In this deeply satisfying book excerpt from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson explores her upbringing in Black Appalachia, in Indian Creek, Kentucky. Wilkinson recalls the unceasing labor of farm life and her Granny Christine’s love, served up on heaping plates of greens and in slices of jam cake.
But most of my memories of her are nestled in the growing, the cooking, the preservation of food.
Hoeing the garden. Stroking the long necks of the yellow squash. Stirring butter beans in a pot. Pouring hot bacon grease over new lettuce, onions, and cucumber. Canning runner beans.
Every morning of my childhood, my grandmother donned an apron and cooked breakfast. Slow. Precise. Deliberate. She equated food with love, and she cooked with both a fury and a quiet joy. She fried bacon, sausage, or country ham. She scrambled eggs. The eggs came from our chickens. She made biscuits from scratch. The lard was rendered from our pigs. The milk from our cows. She rolled out the dough and threw flour into the air like magic dust. She churned butter, made the preserves from pears, peaches, or blackberries that she had harvested herself.
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Conde Nast recently announced that it was folding beloved music publication Pitchfork into the operations of GQ. In this enjoyable essay for Defector, Dan McQuade reflects on his love for early Pitchfork reviews and the evolution of music criticism since the ’90s, when writing about music on the internet, and the internet itself, was very different.
Every week Wisdom would get a stack of CDs in the mail and was responsible for writing four reviews a week. Most are only a few paragraphs, but that’s understandable: He only had a day or two to listen to, think about, and review an album. He was not paid, but did make some money from selling the CDs to a record store after he was done with them. Again, this was a very ’90s thing to do.
Pitchfork was old, with roots that date back to what feels like the beginning of the usable internet. The site had been around since the 1990s. Al Isaacs closed Scoops, the wrestling site I wrote for, more than 25 years ago; Pitchfork continued, and a lot of people got to write about things they cared about there. Even if a lot of the site was about posturing, the jobs there seemed honest.
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One morning in November 2023, when Ashish Prashar and his toddler son were at a playground in Brooklyn, they were attacked by a woman who threw her phone and coffee cup at them and repeatedly shouted at Prashar to “go away.” At the time, Prashar—who is Punjabi—wore a kaffiyeh around his neck. His 47-second video of their encounter went viral on the internet, sparking a chain of events: an online mob searching for the woman in the video, the doxxing of a wrongly identified person, and the real assailant eventually charged with hate crime charges. In this story for The Washington Post, Ruby Cramer spends time with Prashar and his wife after the incident, as they deeply consider questions about justice and mercy, as well as compassion. (Note: Story is for Washington Post subscribers.)
Someone had seen the woman at a grocery store in Brooklyn.
The person had taken photos. They’d called the precinct and waited at the store for the police. No police came. No arrest was made. Ash was also feeling impatient. He decided to post the photos to his Instagram. “It is disheartening to let you know that the NYPD didn’t send an officer to the scene to apprehend her,” he wrote, and more comments came streaming in.
But a few days later, he saw something that alarmed him. It was a new video about the case, from another stranger. This one named the woman and listed her home address.
“This is not what I wanted,” Ash said.
He called the detective. “Someone posted her address and her name online,” he said, speaking quickly. “I don’t know who this person is, but I wanted to call you to tell you straight away —”
The detective stopped him. “Okay, so, Ash,” he said, “I have her under arrest.”
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So many elements contribute to a city’s soundscape, from songbirds to rushing streams to the collective chatter across a neighborhood. Instead, human- and machine-generated sounds like car engines, leaf blowers, and amplified Bluetooth devices typically drown out these more natural and “pleasant” sounds in urban settings.
For Noema, Jeffrey Arlo Brown explores the research in urban soundscape planning, looking to cities like Berlin for solutions that promote healthier acoustic environments.
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It’s no secret that the state of elder care in the United States is disastrous. Nursing homes have long been under-staffed and under-resourced; the private-equity boom—to say nothing of the pandemic—has only made things worse. Here, Ann Neumann links this crisis with the specific concerns of aging LGBTQI+ people:
A rather quiet ongoing legal conflict in California is set to determine whether it is a crime for nursing home staff to intentionally and continuously deadname or misgender a trans elder. The California legislature passed a law known as SB 219 in 2017 prohibiting such discrimination, but it has not taken effect due to a lawsuit claiming to protect nursing home employees’ “freedom of expression”—at the explicit expense of residents’ rights.
The challenge is the work of Taking Offense, a shadowy advocacy group which self-describes as an “unincorporated association which includes at least one California citizen and taxpayer who has paid taxes to the state within the last year.” That’s practically all we know about Taking Offense, as well as the name and contact information of their lawyer, David Llewellyn Jr., who has declined to speak with any journalist I could find. (Llewellyn also did not return my call.)
