while the descendants of those held in bondage bear the burdens of generational poverty, trauma, and racism. Barbados, where Black slaves worked sugar plantations for centuries, is demanding justice:
Reparations have moved from a fringe idea to a thing everyone is talking about. And this island, long regarded—some would say intentionally misconstrued—as so compliant with the colonial project that it is sometimes called Little Britain, has moved into a regional leadership position.
“Barbados is that country,” says Dorbrene O’Marde, chairman of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparation Support Commission and vice chair of the regional CARICOM Reparations Commission. (CARICOM, or the Caribbean Community, is an intergovernmental organization with 15 member and five affiliated states.) CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on Reparations for Native Genocide and Slavery, five elected officials led by Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley, is expected this year to request that 10 European countries begin negotiations for reparations. Almost a decade ago, CARICOM’s Reparations Commission developed a 10-point plan calling for, among other things, a careful accounting of what occurred; formal apologies; attention to the psychological and cultural toll of centuries of oppression; European funding to strengthen infrastructure, education, and health care; and debt forgiveness. European countries rebuffed this request, but an updated 10-point plan will be finalized in the next few months, O’Marde says.
This year’s demand for reparations—which will call for a Marshall Plan–like public investment, not the individual payments that have dominated the conversation elsewhere—will arrive with more force. African countries, about two decades after they were first asked, have agreed to support the claim, and CARICOM officials have built alliances with reparations activists in the U.S. The letters are expected to say the time has come to negotiate reparations to improve infrastructure and human conditions in the Caribbean. Come to the table, they will say, or prepare to see much of the Caribbean in international court. Lawyers who won a reported £14 million ($17.86 million) settlement in 2012 on behalf of three Kenyans brutalized by the British have been retained.
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In yet another true crime story—but one that can still surprise—Margie Palm gets kidnapped by serial killer Stephen Miller and talks about her religious beliefs until he finally lets her go. Julie Miller recounts the bizarre, terrifying day and the even more bizarre friendship that followed. By smartly delving into the background of both characters she provides the necessary context to understand an otherwise unfathomable scenario.
In the years since she survived Morin, Palm was approached by agents, authors, and name-brand Hollywood producers eager to turn her abduction into books, a dramatized movie, or a miniseries. Invariably, they wanted to package her story either as a two-dimensional thriller or a Christian parable in which God comes to her in a car and saves her life and a mass murderer’s soul. Palm turned them all away, making her story a white whale even in our era of peak serial killer content. She’s telling her story in full for the first time here partly because she finally understands what happened to her.
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A beautiful homage to swimming. Diane Mehta explores what swimming means to her, alongside some keen observations of those she shares the pool with.
I observed other swimmers intensely, memorising their moves, admiring their technique, and I probably seemed a little creepy. Instead of dreading the hard slap of cold water, I let it flow over me and refused to tense my shoulders. I told myself that, like ice, the water would help prevent migraines. When I pushed off the edge, I said to myself, “blue”, like a mantra key to the sublime. My mind emptied when I was submerged. Time was blue. My old friend who died was blue and every day she met me there underwater. Thinking got left behind as I entered the thrill of that quiet blue world.
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After an annoyingly enlightening Dry January this year, I was on the lookout for non-alcoholic beverage options that would not only taste great but also replicate, at least in part, the ritual of a rewarding nightcap. That quest led me to Athletic Brewing, which makes non-alcoholic beers that taste amazingly like beer beer. (And high-quality beer at that; their Hazy IPA is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.) It was no surprise then that I found myself frequently nodding in agreement—along with other imbibers, I’m sure—while reading Gabriella Paiella’s piece about how Athletic found a way to make a great product and take the social sting out of teetotaling.
And that might be the single most appealing thing that Athletic has provided people. We’re already in an existing nationwide loneliness epidemic. If you’re not drinking alcohol, for whatever reason—from sobriety to marathon training—it can add to the sense of isolation.
Even if chugging beer isn’t physically healthy, there’s something about cracking open a cold one around other people that is. Athletic proved that it doesn’t have to be alcoholic to provide the same much-needed ritual pleasure.
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The incalculable human cost of institutionalization. An homage to rappers gone far too soon. A profile on the trans son of an anti-trans zealot. A summer camp that helps children to process grief, and bearing witness to the survivors of the 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut.
