Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

At GQ, and now at NYT Mag, Caity Weaver is a profile artist of the highest caliber, able to approach any and everything with curiosity and an sharp, infectious enthusiasm. She’s done it with superstars; she’s done it with glitter; now, she does it with Stephanie Courtney, an actor who for 15 years has made a (very good) living as what amounts to a corporate mascot. Comedy. Ambition. Business. Dreams. Fulfillment. The concept of “enough.” Nothing is too lofty for Weaver to wrestle it onto the page, and nothing is heavy enough to keep this feature from soaring off the page and into your group chat.

If my visit to the “Superstore” set can be taken as representative, being closely involved with the production of popular TV commercials for large national brands is the best possible outcome for a human life. The scale and complexity of the operation at the center of Courtney’s work is eye-popping. Every fleeting football-game-interrupting Progressive ad is the product of hours of labor from more than a hundred people. On set, a cat wrangler stood just out of frame, ready to pounce with a backup cat if the primary cat failed. Trays of lickerish delights — crostini with prosciutto, cups of ethereal parfait — were discreetly proffered, at frequent intervals, to people scrutinizing monitors. Every lens, light and politely anxious face was turned heliotropically toward Courtney, in a rented living room, trying to remember, while delivering her line, that Progressive was offering deals “for new parents” rather than “to new parents” — a possibly meaningful distinction. This wasn’t a critically acclaimed Hulu series; there was actually a lot riding on this. It needed to be the same, but slightly different, and every bit as successful as the 200 that had come before it, so that everyone would be asked to return to this job — not necessarily, perhaps not exactly, the job of their dreams, but a better job than anyone could ever hope for, bolstered by friendly faces and fantastic catering and a sumptuous corporate budget — in perpetuity.

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Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures

Miniatures are having a moment. This intricate art of building and furnishing tiny worlds exploded during the pandemic, and has continued to grow popular through TikTok as well as shows like Best in Miniature. For Esquire, Scott Huler immerses himself in the world of miniaturists and seeks to understand the why behind these delicate and incredibly detailed dioramas called roomboxes. Are they places in which to escape? Spaces to control? Settings to find focus, or perhaps peace? Perhaps all of the above.

This is what distinguishes miniatures: this sense that just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway. That’s what I was looking to understand. Then Off told me something.

“I put things in drawers,” he said. “In my rooms.” Those roomboxes are behind glass. But if Off includes a table in a roombox, and that table has a drawer, well: something will be in that drawer. Pencils, a sewing kit, tools, cutlery. Nobody will ever see it. Nobody will ever know it’s there, yet putting it in there is an essential part of what Off is doing. It’s about a story. “My whole life,” he said, whether creating roomboxes or connecting with clients to sell real estate, “has been about the story.”

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Our Most-Read Longreads Originals of 2023

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Today kicks off our annual year-end series. We’re grateful for another year of Longreads and thank our members for their continued support. With the community’s help, we published dozens of original stories and reading lists from both established and emerging writers, including contributors who had never been published before. Each week, our editors also read and recommended exceptional nonfiction stories from across the web.

Our Best of 2023 collection honors writers, journalists, news publications, and literary outlets publishing important, moving, and memorable work. We’re thrilled to launch this collection with a list of our 10 most popular essays and reported stories.

—Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter, and Seyward

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1. The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews

Will McCarthy | January 3, 2023 | 12 minutes (3,313 words)

Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet.

2. Who’s Afraid of Lorne Michaels?

Seth Simons | August 17, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,165 words)

Very rarely can we see an entire system reflected in one person. The creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live is such a person.

3. How to Survive a Car Crash in 10 Easy Steps

Anne Lagamayo | May 11, 2023 | 4,252 words (15 minutes)

A journalist navigates a world forever changed by her traumatic brain injury.

4. The Road to Becoming Enough

Cassidy Randall | February 16, 2023 | 4,141 words (15 minutes)

I began, if not to turn away from the mythical notion of a man to “complete” me, to accept that there was no love out there for me. I chose mountains instead.

