Paul Landis, one of Jacqueline Kennedy’s Secret Service agents, supposedly found a bullet lodged in the car’s back seat that infamous day in Dallas. What would this mean if true? James Robenalt sets out to analyze the bullet’s significance in a clinical manner, with his lack of hysteria and careful analysis making up for his somewhat dry approach. There are countless words on this subject, but this essay gives potentially new—and interesting—information rather than another rehash.
Then came November 22, 1963. A month after returning from Greece, Landis stood on the right rear running board of the Secret Service follow-up car, code-named “Halfback,” in the president’s motorcade as the vehicle headed from Dallas’s Love Field airport to a luncheon at the city’s Trade Mart. Landis was approximately 15 feet away when Kennedy was mortally wounded, a close witness to unspeakable horror.
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Jenisha Watts | The Atlantic | September 13, 2023 | 11,129 words
Journalist Jenisha Watts was raised in Kentucky, in part by her mom Trina Renee Watts, and in part by her granny. At one time, Trina was a promising track star. She loved words and was accepted to Western Kentucky University. But when she became pregnant with Jenisha, she dropped out. Soon, Trina was addicted to drugs, with five children from five different fathers, often leaving the kids alone when she left to get high. How did everything go wrong, seemingly so suddenly? Jenisha, a senior editor at The Atlantic, unravels a tangled family history skein by skein, discovering that Trina was sexually abused by her stepfather, Big Dishman, childhood trauma that became generational when Trina spiraled into addiction. Jenisha goes to Florida to live with relatives; her siblings went into the child welfare system. They never gained a stable living situation, causing damage that spurred their own addictions. This is a very tough read. It is a master class in craft, a bold testament to courage in the face of repeated humiliation. The final line of this piece is the most triumphant and inspiring sentence I have read this year. I won’t spoil it for you. It speaks to a truth: that we come into this world with part of our story written for us unless we can stand up, take the pen, and start to write the story for ourselves. —KS
Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris | Slate | September 10, 2023 | 3,418 words
“Alive is better than clean.” This belief guides the operators who talk to drug users who dial the Never Use Alone (NUA) hotline, a service they can call while they use alone. If they become unresponsive during the call, the operator then sends help. This moving story by Aymann Ismail—a companion piece to Mary Harris’ This American Life episode—follows Jessica Blanchard, one such operator in Southwest Georgia, who takes these calls from her cellphone. Blanchard, a former nurse and NUA’s education director, is also a mother to an addict; she has a “mama spirit,” a sixth sense, and knows within a few minutes of talking to someone whether she’ll need to call EMS. Critics ask: Does this approach to overdose prevention enable drug use? Isn’t supplying your own daughter with a clean needle a step in the wrong direction? Blanchard is nonjudgmental, caring, and quite literally an angel, giving each person on the other end of the line another chance. As Ismail shows, the work of NUA makes a strong case for harm reduction, and how treating others with dignity is not only compassionate, but life-saving. —CLR
Elizabeth Kolbert | The New Yorker | September 4, 2023 | 8,276 words
David Gruber is the kind of man who contemplates such questions as “What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark?” He’s the kind of man I want to read about. One of the founders of the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short—Gruber is currently trying to decode sperm whale click patterns. In a nutshell: he wants to talk to whales. (I presume he has questions for them, too.) Animals having language can be a fraught topic in the scientific community, but Gruber has gathered an impressive group that includes big names from the artificial intelligence field. The theory is that with enough data machine learning, algorithms could be taught to understand whale clicks. However, getting the data requires sticking a recording device on a suction cup to the back of a whale—no mean feat, particularly with a reporter watching. Despite the odd wayward recording device merrily bopping about the Caribbean Sea, the team is persevering. I am glad. A lot is at stake with the development of AI models, but a better understanding of nature would be in the plus column. This piece gives you a lot to think about but rewards you with some incredible scenes I will let you read to discover. —CW
Wyatt Williams | The Bitter Southerner | September 4, 2023 | 6,303 words
When I opened the email from The Bitter Southerner on September 5, I saw that they were sharing a new piece about Lucinda Williams. They had my attention. Then I noticed the author: Wyatt Williams (no relation). I sat up straight. I remembered Williams from “Eating the Whale” at Harper’s Magazine, a piece I savored, start to finish. That feeling when you know something is going to be good, so very good? I had it. I ingested this piece over a few days because I didn’t want it to be over. Williams’ mother and the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams were born a few months apart in Louisiana in 1953, though this is no mere profile of Lucinda or a survey of the author’s personal history. Williams traces her voice through his life from childhood car rides to porch evenings spent listening to her songs with his mother, songs that evoke the “idea of Louisiana,” a waterlogged place slowly being washed away, populated by people trying to get by despite poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. What captivated me about this piece is that Williams by no means comes to terms with his mixed feelings about his home state, even after a deep study of Lucinda’s work, saying, “But if you asked for an explanation why I love this place, the only answer would be just the same as why I hate it.” What you end up with is a profound portrait of a place and a family, where if you look hard enough, beauty still resides if you choose to see it. —KS
Jackson Wald | GQ | September 13, 2023 | 2,725 words
When you first meet James Grammer, the central character of this underdog sports tale, you’d be forgiven for thinking something along the lines of this again? The seeming disconnect of a white sumo wrestler, or any athlete in a sport that tradition (or racism) has deemed “not theirs,” has fueled many a glib fish-out-of-water piece. Thankfully, Jackson Wald’s story fully ignores that trope, and Grammer becomes one of the most interesting people I met this week. While sumo has grown in the U.S. over the past few years, it’s still a curiosity; when Grammer and his fellow enthusiasts began practicing in a Brooklyn park, they had to deal with onlookers asking to join or even betting on their matches. Grammer wants to be a champion, but the charm of his story lies less in his quest for greatness than in his human complexity. Before a match, most sumos think about their opponents’ weakness. Not Grammer. “As a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism,” Wald writes, “he believes in a series of deities, including ones that are fierce and wrathful, and that as he’s staring his opponent directly in the eyes, he imagines he and his opponent as two forearm hairs on one of the evil deities, blowing against each other in the wind.” Yes, you’ll find the hallmarks of a good niche sports piece—a giant boa constrictor, a guy who seems to want to be a samurai, Wald sparring with the 340-found Grammer to predictable results—but it’s Grammer himself you’ll remember, and particularly the man he is outside the dohyo. —PR
Lane Brown | Vulture | September 6, 2023 | 3,179 words
Critics are everywhere; great critics, not so much. But all of them have seen their influence wane over the past 15 years, as the Mitchells and Dargises of the world have been subsumed by Rotten Tomatoes and its nuance-flattening Tomatometer score. Why? It’s gameable. (Also, as filmmaker Paul Schrader points out, “audiences are dumber.” No argument there.) Lane Brown digs into the rottenness, aided by one of the grossest lede images you’ll ever see at the top of a magazine feature. —PR
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In some ways, Jackson Wald’s look at sumo in NYC is a typical scrappy-band-of-enthusiasts subculture story. In others, it’s a sports-underdog story. And perhaps most surprisingly, it’s a portrait of a man for whom sumo simply makes sense. A memorable profile, disguised in a mawashi.