Jennifer Senior | The Atlantic | August 7, 2023 | 13,585 words
Fair warning, dear reader: This will be among the best stories you read this year. Prepare yourself to be wrecked. In this masterpiece of longform journalism, Jennifer Senior reports on her aunt Adele, a woman later diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12, a genetic condition that manifests in intellectual disability and physical delays. Adele was institutionalized at 21 months old on the advice of doctors who insisted that a care placement was the best thing for her, leaving her older sister Rona bereft “as though she’d lost an arm or a leg.” At its core this story is about trauma and loss, suffered chiefly by Adele who was deprived of her family and early chances to expand her intellectual capacity, warehoused in the notorious Willowbrook State School. The shockwaves of loss extend outward to Adele’s mother, father, and sister, deprived of Adele’s presence in their lives, and to society at large, deprived of Adele and the person she could have become had she received more enlightened, loving care much earlier in life. Glimpses into Adele’s psyche, including her need for order, her penchant for needlepoint, and delight in matching her clothing, hint at the contours of Adele’s personality. Senior, in trying to name her aunt’s condition to attempt to understand the scope of loss, confronts the many ethical concerns of writing about someone who is not able to give consent. Tracing her aunt’s living conditions and likely treatment at Willowbrook makes for extremely difficult, but absolutely necessary reading, to ask and attempt to answer a vital question: How do you tally the cost when, despite the best of intentions, we fail to provide essential care to the most vulnerable among us? —KS
Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | August 8, 2023 | 4,548 words
Things don’t always match up as neatly as this: Exactly 50 years ago tonight, a young woman named Cindy Campbell threw a back-to-school party in their Bronx apartment building’s rec room. The DJ was her older brother, known as Kool Herc; the ensuing soirée would come to be known as the night hip-hop was born. If you’ve been on the internet anytime this week, of course, you probably already know the broad outlines of this story; celebrating the culture’s golden anniversary has become the most ubiquitous editorial peg in recent memory. Every outlet imaginable has done every story imaginable—and NYT Mag’s special issue has some of my favorites, from Tom Breihan’s Too Short profile to Niela Orr’s exploration of the norm-breaking current generation of female artists. But Danyel Smith’s elegy delivers something altogether different. Death has long lurked within hip-hop, as it does within most creative pursuits; however, given this country’s systemic ills that face the culture’s overwhelmingly Black artists, the actuarial tables here tip ominously askew. Lives cut agonizingly short by violence, by health, by drugs, by flukey tragedy. Smith contends with all of these in turn, saying the names of the people who matter to many of us, but are anonymous to many others. This is a tally I’ve been keeping and a story I’ve been telling — conversationally, journalistically, eulogistically, bitterly, in novel form — since the late 1980s, she writes. Her three-plus decades as a journalist and a fan have given her a cruel proximity to these tragedies, and you feel the accrual of that pain in her writing. Yet, as Smith so often does, she manages to end the piece by embracing life; the final act is so buoyant, so transcendent, so defiant, that you’ll likely run it back just to re-experience the frisson it causes. In another piece of synchronicity, this essay was published on the death day of one of my favorite artists, Sean Price, and I’d woken up that morning with hip-hop’s mortality on my mind. Even if he and the rest of these dearly departed never get the credit they so richly deserve, pieces like Smith’s give me hope that they’ll never be forgotten. —PR
Christopher Mathias | Huffington Post | June 30, 2023 | 7,864 words
Thisis how you write a story about a moral panic: You call it dehumanizing and terrifying, you don’t entertain even an ounce of both sides-ism, and you center the targets of the panic without stripping them of agency. Kudos to Christopher Mathias, one of the best reporters covering right-wing extremism in America, for his profile of Renton Sinclair, the trans son of a zealous anti-trans advocate. Renton’s mother, a former Miss America contestant, has used him to advance her odious agenda. Here Mathias lets Renton tell his story, on his terms. It contains chapters about his mother putting him in conversion therapy, overlooking his suicide attempt, cursing the testosterone that sustains him, and humiliating him before national audiences. But Renton’s story is also about resilience, respect, and joy. He has a message for trans people afraid to come out because they fear a loved one might abandon them. “That is 100% not on you,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you’re fucking bad. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean there’s something broken with you. That is someone else being fucked up.” Amen. —SD
Mitchell Conksy | The Walrus | August 9, 2023 | 3,500 words
At Camp Erin, a group of boys from the same cabin name three caterpillars Gerry, Larry, and Harry. It’s one of several small details sprinkled throughout this beautiful essay that is incredibly affecting. These boys are having fun—rolling down hills, dancing on stages, naming caterpillars—despite having recently lost their dads. Camp Erin recognizes that children process grief differently from adults, that they can transition from devastation to joy in a moment, and that joy is still worth celebrating. I loved that these kids had the respite of naming caterpillars, that grief didn’t weigh them down every second, and that “grief camp” encouraged this. The boys form a close bond with Mitchell Conksy, their counsellor, and his first-hand account of how he steers them into realizing they all share the loss of their fathers (Conksy included) is gentle and touching. I expected an essay on child grief to be gut wrenching, and while I did wipe away the odd tear, I came away feeling that Camp Erin was a special place. The children realize they are not alone and can talk about their grief. They also just have a summer camp. —CW
Tamara Saade | The Delacorte Review & Literary Hub | August 3, 2023 | 3,971 words
When a disaster strikes affecting thousands, the only way you can possibly begin to understand the toll is to learn the stories of survivors. On August 4th, 2020, 218 were killed and 7,000 injured in an ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut. Through personal accounts, and as a way to confront her own trauma over the event, Tamara Saade bears witness to those that were there. “I had thought that telling the stories of other people would make writing about August fourth easier for me,” she writes. “But I came to see that it was as hard, if not harder, to do justice to these people and their stories of that day.” In this beautiful braided essay, Saade processes her own thoughts, reactions, and feelings, alongside those of the citizens she profiles in the aftermath of the explosions. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, Saade’s measured prose makes cogent the post-blast chaos and confusion, creating order out of disorder, in a bold attempt to find peace where once was pandemonium. —KS
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our audience loved most, this week.
Jack Holmes | Esquire | August 1, 2023 | 6,470 words
Inconsistent potency makes doing fentanyl—already up to 50 times stronger than heroine—like playing a game of Russian roulette. Will you get the dose you can tolerate or will you take the hit that leads to overdose? For Esquire, Jack Holmes reports from Portland in Oregon, a state which decriminalized drug possession via Measure 110 in an attempt to treat drug abuse as a behavioural-health disorder. —KS
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