With SB 219, the intent of the California legislature was to make it unlawful for long-term care staff to “willfully and repeatedly” refer to residents by names and pronouns they don’t identify with, and to assign, reassign, or refuse to assign rooms to transgender residents that don’t match their gender identity. Repeatedly calling a trans woman “Mr.,” for instance, would be a misdemeanor, and it would be illegal to put her in a room with men, with the possible penalty of 180 days in jail and a $2,500 fine. If implemented, the bill would strengthen and qualify existing nondiscrimination laws in the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.
The Taking Offense challenge is a “get off my lawn” screed and a willful misunderstanding of LGBTQ rights; it invites overzealous nursing home staff to pass judgement on their residents’ sense of self. The contempt in the group’s legal filing practically drips off the page. It complains a lot, at length, and randomly. One section declares that pronoun is not clearly defined, then goes on to list “different declensions” like “zie, zim, zir, zis, zieself.” The intention is to make the current moment’s search for how best to protect sex and gender minorities to be silly, a child’s game beneath the state court and state law, and certainly beneath the righteous, anonymous people behind Taking Offense.
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In this ambitious project, El País shows how fentanyl has become a global crisis, involving criminal syndicates in Wuhan and Sinaloa, as well as addicts in the streets of Philadelphia and San Francisco; and stretching from a mayor’s office in Manzanillo, Mexico, to the halls of power in Washington, D.C. El País offers vignettes at what it describes as the various “stops” along fentanyl’s path:
Life—or what’s left of it—stops on Kensington Avenue every 10 minutes or so. It happens when the subway hums along the elevated tracks, a blue steel structure that flies over this Philadelphia street. The roar doesn’t allow you to think… but, at least for that moment, the problems at ground zero of the fentanyl crisis in the United States are put on hold.
Afterward, the addicts and the volunteers who help them, the dealers and the police, the YouTubers and the tourists attracted by the news, the armed merchants and the residents of this gigantic open-air drug market will return to the free-for-all fight under the tracks. Hundreds of people who are addicted to the powerful opioid—which is 50 times stronger than heroin—live and die on these streets. Some, like Daniel—who lost all his toes due to the cold—have been wandering around them for years. Others don’t make it past their first month here.
The fate of all of them begins about 2,500 miles away, next to a different set of train tracks: those that cross Culiacán, in the heart of Mexican drug trafficking territory. There, a fentanyl cook—who calls himself Miguel—carries out macabre experiments on a handful of consumers, who test the merchandise before it’s shipped off to the United States. They start with one dose: one third pure and the rest, cut. The “human guinea pigs” inject it in front of him. If they say, “No, it didn’t rock me, it didn’t put me to sleep, add more,” the percentage increases. Miguel assures EL PAÍS that no one has ever died from this process.
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• The cartels making millions off sand
• How change actually happens
• Considering the history and handwringing behind the hooded sweatshirt
• A woman who spent more than a year alone in a lightless cave
• Reclaiming a fruit that’s both a summer staple and a fraught symbol
David A. Taylor | Scientific American | February 1, 2024 | 3,485 words
My favorite subplot of Barry? The romantic relationship between Chechen mafioso NoHo Hank and Bolivian crime boss Cristobal. In season four, ostensibly in an attempt to move away from criminal life, they decide to import sand. When I watched the episode in which they hatch a plan, I’d thought it was an inspired comic bit; only once I read David A. Taylor’s story did I realize that sand mafias are very real. Sand is one of the main ingredients in concrete, and given that construction worldwide has been booming for decades, we could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. In this piece, Taylor writes about the devastating impact of sand mining and looting on ecosystems that are already fragile, and on vulnerable communities in places like Mozambique and Kenya (and how one woman in Kenya’s Makueni County successfully fought the sand cartel in Nairobi and introduced a regulated, sustainable approach). Stories of organized crime aside, it’s really the simple yet eye-opening details that make this piece, like the fact that China used more cement in just three years than the United States used in the entire 20th century. Or that half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined. Or that sand from rivers and lakebeds, not coastal areas, is ideal for building, and builders who skimp on better sand end up constructing buildings that are flat-out dangerous (just look at the destruction in Turkey and Syria from the February 2023 earthquake, one expert tells Taylor). A fascinating story on a global issue that more people should be talking about. —CLR
Rebecca Solnit | Literary Hub | January 11, 2024 | 1,745 words
