In December 2022, the chimpanzees of Furuvik Zoo escaped when a staff member tending them accidentally left one of their enclosure’s doors open. In this riveting but heartbreaking Guardian read, Imogen West-Knights recounts the chaotic 72 hours it took for the zookeepers and park staff to contain the chimps in their ape house. Be warned, though, that this is far from a happy tale. In fact, it’s distressing. But West-Knights reconstructs the incident from minute to minute in a brilliantly reported piece.
It’s not uncommon for animals to escape from zoos, and all zoos have protocol to deal with this eventuality. The precise response, however, depends on which animal has escaped. In 2022, a king cobra escaped from its enclosure in the reptile house at Skansen Aquarium, a zoo in Stockholm. The week-long hunt for the snake involved calling in X-ray operators from Stockholm’s main airport, who used equipment typically used to scan suitcases for narcotics to X-ray the reptile house for the shape of a snake hiding in pipes or air vents. (The cobra, now renamed Houdini, returned to its enclosure on its own, in the end.)
Seven chimpanzees on the loose require a very different approach. Chimpanzees are big and smart, they are adept climbers and can move at up to 25mph. For the humans catching the chimps, the experience can be emotionally challenging, even existentially confusing, in a way that returning an escaped cobra to its cage is not. Great apes, the name given to large primates like chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, are so like us. They hold hands, embrace and kiss one another, and the meanings of these gestures seem to be the same as when we do it. They express fear, delight, surprise, affection. And yet they are not us. The Dutch zoologist Frans de Waal, who has more than 50 years of experience with chimpanzees, suggests in his seminal book Chimpanzee Politics that we cannot help but feel a sense of unease around the animal. How should we relate to them, these creatures we know to be wild, but who look like we do? Last month, I stood with a zookeeper at a zoo in the south of England, watching a group of chimpanzees sun themselves in their enclosure. “I find them terrifying,” she admitted. “They’re so human. Who is looking at who?”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/QyZPv4E
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/UsKbS8Z
A provocative review of Beyoncé’s new film. Whether you agree or disagree with Angelica Jade Bastién’s take, and whether you like Beyoncé or not, this essay is worth a read:
Like the album and tour with which it shares a name, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé seeks to be a celebration of Black queer joy. From the start, Beyoncé preaches her desire to create a “safe space.” “Renaissance means a new beginning,” she says; it’s a balm “after all we’ve been through in the world.” But what exactly is she referring to? The onslaught of death and illness brought on by the continuing pandemic? The lawsaimed at criminalizingtrans children and adults? The rising misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Blackness that leads to grave violence? The various, ongoing genocides? Beyoncé gives us no context for what she’s referring to or how it touches the shores of a life dominated and driven by the kind of wealth that insulates her from harm. Her words reflect broadly liberal pablum meant to give the appearance of care and mean just enough that her fans can project radicalness upon her but not so much that she would ruffle anyone enough for her to lose money or be forced to stand for something.
Beyoncé has been a remote star for years, someone far more content with having her dedicated Hive project upon her than speaking for herself. This makes the behind-the-scenes moments of her latest concert documentary, which are so primed toward engendering intimacy, rather curious. Every time you think you’ve seen behind the curtain, you realize there’s another curtain upon another stage. This isn’t new for her. Consider previous projects like the labored 2013 film Life Is But a Dream and the more successfully realized Homecoming in 2019. From this vantage point, fake intimacy is a currency she utilizes to give the appearance of revelation even if she actually remains as closed as a fist. Beyoncé positions herself not as a goddess bestowing a peek of humanity to her loyal subjects but as a relatable figure we can and should connect with. But if you have cameras on you all the time, even when you’re supposed to be “off,” when do you take down the performative mask? It isn’t even when she has knee surgery, a moment carefully documented on camera. For Beyoncé, a woman known to film her every move and house it in a temperature-controlled archive, everything is performance and each performance is merely a means of brand extension.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/10FQc5s
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/UsKbS8Z
Personal essays are as much about the readers as the writers. While all the essays in this list demonstrate exceptional writing—each piece struck a distinct chord with the editor who chose it. For Seyward, it was an essay on grief. For Krista, a piece on community experience. Peter was drawn to video game writing (Red Dead Redemption 2!), Cheri to the immigrant experience and caring for loved ones, and Carolyn to the fear of missed opportunities as we age (and a vicious jungle tick).
We hope you find a piece to resonate with you as you read these beautiful personal stories.
Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words
Grief is unpredictable. Sometimes it stabs you, sometimes it suffocates you; when it isn’t making you weep or scream, it’s leaving you numb. Grief is also unfathomable: we cannot see, much less reach, the edges of the permanent absence of someone we love. “Grief may be the knowledge … that the future won’t be like the past,” Kamran Javadizadeh writes in this exquisite essay about the death of his sister, Bita. “Like water to the page, it spreads in all directions, it thins the surface, it touches what you cannot touch.” Javadizadeh reflects on his grief through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience of losing Bita: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from college; a Hafez verse that Bita texted to him one day. The best poetry is not unlike grief: it is vast, complex, elusive. And in reading verse, Javadizadeh shows, we can find lessons for mourning. I’ve thought about this essay countless times since I read it last summer, and I suspect I will reread it many times in the years to come. —SD
Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words
Consider what it means to truly feel full—with a full stomach and a full heart—when your physical and spiritual hungers are satiated for a time. Diné poet Jake Skeets mulls these layers of resonance in his beautiful essay “The Butchering,” in which he prepares to kill a sheep for “the Kinaałda. . . .loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony.” For Skeets and members of his Indigenous community, story is wonderfully entangled with preparing the food that will nourish his family both physically and spiritually. Community members teach and learn interchangeably, switching roles naturally in a space of safety, free from shame. Skeets meditates on the open mindset needed to fully participate; sometimes he is a child, earning knowledge passed on from family and sometimes he is an uncle, offering an example for others. There’s a slowness to savor in Skeets’ writing, a gentle quickening you observe in the essay as he educates you on what it takes to sustain his community and their Indigenous way of life. “The next time I butcher I’ll have my own story to tell, my own memory to share, knowledge to offer. One more voice to add to the chorus on those nights when you’re out in the desert under the night sky, no sound for miles, just the moon and the ground beneath you, reminding you it’s all real. That and your full stomach. Generations heard through wind, the air, the stirring gleaming stars. All that knowledge, all that story, all that beauty,” he writes. Be sure to make time for this piece; it will ignite your sense of wonder and spark your curiosity, feeding you in a way that’s truly satisfying. —KS
Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words
Not long after I started at Longreads, I put together a reading list detailing some of my favorite pieces of video game writing over the previous decade. If people could enjoy reviews of movies they haven’t seen, I reasoned, then they could do the same with gaming criticism and journalism—even if they’d never held a controller. That conviction hasn’t wavered in the years since; however, this year brought a piece powerful enough to vault back through time and land on that list. Hanif Abdurraqib’s Paris Review essay (which also appears in the newly published collection Critical Hits) is nominally about the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ critically acclaimed title set in the American West in 1899. The word “nominally” carries more weight than usual, though. In Abdurraqib’s able hands, the game instead becomes a portal to grief and salvation, futility and loss. Some characters can’t be redeemed by virtue of their programming. Others can. The trajectory of the character of you is another story altogether. “If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say,” Abdurraqib writes. “I don’t think about it, until I do.” As with the very best of arts writing, this meditation teases apart its medium’s limitations to find the universal truths and questions embedded within. No virtual revolver necessary. —PR
Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 5, 2023 | 6,197 words
Jiayang Fan was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with ALS. She writes: “The child became the mother’s future, and the mother became the child’s present, taking up residence in her brain, blood, and bones.” This was the first personal piece Fan wrote after her mother’s death; it’s a devastating tale of the immigrant experience in America, of illness, of the intimate and complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. Fan’s descriptions of her bedridden mother range from exquisite to grim to satisfyingly peculiar. She is “shipwrecked in her own body,” with skin like “rice paper” that will inevitably tear. Even a line detailing how literal shit excretes out of her mother’s body—a “rivulet” down the “limp marble of her thigh”—manages to read beautifully. Fan writes with vulnerability about caring for an elderly loved one, love and sacrifice, the intertwining of two lives, and the story about them that’s ultimately written. I had to pause and collect myself a number of times as I thought about my own aging mother, and the decisions made over the course of our lives that have made us who we are. “One creature, disassembled into two bodies,” Fan writes of their shared life. This is extraordinary writing that hit me in a spot deep within. —CLR
Melissa Johnson | Outside | July 18, 2023 | 4,273 words
A key sentence in this essay goes as follows, “Behold my nightmare: a tick has bitten my vagina.” The incident—relayed with “the gravitas of Obi-Wan Kenobi describing the destruction of planet Alderaan”—occurs in 2017, while Melissa Johnson is enduring a five-day trek in northern Guatemala to attend the wedding of two ex-military women. (She reflects on how during the days of Trump America, the middle of the jungle felt a safer spot for such nuptials.) Johnson embarks on this quest fresh from harvesting her eggs. Single at the age of 39, she is not only wrestling ticks from her “holy garden” but with her fear of missing out on love and motherhood. Trudging along the soggy trails, Johnson dwells on her cloudy future with trepidation. But, by the time she is released from the jungle’s insect-infested innards, she has come to terms with the fact that she is an adventurer—someone comfortable with the unknown. This piece has many layers: an adventure story, a character study of people with names such as “Tent Dawg,” and a thoughtful take on aging and motherhood. It’s also just plain funny. I loved going through the jungle with Johnson, and I also loved the last sentence of her bio: She had a baby girl in March. —CW
You can also browse all of our year-end collections since 2011 in one place.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/MP69Tiw
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/UsKbS8Z
In this personal piece on grief and loss, formatted and laid out as a personal thesaurus of sorts, Jackie Domenus reflects on the drug overdose of Chris, a close cousin. Domenus celebrates their friendship, remembers their adolescence and life growing up in New Jersey, and expresses anger and regret over the circumstances of Chris’ death.