Practice was scarce today; a combination of injuries and a muggy, dense rain enveloping New York City kept the vast majority of its six members home for the weekend. Grammer quickly gave me a tour of his home—the bookshelves lined with thick texts on poetry, art, and existentialism, the kitchen stocked full of his sumo-training nutrients, and the dohyo itself, marked off in his living room by wedges of black electrical tape. And then we got to the matter at hand: it was time for Grammer and I to train.
Practice began with 100 shiko, an exercise that combines a deep squat with high leg raises, each motion ending with an emphatic stomp. Next came 100 teppo, or pillar strikes. We positioned ourselves on opposite sides of Grammer’s living room and began methodically hitting the supporting columns of his walls. (Grammer does 300 of these a week, and if you look closely enough at a patch near the living room window, you’ll see a long, lightning-bolt-shaped crack stretching from the top of the frame to the base of the wall: residual damage from the repeated blows). After five minutes of suriashi, a squatted walk around the dohyo, we partnered up and transitioned into butsukari—each of us taking turns, in a waltz-like rhythm, striking the other’s breast as we shuffled diagonally across the ring. By this point, only thirty minutes into the training, I was drenched in a coat of communal sweat, and my hips were screaming in pain. A wave of apprehension washed over me— primarily because the Beya’s technique coach had just walked through the door, and that meant it was time to spar.
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In a piece that will top “best of” lists in 2023, journalist Jenisha Watts unravels a tangled family history to understand how her mother Trina Renee Watts became addicted to drugs, often leaving Jenisha and her four siblings alone when she left to get high.
My deficiencies haunted me: my childhood, my accent, my lack of knowledge. Silly things, like the fact that I’d never seen the movies that well-off Black kids had all watched: Coming to America, Harlem Nights. I asked “Where you at?” instead of “Where are you?” I talked quietly because I was never certain I was saying the words correctly. When I said “picture,” people heard “pitcher.” Eventually, I trained myself to always say “photo.” I even found an acting coach online who agreed to give me voice lessons to try to change my accent, and we practiced on monologues in her studio.
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If you’ve been fortunate enough to be there while Erykah Badu works her otherworldly magic, Casey Gerald’s profile will remind you why the singer remains so magnetic, even 13 years after her last conventional studio album. (And if you haven’t been so fortunate, the piece’s lede will transport you there.) It’s not just a work of candor, but one of illumination: Gerald seeks out a wealth of impressive secondaries to shed valuable light on Badu, along with his own considered takeaways.
Let me be as clear as I possibly can: Erykah Badu is not like your aunt, not even your favorite one. I’ve met presidents, mayors, billionaires, Dallas Cowboy Hall of Famers, Holy Land juice healers, TED Talkers — a lot of people, all over the world, and Badu is one of the few who holds up after close inspection. I don’t mean she is perfect. I don’t mean she is better than you or anyone else. I mean she is who she says she is; she is trying to be better than she’s been. Most of all, she seems to truly like, or at least accept, herself. When I learned and saw that she walks barefoot nearly everywhere, and wondered how in the world she keeps her feet clean, she answers, “I don’t. They be black as hell!”
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This is a niche essay—not everyone is interested in a family spearheaded by high-altitude climbing greats—but as a fan of the climbing documentary “Torn,” I was delighted to catch up with Max Lowe’s latest projects. This offers a nice insight into his world, one that is just as much about family as it is about film.
There’s a scene in Torn where Max interrogates his mom about falling in love with Anker so soon after Alex died. It’s tense to watch, and it strips away any sense that Max is going to be delicate or easy on his subjects. “I was surprised, and thought, How dare you ask me that?” Jenni says. “But I was able to answer because I’m just as forthright as he is.”
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For The Bitter Southerner, Wyatt Williams explores his Louisiana upbringing and memories of his family and the state through the work of Lucinda Williams, the singer-songwriter born in 1953, the same year as his mother.
What I tried to type out on those nights instead was something about Lucinda’s approach as a poet: the way that, when you can’t exactly explain what you’re thinking or remembering without getting it somewhat wrong, or when the thing you’re trying to explain is inexpressible, sometimes the only way to do it is to just name your world: the places and people and things in it. Sometimes that can be the only way to explain it.
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