The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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A glimpse into what it’s like to have aphantasia. An account of escaping wildfire in Yellowknife. A profile of an NBA-reporting phenomenon. An essay about taking control of one’s own story. And a read on meat and the English language.

1. My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

Marco Giancotti | Nautilus | October 4, 2023 | 3,644 words

Marco Giancotti has aphantasia, which means “the absence of images” in Greek. Ask him to picture a top hat or recall a sound or a smell and he can’t imagine it. He has trouble remembering events unless he can deduce their timing by assembling facts such as where he was living and the people in his circle at the time. For Nautilus, Giancotti does a terrific job breaking down his lived experiences and the studies he’s participating in so that science, society, and the lay reader can begin to understand more about this fascinating condition. “As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind,” he writes. “I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head.” What’s most beautiful and poignant about this piece is how, by learning more about aphantasia and contributing to its study, Giancotti comes to appreciate his condition as an example of what makes humanity so beautifully diverse. “The question I started with—what’s wrong with me?—was both rhetorical and itself wrong. The better question is one we all ask ourselves at some point: ‘What makes me who I am?’” Can you imagine how much better our world would be, if we all dared to do so? —KS

2. I Evacuated From Yellowknife This Summer. Coming Home Was The Hardest Part.

Jessica Davey-Quantick | Maclean’s | October 5, 2023 | 3,842 words

This September, I saw flames licking up the side of a hill near my house. The smoke spiraled above in thick, sinister plumes while the taste of bonfire invaded the once-crisp air. I was lucky: my local wildfire was controlled before evacuation was necessary. Many in Canada were not so fortunate. Nearly 200,000 Canadians were under evacuation orders this summer, Canada’s worst wildfire season since records began. Jessica Davey-Quantick was one of them, fleeing her home in Yellowknife as the area burning across the Northwest Territories reached roughly the size of Denmark. She left reluctantly, boarding one of the last evacuation flights with her cats—Allen and Bruce—squeezed in beside her. Her account is one of both fear and the mundane logistics of evacuation travel, a mixture that makes this piece incredibly relatable. When she finally reaches her destination, the wait begins. She waits to see how long before she can go home. She waits to see if she has a home. When she finally does return, the sky is still smoke-filled. I know how that feels—days on end of murky light, filtered through a hazy lens, air that clings hot and heavy as claustrophobia creeps up to envelop you. This apocalyptic atmosphere brings reality home, as it does for Davey-Quantick, who ends her piece with a desperate plea: Climate change is screaming at us. We have to listen. —CW

3. Shams Charania’s Scoop Dreams

Reeves Wiedeman | Intelligencer | October 11, 2023 | 6,695 words

In The New Yorker this week, Choire Sicha tells Kyle Chayka that he pegs 2014 as the beginning of the end of social media. Coincidentally, that’s the same year that a young sports journalist named Shams Charania landed his first big NBA scoop. As it turns out, tweeting first about an impending trade wouldn’t just turn him into a first-name-only phenomenon among basketball fans; it would eventually place him at the dead center of sportswriting’s current existential crisis. Reeves Wiedeman isn’t the first to profile Charania, as he did this week for New York’s Intelligencer vertical. He is, however, the first to do so in a way that lays bare the larger forces set in motion by Charania’s ascendancy: chiefly, The New York Times’ decision to disband its sports department in favor of The Athletic, its $550 million acquisition that just happens to be Charania’s current home. Wiedeman has written stories far more cinematic—2021’s “The Spine Collector” and 2018’s “The Watcher” come to mind—but there’s something undeniably pleasing about how this acts as both unflinching profile and business story. As much as Charania’s indefatigable M.O. is the stuff of legend (and no shortage of resentment from his competitors), it happens to be a prime example of how journalism has been subsumed by that formless extrusion known as “content.” Yes, during the offseason a good #ShamsBomb delivers a frisson. But as a representation of how we consume and share information, it might also be laying waste to its surroundings. —PR

4. The Protagonist Is Never in Control

Emily Fox Kaplan | Guernica | October 2, 2023 | 6,552 words

Spellbound. This isn’t a word I use often. But rarely does a piece mesmerize me like this one. Emily Fox Kaplan recounts growing up with an emotionally abusive and manipulative stepfather (who is also a prestigious surgeon). Smartly written in second person, Kaplan uses the power of voice and narration to take back control of her story, shifting effortlessly between her perspective as a child to self-assured present-day narrator. “And you’ll realize, too, that a person can tell a story any way she likes; that the same story — a little girl who loves to read — can be told as a horror story or a fairy tale, depending on the choices of the author.” It’s a tense read, likely triggering for some people, about the power of “bad men” and the effects of toxic family dynamics. But it’s also a brave piece, and I’m glad Kaplan could tell it. —CLR

