With Melville in Pittsfield

There’s the journey and then there’s the destination—but there’s also the motivation. All three are on display in J.D. Daniel’s essay about driving to visit Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s onetime home and writing habitat. A memorable diversion for a slow Thursday.

Snow in the yards and snow on the roofs of Grafton, snow on the rocks, snow on the hills. A red-tailed hawk crossed left to right in front of my car so low I could see the brown and white marks on her belly. Snow on the banks of the stream at Auburn. Snow on the stonework underneath the power lines. Snow in the wide white fields. Snow falling on Charlton westbound service plaza. Coming into Palmer, the Quaboag River was partly frozen, white with snow. Coming into Wilbraham, Home of [illegible] Ice Cream, its sign was buried under snow. Coming into West Springfield, visibility got low at the Connecticut River. My car was encrusted with dirty road salt like a steak au poivre. I smelled like a french fry. Some of the huge spears of ice hanging from red and brown rock walls to the left and right were netted off, as if to discourage or prevent ice climbing. Made me want to do a bit of front-pointing.

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The Eider Keepers

A gentle piece exploring the relationship between the people of the Vega Archipelago and the eider ducks who nest there. Mixing between the ecology and history of these islands, this is lovingly reported, and—for once—humans are portrayed as protectors rather than destroyers.

I visited Vega hoping to understand what drives someone like Stensholm to spend up to six months each year living mostly alone, without running water or electricity, on a sliver of ice-scoured strandflat at the top of the world. In a time when so many stories about humans and wild animals are about harm, habitat loss, or extinction, I wanted to witness an example of the ways humans and wild animals can not only coexist but benefit from one another. I wanted to see how a grown man’s heart could break over a duckling, not because he hoped to turn a profit but because he had inherited a legacy of love.

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‘They Scream in Hunger’ – How Israel is Starving Gaza

This piece is simple, with the reporters detailing the meals of three families in Gaza over three days, counting their calorie intake. It’s a strikingly effective way of highlighting the reality of hunger: by removing the higher constructs and focusing on the day-to-day the concept of famine becomes more than just a concept.

After having nothing to eat for breakfast or lunch, the family managed to get hold of three tins of fava beans.

Umm Mohammed puts aside two tins, knowing they may not be able to get any food tomorrow.

“What should I do? If I feed them today, how will I feed them tomorrow? I keep thinking, how will I provide them with food for the next day?”

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“To the Train Lady with Dark Brown Hair … :” Extraordinary Stories of Four Couples who Found Love via Small Ads

For The Guardian, Amelia Tait shares four stories of chance encounters and serendipitous reunions, along with the surprising history of the missed connection ad. She suggests that the world is full of connections waiting to be made, if only we stop staring at our phones.

They spoke for the entire five-hour duration of their flight; Darcy, who was in her 30s, told him about her job sorting out the “instant replays” for sports tournaments, and the pair told “stupid jokes” that made each other laugh. At one point, Scott asked Darcy if she was dating anyone. She hesitated. Technically she was, but she had already decided to break up with her boyfriend the night before, because they had been on the phone and he hadn’t stopped talking about his ex-wife. Darcy stumbled over Scott’s question. She couldn’t tell him the truth: “Well, I’m dating somebody, but I’m thinking about dumping him because I might like you.”

Scott got the hint and changed the subject. The pair enjoyed the rest of the flight together, but Darcy said goodbye abruptly when they landed – her boyfriend was picking her up from the airport, and in those days the people you were meeting could come right up to the gate. She saw Scott again by the luggage carousel while her boyfriend was busy smoking a cigarette – they shared a look. Then they shared another look. He left and turned back to look at her one last time. For weeks afterwards, Darcy couldn’t believe that she had just let him walk away.

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The Foreign Language That Changed My Teenage Son’s Life

Even as a young child, Paul Tough’s son had a tendency to go all in on new interests. “Max would go deep, finding satisfaction not just in the playing but also in the experience of plunging himself into a new and unfamiliar world and mastering all of its contours,” writes Tough. During the pandemic, Max—a shy kid—took up birding as a hobby, and Tough found that he began to interact more with other people. Then, when Max was 12, he decided to learn how to speak Russian, a seemingly random choice that ultimately opened him up to a whole new world. In this essay for The New York Times Magazine, Tough recounts a father-son trip they took to Uzbekistan, where Max could immerse himself in the language he had been studying. The piece is about learning to navigate and communicate in a foreign place, yes, but—more importantly—is about a parent learning how to sit back and watch their grown child navigate the world on their own.

There was a part of me that felt proud of his deep dives, but if I’m being honest, they often made me uneasy. When you’re a kid, knowing a ton about obscure subjects can be an early sign of intellectual curiosity, but just as often, it can be a symptom of misfiring neurons, an omen of future mental struggles. Sometimes the child who can tell you everything there is to know about dinosaurs or baseball statistics or the solar system grows up to be a groundbreaking scientist or a brilliant entrepreneur. Sometimes he just grows up to be a guy who never moves out of his parents’ basement.

As I watched Max walk off with a group of foreign strangers into an unknown land, it felt like a glimpse of my future, and his. I was slowing down, and he was speeding up.

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The Darkness That Blew My Mind

Tim Neville encounters himself in this piece—after immersing himself in darkness for a few days. His thought processes (and hallucinations) during this sensory deprivation are fascinating, and Neville does not hold back in sharing the places his mind takes him to.

At first the visions are fun, because they seem so real. I blink a dozen times to confirm that the room has indeed become a limestone cave illuminated by beams that shoot from my eyes. And the darkness is no longer monolithic, but swirls with shades of black and a parade of textures. Meanwhile, my proprioceptive senses have gone haywire. I take a bath, and when the water cools I can see my foot reach up to find the hot-water faucet handle. I can’t see any detail. My foot just looks like a darker, smoother patch of darkness, but there’s no mistaking that it’s there.

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Is It Even Possible to Become More Productive?

Deep work. Flow states. We’re awash in the language and concepts of “productivity,” all seemingly calibrated to help us escape digital distraction and answer the question of how to be more effective. But for someone like Esquire editor (and Longreads alum) Kelly Stout, who used to literally fantasize about having more work to do, immersing yourself in self-maximization raises some questions of its own.

The main question of my day, every day, was: How can I get myself into a flow state? I would sometimes overshoot the mark and get myself flowing on flow itself, leaving not much for the actual work. On Newport’s advice in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, I planned out every minute of my day on a sheet of graph paper, dividing the day into optimistically labeled chunks. The joy I felt when I could actually produce was overwhelming yet relaxing. I felt like a hybrid vehicle at a stop sign: silent, sustainable, efficient, morally correct. But I despaired when, instead of using the designated hours for “deep work,” I used them to look at photos of my dog on my phone from when she was a puppy or write an email about a contract. I felt like a third grader telling the teacher his favorite subject was recess when I filled in “lunch!” at 12:30.

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