Whenever I plant seeds, I want immediate payoff. Notoriously impatient, I’ll check on them mere hours after planting to see if they’ve sprouted. Now? (No.) Now? (No.) How about now? With all things, I need evidence that my actions will take root and bear fruit. Rebecca Solnit’s recent piece at Lit Hub gave me some much-needed perspective on the slow pace of change, be it personal or political. Popular culture suggests that all-important turning points come after the impassioned speech or the meet cute, but in reality, true change is imperceptible and incremental, and progress is hard to pinpoint. In this piece, Solnit focuses on the years of advocacy and baby steps that, taken one after another, can lead to a shift in government policy that benefits the environment. What I appreciated most about this piece is Solnit’s gentle reminder that, for the most part, change happens when you’re not looking. For me, that not-looking is both a solution and a problem to be solved. At its best, not looking means keeping the faith that action will beget change; at its worst, it means avoiding the personal reflection necessary to achieve those tiny, cumulative changes that add up to real progress. “A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient,” she writes. According to Solnit, if you take it slow, over time you’ll find perspective. It just depends on how you look at it. —KS
Nicholas Russell | The Point | January 23, 2024 | 3,053 words
“At a glance,” Nicholas Russell writes, “there is no coherent history of the hood as a symbol for anything.” As we know all too well, that changed in our lifetimes—first with the arrival of hip-hop, and then irrevocably with Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012. But as Russell deftly unpacks in The Point, the hood’s unique position as a cultural signifier exposes far more than this country’s cancerous paranoia about young Black men. Even if this isn’t a piece he wanted to write, having cars swerve at you on two separate occasions while you’re running in a hoodie has a way of changing things. So Russell considers the garment from every angle imaginable. As a guarantor of boy-genius tech-world wizardry. A flashpoint of respectability politics. An easy shorthand for crime-show producers. And of course, in its pointed variant, as an icon of American hatred and bigotry. None of them, though, seem likely to eclipse its current mournful status. Russell is as resigned to that fact as he is resentful: “The hoodie is redolent with meaning no matter what I do, no matter what anyone does. Its legacy is a divorced one, operatic and ugly.” —PR
D.T. Max | The New Yorker | January 21, 2024 | 7,430 words
Spelunking (a delightful word—go on, say it out loud) means cave exploration, but Beatriz Falmini took it to a whole new level. After realizing she’d “never had a bad time in a cave,” as D.T. Max writes, Falmini decides to spend 500 days in one, neither seeing nor speaking to another human being. If you struggled during COVID-19 lockdowns, imagine nearly a year and a half alone . . . in the dark. In some intense reporting, Max pushes Flamini to dive deep into her experience. Even the logistics of organizing 500 days in a cave is more gripping than most thrillers; I have never found facts about food delivery and hygiene more fascinating. Moving on to Flamini outside the cave, Max realizes “she spoke about her happiness underground so adamantly, and repeatedly, that it was a little hard to believe.” The more time he spends with her, the more reality he uncovers: This experience was anything but a breeze. The darkness sapped life. The cave nearly broke her. It’s hard to fathom the psychology of spending so long underground, but Max does an excellent job of getting beneath Falmini’s bravado to do so. —CW
Jori Lewis | Switchyard | November 25, 2023 | 4,744 words
Watermelon has been in the zeitgeist lately. The humble fruit is an important emblem of Palestinian resistance, which means that, over the last three months, images of it have appeared at everything from street protests to Paris fashion week. In the context of US cultural history, however, watermelon carries different connotations—racist ones. Jori Lewis examines these crude and cruel associations in her essay for Switchyard, an exciting new magazine based at the University of Tulsa. She draws on her family’s experiences to show the complicated relationship many Black Americans have with watermelon, but her piece is about much more than the harm stereotypes can do. Lewis is interested in reclaiming meaning, and as is so often the case, that requires looking beyond US borders and deep into the past. This essay is beautifully rendered, taking readers from the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt, to a roadside fruit stand in Senegal, to the agricultural fields of China, in search of watermelon as both sustenance and symbol. “The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds,” Lewis writes. Cultures have associated it with fertility, solidarity, and luck. Watermelon can both cure hunger and quench thirst, and Lewis bookends her essay with scenes where she lets a juicy slice do the latter. By the time she gets to the second instance, watermelon feels to the reader like a thing transformed. “I felt an ever so slight twinge about me in this Black body in a white man’s field and all that has ever meant. But it was hot, and I was thirsty,” Lewis writes. “I took it with my fingers, and I ate.” —SD
Audience Award
What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?
Jasper Craven | The New Republic | January 16, 2024 | 5,484 words
At age 38, Janikka Perry died of a heart attack at work, on her bakery shift at Walmart in North Little Rock, Arkansas, but you will not find her death recorded by OSHA as workplace-related. The New Republic‘s investigation has revealed that while Walmart touts an enlightened approach to time off, it expects associates to work while sick, or in Perry’s case, deathly ill. “The store was short-staffed, and her manager allegedly told her to ‘pull herself together.’” —KS
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