5. Who’s Afraid of Spatchcocked Chicken?

C Pam Zhang | Eater | October 3, 2023 | 1,300 words

I love words. (I know, shocking.) I am also a vegetarian. So it was with delight and horror that I read C Pam Zhang’s piece all about the English language—and meat. Have you ever considered why most animals are shielded by a fancy term once they hit a plate? Why is it a beef bourguignon, not a cow casserole? Zhang muses extensively on this prissiness—while spatchcocking a chicken, as a student at Cambridge, no less. It turns out (like many things in England) it has to do with the French. And class. Zhang explains: “The names of the living animals have Anglo roots, whereas the names of the ingredients came from the French—a trademark of Norman conquerors who, in the 11th century, hoped to subjugate the ‘savage’ Natives of the British Isles.” (The humble chicken managed to keep its name by being considered peasant food, not worthy of a new anointment.) Zhang compares this coyness with words in Mandarin, where pork can literally be labeled “pig flesh.” It’s a fascinating and fun essay, with the added pleasure of imagining the smell of baked chicken guts wafting down the hallowed halls of Cambridge and into the nostrils of disgruntled young lords who like their veal marinated. (Helped by the marvelous illustration of a chicken running down said halls.) While a little shorter than our usual Longreads offerings, you can’t say “spatchcocked” without encountering some joy, so I hope you will forgive me. —CW

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Audience Award

Our most-read editor’s pick this week:

When Horror Is the Truth-teller

Alexander Chee | Guernica | October 2, 2023 | 2,587 words

What is a monster? Why has a fictional character like Dracula stayed in our minds through the centuries? In this piece for Guernica, Alexander Chee asks us to revisit and sit long and hard with Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic while also considering the modern real-life evils of our world. Chee also makes connections between the story and Stoker’s potentially queer love triangle with Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, the latter a possible inspiration for the Count himself. The essay is the foreword to a new edition of the novel, published by Restless Books. —CLR

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“America Does Not Deserve Me.” Why Black People Are Leaving the United States

The pandemic prompted a lot of people to move to a lot of different places. But as Kate Linthicum reports for LAT, the scale of “Blaxit”—Black Americans’ emigration around the world—could make it one of the largest such patterns since the 1920s. But while Europe has long been a home for Black American artists, the current moment stretches from Mexico to Ghana, and encompasses all walks of life. This is what following one’s bliss looks like.

[Nuriddin] acknowledges that she is lucky to have a job that allows her to work remotely, and that a lot of people, including many of those from her parents’ generation, don’t. She’s trying to convince her cousins to find work that will allow them to live outside of the country.

Like many Black expats here, she’s still learning Spanish. She communicates easily with the English-speaking descendants of Jamaicans, but talking to other Costa Ricans is hard. Still, she says she feels a mutual recognition when she locks eyes with Black locals. “There’s almost a little glimmer in the eye when you look at each other,” she said. “There’s like a little nod.”

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Shams Charania’s Scoop Dreams

Ask any basketball fan where the best trade news comes from, and you’ll hear one name: Shams. For Intelligencer, Reeves Wiedeman profiles the journalist who turned the industry on its head with little more than the power of a tweet. (He also delivers one hell of a business story.)

Wojnarowski and Charania have become so dominant in the race for scoops that most other reporters who cover the league told me they have stopped trying. “I talk to the same agents, the same GMs, but I never even try to break news,” another ESPN reporter told me. “I know it’s already promised to one of them — like they’re a wire service.” In an attempt to keep up, Ken Berger, who was a national NBA reporter at CBS Sports, started using Google Voice to send texts because it allowed him to send separate identical messages to five people at once. “I could text three agents and two front-office people in five seconds, and I’m still getting beat,” Berger said. He eventually left NBA media for good to run a fitness studio in Queens. To help his old colleagues, he started a personal-training program tailored to helping NBA journalists survive the unhealthy lifestyle the job entailed.

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Who’s Afraid of Spatchcocked Chicken?

