Kiese Laymon takes us back to 1984 and childhood Friday nights, where he, his grandmama, and her boyfriend Ofa D. went to Jr. Food Mart for takeout dinners Laymon remembers with great fondness.
I loved that we could get batteries and gizzards. I loved that we could get biscuits and Super Glue. I loved that we could get dishwashing soap, which was also bubble bath, which was also the soap we used to wash Grandmama’s Impala, and the good hot sauce in the same aisle. I was 8 years old. I never knew, or cared, that my favorite restaurant served gas. My Grandmama and Ofa D were deep into their 50s. They seemed to never know or care that our favorite restaurant served gas, either.
I suppose there were choices of where you’d eat out in Forest. There was a Pizza Inn. There was a McDonald’s. There was Penn’s Fishhouse. There was Kentucky Fried Chicken. But there were no choices in what we’d eat on Friday. Ofa D would order a box of dark meat, a Styrofoam container of fried fish, and a brown bag filled with ’tato logs. Grandmama would grab a box of a dozen donuts. Grandmama and Ofa D would let me pick my own cold drank. I picked the six-pack Nehi Peach or RC Cola every single time.
Maybe 35 minutes later, I’d eat myself into a lightweight coma while Grandmama and Ofa D lightly petted and pecked each other on the couch with the week’s greasiest lips. This was our practice.
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Rebecca Mason is the UK’s leading romance fraud specialist, so skilled that she can track down victims before they even know they are victims. In this riveting piece, Stuart McGurk explores how Mason discovered an international ring of fraudsters—and told people they were in love with a fantasy.
But Mason was developing something of a specialism: she had begun tracking down victims before they even knew they were victims, locating fraudsters before anyone had reported a fraud. As she and a colleague sat at Baldwin’s dining room table, which was covered with assorted paperwork, they explained what had brought them to him.
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In this nuanced essay for Seattle Met, Allecia Vermillion writes about what it’s like to raise a family when your partner lives with hearing loss.
After a few minutes she told us he had passed his hearing screen. That’s when I heard the sound of crying. Not the infant kind. Across the dark room, Seth’s breathing was ragged. A few sobs escaped before he could dry his eyes and compose himself back into stoicism.
Sure, we were all tired and running on raw emotion. But his tears were my first, my only, clue that Seth had worried our child might inherit the hearing loss that had demarcated so much of his life.
Every other year, Seth visits his doctor for routine hearing tests. They measure the difference between his hearing and that of a typical ear. They also record whether that hearing has diminished since his last visit. So far both right and left are holding steady at the same levels as when we met. Still, I lie awake sometimes, imagining how we would conduct our lives if Seth’s hearing went away entirely. Would we set up some sort of marital Slack channel? Could witty text messages sustain our closeness? They already get us through the workday. When we hug, if I get too close to his ear, it squeals with feedback, like someone adjusting a microphone as their band comes onstage for its set. The sound used to make me retreat. But after all these years I know to tilt my head the other way, and just keep on holding tight.
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What does it mean when someone says a dessert is “not too sweet”? For older generations of the Asian diaspora, it might be a comment of the highest praise. For younger Asians and Asian Americans, perhaps it’s a mark of maturity (and a sign that they’re becoming their parents). For Eater, Jaya Saxena unpacks this common phrase, which is a lot more complicated than it seems.
Like any in-joke among a marginalized group, “not too sweet” is a defiant shorthand, and one that in its construction necessitates a binary: “too sweet” compared to what? Often, in the Asian American usage, it’s a contrast to Western desserts filled with milk chocolate, sticky caramel, and corn syrup. To say “not too sweet” is to say actually, I don’t want your frosted red velvet cupcakes or your sticky toffee pudding; I long for the subtlety of red bean, the freshness of mango over sticky rice. It’s to say that Asian dessert traditions and flavors — matcha, black sesame, jellies laced with lychee — are superior to flavors associated with whiteness. It’s to proclaim that my culture has given me different tastes, better ones, and no amount of soft power can take that away.
This is what got my hackles up every time I saw a blanket “Asian” or “Asian American’’ descriptor around this supposed preference. Estimates put Asia as encompassing about 50 countries, and 4.7 billion people. Do you hear how silly it sounds to describe a cuisine, a behavior, literally anything as “Asian”? How dare you speak for everyone! I called my Bengali grandmother and asked her about desserts, just for extra proof, and she waxed about the roshogulla in her hometown outside Kolkata, the kalakand she ate at college in Lucknow, her mother’s kheer. “I love sweets,” she told me, even though at 93 she now limits her intake. Still, this was proof that the preference for “not too sweet” is not universal among Asians, and that “Asian” and “Asian American” cease to be useful frameworks when we start talking about the nuances of culture.
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Indigenous communities have long relied on the far north’s caribou herds for sustenance. But the herds are disappearing, and there’s not a clear cause of the decline, nor is there a remedy:
To anyone who lives south of the Arctic Circle the problem can seem abstract—another distant note of sadness in an era heavy with extinctions. But this is not how it appears in the far north.
