The online magazine +972 is doing essential reporting on the horrific conflict between Israel and Hamas. If you’re not reading it, consider adding it to your daily media diet. On Thursday, in partnership with the news site Local Call, +972 published a devastating investigation into Israel’s military strategy in Gaza. Since October 7, more than 15,000 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes, which just resumed after a “pause” for the exchange of hostages:
In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.
“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”
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Micro-scale real estate. Marvelous birds with better memory than yours. Neighbors recording neighbors. Love among seniors. A profile of a woman who’s been both ubiquitous and anonymous for 15 years. All that—and more!—in this week’s edition.
Scott Huler | Esquire | November 20, 2023 | 5,653 words
In summer 2020, I ordered a miniature house kit, thinking it would be the first of many cute dioramas I’d construct while stuck at home. As I write this, however, I glance over at the unopened box, a bit embarrassed that I have yet to experience the joy of making it. For Esquire, Scott Huler immerses himself in the world of working miniaturists, and a movement that exploded during lockdown and grew even more popular thanks to Instagram and TikTok. Speaking with collectors and artists, such as professional miniaturist Robert Off, Huler explores the why behind this art. What makes a roombox—the boxed display that houses a miniature 3D environment—so irresistible? I love what Huler discovers: for many miniature makers and viewers, a roombox provides a way to focus, a place of relief. An entire world in which to escape, or to control. An outlet to imagine and dream that “just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway.” This piece brought me joy, not just because I was wowed by the skilled craftsmanship of miniaturists working today, but it also reminded me of the peace we can find within our interior world, and the power of our own imagination. —CLR
Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | November 23, 2023 | 4,036 words
I had to take a moment after reading this essay to sit and untangle the mess of feelings it brought up. It’s joyful, desperately sad, and a poignant reflection on aging: a standout piece. Sophie Elmhirst introduces us to two lovers, Mary and Derek. Theirs is teenage love, pure and easy, with no responsibility to weigh it down. But Mary and Derek are no teenagers; their meet-cute is in a care home. With just a few choice words, Elmhirst brings their characters to life, mixing their love story with memories to remind us of what came before a life of inconveniences and incontinence pads. She uses short, crisp sentences, jumping from place to place and emulating the way fragments of memory come bright and clear before fading and falling out of reach. It was as if I was sitting with Mary, listening as she grasped for a memory before finding another. In a few paragraphs, we have a snapshot of two lives, swinging from love to tragedy, the way life can—a history that makes the love story even more beautiful. “It’s different, meeting someone late in life,” Elmhirst explains. “You know you won’t have long, so the love feels more urgent.” (Even if this leads to awkward noises from the home’s bedrooms.) When the love is lost, it hits with a jolt, and Mary is shocked into facing the truth that she will never go home again. Yet, her final pragmatism is inspiring. An essay that made me think about aging in a way I never have before. —CW
Lauren Smiley | WIRED | November 7, 2023 | 7,704 words
Last April, law enforcement in San Francisco’s Marina District responded to 911 calls about an unhoused man who was beating a local resident with a metal object. The suspect was quickly arrested and the story soon went viral, in no small part because there was a video of the incident. But there were other videos—as Lauren Smiley writes, “In San Francisco, there’s always another video”—and in time they revealed there was more to the story, particularly as it pertained to the supposed victim. I don’t want to give the rest away, because this feature should be read in its entirety. It’s a masterful retelling of events, certainly, but it’s also a razor-sharp, much-needed analysis of the way San Franciscans now police one another via cell phone videos, Ring cameras, and other devices. This citizen surveillance, as Smiley shows, is feeding the national narrative about San Francisco as a place of squalor and violence. Tape something on your doorstep and before long, “the cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In with Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk.” —SD
Brian Payton | Hakai Magazine | November 14, 2023 | 3,700 words
First, let us have a moment of appreciation for this banger of a headline, in tribute to Judith Viorst’s classic childhood read, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I was powerless to resist this piece and was well rewarded for my time. Brian Payton’s Hakai story about the winged wizard known as the Canada jay is satisfying beginning to end. This is no paltry plumed profile; Payton weaves fact, anecdote, and story together so deftly that these 3,700 words evaporate before your very eyes. I could have read a story double the length and still would have wanted more. You’ll meet 81-year old Dan Strickland, a naturalist who is the world’s foremost authority on the bird species, his knowledge gained from decades spent observing and interacting with the cunning corvids in the boreal and subalpine forests where they make their home. “Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information,” writes Payton. “London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.” Not only is this story about a jay a real joy, it’s a rare treasure that reminds me of why I fell in love with reading in the first place: learning about those with such deep interests is deeply interesting. —KS
Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | November 25, 2023 | 4,690 words
I always feel just a twinge of guilt recommending a story that has already become The Thing Everybody Read This Week. In my defense, though, I read the story before This Week had even officially begun, and immediately knew that it would be my Top 5 pick. Also in my defense, the first line is perfect. “One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth.” Why is this perfect? Well, because it tells you everything you need to know about what the story will be about, and what this story will be. It will be funny (as Caity Weaver’s profiles always are). It will be clear-eyed. It will be armed with some well-earned cynicism about how companies—or, rather, their vaporous and often uncanny incarnations known as “brands”—operate. The one thing this sentence doesn’t quite prepare you for is how generous the story is. How generous its subject is. And how generously you might think about things thereafter. We all have aspirations. Sometimes our life realizes those aspirations, sometimes it doesn’t. But sometimes even when it doesn’t, it does. Stephanie Courtney, the comic actor once bent on getting to Saturday Night Live and now in firm possession of a far more fulfilling gig, knows that better than anyone. —PR
Audience Award
What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!