C Pam Zhang provides some interesting history, musings on language, a cookery lesson, comments on class, and some chuckles in this joyful piece that simply whips along. Next time you are preparing meat, this will pop to mind.

I lost weight my first few months at Cambridge, in part because my meals were no longer subsidized. Back at my American university, my need-based scholarship had covered on-campus food, as well as tuition and housing; in Cambridge, I faced the unpleasant discovery that food was not considered a financial need. Each dish of pudding or squash I placed on my dining hall tray increased my credit card debt. The price-to-calorie ratio of each bite I took in that gorgeous, centuries-old dining hall was sharper than my own hunger. It came to feel of a piece: that an empire unwilling to connect a piece of meat to the living animal from which it came would also refuse to connect the education of a mind to the needs of a body; would serve, with exemplary manners, each course over my left shoulder while ignoring, on the other side, centuries of colonial hypocrisies at home and abroad.

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The Protagonist Is Never in Control

In this spellbinding read, Emily Fox Kaplan recounts being emotionally abused as a child by her stepfather, a well-off surgeon. Written in second person, Kaplan masterfully explores the telling of her own story, taking back control of the narrative with clarity and bravery. It’s a tense read about childhood abuse, toxic family dynamics, and the power of a “bad man,” and Kaplan guides the reader through the piece with a bold, assured voice.

You figure out which genres you love and which ones you don’t. You like historical fiction, stories of brave, precocious kids in troubled times. You like science fiction, and series about normal kids with everyday problems — strict teachers, bullies, beloved pets who die. You don’t like the horror series that are popular with your classmates, written in a second person much too visceral for comfort, where the protagonist is never in control. In those stories, the worst things always happen off the page, leaving you to fill in the most terrifying details.

And then there are the stories where, midway through, the premise shifts beneath you, where you realize that everything you thought you knew was false. You learn that these stories have what’s called an unreliable narrator. These are the scariest stories of all.

You prefer fairy tales, with their strange logic and their consistent casts of characters: unloved children and evil stepmothers, all happening some place outside of time. As you get older, you seize upon stories that play with their tropes: the castle as a metaphor for loneliness, the princess who saves herself.

And you’ll realize, too, that a person can tell a story any way she likes; that the same story — a little girl who loves to read — can be told as a horror story or a fairy tale, depending on the choices of the author.

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Emergence

In this personal essay, Cherise Morris explores her family’s relationship to—and deep respect for—extreme weather, how Black communities have created homes in the most inhospitable places, and the importance of mutual aid and helping each other in times of climate crisis. It’s a beautiful, ultimately uplifting lyrical essay that’s part of Scalawag’s Salt, Soil, & Supper series on climate justice and the American South.

In the overgrowth of Cypress trees older than humankind, a vast expanse of marshy waters became a mirror. In the morass of swing limbs and undisturbed brush, there was a refuge to be found. The people who found it, the ancestors—familial or collective—who willed their freedom across untamed horizons, were called maroons. While there is no official record or documentation of these free people, history estimates thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of formerly enslaved Black folks made homes in the Great Dismal Swamp throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The news cycle after Hurricane Katrina was constant, a 24-hour-loop of rising flood waters, record high temperatures, “looting,” unsubstantiated claims of rape, murder, and lawlessness in the Superdome, where a city and country had abandoned its citizens. New Orleans, a city forged by Blackness, Black people, and Black culture became the epitome of a mythic recklessness. The recklessness born from the wrath of nature, the recklessness cradled by untamable waters, the recklessness bred by Blackness. Blackness, in this biased retelling, was an invasive plant watered by the floods, a plant left overflowing and uncontrollable.

But what the news coverage never showed was the ways Black people, at the nexus of nature’s calamity and systemic disinvestment, came together to care for one another, to look out for their neighbors who were also stranded, to plead for help together, and then, when they realized help wasn’t coming, to become that help themselves.

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I Evacuated From Yellowknife This Summer. Coming home Was The Hardest Part.

A harrowing account of an evacuation from Yellowknife, Canada, as wildfires rip towards the city. Jessica Davey-Quantick’s trauma is clear, and her message is desperate. A powerful piece.

When it was time to go home, after 35 days on shift, that gut-twisting fear came back. I knew too much and too little: I knew enough to be terrified that this was too early, that the highway through the South Slave up to Yellowknife was still unsafe and threatened by winds like the ones that had sent us all out of the territory in the first place. But I didn’t know what I’d be coming home to. 

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