5. Fast Times on America’s Slowest Train

Harrison Scott Key | October 3, 2023 | 14 minutes (4,055 words)

A surreal train ride between Chicago and New Orleans proves that Amtrak still has a lot to offer. (Not including speed or the food.)

6. Meals for One

Sharanya Deepak | June 22, 2023 | 19 minutes (5,246 words)

On what it means to nourish ourselves and others.

7. Bad Tape

Dan Hernandez | February 28, 2023 | 16 minutes (4,503 words)

What I learned about judgment from a car thief, a bank robber, and a mysterious VHS.

8. I Tried to Forget My Whole Life. I’m Glad I Failed.

John Paul Scotto | July 6, 2023 | 11 minutes (3,069 words)

The hindsight of an adulthood autism diagnosis.

9. The Teacher Crush

Jessica L. Pavia | February 21, 2023 | 20 minutes (5,721 words)

What happens when a teenager develops a risky infatuation?

10. Age, Sex, Location

Kira Homsher | March 14, 2023 | 3,308 words (12 minutes)

Chatrooms taught me everything I needed to know about what real people were like before I had to grow up and become one of them.

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Explore our Best of 2023 lists

You can also browse all of our year-end collections since 2011 in one place.

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Piecing Together My Father’s Murder

In August 1999, Orbey’s father was murdered while their family was on vacation in Turkey. He was only 3 years old, and as he grew up, most of what he learned about his dad and the murder was through the internet, or from bits of information gleaned from his older sister, G. In this personal essay, Orbey recounts his own investigation into his father’s death.

I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.

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How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out. From Lauren Smiley, one of the great chroniclers of technology’s impact on people’s lives, this is a feature about what it means to watch and be watched on the streets of the world’s troubled tech capital:

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.

In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.

True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.

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The Train Wrecked in Slow Motion

In this harrowing essay for Slate, ER doctor Grace Glassman recounts the birth of her third child, a daughter, and the risks involved with pregnancy at age 45. In a piece that is a master class in pacing, Glassman remembers her uncontrollable bleeding post C-section and going into hemorrhagic shock that required life-saving emergency surgery. In reflecting on her experience as a medical doctor, she suggests that only one thing stood between life and death: pure luck.

The anesthesiologist returned. “I don’t get your pressures. They don’t reflect how you look.”

In her defense, I did feel well, even though my blood pressure was abysmal.

“We could put in an arterial line and then we’d know for sure,” she said. She was referring to a small wire with a sensor that gets placed in an artery, a more accurate gauge of blood pressure than a cuff. “But it hurts. I don’t think we’ll do that.”

I disagreed. Just put in the damn line, I thought. She was slight, with brown hair in an unfussy bob. She wore dark tortoiseshell glasses. She moved slowly, catlike, and seemed not too concerned. I worried that she wasn’t more worried. It was the emergency doc in me, always defaulting to the worst possible outcome, I told myself. I reminded myself that this was not my show.

She decided instead to transfuse more units of blood and start pressors, medicines that boost blood pressure. Blood pressure can drop for many reasons—a hemorrhage, an infection, a reaction to medication, a compromised heart. Pressors divert blood to the vital organs, such as the heart and the brain, at the expense of body parts that can be sacrificed, like the arms and legs.

Pressors are the mark of a critically ill patient.

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Last Love: a Romance in a Care Home

A beautiful, moving piece about love in old age. Sophie Elmhirst draws you in from the first sentence and keeps you hooked with her quick-fire sentences. It’s an essay to make you both smile and cry.

It’s not entirely clear when this was. Two years ago, maybe three? Timings, the order of things, time in general, can be confusing. But there are some things we know for sure. Mary is Mary Turrell, nearly 80 years old. She had been living at Easterlea Rest Home in Denmead, near Portsmouth, for a little while, a year or two, perhaps, when the man with the voice arrived. And his name was Derek Brown.

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