In small communities scattered along the tree line or set in the open tundra, towns such as Anaktuvuk Pass that are often isolated, often Indigenous, where imported food and gas can be astronomically expensive and hunting caribou is often the cheapest and fastest and certainly the most satisfying way to provide for a family, the decline brings a peculiar dread. An Inupiat elder in a coastal town told me it was like feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on. The cold arrives, and it lingers. You don’t get over it. Then it worsens, until you become gaunt and haunted, until you’re afraid it isn’t a cold at all but something deeper. Something that’s shot through your whole system.
This is how the caribou problem feels to many Native people in the north, including the Nunamiut. Their name means “people of the land,” but anyone will tell you that they are, most of all, a caribou people. They are also sometimes called America’s last nomads, because only in about 1950 did the Nunamiut give up a mobile life, a life spent hunting and following caribou. They chose to settle in Anaktuvuk Pass exactly because the herd poured through it like a river. The name Anaktuvuk means “the place of many caribou droppings.”
One night after I’d gone out hunting with Clyde Morry, his father, Mark, made a quiet comment about the choice his people had made. Mark Morry was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thick gray hair, thick old glasses. He sat in a recliner by a window in the house he had built, watching his family eat caribou that Clyde had brought home.
“It was a big gamble for them to settle down like that,” Mark said of his own father and mother and uncles and aunts, the generation who gave up nomadism. “They figured the caribou would always be here.”
*This story is only accessible to National Geographic subscribers.
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This week we’re featuring stories about restorative justice, donated bodies allegedly sold at Harvard, an ER doctor who recognized her own catastrophic symptoms, a fascinating career pivot, and chimpanzees on the lam.
Mari Cohen | Jewish Currents | September 28, 2023 | 7,745 words
In 2015, I was on an Amtrak train that derailed, killing eight people, including the young man sitting next to me. I was lucky to escape with relatively minor physical injuries. In the years since, I have thought often about the conductor of the train, who was acquitted in a jury trial of a series of charges related to the crash. He had no intention to cause harm, and he certainly wasn’t responsible for the systemic issues that, had Amtrak addressed them proactively, might have mitigated the scale of the tragedy. I don’t think he should be made to suffer—I have no doubt that living with the knowledge of what happened while he was driving the train is a terrible enough burden. But this doesn’t mean that I’m not upset about the crash, a feeling that wasn’t really assuaged by the compensation that Amtrak provided victims. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to talk to the conductor, because in the exchange of words there might be some measure of healing for both sides. A similar notion is at the heart of Mari Cohen’s beautiful essay about being the victim of a hit-and-run. In the aftermath, Cohen began reporting on restorative justice approaches to traffic crashes, which advocates believe can “better serve the needs of all involved, creating a confidential space where drivers could express remorse without legal consequences, and where victims could receive the apologies they were looking for.” Through readings, interviews, and her own experience, Cohen considers whether restorative justice is a viable alternative to criminal justice. She suggests that it might be if we can shift our perceptions about closure. “I am trying to let go of the idea that a solution has to do everything,” she writes, “in order to do something.” —SD
Brenna Ehrlich | Rolling Stone | December 4, 2023 | 4,937 words
This grim tale explains the bizarre crossover between morgues and the oddities world. Bodies donated to Harvard (via the Anatomical Gift Program) may have inadvertently ended up as collectibles, after Cedric Lodge, the head of the Harvard morgue, allegedly allowed people to come in and pick out human remains to buy and take home. Yep, someone who gave their body for science may now have a body part on a collector’s shelf. Brenna Ehrlich unpicks this disturbing story for Rolling Stone and finds other morgue owners accused of the same crime. It’s hard to fathom that people in such positions of trust could be selling their charges or that anyone would actually want to buy them—a macabre segment of the world to discover. But it’s by talking to the families that Ehrlich shows us the true horror of this case: grieving family members are now unsure if they have the correct ashes or if their relative has ended up as an unusual knickknack. A touching detail was the number of people keen to discuss the secret recipes of their loved ones (William R. Buchanan had a famous carrot cake, Doreen Gordon some excellent macaroons, and Adele Mazzone was good at pork fried rice). I appreciated the care taken by Ehrlich to humanize those who donated their bodies in the first place. —CW
Grace Glassman | Slate | November 26, 2023 | 5,038 words
In an ongoing medical emergency, lay patients and their families often have no idea exactly how dangerous a situation has become as specialists and professionals speak in rapid-fire numbers and acronyms only they understand. (Strangely, if you don’t know precisely how dire things are, you also don’t understand how bad things could get, and this incomprehension can sometimes be a kindness.) As an emergency room doctor, Grace Glassman had no such luxury: when she went into hemorrhagic shock after delivering her third child via C-section, she knew she would die without heroic medical intervention and she asked for as much on the way to the operating room for life-saving surgery. “My doctor was running next to my gurney,” she writes. “I found her hand and said, ‘Dr. P., please, do everything. For my kids.’ I was shocked to see her wipe away a tear.” This piece is a master class in the personal essay: it unfolds with perfect pacing, placing you in the hospital room as trauma unfolds, delivering critical context you need to understand Glassman’s peril without overwhelming you with medical detail. It can be said that birth stories are all individual and universal, yet Glassman begets a piece that belies the genre. —KS