Grace Glassman | Slate | November 26, 2023 | 5,038 words
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. —KS
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Did Tim and Deb Nicholls conspire to set their house on fire, murdering their three children, or were they victims of a shoddy probe, led by John DeHaan, the pre-eminent expert who literally wrote the book on forensic fire investigation? Worse yet, could DeHaan be behind a string of wrongful convictions? For 5280 Magazine, Robert Sanchez attempts to find out.
Even so, Tim, the only person who survived the fire, became a suspect. “We did not want to believe this was intentionally set,” CSPD detective Rick Gysin told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 2008, five years after the blaze. “You don’t want to think of humanity like that.”
However, investigators eventually came to the conclusion that the fire was a triple homicide. CBI tests on the carpeting, on Tim’s sneakers and jeans, and on pajamas belonging to both Sophia and Sierra had come back positive for xylenes—colorless, flammable liquids that could be used as accelerants in fires—which gave investigators reason to believe the fire was intentionally set.
On top of that, Tim’s recollection of the fire changed with each retelling. At one point, he said he’d walked to the garage and returned to a living room filled with fire; in another, it was heavy smoke. In one, he ran to a bedroom window to get air; in another, he was lining up his children to get out of the house. “What Tim Nicholls said didn’t make a lot of sense,” Derek Graham, part of the police homicide investigation team, told the Gazette in 2008. “That was a big red flag from the beginning.”
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Chik-fil-A has been a political lightning rod nearly as long as it’s been a phenomenon—and in recent years, has achieved the dubious distinction of getting blowback from both ends of the ideological spectrum. But as Clint Rainey details, the company is in the midst of a tightrope walk: listening and learning, while still preserving the customer-first approach that has set it apart from the fast-food fray. An image-rehab piece? No question. But here’s what matters: it’s smartly structured, well reported, and strong enough to make you question your own stance toward the company.
Through the years, Christian companies have varied widely on where to set boundaries between their businesses and their values. For every Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s cofounder and devout Catholic who donated so much money to anti-abortion groups in the 1980s that he triggered a pizza boycott from the National Organization for Women, or the Green family, who got the Supreme Court to carve out a right to religious freedom for Hobby Lobby by suing to overturn the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, there is a more subtle player. Take the Snyder family, owners of In-N-Out Burger, who for 40 years have done little beyond stamping Bible verse references onto various food and beverage packaging items. “There are lots of ways to be a Christian business,” says Jonathan Merritt, author of several books about Christianity, including A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars. “And some are riskier than others.”
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Joe Lindsey has been writing about cycling since Jonas Vingegaard was using training wheels. When hereditary hearing loss turned into something even more incapacitating, he was forced to re-engage with the sport and pastime he loved—an interior upheaval that continued even after all his senses returned. A lovely, meditative read.
Last year, Bicycling magazine published a short video about a blind bike mechanic in Iran. In it, Reza Alizadeh explains how he uses touch to replace his sight when working on a bike. “The majority of the work for a blind person relies heavily on a sense of touching,” he says at one point. Like Alizadeh for his sight, I used touch to replace sound. And even after regaining my hearing, those techniques stayed with me.
When I tune a drivetrain, in addition to using my sight, I now place a finger on the back of the rear derailleur; I can turn a limit screw or the barrel adjuster (or press Di2 buttons in the micro-adjust setting) and as I hand-turn the cranks I can sense the change in the chain’s vibrations as the pulley cage moves. When truing a wheel, the whispered scrape of rim on caliper is, for me, felt in the stand as much as heard. A creak in the bottom bracket? A subtle vibration through the crankarm and pedal, to the strain gauge that is the nerves in my foot, exquisitely more sensitive than the most-accurate power meter on the market.
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The Longreads editors love to curate the best nonfiction stories on the web for our readers, but we are always happy to have some help! 2023 has been another year where we have published reading lists from outside contributors—on eclectic topics that range from Taylor Swift to neuroscience.
We have been lucky enough to have garnered some regular reading list authors, but we are always happy to welcome first-time listers into the fold. Our top 10 most popular lists of the year include curation from both veterans and new authors, and we are delighted to remind you of their many fantastic recommendations—get comfortable before you dive in, you may be here awhile.
We’ll continue to commission and publish reading lists in 2024. So, if you’ve got a great idea for a list, please pitch us.
You can also browse all of our year-end collections since 2011 in one place.
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Tania Galiñanes, a librarian at Tohopekaliga High School in Kissimmee, Florida, loves books. But with the spread of book bans across public schools in the state, she decided she’d had enough—and quit. For The Washington Post, Ruby Cramer reports on what’s happening in school libraries across the U.S., like this one, and recounts Galiñanes’ last day at work.
She was tired. Her husband was always reminding her: Tania, you have no sense of self-preservation. She had thought about pushing back against the district, had imagined putting up posters all over the walls from the American Library Association celebrating “freedom to read,” a final act before her last day on Friday. But even if she did put up the posters, who would be there to see them once she left? The library would be closed after this week, until they found someone to take her place.
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