Yearn, v.
Synonyms: desire strongly, ache
At family parties now, we get ready to have cake and someone says, “Is everyone here?”
“Yup,” someone else answers.
And I wish that were true, but someone is always missing.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/i2vu6mk
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/RQvZ10C
Tracie White on physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee’s insatiable quest for knowledge and his innate ability to make connections between literature, history, and science as he creates and evolves treatments for his cancer patients.
“Sid thinks big and sees big,” says Atul Gawande, ’87, himself the author of four bestselling books on medicine, a surgeon, and a friend of Mukherjee’s. “He’s able to see the entire landscape of cancer, the gene, and then the cell, and then on and on. He’s driven by understanding at the molecular level what our lives are like as an organism, and even at the societal level. That’s how he makes sense of the world.”
It’s late afternoon, and the light in Mukherjee’s office begins to fade. But Mukherjee is still thinking and talking and making plans. He talks about the art scene in New York City, visiting museums on weekends. He admits, a bit sheepishly, that he also has artistic talents. In fact, some of his obsessive doodling of molecules appears in his books. He grins. Sure, he’s obsessive about his work, but he loves his life outside the office. He and Sze throw elaborate dinner parties in their Manhattan apartment, for which he cooks. Sze describes how, when her husband likes a dish at a restaurant, he dissects it, smelling it, tasting it, talking to the chef if he can’t figure out how it was made—and then re-creates it at home. “It’s a good metaphor for how he looks at life,” Sze says. “He’s always kind of sniffing out good ideas. Always on the prowl for things to be cracked open and solved.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/q5prJB0
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/RQvZ10C
A joyful little piece, complete with a few goat puns. Lauren Larson obviously delights in her topic: how goats are rented out to eat invasive plants. (An idea that seems to work splendidly.)
The herd is startlingly efficient and even organized—at certain times throughout the day, the entire group gathers together and lies down for a break. On the day of my visit, in early November, the goats have been working along the lake for a week already, with a little over a week to go before they return to the Carrs’ ranch in Brownwood, just south of Abilene. The opposite side of the inlet has already been neatly denuded. This is the herd’s second tenure on the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail: they were stationed along the trail for several weeks this past summer, and were so effective that the Trail Conservancy invited them back.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/cZ2Ru1n
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/RQvZ10C
Jeff Gottlieb details the downfall of a businessman named Steve Carroll, who went from the life of a high-flying executive to robbing banks—a dramatic tale of someone who lost it all. It’s a fast-paced, and well-told, read.
The day after the August 2018 robbery, Scott Hamilton, a commercial airline pilot and Air Force Academy graduate living in Texas, answered a phone call from his brother John. “Dude you’re not going to freaking believe this,” John told him as he emailed him a link to one of the photos pinging around the internet. Scott opened the link and agreed it sure looked like Steve, but he offered that maybe it was just someone who resembled him. Another brother, Bob, came on the line and directed them to photos taken from different angles. There was no question: The man robbing the bank was their brother-in-law, their sister’s husband of 36 years. Scott even recognized the Bersa Thunder 380 pistol, which he’d given his sister as a gift. The Foster Grant sunglasses were familiar, too, a present from Scott to Steve the previous Christmas. The revelation left them shocked.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/nQ1PZDj
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/RQvZ10C