Tad Friend | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 8,925 words
Part of being an aging rap fan means periodically being confronted with bizarre “what happened to X” moments. To wit: learning that Jesse Jaymes, the man behind the ill-conceived 1991 oddity “Shake It Like a White Girl,” is now Jesse Itzler, a billionaire (by marriage) and triathlete (by hobby) who is also bent on becoming a top-tier motivational coach. I still don’t know how to react to this development, but at the very least I can say that it gave Tad Friend his latest A+ profile. This is a window into a world that feels like the end state of every “optimization” podcast you’ve ever heard: “The conference-goers, mostly in their thirties and forties, have the air of commuters who missed the first train to the city and are determined to crowd onto the next one. They seek trade secrets and, better still, the mind-set to deploy them.” Personal development, as it’s currently known, is a massive industry, awarding (mostly) men six figures for a single speech at a popular conference. That’s where Itzler is aiming, though under the guise of helping people connect with gratitude and overcome self-doubt. But while there’s no shortage of great scenework—the green room before addressing people who sell dialysis machines, a spontaneous swim race against Olympic athletes—the real draw here is the keen deconstruction of the mythologies we establish. Last year, Friend’s feature about the world of door-to-door salesmen captivated me in similar fashion; he’s able to chronicle a certain kind of masculinity like few others can, teasing out its tensions and deceptions until what starts as a profile of one person becomes an X-ray of an archetype. You may not have heard this tune before, but you won’t be able to shake it. —PR
Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | December 5, 2023 | 7,400 words
You know right from the start that this one’s going to break your heart. But you carry on and brace yourself, because you can also tell, from the opening line, that Imogen West-Knights will deliver a riveting piece of reporting. Last December, the beloved chimpanzees in Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo escaped their enclosure. It took the zoo staff and keepers 72 hours to contain them to their ape house, and West-Knights reconstructs the ordeal with deft pacing and great detail. As the hours pass, the zoo must weigh the safety of the zookeepers and public at large against that of the chimps, and the situation grows more distressing. The photography in the piece—snowy landscapes of the zoo’s grounds that look more sinister than serene—add to the unsettling nature of the story, as you can’t help but imagine these great apes loose in the cold, some in their final moments. (You also wonder: why are we subjecting these animals to a place that’s too cold for them six months out of the year?) This is a sad read, but it sparks an important conversation around zoo safety protocols, climate-specific zoos, and whether zoos should even exist at all. —CLR
Audience Award
Do you hear timpani? This is the piece our readers loved most this week:
Clint Rainey | Fast Company | November 30, 2023 | 4,722 words
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. —PR
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What’s the weirdest chip flavor you’ve ever tried? For me, it was one that supposedly tasted like a spicy German sausage, and it seems to have been available only for a limited time, and only in Southeast Asia. How does that make sense? How does anything about the global distribution of chip flavors make sense? Amelia Tait talks to the world’s foremost powdered-seasoning gurus in search of answers:
For more than 75 years, Leicester has been the place where British potatoes become crisps. Its Walkers factory produces 5m packets a day, steam billowing from behind big blue security gates. Just down the road sits its HQ, where 300 marketers, scientists and chefs decide which crisps the world needs next.
Emma Wood controls most of the world outside the US—at least when it comes to the taste of crisps. In 2017—12 years after she started working for Walkers’ parent company, PepsiCo —she was promoted to director of global flavour and seasonings, meaning it’s her job to develop flavours for Europe, Africa and Asia. It’s not a responsibility she takes lightly. “I know it’s not an expensive purchase,” she says over a conference table, multipacks of Wotsits lying between us, “but it’s really disappointing when you buy something for your lunch and it’s not what you wanted it to be.”
Actually, not everyone eats crisps at lunchtime—in France and southern Europe, they’re more of a pre-dinner snack with aperitifs. This is why Lay’s in the region are so light and simple; why there is a Mediterranean flavour that is essentially just oil and salt (so it doesn’t overpower any accompanying cocktails). And this is why innovating in Spain is often about offering new thicknesses, not new flavours.
Wood’s favourite flavour is salt and vinegar, but I think her personality is more prawn cocktail—sweet but punchy with her blond bob, floaty floral skirt and silver-studded trainers. In the past two decades, her work has taken her everywhere. Before Doritos launched in India five years ago, she took a “culinary trek” across the northern city of Lucknow, trying different pilaus, meats and breads from street food stalls. She relies on knowledge from local PepsiCo teams, so that if she says, “I think I can taste cardamom,” they can clarify: “It’s roasted green cardamom, actually.”
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